Seek My Face

by John Updike

  Hope tells her briskly, trying to pep her up, “In answer to your question: Jerry left all of his collection acquired before his marriage to me to the children of his first marriage. We discussed it, and it seemed fair. His best pieces, that had appreciated most, were in that lot. Then there were estate taxes, nearly half of it all, and cash had to be raised, there was a liquidation when he died—not only the estate taxes had to be covered, but there were some unsuspected debts including more than a million owed to dealers. Lawsuits!—I became quite blasé, a hardened defendant. In the end, after the lawyers had their cut, there was less than anybody had expected. I had to sell my East Seventy-ninth Street co-op and Jerry’s Southampton place and his half-share in the Sarasota condo he and Pearl had split in the settlement—they were no good to me anyway. I came up here to live year-round. Where up here would I keep valuable art safe from anybody who wanted to break in? A burglar alarm, by the time the local police answered it, was useless. I sold the few major McCoys I had left, and the Holloways that had been part of the settlement, and put it all in a trust for Dorothy, a trust in case some conniving woman got her hooks into her, they can be as predatory as men—more so, since they have the excuse of being disadvantaged in this patriarchal society. The boys don’t need money from me, they’re doing fine—the salaries and bonuses they pay on Wall Street, you wonder there’s any money left for the investor. Often there isn’t. So,” Hope concludes this whirlwind baring of her divestitures and holdings, “I’ve made my daughter a rich middle-aged woman one of these days, when I won’t hear any thanks for it. I suppose you shouldn’t put that into your article either. Let’s let Dot be surprised.”

  “My article won’t be as long as I’d like it to be. There’s a lot I’ll have to leave out.”

  “I know, I know,” Hope reassures her. But she has never learned how little the world needs us to give; its beauty is an impervious beauty, self-absorbed. Her onrushing words have ended by wounding her: they have made realer to her than she wants it to be her own death, which will make Dot rich, though the child will construe it sarcastically, as some sort of payback she had coming, as another attempt of her mother’s to court her and break her righteous silence, as a bribe from beyond the grave, proving to her that her mother was guilty as charged. What had been the charge? Hope cannot remember, for all these years she has felt herself the focus of an anger that has almost nothing to do with her, that had to do with some chemicals the child was born with and that kept her awake and that eventually made her furious that her mother was not as obsessed with her as she was with her mother, whose only sin as far as Hope could honestly see was not rejecting the world but too eagerly accepting it, accepting the promise of freedom America gave, accepting her sex as another piece of potential, and believing, what is harder and harder to do for these young people as scientific evidence to the contrary eats religion away, that you are not quite alone, that the voice you hear within is a companion. Guy came, Guy went, an abstracted stab at a father, and she who was always there in the apartment got blamed for being herself, the one sin she could not help committing every living minute. The ungrateful girl had never had a hungry day, had never been sent out in insufficient clothing. Still, this estrangement inhabits the guilty boggy area visited by Hope’s thoughts of her approaching death and the memory of Jerry’s, which she witnessed. She saw the light die in his eyes. He loved life much as she did and had been so vigorous, yet when death sneaked up on him, in the guise of malfunctioning kidneys and a weakening heart, he went meekly limp in its embrace, a mere seventy-five. He offended her by not fighting harder to stay with her. He would have had to get in line for a kidney transplant, and the wait might be as long as a year, and the doctors were worried that his heart could not take the strain of an operation. They could do a bypass operation in the meantime, but Jerry was dubious and strangely uninterested; he called it a hassle that benefited mostly the doctors and would leave him with an endless caretaking of his own body. He was afraid of it, she realized—he who had been afraid of so little, who had rushed forward into every experience, including his experience of her. They had made love the second time they dated, and the first date had scarcely been that, she was just separated from Guy and still disbelieving they would never get back together, she had remembered Jerry from the time they had stood together and called the same white vinyl typewriter beautiful, and then at other openings they would gravitate toward each other and she began to feel their attraction lighting up over their heads like a neon thought-balloon in a Kienholz tableau, and she had called him, yes, she had made the move, telephoned him at his office instead of at his home and told him her circumstances were changing so that she might need some financial advice, and he took her to lunch downstairs at Lutøce with its two steps down and its skylit back room full of dappled dazzle like a plein-air Bonnard, and he put a warm soft hairy-backed hand, brown from tennis and the beach at Southampton, over hers when the lunch was over and she was done crying and spilling out her shock and insecurity, spurned when she had done nothing wrong, just grown older, presiding over children, not even Zack at his most abusive, at least he had sent her flowers at the end.… Jerry’s hand gave a squeeze that might have been merely sympathy. But there was an intent, entertained glint in his eyes—her tale of desertion and distress had made him laugh in several spots where she hadn’t been meaning at all to be funny—which she felt as a kind of money in the bank, though it was months before their second date; he had waited for her split with Guy to be public knowledge and in the care of lawyers, and for his own wife to be having her winter stay in Sarasota, with him flying down on weekends. That light of interest, of mischief, in his steel-blue eyes, surprising eyes in a Jew, had faded in the hospital to a dull color as if mixed with a fine ash, while his kidneys and heart raced toward total deterioration and the doctors came to him like Job’s comforters, salesmen pleading with a tight-lipped customer, tight-lipped or deaf, the life in his eyes and ears and fleshy mouth with its wry little scar seeming to sink as he relaxed into the care of the hospital, its clean white rooms, its gentle night-noises and winking little signal lights as on the bridge of a great gliding ship, its deceptive bustle of young nurses and interns, as if their youth and efficient health could be portioned out to patients as equably and breezily as diet meals and pills and consent forms, there above the East River. His room looked down on the river from eight stories up, the widening wakes of its traffic of tugboats and barges brimming with rusted scrap metal and round-the-island tour boats and speeding police launches and the occasional yacht at half-throttle, its sails furled and two just-about naked young women sunbathing on the bow as the skyscrapers and all their gazing windows floated past. Jerry liked the hospital because it was a city within a city and hummed with impersonal city current around the clock; Hope was furious at him for making himself so at home here, for not fighting harder to stay with her on the outside of this seductive death-factory, for so passively letting the city reclaim him and putting the lie to the Vermont idyll she had constructed, perhaps out of her memory of her youthful self taking Zack to Long Island, bringing Zack out to the light-soaked Flats at the end of the civilized world where he needed to be to make his fame, with five glorious, drudging years, Hope’s masterpiece as a wife, there by Gardiners Bay, in sight of McGonicle’s Harbor. The Bay merged with the Sound, whose same waters narrowed at last to this so-called river, a river only insofar as its circulating waters were borrowed from the Hudson. But Zack had been a country boy, untamed space was in his veins, whereas Jerry had been a child of paved streets and ceaseless human sounds. “Jerry. Don’t leave me.”

  “What?” The whispered plea brought him back from some haven within, a pocket of drugged peace; his brown eyelids, with their broken capillaries like the tiny red and blue threads embedded in dollar bills, curved around a greater portion of his eyeballs now that his face was shrinking, adhering closer to the bone.

  She made her voice more penetrating. “I said, Jerry, please fig
ht harder for me. For us. Don’t give up.”

  He struggled to be awake; his eyelids lifted on his irises’ ashy blue and kept blinking. “I’ve had a good ride,” he said. “This last leg has been the best. Much obliged, Tiger.” He called her Tiger, after one of their first times in bed, when her hunger had startled herself as well. The nickname went oddly with her impression, those first trysts, of his hair, thinning but thick and pungent, matted like sheep’s wool. It had become fleecier, whiter, in nine years, but a docile streak had always been his. She had seduced him away from Pearl and now his death was seducing him away from her.

  “The doctors want to give you a new heart, Jerry. And dialysis until a kidney is available.”

  “You don’t think,” he asked, forcing his eyes to stay open, the effort coaxing a sheepish smile onto his lips, with their crimp remaining from a youthful street battle, “it’d be putting a new engine into a rusted-out chassis? And then a new carburetor. One more bionic man, bankrupting the health system.”

  “Jerry, don’t you want to see your next step-grandchild? And see Piet made partner?” Paul’s wife, Kay, was pregnant again, and hoping for a girl this time. Jerry had taken as keen an interest in Hope’s children as in his own—keener, since even Dorothy was less fraught for him than his and Pearl’s offspring. His stepchildren could be his friends, his children were painful extensions of himself, when he was aware of them, so he did not go out of his way to be aware, and thus saved himself aggravation. Hope urged him to communicate with them more, but he brushed her aside: “We understand each other, they know I’m here if they need me.” It was as if she had opened one of those passages of the Old Testament—lineages; dietary laws; the smiting, vengeful, barbaric God—that had nothing to do with a Quaker maiden. Jews in America, for all that they ebulliently conversed with the Gentile world around them, kept something back, there was a room that stayed locked, and in this room their transactions with each other were conducted and, she imagined, their secret kept in its tabernacle. They saw his children rarely; it was hers, their changes of job and apartment, their births and promotions, that kept the aging couple in touch with the elementary adventures of living these nine years they were married, travelling abroad and to Vermont and back to New York and performing the little they needed to perform to keep their positions, in the ever more diffuse and directionless art scene, as painter and as collector. Now she dangled by Jerry’s hospital bed these tidbits of vicarious life and he could not conceal his boredom. He closed his eyes, the orb of the eyeball declaring itself beneath its fragile covering, the red and blue threads of broken capillaries never to be mended. She began to cry at her helplessness in the face of our creaturely limits, which included, she could see, a limit in this, the fullest, the least marred, of her relationships. Without a break in his faithful graciousness, Jerry was leaving her. Had there always been something patronizing about his good humor: a disdain of giving her the honor of a fight, equal on equal, as she had given Zack, and Pearl must have given him? He seemed determined to go through with this last bargain and keep any deficits to himself. Hearing her silence, he opened his eyes, and they wore a fishy glaze she had seen before, in Zack’s and Guy’s eyes when she realized that all that a woman does for a man, all that tending and loving, falls short, for him is secondary, inessential. Art was what these men had loved—that is, themselves. Jerry had picked her up cheap, with a fine provenance. She had become to Zack and Guy dreamlike in her inconsequence, as she was to Jerry now, weeping and begging him to live for her sake. She bored him, she was annoying him, tiny as she had become. He didn’t have the strength to swat her away. “Give it a rest, Tiger,” he told her. “We’ll see how it all looks tomorrow.”

  Hope tells Kathryn, “I do have some worthwhile pieces upstairs. Downstairs, I didn’t want anybody looking in the window and seeing anything worth stealing. Though whoever looks in these windows isn’t apt to know the difference. I think the locals decided long ago, when Jerry and I were going back and forth, that there was nothing here they could resell. Actually, in this room and the dining room around the corner are some paintings that used to hang in my grandparents’ house in Germantown. That watercolor of nasturtiums, for instance, near the phone, and the still life in oils on the far wall, and that old wedding certificate over the mantel, above the clock.”

  “I wondered what that was.”

  “Pennsylvania Dutch Fraktur. A marriage certificate, in German. As a child I used to study the little doll-like figures, the bride and groom. They seem so unready for marriage, don’t they?—more like the paper dolls little girls used to dress in paper dresses. There are some nineteenth-century miniatures of my Ouderkirk ancestors in the dining room, which I never use any more—oval miniatures in velvet-lined box frames. They have rosy cheeks and clear blue eyes, blue like the eyes of two of my three husbands. Some of the fine brushwork and stippling is rather wonderful; they painted on thin sheets of ivory, you know, very precious fine-shaved stuff, and it didn’t take the watercolors very readily. Would you like to go around the corner and see them?”

  “I don’t think I need to. You describe them so well.”

  “Upstairs, in the various bedrooms—let me think. In the guest room, some old prints, faded, never expensive. Lawrence’s Pinkie in a tarnished brass frame, and the Vermeer of the woman with the silver pitcher, in the Met, with that marvellous streak of reflected blue on the back of it, away from the window—blue everywhere, really, even on the rod at the bottom of the map, you wonder if it hasn’t burned through some other pigments which have bleached out. And on the blank wall of the upstairs landing, a big messy oil of woods that was in my grandfather’s study, the only wall without books or a window; when my grandmother used to complain that she couldn’t understand how he could look at something so gloomy, he’d tell her, ’That’s how woods are, full of fallen deadwood. That painter was an honest man.’ And in my bedroom I have a few modern items, worth something to the right collector, I suppose—the first, rougher version of the pastel Ruk did of me that hangs in the Corcoran, and a silk screen Bernie gave me, an intimate version of one of his heroic oils, a nearly square field of blue, as cold as the underside of an iceberg, with a single strip, well off to one side, of rose madder, done in slightly uneven, jabbing strokes. Would you like to go upstairs to my bedroom to see them?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Aware of possibly seeming unresponsive, Kathryn adds, “You must be tired.”

  “You too, dear.”

  Her bedroom—she would have liked to exhibit it to this dark-haired young intruder, the site of her nightly surrender to sleep, her airy cell, the tightly made bed, the pink-bordered Amish quilt turned down to the foot with linear precision, with the fussy primness of the old. The first thing Hope does each morning, once she empties her inelastic bladder and brushes her teeth—crowns and implants, most of them; her smile is a lie—is make the bed, having turned on the classical-music station from Burlington, an affiliate of WNYC. She has never painted to music, unlike Zack and his noisy jazz—once they got electricity out to the barn, he turned it up loud as if to keep her away—but she needs it to make the bed to, with aching finger joints; it lifts her mind up from the ignominy of these daily chores, catering to our own creature comforts, the tedious rites of hygiene. Often, wet from the shower, she makes the bed naked, her ghastly bony and bulging and sagging and spotted old body shining out in the room’s fresh light, the Lord her only witness, and He in her mind’s eye pleased enough by her Schongauer look; that was Protestant art, God looking at us rather than us looking at Him, every Dutchman and Jew in Holland a saint in darkness to Rembrandt’s loaded brush.

  “You mustn’t think,” Hope tells Kathryn, who once more has leaned forward anxiously, her body like a folded black jackknife, to check if the Sony is still running, “and I know I sounded like a terrible grouch and philistine, that Jerry and I disdained everything in art after 1975. Those Photo-realistic sculptures that used to startle yo
u at the Whitney because they looked too much like people, lifesize and made of Fiberglas, with glass eyes and real hair, in real clothes, one of them was even of a museum guard, people kept asking it questions, oh, what was the man’s name. Hanson. Duane Hanson. I should remember it, because he died a few years ago, and he was younger than I am. Even younger, I should say. And there was a young British artist, he might have been Australian if there’s a difference, Ron something, he was in that exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that got Mayor Giuliani all upset, a German kind of name, Monk or Munck, he has the same idea, though he doesn’t do lifesize, he did a perfect little replica of his dying father no bigger than a housecat, and then a huge one of his own face, with every pore rendered, every stubby whisker. I’ve always been so grateful—haven’t you?—that I don’t have to begin the day by shaving, I don’t think feminists are appreciative enough of what men go through, even though it’s true they don’t have to bear the babies, or suffer in love so horribly. When you look at these Middle Eastern men, with these five days’ beards so they all look like terrorists, and baseball pitchers too now—to intimidate the batters, I suppose—it makes me at least thankful. Mueck: his name just came to me. M-U-E-C-K, I do believe.”