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dollars and sanded and varnished, those first few years when she and Zack were enthusiastic about making a home together on the light-soaked windy tip of Long Island, worlds removed fromwhat he called, euphemistically, covering his from-bar-to-bar binges, the “wear and tear” of Manhattan. Kathryn says hurriedly, as if Hope were sensitive to such matters, “The triumph was exploited, I know, politically, by the Rockefellers and the CIA among others, but I don’t see it as a political movement, originally. I see it as innocent, the last flare of our idealistic innocence.”
    “Oh dear,” Hope responds. “We didn’t feel innocent to ourselves. We felt very sophisticated and a bit wicked. And the painters didn’t all know each other equally well, or should I say like each other equally. A number of the others, the more intellectual and better organized, didn’t like Zack much, especially after his paintings became so famous and his drinking became terrible again. Zack wasn’t easy to like, or even, after a while, to love.” She lets that float a few seconds, tantalizing this other, tempting her to pounce prematurely on that belly-up word “love,” but Kathryn ignores the provocation, and Hope has to continue, explaining, clarifying what would have always been better left mysterious. Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life. She flutters a hand—knobby, freckled, smelling of paint thinner—at the end of her man’s lumberjack-shirt sleeve and says, “Everybody now is expected to turn inside out on command, like impatiens seeds when touched, or—what is that plant called?—squirting cucumber. Zack hated being interviewed; it offended his lower-class sense of dignity, of there being things one didn’t say. We all—me, Clem, Peggy, Betty, Herbie Forrest—used to coach him on what to say, but when the time came he refused to say it, or mumbled it. It was his arrogance—he thought you shouldn’t chase recognition, it should come to you without being asked. He was wild for it yet despised playing the game.” He isgropingly coming back to her, his squarish puzzled bad-boy face, its three muscular dents, deep dimples as if in amplification—a stronger restatement—of her own lone dimple, and with his face the look of the Manhattan streets back then, before glass-skin architecture and plastic garbage bags: the curbs of East Ninth Street crowded on collection days with corroded galvanized trash cans, angrily dented on the dump truck’s hydraulically lifted lip, and the huge metal noise they made in the middle of the night, the trash men getting their own back at all those sleeping safe above them. The cans smelled plainly of garbage then, and class war was unconcealed, unions versus management, the Reds against the rich. You were not asked to have a nice day; buildings looked much the same in Manhattan as in any city, brick and four stories high; each block formed a little village, with a shoe repairman, a barber shop, a notions shop run by a pair of sisters, a Chinese laundry, a coal-and-wood cellar, a drugstore with a marble soda counter. Eighth Street was a kind of
souk
, where you were jostled down into the gutter, and the area north and east of Washington Square had a furtive European quality, Grace Church with its waffle-pattern gray steeple presiding where Broadway slightly bent like a medieval street sneaking along, and Cooper Union standing afloat in its square like a brown Venetian palace. University Place was a string of bars, including the Cedar, which when you opened the door always seemed warm, and dim enough so that your defects were left outside. It smelled of smoke and sawdust.
    “He was,” Hope says, halting, conscious of herself as the possessor, in this other’s pendulous black eyes, of a wandering, frayed old mind, beyond any usefulness but some shreds of memory to be woven into another’s story, “he was self-indulgent and hardly even