Free Seek My Face by John Updike

figure then, nothing big or floppy, so I could have been wearing a leotard—until, late in the evening, I looked down and realized all the men dancing with me had rubbed my coal dust off and I was just about naked in the front, except for this little lavender G-string Cindy had produced from the time when she was doing burlesque in Jersey City to support a boyfriend in law school!”
    Kathryn blinks. She senses that this image, of Hope nude but for coal dust, is meant to tease her, to taunt her. With a brisk distaste she glances down again into the notes on her lap. “You told
Artforum
in the ’sixties,” she said, “that if you had known how much trouble Zack was going to be—”
    Hope can’t let her young self clothed in coal dust and grease and blacking in her hair go. She can still feel the cool air of that upstairs loft washing across her front when she and her partner parted, whoever he had been, dead now no doubt like all the other witnesses of her youth, dead like all who had held her at those sweaty dances in the ’forties, the war outside the windows, beyond the fire escapes, darkening the city in which civilian life yowled on like a party of backyard cats. “Of course it was no big deal, nudity, a lot of us modelled, at least for each other.” She realizes she has fallen a question behind. Something about Zack and trouble. She says, “Anybody could see at a glance how much trouble he was going to be. He would sit there not saying a word, as if he didn’t know the English language, then he would have drunk enough to get his courage up and start shouting ‘Fuck you’ at everybody, things like ‘You’re all pretentious shits’ and ‘Some day all that matters about you will be that you got close enough to me to kiss my hairy ass’and then mumble and stumble off and go pee in the corner or Peggy’s marble fireplace or anywhere. Zack did a lot of peeing, as anybody who drank like that would, of course. But he did more of it in public than necessary. It was like he was saying, ’I’m not that good with this thing in bed but I sure can pee.’ ”
    “Peggy Guggenheim?” Kathryn’s voice grew an anxious little tip when a name came along, a scandalous famous old name, it was rather disappointing to Hope, this susceptibility to celebrity. She would have preferred for Kathryn more of the
je-m’en-foutisme
she imagined for herself at this tender age. Before she possessed it, Hope considered celebrity vulgar, and an affront to the proletariat, whose anonymous dictatorship was coming, once the war cleared the air of plutocrats and princes. Would the air also be cleared of movie stars? They were what the proletariat seemed to care about; they hung over the war-darkened nation like silvery blimps.
    “I think so. I forget whose marble fireplace, there was certainly more than one Zack peed in. He was pathetic when he was drunk. He had no gift for alcohol, not like Ruk, who was always aware, always civil. Zack reverted to infancy, this drastic insecurity and megalomania, burbling, showing his penis, doing whatever it took to make himself the center of attention, punching somebody. He liked upsetting a table with all the food on it. He did that to me more than once.” The Thanksgiving feast with his family from California; the gallery party after the
Life
article had come out and celebrity had turned him ugly: the incessant ornate humiliations of those last Long Island years, all her attempts to make a decent home overturned and rebelled against, have unexpectedly affected Hope’s eyes. Old age does that: senility of the ducts. As a young womanshe took pride in never crying, no matter how stung or insulted—in not giving the evil, creaturely, colorful world the satisfaction.
    Kathryn’s voice softens, retracts its hard tip, becomes almost idle in its helpful prompting: “It was Herbert Forrest who kept bringing Zack to Peggy’s attention. She didn’t like his work for the longest