Free Seek My Face by John Updike Page A

time.”
    “She
never
liked it, really. Poor dear Herbert, yes, I think he loved Zack, much the way I did. Except he also liked those muddy Picassoesque ’forties paintings of Zack’s, all those scribbled Jungian symbols. I didn’t. Herbie was a miserable person, poor soul—overweight, queer, terribly epileptic, which he tried to hide, but he had the training, he had been to Paris, he had the eye to see the genius in Zack. He called him a genius from the outset. For me in my ignorance there was too much groping and searching in Zack, not enough finding. Zack couldn’t draw really, as I was saying, and until he began to use industrial paints right out of the hardware store his color was dismal, I thought. But what did I know? I was timid and tidy; I hated to dirty a clean canvas, the first strokes that Hochmann said were so important. No, it wasn’t Zack’s painting I was attracted to, it repelled me actually, it was Zack himself, his body, his face. He was beautiful, and it was a beauty that, unlike Ruk’s, took some creativity to discover. You’ll think I thought all men were beautiful, I was your usual de-repressed ex-Quaker hotpants, but no … it was Zack. Something about the
knit
of his face, and its color; he had skin, Western skin I thought of it as, leathery-soft, it didn’t wrinkle, it
creased
, and he kept a sallow sort of tan through the winter, and in summer he never used lotion; his face had these lovely low-relief episodes of muscle, even in his forehead, the twodiagonal high places up from the deep creases where his eyebrows frowned in, he was always frowning; as his hair thinned more and more, he looked less and less as if he had
ever
had hair, it was the most natural and becoming baldness I ever saw. When I was shown snapshots of him with this blond mop from boyhood I felt a kind of disgust. His dimples are always mentioned in descriptions of him, but there was something in the
planes
, a kind of perfectly symmetrical push-and-pull that may have been what Hochmann was always talking about. And perfect ears—look at the photographs, they’re rather amazing, big but perfect, without lobes. And the rest of him—we never talked about men’s ‘bums’ back then, but his was tight and quite lovely, he couldn’t see it so he was un-self-conscious about it, the two buttocks tight against each other with this fuzzy innocence—he had a lot of body hair but it was pale hair—and the legs looked almost bowed out, the calf muscles were so rounded, he was always telling people he had been a cowboy and it was a lie but his body looked it. You can’t do a beautiful person item by item, there’s the unity, there was a
swing
to his body, a
thrust
I guess we can say without getting too Freudian, that used to take my breath away when he wasn’t aware I was looking at him. You know those male bodies they used to do in murals, like in Rockefeller Center, not the ones bringing the electic light bulb or whatever but the workers operating the capitalist machinery or hauling bales of cotton up from the docks? Zack had that kind of body, but because he never did exercise if he could help it there was nothing preening about him. It would have violated his sense of manhood to be pleased with his own body. His art was strangled by self-consciousness, before it got great suddenly, but his body just always happened tohave this grace. Except, come to think of it, he couldn’t dance. He just couldn’t match his steps to yours, or let you match his.”
    She feels emanating from Kathryn an opinion that this is enough on the subject, but Hope continues with a superior insistence, “He was trouble, yes, but, dear,
life
is trouble. Bernie used to say that life disturbs matter’s unconscious mineral calm, that’s why we have a death wish.” To bring herself back within the bounds of an interview, Hope tells the young woman, offhandedly, “I’ve been trying to remember the year of that dance when I went as a Hottentot,