by John Updike
I prefer dinners on the intimate side, four, six people, give everybody a chance to shine, strut their stuff. You invite a mob and mob psychology takes over, a few leaders and a lot of sheep. I have some super candelabra still packed, eighteenth-century, expert I know says positively from the workshop of Robert Joseph Auguste though it doesn't have the hallmark, the French were never into hallmarks like the English, the detail on it you wouldn't believe, imitation grapevines down to the tiniest little curlicue tendril, you can even see a little bug or two on 'em, you can even see where insects chewed the leaves, everything done two-thirds scale; I hate to get it up here in plain view until I have a foolproof burglar alarm installed, though burglars generally don't like to tackle a place like this, only one way in and out, they like to have an escape hatch. Not that that's any insurance policy, they're getting bolder, the drugs make the bastards desperate, the drugs and the general breakdown in respect for any damn thing at all; I've heard of people gone for only half an hour and cleaned out, they keep track of your routines, your every move, you're watched, that's one thing you can be sure of in this society, baby: you are watched."
Of Alexandra's responses to this outpouring she had no consciousness: polite noises, no doubt, as she held herself a distance behind him in fear of being accidentally struck as the big man wheeled and gestured. She was aware of, beyond his excited dark shape as he lavishly bragged, a certain penetrating bareness: a shabbiness of empty corners and rugless scratched floors, of ceilings whose cracks and buckled patches had gone untouched for decades, of woodwork whose once-white paint had yellowed and chipped and of elegant hand-printed panoramic wallpapers drooping loose in the corners and along the dried-out seams;
vanished paintings and mirrors were remembered by rectangular and oval ghosts of lesser discoloration. For all his talk of glories still to be unpacked, the rooms were badly underfurnished; Van Home had the robust instincts of a creator but with only, it seemed, half the needed raw materials. Alexandra found this touching and saw in him something of herself, her monumental statues that could be held in the hand.
"Now," he announced, booming as if to drown out these thoughts in her head, "here's the room I wanted you to see. La chambre de resistance." It was a long living room, with a portentous fireplace pillared like the facade of a temple—leafy Ionic pillars carved to support a mantel above which a great bevelled mirror gave back the room a speckled version of its lordly space. She looked at her own image and removed the bandanna, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today but with a sticky twistiness still in it. As her voice had come out of her startled mouth younger than she was, so she looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. It was slightly tipped; she looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show. In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, a hag with cracked lips and a dented nose and with broken veins in her septum, and when, driving in the Subaru, she stole a peek at herself in the rearview mirror, she looked worse yet, corpselike in color, the eyes quite wild and a single stray lash laid like a beetle-leg across one lower lid. As a tiny girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to peek back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a sense true.
Van Home had put around the fireplace some boxy modern stuffed chairs and a curved four-cushioned sofa, refugees from a New York apartment obviously, and well worn; but the room was mostly furnished with works of art, including several that took up floor space. A giant hamburger of violently colored, semi-inflated vinyl. A white plaster woman at a real ironing board, with an actual dead cat from a taxidermist's rubbing at her ankles. A vertical stack of Brillo cartons that close inspection revealed to be not airy stamped cardboard but meticulously silk-screened sheets mounted on great cubes of something substantial and immovable. A neon rainbow, unplugged and needing a dusting.
The man slapped an especially ugly assemblage, a naked woman on her back with legs spread; she had been concocted of chicken wire, flattened beer cans, an old porcelain chamber pot for her belly, pieces of chrome car bumper, items of underwear stiffened with lacquer and glue. Her face, staring straight up at the sky or ceiling, was that of a plaster doll such as Alexandra used to play with, with china-blue eyes and cherubic pink cheeks, cut off and fixed to a block of wood that had been crayoned to represent hair. "Here's the genius of the bunch for my money," Van Home said, wiping the corners of his mouth dry with a two-finger pinching motion. "Kienholz. A Marisol with guts. You know, the tactility; there's nothing monotonous or pre-ordained about it. That's the kind of thing you should be setting your sights toward. The richness, the Vielfältigkeit, the, you know, the ambiguity. No offense, friend Lexa, but you're a Johnny-one-note with those little poppets of yours."
"They're not poppets, and this statue is rude, a joke against women," she said languidly, feeling splayed and out of focus, in tune with the moment—a gliding sensation, the world passing through her or she moving the world, a cosmic confusion such as when the train silently tugs away from the station and it seems the platform is sliding backwards. "My little bubbles aren't jokes, they're meant affectionately." Yet her hand wandered on the assemblage and found there the glossy yet resistant texture of life. On the walls of this long room, once perhaps hung with Lenox family portraits from eighteenth-century Newport, there now hung or protruded or dangled gaudy travesties of the ordinary—giant pay telephones in limp canvas, American flags duplicated in impasto, oversize dollar bills rendered with deadpan fidelity, plaster eyeglasses with not eyes but parted lips behind the lenses, relentless enlargements of our comic strips and advertising insignia, our movie stars and bottle caps, our candies and newspapers and traffic signs. All that we wish to use and discard with scarcely a glance was here held up bloated and bright: permanized garbage. Van Home gloated, snorted, and repeatedly wiped his lips as he led Alexandra through his collection, down one wall and back the other; and in truth she saw that he had acquired of this mocking art specimens of good quality. He had money and needed a woman to help him spend it. Across his dark vest curved the gold chain of an antique watch fob; he was an inheritor, though ill at ease with his inheritance. A wife could put him at ease.
The tea with rum came, but formed a more sedate ceremony than she had imagined from Sukie's description. Fidel materialized with that ideal silence of servants, a tidy scar placed so flatteringly beneath one cheekbone it seemed appliqued to his mocha skin, a deliberate fillip to his small slanting features. The long-haired cat called Thumbkin, with the deformed paws mentioned in the Word, leaped onto Alexandra's lap just as she lifted her cup to sip; its liquid content scarcely swayed. The horizon of sea visible through the Palladian windows from where she sat stayed level also: the world was in part a gently shuffled deck of horizontal liquids, it occurred to her, thinking of the cold dense stratum of the sea where only giant eyeless slugs moved beneath the pressure, and then of mist licking the autumnal surface of a woodland pond, and of the spheres of ever-thinner gas that our astronauts pierce without puncturing, so the sky's blue does not leak away. She fell at peace here, which she had not expected, here in these rooms virtually empty but for their overload of sardonic art, rooms eloquent of a bachelor's lacks. Her host seemed pleasanter too. The manner of a man who wants to sleep with you is slicing and aggressive, testing, foreshadowing his eventual anger if he succeeds, and there seemed little of that in Van Home's manner today. He looked tired, slumped in his tatty boxy armchair covered in a mushroom-colored corduroy. She fantasized that the business appointment for which he had put on his solemn three-piece suit had been a disappointment, perhaps a petition for a bank loan that had been refused. With plain need he poured extra rum into his tea from the bottle of Mount Gay his butler had set at his elbow, on a Queen Anne piecrust table. "How did you come to acquire such a large and wonderful collection?" Alexandra asked him.
"My investment adviser" was his disappointing answer. "Smartest thing financiall
y you can ever do except strike oil in your back yard is buy a name artist before he has the name. Think of those two Russkis who picked up all that Picasso and Matisse cheap in Paris just before the war and now it sits over there in Leningrad where nobody can lay their eyes on it. Think of the lucky fools who took an early Pollock off his hands for the price of a bottle of Scotch. Even hit or miss you'll average out better than the stock market.
One Jasper Johns makes up for an awful lot of junk. Anyway, I love the junk."
"I see you do," Alexandra said, trying to help him. How could she ever rouse this heavy rambling man to fall in love with her? He was like a house with too many rooms, and the rooms with too many doors.
He did lurch forward in his chair, spilling tea. He had done it so often, evidently, that by reflex he spread his legs and the tan liquid flipped between them to the carpet. "Greatest thing about Orientals," he said. "They don't show your sins." With the sole of one little pointy black shoe—his feet were almost monstrously small for his bulk—he rubbed the tea stain in. "I hated," he volunteered, "that abstract stuff they were trying to sell us in the Fifties; Christ, it all reminded me of Eisenhower, a big blah. I want art to show me something, to tell me where I'm at, even if it's Hell, right?"
"I guess so. I'm really very dilettantish," Alexandra said, less comfortable now that he did seem to be rousing. What underwear had she put on? When had she last had a bath?
"So when this Pop came along, I thought, Jesus, this is the stuff for me. So fucking cheerful, you know—going down but going down with a smile. Like the late Romans in a way. 'D’you ever read Petronius? Funny. Funny, God, you can look at that goat Rauschenberg put in the rubber tire and laugh until sundown. I was in this gallery years ago on Fifty-seventh Street—that's where I'd like to see you, as I guess I've been saying to the point where it's boring—and the dealer, this faggot called Mischa, they used to call him Mischa the Muff, hell of a knowledgeable guy though, showed me these two beer cans by Johns—Ballantine ale, actually—in bronze, but painted up so sweet, with that ever-so-exact but slightly free way Johns has, and one with a triangle in the top where a beer opener had been and the other virgin, unopened. Mischa says to me, 'Pick that one up.' 'Which one?' I say. 'Any one,' he says. I pick up the virgin one. It's heavy. 'Pick up the other one,' he says. 'Really?' I ask. 'Go ahead,' he says. I do. It's lighter! The beer had been drunk!! In terms of the art, that is. I nearly came in my pants, that was such a turn-on when I saw the light."
He had sensed that Alexandra did not mind his talking dirty. She in fact rather liked it; it had a secret sweetness, like the scent of carrion on Coal's coat. She must go. Her dog's big heart would break in that little locked car.
"I asked him what the price was for these beer cans and Mischa told me and I said, 'No way.' There are limits. How much cash can you tie up in two fake beer cans? Alexandra, no kidding, if I'd taken the plunge I would have quintupled my money by now, and that wasn't so many years ago. Those cans are worth more than their weight in pure gold. I honestly believe, when future ages look back on us, when you and I are just a pair of skeletons lying in those idiotic expensive boxes they make you buy, our hair and bones and fingernails pillowed on all this ridiculous satin these fat-cat funeral directors rip you off for, Jesus I'm getting carried away, they can just take my corpus and dump it on the dump would suit me fine, when you and I are dead is all I mean to say, those beer cans, ale cans I should be saying, are going to be our Mona Lisa. We were talking about Kienholz; you know there's this entire sawed-off Dodge car he did, with a couple inside fucking. The car sits on a mat of artificial turf and a little ways away from it he put a little other patch of Astroturf or whatever he used, about the size of a checkerboard, with a single empty beer bottle on it! To show they'd been drinking and chucked it out.
To give the lovers' lane ambience. That's genius. The little extra piece of mat, the apartness. Somebody else would have just put the beer bottle on the main mat. But having it separate is what makes it art. Maybe that's our Mona Lisa, that empty of Kienholz's. I mean, I was out there in L.A. looking at this crazy sawed-off Dodge and tears came to my eyes. I'm not shitting you, Sandy. Tears." And he held his unnaturally white, waxy-looking hands in front of his eyes as if to pluck these watery reddish orbs from his skull. "You travel," she said.
"Less than I used to. I'm just as glad. You go everywhere but it's always you unpacks the bag. Same bag, same you. You girls up here have the right idea. Find a Nowheresville and make your own space. All the junk comes after you anyway, with the TV and the global village and all." He slumped in his mushroom chair, empty at last of phrases. Needlenose trotted into the room and curled at his master's feet, tucking his long nose under his tail.
"Speaking of travel," Alexandra said. "I must run. I locked my poor doggie in the car, and my children will he home from school by now." She set down her teacup—monogrammed with N, strangely, instead of any of Van Home's initials—on his scratched and chipped Mies van der Rohe glass table and stood to her height. She was wearing her brocaded Algerian jacket over a silver-gray cotton turtleneck, with her slacks of forest-green serge. A pang of relief at her waist as she stood reminded her of how uncomfortably tight these slacks had become. She had vowed to lose weight; but winter was the worst time for it, one nibbled to keep warm, to keep the early dark at bay, and anyway in this bulky man's eyes, turned upwards appraising the jut of her breasts, she read no demand to change her shape. Joe called her in their privacy his cow, his woman-and-a-half. Ozzie used to say she was better at night than two more blankets. Sukie and Jane called her gorgeous. She brushed from the serge tightly covering her pelvis several long white hairs Thumbkin had deposited there. She retrieved her bandanna with a scarlet flick from the arm of the curved sofa.
"But you haven't seen the lab!" Van Home protested. "Or the hot-tub room, we finally got the mother finished, all but some accessory wiring. Or the upstairs. My big Rauschenberg lithographs are all upstairs."
"Perhaps there will be another time," Alexandra said, her voice quite settled now into her womanly contralto. She was enjoying leaving. Seeing him frantic, she was confident again of her powers.
"You ought at least to see my bedroom," Van Home pleaded, leaping up and barking his shin on a corner of the glass table so that pain slipped his features awry. "It's all in black, even the sheets," he told her; "it's damn hard to buy good black sheets, what they call black is really navy blue. And in the hall I've just got some very subtly raunchy oils by a newish painter called John Wesley, no relation to the crazy Methodist, he does what look like illustrations to children's animal books until you realize what they're showing. Squirrels fucking and stuff like that."
"Sounds fun," Alexandra said, and moved briskly in a wide arc, an old hockey-player's move, so the chair blocked him for a moment and he could only loudly follow as she sailed out of the room with its ugly art, on through the library, past the music room, into the hall with the elephant's foot, where the rotten-egg smell was strongest but the breath of the out-of-doors could be scented too. The black door had been left its natural two-toned oak on this side.
Fidel had appeared from nowhere to position himself with a hand on the great brass latch. To Alexandra he seemed to be looking past her face toward his master; they were going to trap her here. In her fantasy she would count to five and start to scream; but there must have been a nod, for the latch clicked on the count of three.
Van Home said behind her, "I'd offer to give you a ride back to the road but the tide may be up too far." He sounded out of breath: emphysema from too many cigarettes or inhaling those Manhattan bus fumes. He did need a wife's care.
"But you promised it wouldn't be!"
"Listen, what the hell do I know? I'm more of a stranger here than you are. Let's walk down and have a gander."
Whereas the driveway curved around, the grass mall, lined with limestone statues the weather and vandals had robbed of hands and noses, led directly down to where t
he causeway met the edge of the island. An untidy shore of weeds—seaside goldenrod, beach clotbur with its huge loose leaves—and gravel and a rubble of old asphalt paving spread behind the vine-entangled gate. The weeds trembled in a chill wind off the flooded marsh. The sky had lowered its bacon stripes of gray; the most luminous thing in sight was a great egret, not a snowy, loitering in the direction of the beach road, its yellow bill close to the color of her abandoned Subaru. Between here and there a tarnished glare of water had overswept the causeway. The scratch of tears arose in Alexandra's throat. "How could this have happened, we haven't been an hour!"
