Seek My Face Read Online Free Page B

course he was right. One man in the Flats—Jimmy Quinn, who ran what was really a glorified vegetable stand—took a little thirty-by-forty fiberboard of Zack’s in payment and ten years or so ago finally sold it for two million dollars. He still drives around in his beat-up pickup. Zack would have liked that.”
    Hope pauses, and Kathryn’s lips part to spit another question into the tape, but Hope is not done with her long, looping thought; there is a picture of Zack she wants to finish, though the memory of him threatens to suck her back, out, down, like waves foaming at her ankles at one of the beaches, one of the remote rocky ones past the bluffs, past the old fish-factories, toward the Point, where they would stand as the afternoon gave up its strong light and turned ruddy and the breeze picked up, there being nothing to the south but the Atlantic, a few gray ships on the horizon like index tabs in a filing cabinet. “We all drank,” she repeats, “but for Zack it was a poison, it released demons. Like many a famous drinker, he really couldn’t drink. I held my liquor better than he did, and I was just a slip of a thing in my twenties.” Zack was in his thirties when they first went together: his narrow hips, his chest and shoulders coated with blond wool, even his bare feet were beautiful, knobby and broad across the toes, and the insteps as white as the skin inside a woman’s arm. She stood beside him feeling the suck of ankle-high surf, the way it pulls the sand out from under your heels. There had been the white noise of the waves and the far-stretching scent of beach, salt and iodine and rotting marine bodies, fish and jellyfish leaving their round ochre corpses like puddles of varnish on the rocks, collapsed, unable to get back to their element, theiranatomy dimly seen within the puddle, useless, wasted, something like breathing still taking place, poor doomed creatures, so we all. She had liked the way Zack was not too much taller than she, like some men, including Ruk; she felt like an Eve matched to him, as in those marvellous Cranach panels in Pasadena, or the two frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, the Masaccio so anguished and ashamed, the red angel over their heads banishing them, and the Masolino so serene and stately and haughty, the little benign female snake’s head above Eve’s, Eve cool with her centrally parted fair hair, unrepentant, before the Fall, the cleft of her sex not hidden, nor Adam’s penis. Face it: this young woman, too, is beautiful. Hope imagines Kathryn’s naked body—the swing of hip into thigh, the rose-madder-tipped breasts floating on the rib cage, the pubic triangle pure ivory-black and oily as in a Corot—all in a flash, then renounces the image:
of the creature
. Her susceptibility to beauty, Hope has always known, is what has kept her minor as an artist. The great ones go beyond beauty, they spurn it as desert saints spurned visions of concupiscence and ease: the Devil’s offer of the world as reward.
    She tells her interrogator, “The moment you describe, when America came into its own in terms of art, artists had been saying ever since the Armory Show that it must happen; what was Regionalism but an attempt to make it happen?—Benton and so on, the WPA murals. We were terribly marginal, abstraction was a pipe dream like Communism. The media—they weren’t called that then—played us for laughs; we were mad fools. America was titillated. Those pictures of Zack in
Life
, and then the little movie that terrible, bossy German made, Hans something—those were what killed him, really. He hated himself for becoming a celebrity, the new Dalí. For being made to see, I suppose, that becominga celebrity was what he had wanted all along. He really had very little talent, the way most art students have it—just this terrible drive to be great. He was desperate to be not just good but
great
. Others thought they had it, too, the drive, but they didn’t stick with it,