form of light, which she rationally understands as a senseless rain of protons, a universe of particles that once upon a time burst into being for absolutely no reason. But she has a long life behind her that can’t be taken away, five grandchildren with some facet of herself embedded in them, works on display at the Hirschhorn and the Whitney, in Tokyo and Zurich and São Paulo, and a filing drawer full of reviews that are some of them very flattering, even adoring. Poor Zack had none of that, going out to the little barn, its loose and gappy boards leaking heat as fast as the woodstove could produce it, those first winters on the Island, for the single hour before the cold got hopelessly to his hands in the rough work-gloves he had cut the fingertips off of; he had only this desperate creative drive, this appetite for something even beyond fame and wealth, as blind as a sick animal’s instinct to seek privacy beneath the porch. He drank less in those years—he saw how she responded to his sobriety and still wanted to please her—but his smoker’s hack would take hours in the morning to clear.
Hope confides to this girl, to keep her off-guard, “You
do
understand that to have a real artistic advance there must be not only individual stout hearts but also a certain widespread—how can I say?—
rottenness
in things that onlyan initiated few suspect. It’s this nose for the rotten, I sometimes think, that takes the sensitivity, and the courage.” She would get dread in her stomach before each of Hochmann’s classes, too—before her mind lost itself in the paint, in that druglike rapture of self-forgetfulness when things began to happen on the canvas,
in
the painting, Zack used to say. The push and the pull. Since Kathryn, lurching forward in the chair to inspect her tape recorder, gives no sign of having heard this abruptly issued oracle, Hope asks her, more kindly, “Would you like a cup of tea if I made it?”
Kathryn casts an annoyed eye at the little gray machine purring on the refinished sea-chest with its rows of brass nailheads. “Could we keep going,” the younger woman insists, “until the tape runs out? Would you like to tell me how you remember meeting Zack?”
Feeling pushed, feeling the other woman has been deaf to the subtlety of what she has said, letting the little machine listen for her, Hope says, modelling attentiveness, “I
like
the way you put that. How one remembers slowly replaces what really was. Like fossils.” She thinks she is unclear, and amplifies, “The same way that mineral particles fill in the shape where a body has rotted away—a kind of lost-wax casting process, as I understand it. Zack,” she restates, nettled to think that the girl will see her as an old fool wasting precious tape. “As I remember it, it was at one of the Saturday dances at the Artists Union loft at Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. This drunken man grabbed me and asked me if I wanted to fuck, that was his word, considered quite rude in those days, even among so-called bohe-mians. Pretending to dance, he pushed his body against mine to show me he had an erection, and I slapped his face. It seemed to wake him up, because he became suddenly very polite, like a little boy. He kept begging my pardon,and I couldn’t get away from him. He was too drunk to remember me afterward, but I remembered
him
, and would see him at the Cedar Tavern, where Ruk used to take me before he suddenly deserted New York and joined his family in Minneapolis, where they had somehow landed on their feet. Or their boots. Their White-Russian boots. Did I tell you I never understood how his family got their money out of Russia? I mean, that yellow Lincoln cost somebody a bundle. Jewels, I supposed, sewed into their girdles. You know about the Cedar, I’m sure—it was a perfectly plain bar, painted one dismal shade of green inside, and looked from the outside just like a dozen other bars along University Place, but the painters
Hope confides to this girl, to keep her off-guard, “You
do
understand that to have a real artistic advance there must be not only individual stout hearts but also a certain widespread—how can I say?—
rottenness
in things that onlyan initiated few suspect. It’s this nose for the rotten, I sometimes think, that takes the sensitivity, and the courage.” She would get dread in her stomach before each of Hochmann’s classes, too—before her mind lost itself in the paint, in that druglike rapture of self-forgetfulness when things began to happen on the canvas,
in
the painting, Zack used to say. The push and the pull. Since Kathryn, lurching forward in the chair to inspect her tape recorder, gives no sign of having heard this abruptly issued oracle, Hope asks her, more kindly, “Would you like a cup of tea if I made it?”
Kathryn casts an annoyed eye at the little gray machine purring on the refinished sea-chest with its rows of brass nailheads. “Could we keep going,” the younger woman insists, “until the tape runs out? Would you like to tell me how you remember meeting Zack?”
Feeling pushed, feeling the other woman has been deaf to the subtlety of what she has said, letting the little machine listen for her, Hope says, modelling attentiveness, “I
like
the way you put that. How one remembers slowly replaces what really was. Like fossils.” She thinks she is unclear, and amplifies, “The same way that mineral particles fill in the shape where a body has rotted away—a kind of lost-wax casting process, as I understand it. Zack,” she restates, nettled to think that the girl will see her as an old fool wasting precious tape. “As I remember it, it was at one of the Saturday dances at the Artists Union loft at Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. This drunken man grabbed me and asked me if I wanted to fuck, that was his word, considered quite rude in those days, even among so-called bohe-mians. Pretending to dance, he pushed his body against mine to show me he had an erection, and I slapped his face. It seemed to wake him up, because he became suddenly very polite, like a little boy. He kept begging my pardon,and I couldn’t get away from him. He was too drunk to remember me afterward, but I remembered
him
, and would see him at the Cedar Tavern, where Ruk used to take me before he suddenly deserted New York and joined his family in Minneapolis, where they had somehow landed on their feet. Or their boots. Their White-Russian boots. Did I tell you I never understood how his family got their money out of Russia? I mean, that yellow Lincoln cost somebody a bundle. Jewels, I supposed, sewed into their girdles. You know about the Cedar, I’m sure—it was a perfectly plain bar, painted one dismal shade of green inside, and looked from the outside just like a dozen other bars along University Place, but the painters
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