Why is she talking without letup? Because she wants to exhaust this woman on the subject, she wants to hide the humiliation Guy did inflict upon her with his casual abandonment, her and the children, the pain of seeing this, her only set of children, ever, maimed and puzzled by his defection. She is like Guy in being well bred, in seeing the value in a front, in seeing everything as a front, in believing in a controlled finish, for all the incidental dribbles. She had felt in league with his coolness, that calmly considered distance in him which was necessary to his steady good nature, and then she had been spurned, turned out of their little club. She tells Kathryn before the tenacious, clinging girl can think of another question, “Toward the end, as I said, as the ’seventies wore on, I think he began to feel strain, the strain of keeping ahead, of staying sexy for the galleries and the museums. It’s not easy, making kitsch and trash seem something else. The tragedy of the modern, or should we say post-modern, artist is that the public’s attention span is so much shorter than his normal creative life. Duchamp quit and gained a lot of points, Korgi and Seamus committed suicide, and Zack too in a way, but for a non-self-destructive artist there is just too much time. If he hits his vein early, his art is eventually exhausted. Those things Guy was doing before and after leaving me, the huge public statues, the pseudo-billboards, the giant coloring books with hideous colors, were not good. They had the same effrontery but lacked the original—what can we call it?—merriment. He thought leaving me might give him back his merriment.” That is how she has framed the abandonment, as a byproduct of the artist’s quest.
“There was a certain scandal attached to Guy’s work, especially the movies and the happenings, with all their nudity and homoeroticism. How did you cope with that? How did your children, as they got older?”
“It was part of Daddy’s business,” Hope tells her, slightly lying and not caring; her visitor’s inquisitiveness is wearing down her ethical sense. She feels most ethical in the morning, when she paints, and her exaltation crumbles away as the day goes on. She makes an effort to reflect and be honest. “The boys handled it by becoming very square, beginning at Buckley—it was Guy, by the way, who wanted to send them there, I had thought some school more progressive, but he said No, he didn’t want his children typecast, he wanted them to have the straight educations he and I had had—and then at Putney, where almost nobody else was square. Dot did her own rebellion, as we’ve already discussed, off the record. What is hard to remember about those years is that Guy didn’t put on a suit and tie like the other men in the building but in his turtleneck and tweedy jacket and blue jeans he did go off downtown much like they did and came back at dinnertime, or else called me and told me he was being held up at work and that I should eat with the kids without him, again a lot like the other men. He was dutiful, going to school events and playing softball with the other fathers and sons when they had outings in Central Park, and for the first dozen years at least he tried to be a normal husband to me. We would go together to one of these ballets in the basement of the Judson Church and watch a bunch of young people writhe around naked smearing each other with brown fingerpaints to symbolize filthy capitalist lucre or whatever, and then come home and have a lentil salad and a glass of milk in the kitchen, whispering so as not to wake up the children. Guy was a sensible, mild—”
“Or marmalade and peanut butter,” Kathryn interrupts.
“What?” Hope’s inner eye had been intent on the domestic picture, focusing on what she needed to say, to be fair, about Guy.
“I was reminded of the sandwich you just gave me,” says Kathryn. “That was sweet.”
“Too sweet, I suppose. You didn’t finish it. You’re all so afraid of sugar.” This young woman’s presuming to joke about the older one’s apparently innocent tastes inflicts on Hope an irritation she resists revealing, because any sign of a quarrel or difference to be smoothed over will prolong the interviewer’s already excessive stay. Hope tries again: “A mild, sensible man, and it was easy for all of us to forget that he was a celebrity, a major force in American art when it was still the world leader, and that behind all his family-man obligingness he was fighting for his life. He would wake up at night and not get back to sleep, I would roll over and readjust the eye mask and leave him sitting up under the reading light and find him at the breakfast table with the Times all read and refolded and lines in his face I had never seen before. With that effortless intuitive sense of his, he could feel it all slipping away, he was falling behind. In the late ’sixties, it wasn’t just Pop and Op and what little was left of Abstract Expressionism, everything was having its start-up then—Minimalism, scatter art, earthworks, conceptual art that used just words, claiming it was a lie to pretend that perception wasn’t a matter of language, or of theory. Europe was sending us its critical theory to kill our creativity, Guy used to say. It got so that any art that still produced paintings or combines that even if cumbersome could be hung on a wall and sculptures that could actually stand or sit in somebody’s not terribly immodest living room was in danger of being old hat. No matter how hard Guy worked, no matter how inventive he was, Pop was beginning, with its flags and stacks of Wheaties boxes, while these enraged kids were out on the streets burning American flags, beginning to look, I hate to say it, cozy, and that was why I couldn’t mind too much the drugs down at the Hospice, and the porno films that look so funny and fuzzy now, because they kept his enterprise—let’s call it that—trendy; they kept for Guy his edge of being maudit. For selfish reasons and the sake of the children, which is selfish at one remove, I wanted him as domesticated as possible, but for him as an artist it wasn’t healthy, we can’t have Vermeers and Chardins any more, we can’t glorify bourgeois life any more, not when it was somehow to blame for Vietnam and Birmingham and colonialism and so on, and it was a strain, as I said, for Guy to pretend to be bourgeois, to pretend art can be a business. I half-blame myself for going along with it, Guy’s pretense, for my own bourgeois comfort, and that was why when he upped and left I was so halfhearted in resisting. Dot sensed it, and hates me still for being so weak. Don’t put that in anything you write, please. But what could I do? I thought it might be better for him, for his art.”
“I wonder why,” Kathryn muses, “art can’t be a business. It used to be a trade, and there was no shame in that.”
“I suppose the same way religion shouldn’t be a business, or be only one. Except that religion has a dependable product, our fear and loneliness, to trade on, whereas art has to convince people that they need it, they need something purer and more authentic than they get elsewhere, in all of life’s other business. That purity and authenticity are worth having, or witnessing from however far away. The soul—can you stand the word?—can’t be sullied by worry and self-interest. Guy had a lovely untroubled productive disinterest when I met him, living in that loft full of junk he’d stolen from the street, and as the money and flattery and awards poured in, he felt it slipping away from him, the purity, the heedlessness that can make something truly new. He began to care too much, because he had to care, because all of us around him depended on him; it was cruel. But, I must say, he never did anything that mattered—that had enough soul, enough disinterest to matter—while he was in the care of Little Miss Hardbum. And now she’s nursemaid to a man who hasn’t a clue as to who she is or he is.”
“We should move on,” Kathryn has the nerve to tell Hope, when it was her obtuse question that had prompted the monologue. “Tell me about Jerry. The two of you met when? Do you remember the occasion?”
“Oh, it was at one of Guy’s openings. Unlike most of the people there, he was trying to look at the works, and I was worn out with making conversation, and we were standing side by side in front of a limp old-fashioned typewriter, twice real size and made of shiny white vinyl, all the round button keys overlapping and jumbled and the keys and carriage return dangling like a newborn lamb’s helpless little legs, and we both said, together, ‘Beautiful.’ Beautiful. What can
I say about Jerry that everybody doesn’t already know? He was a dear man. He was dear at least to me, divorcing his wife to marry me, a favor I must say I never received from Bernie. Not that I wanted it. Bernie was too … too citified, he and Jeanette were too much a team. As we were saying earlier, in the decade after I … knew him well, Bernie had come up roses, the father of this, the father of that, when they’d had no children actually, Color Field, Hard Edge, the father even, supposedly, of some of the earthworks, those two-mile-long chalk lines somebody drew in the Mojave Desert in the late ’sixties, as I remember, using the desert like one of Bernie’s big monochromatic canvases. Those big flat paintings everybody hated for years—Peggy couldn’t stand them, and neither could Betty—they turned out to be the road to the future, while Jarl’s huge, scraggly vertical things were an embarrassment to museums he had bullied into buying them, they took up too much wall space, Jarl wanted room after room to himself, and Zack was stuck in his moment, a classic like Ryder or Bierstadt but absolutely fatal to imitate, in fact nobody else knew how to do it, how much to thin the enamel and what stick to use. Bernie was even named the father of Guy’s early flat look and lack of impasto, and I’ve never seen Guy so miffed, it was as if he resented the little part that Bernie had played in my life before, of course I had told him, but that kind of conventional sexual jealousy was the last thing Guy would ever let himself confess to.”
“And weren’t there, even while you were married, a few younger men,” Kathryn asks in the careful, slightly retracted voice with which she hopes to enter Hope’s bloodstream without breaking the skin, “performance artists?”
Young male bodies, shadowy, the rounded muscle mass of shoulder and thigh, the flat stomachs and their tender pendants, stir in her mind like bodies buried in mud, faces without marked expressions. Jeb. Randy. They had names, addresses, philosophies, aspirations. They had hoped to use her, but she was hard to use, even by herself for her own benefit. The blacks were an adventure for her, dancers, their touching knobby hardworking feet. Henry. Kyle. They differed from whites in that as soon as you began to talk to them they assumed they knew what you wanted and they were right. She wanted release. They were gentle in adhering and gentle in letting go, too much so for their own benefit, but this was a time when profitless bestowals were the political fashion. “Please, my dear,” she protests. “I was in my early fifties. I was a grande dame.”
“But still very attractive. I’ve seen lots of photographs. I’ve also seen,” Kathryn goes on when Hope says nothing, “you described as another of Bernie’s disciples. The stripes.”
“My stripes are much smaller and more numerous than his,” Hope says, her voice firmer on the ground of her art. “I would describe myself as a Hochmann disciple, one of the last. I’m still trying to do the ‘push and pull’ he taught us, but in a quieter, shallower space.” With her bent fingers Hope measures for the girl an inch or less of space, to show how subtle the push and pull have become in her gray mists. “Like the push and pull, scarcely noticeable, of breathing.”
She wonders now if any of her infidelities hurt Guy. At the time she felt, or made herself feel, that he wanted it, with that obscure impulse that led him to hide himself in a mass of identities, an outpour of parodies, an art that committed itself to no one personality. Her little band of lovers were her Hospice, her self-effacing haven.
Kathryn decides she is going to penetrate no deeper in this direction and says, “And all this time, you were holding on to your and Zack’s place in the Flats.” This seems an accusation. Though Hope has tried to sell her interviewer on Guy, painting an affecting portrait of his beautiful fluency and flair and eventual stymied sorrow, the art world cycling even the blithest talent out of fashionability, Zack is where Kathryn’s heart lies; Zack has brought the two women together. Her interviewer is implying that Hope betrayed her second and third husbands by holding on to the house where she had lived with the first.
She doesn’t deny it. “It was security, I suppose, to have a property that was all mine, that I had inherited. At first I had the paintings he left to deal with and protect. Then, when they became too valuable for me to protect, and I was spending more time in the city, it was easier to leave the old furniture in place, it would have looked like junk mixed in with Guy’s and my expensive things. We would spend summers out there, the children loved it—the beaches, the funky feel of the Island out that far—though Guy came with us less and less, he said he hated rich people’s parties and sand in his shoes. Zack’s ghost oppressed him, I think. The new art crowd was more Fire Island than East Hampton. Off-season, I rented it, for quite little if the renter seemed sympathetic, sometimes a Lemon Drop buddy of Zack’s or one of Guy’s protégés who needed somewhere to cool off, the money was less important than that the place not be damaged or go to ruin. When Jerry came into the picture, he had his own place in Southampton but never saw any need to sell the Flats, he called it my ace in the hole. The collector in him was excited, actually; he hired a custodian to live in the house, since things were getting broken or stolen under my system, and we both saw that the value of it was to keep the place, especially including the barn, the way it was when Zack lived there.”
“And now it’s a museum.”
“By appointment only. Schoolchildren come, on trips. Documentary filmmakers use the house, I’m the only one left who knows how it isn’t exactly right, what furniture is missing and so on, but it’s close enough. There are people to whom Zack has become a cult, not as big a one as Elvis’s or Marilyn’s but like James Dean’s, say; Zack was a far more important painter than Dean was an actor but, still, car crashes, and that uneasy cocky look—these people should have a place to visit, and where better than where he did all his important work?”
“Of course,” Kathryn says. “And it keeps a part of your life intact, too.”
“You object to that?”
“Not at all. I envy it. Most of us live in a place, and then move out, and the landlord moves another person in.”
“Don’t envy me, my dear. You have your life ahead of you, and mine is behind me. You wouldn’t want to be in my body a minute, there are so many aches I’ve learned to overlook that you would notice; you would find them unendurable.” This would be impolite to dispute, though Hope sees that Kathryn is tempted to argue, her long head recoiling as if at a scent or to hearken to the rain that taps at the windows and makes that low groaning harmonic in the gutter, and Hope notices for the first time a beauty to the underside of the other woman’s nose: its curve ends in a tip where two small planes meet, the lower facet continuous with the flesh of the septum, which extends lower than is common, so that her nostril flares in profile, tender and avid and redly suffused with blood. This glimpse of live creatureliness brings the girl’s other features up into a feral glory: her plum-dark eyes with their curious glassiness, her unpainted lips pursed and unsmiling under the tension of this interview, her somewhat cupped and uncannily white little ears, small for the size of her jaw and fully exposed by the silver combs that flatten her hair against her skull, hair that, left to its own tendencies, would sprawl hugely on the pillow. Hope sees the other woman as one a man could adore, go sick in love of, sink his seed into the groin of as if his life’s work would be thereby accomplished. The strange concept, which she heard herself just propose, of this alien young identity seated opposite her transposed into Hope’s own body, with its arthritic fingers, passing chest pains, frequent shortness of breath, and abdominal complaints as her shrinking stomach resists the daily meals she force-feeds it, engenders more quick fantasies—the half-dreams that flutter through a weary mind—of their interpenetration, scorpions in a bottle, this girl invading her with her questions while Hope in turn tries to imagine Kathryn’s intimate life, the sensate creature beneath the oily pubic curls.
“So,” the next question comes, “your relationship with Jerome Chafetz began while you were still married to Guy Holloway?”
“Yes, several years b
efore, but perfectly properly. Jerry had bought a number of Guy’s white vinyl sculptures just as the market not only for Pop but for every kind of art was cooling,” Hope states. It pleases her to demonstrate that, thanks to her third marriage, she knows how money talks: “The Arabs had embargoed oil shipments to the U.S. because we helped Israel win the Yom Kippur War, and the economy had gone into what they called stagflation for the rest of the decade.”
“But Jerome Chafetz didn’t starve.”
“You can call him Jerry if you like. Everybody did, even his underlings and the help up here. Well before I became his wife, Jerry had reached that lovely point where his money couldn’t help making more money. He had been a stockbroker and then a stock analyst for one of the earliest mutual funds; in the early ’sixties, he struck out on his own and set up his own funds, designed to attract small investors as well as the pension-fund managers. He kept it simple, with just three funds in the beginning—Super-Gro, Sur-Gro, and Slo-Gro. Oddly enough, the Slo-Gro was the most heavily subscribed—people trusted it, people with money were still very conservative. The idea that everybody was rich or soon would be was something that Reagan brought in.”
“Jerry”—trying it out, with a twitch of that glorious nose—“died in ’86.”
“Yes. We were married in ’77. Nine wonderful years. We must have had some cross words, but I can’t remember them. He was eleven years older than I, and saw me, I think, as the companion with whom he would start to have some fun in his life before time ran out. The funds were in the hands of younger managers, and we were always going away to Europe, or the Caribbean, or up here. We bought it in 1980. He had been a city boy all his life and discovered he loved the soil, the grass, the rocks—he built yards of stone walls, with his own hands. They got calluses, he would show me proudly.”
“He was an art collector; there must have been a frustrated artist in him.”