by Martin Roper
Although this is art stripped of ego, it dawns on me I can see more artistic passion in this painting than anything else I have gawked at. The reclusiveness—what I considered eccentricity—is an armour worn to enable her to peel her skin away. Suddenly Rodin is as vulgar as Dali. The opinion shocks me. It makes me uncertain of all my opinions. As I stare the grid seems to fade, so too the cream texture: I am staring into myself. Art, Pound says, is fundamental accuracy of statement. Truth was found with passion and commitment. The blood runs through my veins and the hair breathes on my skin. She says religion plays no part in her life. I look at Holfy, taking in what she is saying as if she is an apparition. It is as if her voice has been in my head and her presence—my own presence—startles me.
We scour New York together: the Met, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Morgan. We are in the downtown Guggenheim again, looking at the Agnes Martin paintings. They still make no real sense to me—the blankness. A depth and commitment to statement. She spent years in the desert.
—She’s full of herself. All ego.
Holfy looks at me and nods, not agreeing with me. Pride stops me from admitting I’m seeing it, seeing what she sees. All else is nonsense and a chap trick. Truth had to be found with passion and commitment. This was what one did. What was true to the spirit.
—She’s all ego and she doesn’t believe in religion and she was years in the desert.
—Christ. It’s worse than school with you.
She looks offended.
—I’ve been listening to you. I just don’t see it. Let’s go to Fanelli’s.
We eat and talk about photographs. She talks about Fanelli’s. She talks about her next project—photographing boxers. The food is good and she cheers up.
—Photography and boxing are immediate acts. With photography it depends on the way the camera is used. Photography can have an attitude that painting never can. Paint insulates the viewer.
I am tired listening to her. She’s going on about Beaton and his snapshots—as she calls them.
—He’s morally dishonest. He says he’s getting behind glamour. Sure he is.
I am doubting her ethos. I think of her waiting for that moment when one’s guard is down and she clicks and captures an ugly corner of the soul. Where is honesty? I have no idea what honesty or truth is. And I see I don’t know Holfy any more than I know why Agnes Martin trailed lines across canvas. Holfy lives in the grove of uncertainty. That is her fascination.
Photography and boxing: two of her passions, two violent acts. Sixty-five percent of New Yorkers, if asked, would refuse to have their photograph taken, I read somewhere. We go back to Beaton and agree we dislike the photographs for the same reason. He insisted he didn’t take fashion shots. His work was beyond fashion. It was art. Morally dishonest shit. The same is true of Inge Morah. She, apparently, searched for the intelligence in her subjects as if this somehow portrayed a profound understanding of humanity. Knickers.
* * *
Holfy rings and tells me her cat is not eating. When I come over the cat is asleep, its purr deep as a drunken snore. We take the subway to the clinic on the East Side. The veterinarian holds Kahlo loosely in her coal-black hands and looks her over.
—She’s not too good, is she?
—I know that—that’s why I’m here.
The veterinarian looks over the rim of her spectacles and takes Holfy in:
—Uh-huh. We can take tests. But she’s very sick. You can get some food down her with a syringe but—
—But what?
—She’s very sick. She’s suffering.
—She’s told you that? My cat told you she’s suffering?
The veterinarian purses her lips, looks at me, straightens her spectacles and looks back to Holfy.
—That’s my opinion.
We leave her in for overnight tests.
Holfy phones the clinic the next day. Kahlo has cancer of the throat. We take the subway over again with Kahlo’s carrier box.
The same veterinarian sees us, her pink surgical gown splattered with dried blood:
—What do you want to do?
Holfy waves it all away from herself and walks out.
I wait while the cat gets the injection. She goes slack, her tongue peeping out her mouth playfully.
We take shelter from the rainstorm in the Bloomingdale’s foyer. Cars and cabs scream at one another in the traffic jam. We step in from the street noise, dripping and steaming with rain. We dry ourselves as best we can.
—Who put her down?
—The nigger.
—Jesus. Don’t say that word.
—The nice vet with the hip orange spectacles wearing the pink gown. Sorry about the N word. Doing what you do, pushing it.
—And you were there?
—Sure was.
She looks at the empty cat carrier in my hand and smiles painfully. When she recovers herself we set off through the labyrinth of perfumes and clothes. She stops an assistant and asks him about the density of a certain fabric. When she looks doubtful, he raises himself fully erect and mentions its durability. They discuss resistance and fall and contour, defining themselves through the way cloth is cut. Holfy presses a jacket against me and tells me to try it on. The assistant crosses some ill-defined social precipice and looks at me with tragic encouragement. He snaps the jacket in the air and holds it open:
—Adolfo Dominguez.
—Pleased to meet you.
He knows the jacket looks silly on me.
—Hey it’s nice.
—It certainly is. It balances discipline with vitality. It gives him a rather potent air. I’m on the verge of telling them both to go and shite but I think of Kahlo’s body soft with death. I slip the jacket on. It has a price tag of $1,125. I feel like a tramp. My trousers are creased and my shoes need a polish. The store is too hot. Holfy tilts her head and tells me to pirouette.
—It does make a statement, says the assistant, picking at his moustache. With his crisp black suit and neat bow tie he looks like he could be on his way to a wedding if he took the measuring tape off from around his neck. Christmas carols dream of a white Christmas on the in-store music and make me dizzy.
—No, says Holfy finally as if disappointed in some failure of the Bloomingdale’s jacket. The assistant leans on his aesthetic temperament, holds the ends of his measuring tape like extravagant lapels and sighs approval at her. Taking the jacket off I see the label is Dominguez and blush.
—I do need lingerie.
—One floor up, he says without blinking.
Holfy looks at me.
—Want to look around here awhile? We can meet up later.
We agree on the diner and she wipes the last streaks of tears from her face. All the stores are too expensive. But I do buy her something. I get her a soft puppet. It’s a sheep, Lambchops. I open it and slip my hand inside it and go in search of her.
She is immersed in conversation with the store assistant, a tall elegant woman. They both throw back their heads in laughter. She buys a two-piece. On the way out, she stops and peruses some silver lingerie.
—Open the cat cage.
She drops several sets into the carrier.
—You’re stealing?
—Be a detective when you grow up. Stolen lingerie turns me on.
—It’s tagged.
She pulls me close with that waggling middle finger and whispers:
—Follow me.
We go through the Lexington Avenue exit and the alarm goes off. Holfy is already halfway down the subway steps.
—Let us go, you and I, and drink some cappuccino.
We face each other in the full subway, the cat carrier jammed between us.
—Will you eat with me tonight? I don’t want to be in the apartment without her. Gerry is sick of you anyway.
Stuffed into the swaying subway with the smell of rain off our clothes, I see her as she must have been as a child sitting on the stairs.
—I’d be very happy to e
at with you tonight. Let’s get some food.
—There’s stuff in the fridge.
—But it’s not from Zabar’s, is it?
—No. It is not from Zabar’s.
—Well, let’s do it then. We’ll get a cab over.
—A cab—you in a cab?
—I get cabs. Sometimes.
The express rattles through station after station, each one a blur of tiles and people. Our eyes avoid each other all the way downtown. From there we get the taxi over to the store and then over to the meat district.
* * *
I am here in the apartment in Gansevoort Street, here in my future. I look around its vastness with the same hidden awe I feel in the museums. A dog yelps somewhere and Holfy climbs over her bed and up the steps to a window. A small black and white creature leaps through from outside and lands panting on the floor, nails scurrying on the rough wooden planks.
—What’s that?
—That is Botero, the love of my life.
—But what is he?
—His breed you mean? He is a full-blooded American Boston terrier. Take a shower.
—I’m fine.
—You smell of rain. I’d hate you to get pneumonia for being a good boy scout.
—I’m fine.
—Irish Catholic, yes? Hah!
—Did anyone ever tell you that you can’t pronounce pneumonia?
—As a matter of fact, yes. A little boy who can’t pronounce his th’s told me. Tanks for dese avocados and dose pears. Well, Irishman, I’m washing the filthy Eastside off me. Amuse yourself.
The sound of jazz from the bathroom. Gentle sound of running water. Flatulent gurgles from pipes. Rush of piss gushing unapologetically into the toilet. Her apartment is a cavern of delights. Open shelving everywhere. I wander down to the living room. Bookshelves reaching up to a sagging ceiling. A wooden stepladder to reach the top has become itself, a temporary bookshelf. The books have the look of having been explored years ago, exhausted. Around the corner is her studio. A desk dense with work. An entire wall is a corkboard for photographs, pinned with careful randomness. Dozens of head shots; faces that exist only in New York. A yard-long panoramic shot of the AIDS flag being carried up Fifth Avenue. A series of nudes; shots of men’s shoulders; legs; bends of elbows; hands in midgesture; backs. Landscapes of suffering. Each shot is taut with grief. A photograph in the corner of the corkboard—a shot that doesn’t fit the others, isolated from the clutter—a close-up of a woman’s hand weary with age spots; hairless. The hand rests on the arm of a chair, a cigarette lazy between the fingertips. And beside the hand; a remote control. The shot is motionless except for a trail of indifferent cigarette smoke. It is the only photograph on the board with a title: Mother.
—Just because there are no doors does not mean it’s yours to explore.
I turn around guiltily but she’s not standing behind me. I look up, foolishly, half expecting her to be crouched on a shelf near the ceiling. No sign of her anywhere.
—Holfy?
—In the bathroom.
I don’t know how I missed her—I see her now through stacks of folded towels. She has had shelving installed in what was once a doorway from the studio to the bathroom. This side of the shelving is walled with glass. She is brushing her hair over the toilet. Pulling tangles out. She must know I’m watching her. She puts a foot on the toilet and is drying her toes. I steal a last glimpse of her and turn back to the photographs.
* * *
I am a parade of blunders. Walking around her apartment I should have known it: we were choosing each other. Thirty years of Holfy’s art books. Margins full of tightly scribbled comments. On a book of photographs by Inge Morath, she has pencilled: How can anyone be presented with so much and produce so little? Hundreds of art books. Steiglitz, André Kertész, Ernst Haas, Fulvio Roiter, Juan Gyenes Remenyi, Ouka Lele, Lee Friedlander, Chagall, Franz Marc, Balthus, Agnes Martin, John Sloan, Magritte, Robert Tansey, Max Ernst, František Kupka, Mondrian, Picasso, O’Keefe, Modigliani. Hundreds of art books. Biographies of painters and photographers. No novels.
—You’ve no Dali, I shout back.
—Dali was only for himself. He’s irrelevant.
—And Picasso isn’t?
—Guernica?
The toilet flushes. Guernica? Don’t know what she means by that and ignorance of what my response should be silences me, pushes me on to another question.
—And no Monet?
—Simply a matter of taste. I don’t like him.
—And no novels?
—The other wall. Around the corner for lit-rat-chure.
Some of her paintings are scattered on the walls—painting and photographs mixed randomly. A glowing red painting with flecks of black and white. A noisy painting, impossible to locate the source of its sound. Gansevoort Street. It looks like something she might have done but it’s not her signature: de Kooning. I lift it off its hook. It is a de Kooning. I almost drop it with fright. A separate bookcase; Kant, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Plato, Foucault, Chrysippus, Pythagoras, Spike Milligan, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel.
She places a tray of tea things behind me. When I turn she is closer to me than I expect. A chartreuse turban tightly wrapped around her head, the effect making her eyebrows stark, her face stunning.
—Heard of any of them?
—You didn’t give me the impression you were a reader.
—I forgive you, you’re a man—you make mistakes.
—Wittgenstein lived in Dublin for a while. Used to go to the greenhouse in the Botanical Gardens to work in the winter because his room was too cold. Before I have time to finish the story she kisses me deftly on the lips.
—Don’t get any ideas. They needed to be kissed, is all.
We sit on the sofa drinking a mixture of Assam and Earl Grey tea. She talks about going to Cooper Union in the early sixties. About trying to paint. About fucking as a political statement. She says the word fucking with such ease that it is difficult for me not to show surprise. I feel small in her presence. I know she is not trying to impress me and knowing this, she impresses me all the more. Her gruffness adds to her charm. This is an old self she is talking about, one she has discarded, one I hunger to inhabit, dead and all as it is. She tells me about Mazo and his infamous techniques: Never mark a canvas unless you mean it. She was too naïve to question him.
—He was respected in New York, still is, she says, smiling emptily. Making digital videos now. Made that famous one about the crazy Truman woman and her daughter. I had taken her twenty years to get past that perfection Mazo preached; hence the photography. All the time she is talking, I am wondering what her purpose is; there must be some purpose to her telling me all this. I pour more tea to appear at ease. It comes out thick and cold. I point to the kitchen and she nods. She continues talking, more loudly, while I potter about trying to find things. I interrupt her to ask her where she keeps the sugar.
—In the blue jug. O’Keefe was in her eighties by then and New York was bestowing some or other award on her. I was covering the event for People magazine. They wanted artistic shots for the issue and somehow they got hold of my name. I took stills of paintings back then. I didn’t do this kind of thing but I needed the money. I borrowed a Hasselblad from Roger (she points a finger to the large shot of the Woolworth building peaking through dense clouds) and did the job. My first celebrity shoot. O’Keefe talked to me. I think because I was a female photographer. I changed direction with her. Are you listening?
—No.
Moving about her kitchen, searching for the tea strain, I am courting her.
—There is less responsibility in photography. At least I thought that until I met O’Keefe.
I pour the tea. Holfy has beautiful hands.
—I discovered my cunt at the same time I discovered art. Art is about touching. Constantly touching. We have to create ourselves as art. You know, you always know a bad portrait photographer if he tells you to be yourself. There is
no self. A photographer creates the self. She studies me bending with the tray. When I look up from the table it’s as if she is looking for something in me, testing me. She is looking for listening, I think, if she is looking for anything; that’s what people always want. The doorbell rings, a shrill, demanding noise. She ignores it and goes on.
—It has taken me a long time to know. I want nearness from a man. Art is about always touching canvas without meaning—without conscious meaning that is. Meaning is a foregone conclusion. That is what O’Keefe did. I learned that over twenty years ago. I’m only beginning to be able to do it now. But that’s not too bad. De Kooning only began to understand in the eighties and he’s been after it all his life. You know the glaring mistake with all that shit (she waves towards the philosophy)? It’s all written by men. How can we invent ourselves out of a male-only philosophy? I’m not talking about women. I’m talking about people. One should always fuck like the animals in the fields, don’t you think.
De Kooning. The resolute way she said his name.
* * *
—You should take a cab. The subway is dangerous after midnight.
—I want you.
—That’s nice. What for?
We stare at each other.
—You smell of marriage. Not attractive. Give it time. Maybe. You can sleep on the downstairs futon.
—I’ll go.
—It’s one in the morning.
