Cat's eye

They’ve got take-out gourmet sprout and avocado sandwiches and coffee with steamed milk, and we eat those and drink that while we discuss the arrangement of the pictures. I say I favor a chronological approach, but Charna has other ideas, she wants things to go together tonally and resonate and make statements that amplify one another. I get more nervous, this kind of talk makes me twitch. I’m putting some energy into silence, resisting the impulse to say I have a headache and want to go home. I should be grateful, these women are on my side, they planned this whole thing for me, they’re doing me an honor, they like what I do. But still I feel outnumbered, as if they are a species of which I am not a member.

Jon comes back tomorrow, from Los Angeles and his chain-saw murder. I can hardly wait. We’ll circumvent his wife, go out for lunch, both of us feeling sneaky. But it’s merely a civilized thing to do, having lunch with an ex-husband in a comradely way: a good coda to all that smashed crockery and mayhem. We’ve known each other since the year zot; at my age, our age, that’s becoming important. And from here he looks like relief.

Someone else comes in, another woman. “Andrea!” says Charna, stalking over to her. “You’re late!”

She gives Andrea a kiss on the cheek and walks her over to me, holding her arm. “Andrea wants to do a piece on you,” she says. “For the opening.”

“I wasn’t told about this,” I say. I’ve been ambushed.

“It came up at the last minute,” says Charna. “Lucky for us! I’ll put you two in the back room, okay? I’ll bring you some coffee. Getting the word out, they call it,” she adds, to me, with a wry smile. I allow myself to be herded down the corridor; I can still be bossed around by women like Charna.

“I thought you would be different,” says Andrea as we settle.

“Different how?” I ask.

“Bigger,” she says.

I smile at her. “I am bigger.”

Andrea checks out my powder-blue jogging suit. She herself is wearing black, approved, glossy black, not early-sixties holdover as mine would be. She has red hair out of a spray can and no apologies, cut into a cap like an acorn. She’s upsettingly young; to me she doesn’t look more than a teenager, though I know she must be in her twenties. Probably she thinks I’m a weird middle-aged frump, sort of like her high school teacher. Probably she’s out to get me. Probably she’ll succeed. We sit across from each other at Charna’s desk and Andrea sets down her camera and fiddles with her tape recorder. Andrea writes for a newspaper. “This is for the Living section,” she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women’s Pages. It’s funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and the other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead.

“Living, eh?” I say. “I’m the mother of two. I bake cookies.” All true. Andrea gives me a dirty look and flicks on her machine.

“How do you handle fame?” she says.

“This isn’t fame,” I say. “Fame is Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. This stuff is just a media pimple.”

She grins at that. “Well, could you maybe say something about your generation of artists—your generation of woman artists—and their aspirations and goals?”

“Painters, you mean,” I say. “What generation is that?”

“The seventies, I suppose,” she says. “That’s when the women’s—that’s when you started getting attention.”

“The seventies isn’t my generation,” I say.

She smiles. “Well,” she says, “what is?”

“The forties.”

“The forties?” This is archaeology as far as she’s concerned. “But you couldn’t have been…”

“That was when I grew up,” I say.

“Oh right,” she says. “You mean it was formative. Can you talk about the ways, how it reflects in your work?”

“The colors,” I say. “A lot of my colors are forties colors.” I’m softening up. At least she doesn’t say like and you know all the time. “The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.”

“You mean the Vietnam War?” she says.

“No,” I say coldly. “The Second World War.” She looks a bit scared, as if I’ve just resurrected from the dead, and incompletely at that. She didn’t know I was that old. “So,” she says. “What is the difference?”

“We have long attention spans,” I say. “We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.”

She looks puzzled. That’s all I want to say about the forties. I’m beginning to sweat. I feel as if I’m at the dentist, mouth gracelessly open while some stranger with a light and mirror gazes down my throat at something I can’t see.

Brightly and neatly she veers away from the war and back toward women, which was where she wanted to be in the first place. Is it harder for a woman, was I discriminated against, undervalued? What about having children? I give unhelpful replies: all painters feel undervalued. You can do it while they’re at school. My husband’s been terrific; he gives me a lot of support, some of which has been financial. I don’t say which husband.