Seek My Face Page 7

  This is burning season. If the girl would only go soon, Hope could spend an hour outside picking up dead sticks—the beeches and hickories drop them endlessly—for the brush fire Jason Warren would light when he came this Saturday, if the wind wasn’t high. Though he is one of those men to whom women are always in the way, strange two-legged incessantly talking animals found now even on the mountainsides, Hope likes to stand with him, adding to his blaze with garden stakes and dry stalks and feeling the heat on her face, enough to singe her eyebrows if her eyebrows hadn’t faded to wisps ages ago. Until she turned seventy she did almost all her own yardwork, Zack, much as she maligns him, having shown her what a person can do on their own; they had been too poor to think of hiring many workmen there on the Flats. Zack knocked out partitions and replaced shingles and porch supports and moved the barn uphill, out of the center of their view of the marsh and the distant strip of saltwater that was really a small harbor. Zack got neighbors—Andy Silcox, Glenn Urquhart—to help push the barn on rollers, it moved five inches each time they leveraged it up, less as the uphill pitch increased, they finally had to get a fisherman with a seine-hauling winch on the back of his truck to pull the big dilapidated thing onto the cement foundation Zack had laid by himself, spraining his shoulder in the process, spreading the hardening concrete. The Flats had been a frontier to them, though English sailors and their inbred descendants had been farming and fishing here since 1640. Neighbor helped neighbor, Zack paid back his labor-debt with labor on their places—rebuilding the Urquharts’ porch, helping harvest the Silcox potatoes. “It was the end of the world,” Hope says aloud. “Just the elements.”

  “What was?” Kathryn asks, behind her. Too close behind her, Hope feels, wary of having the heel of the Birkenstocks stepped on and a strap ripped. Birkenstocks are harder and harder to find to buy, the real ones, not imitations that stretch and loosen up right away.

  “The Flats. Sorry. I was thinking aloud. One does that, living alone. Here is the kitchen, but there’s a bathroom to the left, under the stairs, if you need it.”

  “No thank you, Hope. I don’t need it yet.”

  Hope, is it? How the young do presume—all these letters one gets without a Mrs. or a Ms., Hope McCoy as if there hadn’t been two husbands since or she didn’t sign her work “H. Ouderkirk.” And flaunting their superior bladder control. She really shouldn’t let them in, they take your day and send you to bed dizzy and then write what they had determined to write before they came. She had sat some years ago with a nice young man till near midnight, a professor of fine arts somewhere in the Midwest doing his first book, an expansion of his thesis, and when it came out all she had told him was reduced to a footnote contradicting somebody else. But it had been a while since anyone had asked, not only was Zack fading from what people in art talked about but Guy, too, which she would have thought would never happen, his ideas were so youthful and gay in the old sense, so impudent and fresh and tireless, he was an art movement by himself, until carrying it all began to weigh on him. Zack had felt weight only for a little while, and had got out from under. “When we moved, right after the war, most of the houses in the Flats still had outdoor privies. When we’d try to get to ours that first terrible winter, we’d be blown nearly off our feet, into that big silver maple, and when you were in there the wind would howl from underneath, quite alarmingly.”

  They enter the kitchen, and Hope worries that the girl will think she was talking about this house, which she and Jerry had acquired in another era, another marriage. They ripped out—they paid workmen to rip out—the linoleum floor and low stone sinks and leaky old Frigidaire and put in everything new, but that was a generation ago, and the fashions in stoves and sinks and ovens and countertops have moved on. The suspended cabinets, spray-painted a cream as smooth as a car finish, show loose handles and grubby patches where her fingers touch most often, and the ivory Formica on the long counter below the cabinets has split where the woodwork underneath has settled and shrunk. The black prongs of the burner she uses most often have chipped, and the big Andersen windows that provide a wide view of the old apple orchard staggering up the slope to the north don’t easily crank open and closed any more, rain and snowmelt have dripped down through the casing to swell the frame. It is an expensive airy kitchen turning shabby. Only the green serpentine top to the island holding the gas burners has proved impervious to time, its veins preserving the eddies and ripples and mica flecks of metamorphic flow molten in a moment inconceivably remote, millions and millions of years, time enough for the human species to go extinct a hundred times—metamorphic rock older than these Green Mountains eroding around her but at this moment cool and sleek to her touch as with the other hand she sets the spouted round kettle on the chipped prongs of her favorite burner. Her hand stretches grotesquely in the kettle’s mirroring aluminum; her face is a distant pale spot with pathetic white bangs, a snatch of smoke, white straw too dry to be tamed.

  Hope turns on the gas, holding the knob pointing to noon until its rather frantic little clicking ignites a blue rush of flame that she subdues by turning the knob to where eleven o’clock would be. She feels Kathryn looking about the kitchen, its flaking surfaces and pockets of jumble, and wondering where Hope’s money has gone. She will not ask that, but Hope has a ready answer. She has kept the money, and invested it conservatively, to leave to her children, the major share to her daughter: conscience money, but she won’t go into that. Her father had dribbled his father’s money away, so she is proud of her shrewdness and thrift. She held Zack’s paintings back as their value went up and up; then Guy was an astute and industrious exploiter of the fat art market in the ’sixties and ’seventies; and Jerry was generous, leaving her the same share of his fortune as each of his children by the former wife and listing the Vermont house in her name from the start. It had been hers as the search for silence and country simplicity had been hers. Zack was her partner in that search for a while; a child of Western spaces, he needed room to roam in, as he had that first summer, the one of ’46, dazed by the marshes and dunes as they came into bloom. “What I loved about the Flats,” she tells Kathryn, “was the light, the way the land accepted it, as if it were the flat palm of a hand at the end of an extended arm. It felt like the end of the world. You’ve been there, of course, as part of your research, but not then, right after the war. Nothing had changed for so long. Farmland had that treeless look then, though our own land had the silver maple on it, and a tropical-looking tree with gauzy pink-and-white flowers and feathery locustlike leaves that when you handled them wanted to close up like the page of a book. An albizia, or silk tree, though people called it a mimosa. One of the farmers who had owned the place must have planted it, for an ornament. That far out on Long Island there were almost no houses that weren’t farmhouses—a church, a Masonic lodge—and the potato fields stretched everywhere. The land where it wasn’t cultivated was sandy and marshy, and here and there great stray boulders had been left by the glacier. Montauk had been an island until the glacier filled in the gap with a moraine. Looking east as we did, we saw a strip of blue saltwater—McGonicle’s Harbor—a strip of land beyond, and a huge windy sky. Water, air, sand, the sun. But I bet you wish I wouldn’t talk without your tape recorder being on.”

  “I would prefer it, though my memory is pretty good. Still, it’s better to have your exact words.”

  “Oh dear, does it really matter? I hardly trust my words any more, it’s always been a failing of mine to say what I think people want to hear. And I do doubt there’s anything I can say I haven’t said someplace already. What would you like in your tea?”

  “My tea? Oh. No, just plain, thanks.”

  Why had this simple request startled her? The interviewer’s mind had been elsewhere. Hope finds she is hurt by this, this inattention when she is putting herself out, making tea, talking so freely. Yet this female stranger must have a life, back in the city—men friends, job worries, rent to pay, or condo fees more likely in th
is day and age. When Hope was young it was easier, you paid by the week and ducked the landlord when you were late. He was stuck with you to some extent, eviction was a legal procedure, so there was some play in the situation. Kathryn is looking around, disappointed by the plainness—the Redouté calendar such as anyone could buy in a book-and-card shop, the cabinets with their soiled handles, the appliances twenty years out of date, the fading photographic keepsakes—vacation snaps and official school photos of grandchildren taken in a curtained booth one by one and tacked to the refrigerator door with magnets in the shape of vegetables. “Would you like to see my studio?” Hope asks the interviewer.

  “Oh, yes. Very much.” Yet the young woman’s enthusiasm lacks the fervor Hope thought the offer deserved: the sorceress’s workshop, the scene of the daily miracle.

  The farmhouses in northern New England feel like trains, one car linked to another to spare the farmer wading out into the snow. When she and Jerry had bought the place, a collapsing, disused cow barn was connected to the kitchen by means of roofed storage space filled with ten-gallon milk cans and other apparatus for the defunct dairy operation; this long, low space now holds the tools of lawn and bed care that Hope has gradually yielded to the weekly crew of Warren offspring. Even the little implements of flower gardening—trowels, scratchers, asparagus forks, hand clippers, wire peony supports always maddeningly tangled like Chinese puzzles—are touched by her less than she intends; it seems that making her body move out of bed and doing her morning time in the studio is all she can do, though this spring she firmly intends to make a fresh, more energetic start. The musty odor of last year’s fertilizers—Milorganite, Holly-Tone—and bags of buckwheat-hull mulch fills this long, unheated space with a distilled essence of earth under cultivation, the scent of a season ahead but still out of reach. Past a bench of clay pots and tarnished hose nozzles and bundled green garden stakes she leads the city girl, who cringes to keep her smart black outfit from a dirtying contact, her square-toed boots feeling their way along the cracked concrete floor as if over stepping-stones, through the electronically controlled double doors of the elegant studio Jerry had built for Hope, for her sixtieth birthday, where the old barn once listed sideways on its tired beams, bindweed interwoven with its side boards, a row of hollyhocks, in fainting Kate Greenaway colors, eight feet tall along the south side lost to the reconstruction. The high square space is thickly insulated and illumined by a northward-tilted Plexiglas-bubble skylight brimming this morning with a blue so deep it attains indigo, layer upon layer of atoms of pure illusion. Zack never had such a perfect setup, though in planning it Hope could not but reconstruct his old studio, doing it better. Overhead tracks support long fluorescent fixtures; she flicks several of the switches on a panel just inside the doors, and a sharp artificial brilliance, after some blink and flutter, intensifies the natural northern light.

  “Oh,” says Kathryn. “So bright.”

  “The better to see you, my dear.”

  Hope’s visitor—whose posture could be better, as if when she got her growth spurt she cringed and stooped so as not to tower over her classmates—approaches the canvas on the central easel, still wet with this morning’s work, a canvas six by five feet, of horizontal stripes. Is she nearsighted? She peers so intently, at such close range, that a sideways lurch brushes her against the crusty table crowded with half-squeezed tubes of oil paint and jars of stand oil and the panes of glass, ordinary nine-by-twelves, that Hope uses instead of wooden palettes. Startled by the contact, Kathryn takes a hasty step back, and she and Hope together look to see if any wet paint has spoiled her black slacks, their exotic ribbed fabric. “I don’t see anything,” Hope reassures her.

  “Me neither, don’t worry.” Not trusting the older woman’s eyes, she has inspected independently, fussily brushing at the unsmirched spot. At last looking up, she changes focus. “The painting is lovely. So refined.”

  “I wondered, glancing at it just now, if the two shades of gray are close enough together. You don’t want stripiness to be the first thing you notice, this isn’t meant to be Op. You want them to be so subtle they dawn. Slowly.”

  “Like those Ad Reinhardt rectangles. He leads us into the paint, to see they’re not quite all the same shade of purply brown. You get that in Seamus O’Rourke, too—the elusiveness, the quasi-thereness.”

  Hope flinches at the false note, the student note. But, then, did the painters themselves do any better, verbalizing? That had been one of Zack’s beauties, his refusal or inability to verbalize. Artists should have their tongues cut out. “That was one of their ideas, I think,” she says tactfully. “To immerse the viewer, to paint at such a scale that the viewer ceases to be conscious of the edges of the canvas.”

  “You’ve never gone in for the biggest scale,” Kathryn tells her, and asks, “Does that have anything to do with your being a woman?”

  “Probably. Also, the theory never seemed to me to quite hold water. Bernie Nova’s huge canvases, one is aware of the edges because they’re so huge, so far away on the wall. You think of the space in which he must have made it, and wonder where it can be hung, except in a museum. With Renaissance murals, the building itself is the edge, and it all melts in, flows into something not sharply different. But in a museum, with the white walls, the guard standing in the corner … only in some of Zack’s biggest, the three he did in 1950, before his gift gave out, does it really happen, we lose ourselves in the paint, the way he said he did. And even then, we come up against something, a bumblebee, a sneaker print, a cigarette butt that got worked in, that reminds us of what we’re looking at, a big piece of canvas, with edges. I think it’s very hazardous to base any approach to painting on what a hypothetical viewer will do or feel. It has to be between you and the canvas—question and answer, push and pull, and let the viewer come in however he can.”

  Even amid the resiny, spiritous smell of fresh paint Hope catches a whiff of Kathryn’s perfume, a sweet faux-floral gust thinly applied over a coarser scent, the chemically loaded aura of a young female animal. In the merciless light a small redness, not quite a pimple, burns beside a nostril wing of the long waxen nose; a blusher imposes chalky shadows of orange pastel at the cheekbones, and a henna rinse makes a rust on the metallic black filaments springing back from her brow. Her face is long, but her hair begins rather low on her brow. Hope imagines a fever of wanting pressing behind that brow, giving it its fretful texture, its shadows of tension; these young people know, as her generation did not, that however much is attained it will not be enough. Sex sours, wealth melts, fame is for fifteen minutes. The wet plum-solemn eyes—blue grease on the upper lid, a line of kohl on the lower, the lashes long enough to curl backward but almost certainly her own—dart toward the corners of the mercilessly lit big room, where other gray canvases of Hope’s, dried, with their faint intimations of a beauty on the edge of an invisible quiet, lean against others, splashier, lesser, unsold works by her first two husbands, kept for their passive companionship and as insurance for her old age, as if it were not already here. Photographs of herself with others in other times going back to Ardmore in the ’twenties, framed certificates of graduation and commendation (Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Erster Preis Kunstfest München), the hideous trophies of crystal and painted metal one gets as tokens of recognition and public gratitude (the most ungainly of them handed to her sheepishly by the first President Bush, a tall and boyish Connecticut gent apparently as pleasantly surprised to find himself in the White House as she was; at lunch afterward, seated beside her, he pointed out for Hope to admire the daily flowers, the elegantly clad Marine guards, the splendid imposing punctilio which momentarily surrounded them, two proper children of the fading Protestant hegemony): these souvenirs, still in the hasty order of an afternoon’s arranging when the studio was newly built, attract Kathryn’s attention less than Hope expected. Only the old photographs tempt the interloper to move closer, her neck cranked forward in that unbecoming way. �
�How pretty you were.”

  “I never thought of myself as pretty, but I tried to be amusing and not lazy. If you’re raised as a Quaker, the world seems terribly exciting, like a party you didn’t expect to get invited to. The Devil’s party, if we take that obsolete statement of mine seriously.”