a result finally. Sometimes I make preliminary drawings, but the paintingtends to destroy them. Paint never seems to behave the same. It doesn’t dry the same. It doesn’t stay there and look at you the same.”
It hardens
, Hope thought. None of this would be important if paint didn’t harden.
One painter was conspicuous by his silence. His eyes darted from face to face, tawny slitted eyes the raw sienna of dead grass in blond-lashed lids rubbed pinker and pinker as the beers or whiskeys accumulated within him. At times Hope saw him take in breath, or tense his lips as if to speak, but nothing came out, and an affecting look of congestion knotted his face, his forehead. His face had more muscles in it than most. His forehead knotted easily into ridges, and circles of muscle formed dimples beside the creases at the corners of his pensive mouth and in the center of his chin. His head sank a little lower into his shoulders when his numb-looking lips moved forward to engulf a cigarette; he hunched at each puff. He was not old, though older than she by ten years, she guessed. His fairish hair was thin on top and his scalp was tan, and he wore a white T-shirt beneath a scuffed leather jacket which he had taken off, so this image of hers must attach to warm weather, the summer of 1944, when, after D-day, eight-column headlines followed the advance of the invasion and every day brought its hundreds of American deaths. As she had said to Kathryn, it was strange that while all this slaughter was going on and cathedrals and palaces were being bombed they could have been so blithe, so autocratic, so oblivious in their pontifications about the redemptive mission of paint, but so it was: the duty of the living was to live, and the brave and valid part of their lives was painting. At this time she was working through the benign but ponderous influence of Hochmann by doing collages and Oriental-looking black brushworklike Merebien, who reworked his few images—a rectangular doorway, a row of black ovals like giant beans squeezed in a pod—in a mood of joy and variation, and whose round bland face was sweating amiably in their midst yet on its long child-thin neck also floating above them, willing to be their leader, their theorist. If Hope had ever been attracted to intelligence she would have been attracted to Merebien. But her own father had shown her the limitations of refinement, of well-bred intelligence.
She is not eager to share Zack with Kathryn. She has already shared him with so many inquirers, with the multitude that still look to art to save them. She suppresses her recollection of this night, compounded of many such talky nights, at the Cedar or at Stewart’s Cafeteria or the Waldorf on Sixth Avenue off Eighth Street, at the San Remo or Romany Marie’s on Grove Street, Ratner’s on Delancey or the Jumble Shop at Eighth and MacDougal Streets, nights wherein Zack’s face seemed to yearn toward hers in its bleary puzzlement, which seemed more and more her concern, his face aimed at her and lodged within her inner gallery. “Self,” she repeats, and tells the other woman, “But we—they—didn’t just shout theory at each other; really, that was rare. What did Matisse say, ‘Artists should have their tongues cut out’? Mostly, everybody was burrowing away in their own studio, jealous of everybody else’s imagined successes. When we got together it was to drink and have fun. The Artists Union had dances every Saturday, and I remember going to one of them—a Christmas costume ball, after Ruk had cut out of town, me and this other girl, Cindy Jasinski, I was rooming with on Jones Street—as Hottentots, it would be considered too racist to do now but then there seemed no harm in it, we went as Hottentots, covered in grease and coal dust and big glassbeads and not much else, our hair up in knots with a pretend dog-bone from the pet shop through them, and I felt pretty good about myself—I had a nice tidy little
It hardens
, Hope thought. None of this would be important if paint didn’t harden.
One painter was conspicuous by his silence. His eyes darted from face to face, tawny slitted eyes the raw sienna of dead grass in blond-lashed lids rubbed pinker and pinker as the beers or whiskeys accumulated within him. At times Hope saw him take in breath, or tense his lips as if to speak, but nothing came out, and an affecting look of congestion knotted his face, his forehead. His face had more muscles in it than most. His forehead knotted easily into ridges, and circles of muscle formed dimples beside the creases at the corners of his pensive mouth and in the center of his chin. His head sank a little lower into his shoulders when his numb-looking lips moved forward to engulf a cigarette; he hunched at each puff. He was not old, though older than she by ten years, she guessed. His fairish hair was thin on top and his scalp was tan, and he wore a white T-shirt beneath a scuffed leather jacket which he had taken off, so this image of hers must attach to warm weather, the summer of 1944, when, after D-day, eight-column headlines followed the advance of the invasion and every day brought its hundreds of American deaths. As she had said to Kathryn, it was strange that while all this slaughter was going on and cathedrals and palaces were being bombed they could have been so blithe, so autocratic, so oblivious in their pontifications about the redemptive mission of paint, but so it was: the duty of the living was to live, and the brave and valid part of their lives was painting. At this time she was working through the benign but ponderous influence of Hochmann by doing collages and Oriental-looking black brushworklike Merebien, who reworked his few images—a rectangular doorway, a row of black ovals like giant beans squeezed in a pod—in a mood of joy and variation, and whose round bland face was sweating amiably in their midst yet on its long child-thin neck also floating above them, willing to be their leader, their theorist. If Hope had ever been attracted to intelligence she would have been attracted to Merebien. But her own father had shown her the limitations of refinement, of well-bred intelligence.
She is not eager to share Zack with Kathryn. She has already shared him with so many inquirers, with the multitude that still look to art to save them. She suppresses her recollection of this night, compounded of many such talky nights, at the Cedar or at Stewart’s Cafeteria or the Waldorf on Sixth Avenue off Eighth Street, at the San Remo or Romany Marie’s on Grove Street, Ratner’s on Delancey or the Jumble Shop at Eighth and MacDougal Streets, nights wherein Zack’s face seemed to yearn toward hers in its bleary puzzlement, which seemed more and more her concern, his face aimed at her and lodged within her inner gallery. “Self,” she repeats, and tells the other woman, “But we—they—didn’t just shout theory at each other; really, that was rare. What did Matisse say, ‘Artists should have their tongues cut out’? Mostly, everybody was burrowing away in their own studio, jealous of everybody else’s imagined successes. When we got together it was to drink and have fun. The Artists Union had dances every Saturday, and I remember going to one of them—a Christmas costume ball, after Ruk had cut out of town, me and this other girl, Cindy Jasinski, I was rooming with on Jones Street—as Hottentots, it would be considered too racist to do now but then there seemed no harm in it, we went as Hottentots, covered in grease and coal dust and big glassbeads and not much else, our hair up in knots with a pretend dog-bone from the pet shop through them, and I felt pretty good about myself—I had a nice tidy little
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