by John Updike
Is she rambling to drive this girl away, or because she can’t help emptying herself completely into captive ears?
She goes on, “They affect me, these literalist sculptures. They tell us something about being human—our vulnerability, mostly. Just our skins—so bald, so easy to puncture, even without a gun. The fingernails, the eyelashes, even the earwax, all the tiny touches that at some point in evolution apparently enabled some people to survive better than others, or to find mates, though I’m not sure how earwax would help with that, not to mention all the molecular niceties that we notice only when we get so sick because they are going just ever so slightly wrong. Looking back,” Hope confesses, “it’s hard to remember why we all looked down on representation, regarded it with such contempt—we didn’t want painting to be anecdotal, that was the scare word, Clem would get quite livid at the thought, so he had to take another drink to steady himself, and Hochmann, too, utterly scornful, in that way Germans have of wishing something out of existence, but I wonder now if all painting isn’t anecdotal, a story the painter wants to tell. What he won’t do, what he will do, what he is dying to try, what he is working out from within himself toward some kind of—what?—ultimate economy, let’s say. The canvas is an adventure, Clem was right about that, and the artist is the adventurer, telling his story as he goes. I’m sorry, Kathryn, I fear I’m not saying this very well, it’s clearer when you go back to near the beginning, to Giotto and Cimabue and the Sienese beginning to grasp at perspective and human expression, and then see these skills so triumphantly mastered in the High Renaissance, where the artist keeps boasting what he can do, Michelangelo telling you he can do anything, Raphael too, in a softer voice, and then these skills becoming so common that art gets bored with them finally, think of Ingres and Copley, that sickly finish, and then, in the ’twenties and ’thirties, magazine illustration and Soviet social realism, terribly skillful really, with this leering sort of flair, you see it in Rockwell, who God forbid is marching through the country’s museums even as we sit here, while the mainstream of course since Impressionism has been running the other way, dissolving the image, letting it feather and jiggle away, until you get to Zack and Onno and Bernie and there’s nowhere left to go but parody. I know you’ve thought a lot about decadence—how can one not these days? a whole millennium just went to seed—but it seems as though art has to fumble not to be decadent, it has to be just on the cusp of the possible, or we can’t respond to it as something … something, do you mind if I say, ’heartfelt’? It has to be about us, just a skin away from being nothing. Not nothing perhaps, I don’t know what your religion is, but tumbling back into the radiance.”
The black windows tell them that behind the veil of steady rain the day has moved beyond twilight. The nearly invisible hands of the mantel clock say twenty to seven. If she started right now the girl would get home to New York by midnight at best, bleary and sandy-eyed from squinting through the swishing windshield, deafened by the thud of the wipers and the onrushing of the wet tires and the tinkle of the radio, something Michelangelo didn’t have to keep him company on that scaffold, voices and songs beamed from a cramped, sealed cave lined with insulation, electromagnetic waves what we have now instead of messenger angels, disk jockeys lulling Hope’s visitor, senses swaddled, her legs cramped, an ache across her shoulders from holding on to the steering wheel with her long white hands—Mona Lisa hands, early studies for which can be seen in the portrait allegedly of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery and that of Cecilia Gallerani in Kraków, but without Kathryn’s black or, better, eggplant-colored nails. As if feeling the car’s confinement already, Kathryn stiffly shifts in the wide-armed plaid chair and gazes down at the Sony. Digital is the coming technology, Hope has read, with virtually infinite storage, but who will listen? Who will transcribe and read the infinity of digits?
“You must go,” Hope tells her.
“Yes. But we haven’t really talked about the fifteen years since Jerry died, and the remarkable way you’ve resurrected yourself, with your paintings of course. You’ve created a new reputation for yourself.”
“Have I? What does Shakespeare call it—‘the bubble reputation’? It amuses people that the old lady keeps at it. Critics talk about the gentle Quaker spirit of my abstractions, but I feel more what Bernie used to insist on, the passion. Those big monotone canvases of his, with a stripe or two in a different color, sometimes only slightly different, people wondered how there could be passion in them, even I wondered, but there it was, a terrific tautness, like the surface created when a big stone basin is filled to the brim, or that neo-Minimalist—on the West Coast, I think—who filled a black cube with black ink so that it looked like the top side, perfectly rigid, and you’re dying to touch it but of course don’t dare. Do you know, my young ophthalmologist—they’re all young now, everybody who used to be old, your doctors, your lawyers—my ophthalmologist explained to me, I found it fascinating, that our eyes achieve the fine resolution they do because on top of the film of water, which smooths out some of the cornea’s microscopic irregularities, little sebaceous glands along the edge of the lids, literally hundreds of them, secrete a coating of oil which smooths it out even further. A hawk’s eye is five times finer than ours—five times oilier, it may be. Seeing is the predatory sense, isn’t it? We listen and sniff to protect ourselves, but we see to capture and kill.”
She doubts, as soon as she says it, that this is quite true; her interviewer’s forward-leaning, anxious-edged voice cuts across her doubts with another question: “Do you think men and women see the same? Do they paint the same?”
Hope winces, beginning to feel bruised by the demands of this encounter. The question is feminist but not necessarily stupid; she wants to answer it the best she can, and closes her eyes, as if what the Elizabethans called the beams of her eyes can worm in the reddish darkness toward an honest response. “We look,” she says, “at what interests us, what pertains to us. A woman, for example, entering a room, because she is a housekeeper, sees dirt to which men are blind. She sees how the other women have dressed and painted themselves to set off their best qualities. Women fear danger from a greater variety of directions than men, so I suppose there is less, what can I call it, frontality in their work. Women in theory should be interested in phalluses, and there is—correct me if you don’t agree—a physiological moment when we are, but there is much more phallic imagery in men’s painting than in women’s. Since O’Keeffe and her damn flowers, rather the opposite. We paint ourselves. So no, not quite, but much the same, would be my answer. The human species is less differentiated by gender than many—the male and female of certain intestinal parasites, I believe, don’t look at all alike. We, men and women, are both made to run, and to hang on to branches, and to eat nuts and berries.”
“How interesting.”
“Well, is it? I’ve been thinking about my painting ever since you hit me over the head with that statement I gave five years ago. I was in a rather distinctly religious frame of mind, it seems. Color equals the Devil—what a wild thing to say! I mix lots of colors into grays, to produce just hints of lilac, of beige, of pink even, to set up the vibration between the stripes, the activity, the atomic activity that is in everything, apparently even the flattest-seeming surface, if you can believe the microscope, this seethe, like Zack’s spatters and swirls, in a way, or Guy’s dribbles in that era when I was drawn to him, before he became a factory, declaring we can’t take the imperfection out of art, that’s part of the perfection.”
“Are they your concluding statement? Your recent paintings. They seem darker, richer.”
“They have, I supppose, the terror and sadness of last things, of death—why not say it? Even though it’s impossible to grasp, to picture.” Involuntarily she pictures her bedroom, for which she longs. On the bedside table, spare reading glasses in a paisley cloth case, a copy of the latest little Muriel Spark novel, a square black Braun clock with its face averted so she won’t see
its glowing hands if she awakes in the night and have them frighten her into insomnia, an eye mask to keep her asleep as the spring light slants in around the shades earlier and earlier, wax earplugs in a plastic case—four blobs squeezed in a row as in a painting by Roger Merebien—to shut out the Vermont owls and invading coyotes and the murmur of traffic, oddly audible at night, somehow come closer, from Route 89. On her bureau sit silver-backed brushes that had belonged to her mother and small color photographs of her grandchildren, including the three born since Jerry died. And then in the ’nineties Dot and her giant Dutch housemate adopted a Vietnamese girl; Hope learned of this from Paul, who gave her a color copy of a photograph Dot had sent him, since she had not sent her mother one. The girl, about four in the photograph, looks bony and apprehensive in the glare of the flash but gamely smiling, game to become one more American. “On the other hand,” Hope continues, “when I’m actually at the easel I don’t think of the one I’m working at as at all my last painting, nowhere near it, there is in my mind’s eye a whole string of them, an infinite domino-row, ahead of me.”
“How lovely,” Kathryn says, having waited for the image to continue. How interesting, how lovely—the girl has run dry, the way men do. Men do what they came for and then leave, and for the longest time this seemed heartless to Hope.
“You should go now,” she tells her guest.
“I really should. But it’s so pleasant here, I have this—”
“Inertia.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“You must get back to your life. You tell that young man of yours to open himself up when he goes with you to a gallery. If he can’t see the fun of it he may not be the right man for you.”
“I think it’s hard for Alec to have fun with so much of life—his career and all—undecided.”
“By the time everything is decided, it will be too late. The moment is always now. There is no then, it turns out. Everything real is a kind of now.”
“You tell him that,” Kathryn says.
“I’d be happy to. I was born too long ago to be ashamed to learn from men, but there are things they can learn from us, too, and the smarter of them know it. Men see what’s in front of them but not always all the rest.” Kathryn is in front of Alec, Hope’s impression is, and he does not quite see that she might not always be, that she is ripe and should be plucked.
The two women hesitate at the threshold before them: the end of words, a resumption of their burdens. “Before I switch off the machine, is there anything you still wanted to say?”
Hope holds her mouth open and looks at the far edge of the slightly sagging, here and there discolored ceiling as if at something astonishing. “It feels as though there is, but I can’t imagine what it would be.” She adds, “I’ve been a fortunate woman. I don’t really believe the world is the Devil’s. Or only the Devil’s.”
Kathryn leans forward with that awkward impatience of hers, as if overcoming a mechanical tendency to get stuck, and touches into silence the tiny Sony, dove gray, the third presence in the room, motionless, unsleeping, all-aware. With a snuffly sigh of effort the interviewer stands, and Hope rocks back in her chair of many woods at the splendor of this unfolding—the long black legs; the fine-ribbed pants tight around the thighs and flared above the boot tops; the brief jacket of soft black imitation-leather, which the girl has never removed, in silent comment upon the chilliness of the room compared with almost any New York apartment. The contrasting white turtleneck protects her throat, and above her small cupped ears two curved silver combs pin the long glossy hair tinged with henna flat against her skull. From her square-toed boot soles to the top of her skull she must be fully five foot ten; one of Alec’s holds over her is presumably that he is as tall or taller. Hope, being short, had her pick of men. Both women affect the pulled-back, quickly assembled hairdos of art’s camp followers, of those pursuing, through thickets of commerce, neglect, and personal entanglement, a glimmering activity disinterested, incorruptible, and ardent. Kathryn thrusts the Sony and her printed notes into the big black pocketbook, almost the size of a tote bag, which has waited beside the armchair, on the rug of braided rags.
Hope asks, “Would you like your half-sandwich for the trip? And I could make up a little Ziploc bag of nuts and raisins and dried fruit. I worry about you; there really aren’t many places to stop between here and the New York Thruway—those terrible convenience stores that sell mostly stale candy and National Enquirers. Don’t you love the headlines? Julia’s True Love Kidnapped by Space Aliens. Whitney’s Weight Loss Horrifies Fans.”
“No, I’ll be fine, Hope. It’s Alec’s car, and if I got the wheel sticky with marmalade he’d kill me.”
“Oh my. He sounds not easy to please.”
“He’s sweet, basically. But as I explained he’s at a difficult time of life.”
“Well, aren’t we all? What would an easy time of life look like? Goodbye, Kathryn. I’ve stupidly forgotten your last name.”
“D’Angelo. With an apostrophe.”
“Of course.” It rings a very faint bell, from their introductory phone conversation, a distant rustle in her ear. How stupid she had been, sitting here all these hours assuming the girl was Jewish. Well, she is a child of the Mediterranean, the middling mother of wine and of olive-skinned races and of all the ideas we still live by, we children of the Northern mists.
“Thank you so much,” the intruder says. “You’ve given me so much, more than I can possibly use. I feel guilty about taking your whole day.”
“I did my hour or two at the easel before you came. After that, my time is worth very little, and there seems a lot of it. I fear I talked your pretty ears off. I go many days up here talking to no one except over the telephone—not that it rings every day.”
“You should have a pet.”
This directive takes her aback, but perhaps she asked for it, seeming more helpless than she felt. “Jerry and I did have dogs up here, lovely good-natured goldens, we’d haul them back and forth to New York and put them in a kennel down toward Bolton when we went to Europe, they would look so wounded as we drove off, and be so frantic to see us when we came back, I feared their hearts would burst with happiness, talk about passion! After Jerry died, Jupiter, the last of the goldens, died too, he wore himself out going to the door looking for him. Dogs don’t really respect women the way they do men, and I thought of getting a cat, but then decided it was purer to have no pets, and not to leave my boys the problem of how to dispose of it. The creatures of the wilderness are my pets. Even the bears, though I don’t like seeing their claw marks in the woods too close to the house. There are more bears in these woods now than since the early nineteenth century, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
There was something Hope had been on her way to say when interrupted, and now she says it: “It’s been a gift to me, to be allowed to tell so much. To look at my poor little life entire.”
Kathryn matches this somewhat stilted declaration with one of her own: “It’s so unusual for someone of my generation,” she says, “to talk with anybody so pleased with her life. My friends, they’re well fed, and make good money, some of them, and have enough sex, I guess, but they’re not really pleased. They don’t have that capacity. You are pleased, aren’t you?”
Hope laughs, it has become so oddly formal again. “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. D’Angelo. And I’m pleased I guess that every time I was left alone in my life I still had a reason to keep going. Art, if you have any vocation for it at all, doesn’t desert you. It’s always willing to flirt. Now, really, before you rush off, you should use the bathroom. That I insist on. It’s so hard, even not in the rain, to find rest rooms along the road that don’t humiliate you by making you ask for the key.”
Even while Hope is saying these things to her, Kathryn has stalked across the parlor floor to the front hall and in one large swift gesture dressed herself in the purple cashmere cloak she came in and deposited on the spindle-back se
ttee. The hood makes her look sinister yet winsome, her long nose jutting now from shadow, her big black purse dangling from a bent forearm. She reflects and decides, “Yes, that I will accept. Thank you.”
Again, then, in those noisy boots, she visits the bathroom under the back stairs. In the kitchen, Hope quickly, furtively extracts a medium Ziploc bag from its box in a drawer and, opening the refrigerator, from a set of plastic containers on a door shelf, portions out a modest quantity of Brazil nuts, raw peanuts, lightly salted roasted pecans, raisins, yogurt-covered baby pretzels, and dried apricots. She seals the Ziploc with a painful squeeze of her fingers; Kathryn accepts the fat package of snacks without protest or a word of thanks, like a child hurriedly going off to school. Her mind is on the journey ahead; her eyes are already looking through the windshield, its beating wipers. “You’ve been very kind,” she says in her daze of departure.
“Shall I send you a transcript when I have one made?”
“Oh my goodness, no. I couldn’t bear to read it.”
“Would you like to approve of the quotes I use in my article? As I said, you’ve given me much more than I can use.”
“Not really, dear. I’m sure you’ll get them right enough. You had the tape recorder. And I honestly can’t picture who the reader of this article is going to be.”
“There might even be some print options, depending on the slant I give it. My agent is very enthusiastic about the possibilities.”
“I’ve never had an agent, I suppose it’s their business to be enthusiastic. If you begin to feel tired, and your eyes start to close, and having a dried apricot doesn’t help, dear, you must promise me to pull over, and not just to the side of the road or in one of those vast truck-rests where dreadful things happen, but next to a restaurant with its lights on and people coming in and out.”
“I’ll be fine, honest. Goodbye again, Mrs. Chafetz.” Kathryn tugs at the front door handle but has no success; Hope, who knows all the tricks of this latch, in damp weather or dry, yanks it open it for her. The live wet breath of the rain, the sound and stir of it in the dark, the glimpse by doorlight of its thin vertical rods sparkling with reflections, its towering presence stretching up out of sight into the darkness from which it falls: the beast confronts the two women. The lamps of the living room reveal only a few strides of dead lawn, plus the spangled tops of the bushes planted close to the house, soaked white spiderwebs spread on the flat-cut yew like doilies on a table. The irregular flagstones dimly lead into the whispering, pattering darkness where the visitor’s car is hidden. “Oh, don’t come out!” Kathryn cries, when Hope steps with her out of the shelter of the little roof here, over the porch of flagstones that twenty years ago had replaced rotted porch boards. “You’ll get wet!”