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didn’t need to teach, unlike so many artists. He did quite well, actually, until drink got to him. As a teacher he didn’t try to conceal his indifference but was kind, one on one, flirtatious enough but never gross—we girls all loved him, needless to say, though we distrusted his painting style. It was com
mer
cial and, by the ’forties, rather sweetly old-fashioned—long necks, fine outlines, sheaves of sculptured hair in stylized stripes, an Art Deco bas-relief look. Streamlined. His portraits had, how can I say, that false roundedness you used to see in
Vanity Fair
caricatures.”
    “The pastel he did of you, now at the Corcoran, is lovely.”
    “Yes, the profile. Those gleaming metallic bangs. The muscles in my throat, I suppose. But it seemed to Ruk, his facility, too much of a trick; he sneered at his own work and admired the rough brutes—Soutine, Kokoschka, Picasso when he wasn’t neoclassical, the late half-blind Monet. He thought Dubuffet, who was getting some notice in America, was on to something. He told me to loosen up.”
    Hope senses that Kathryn is dissatisfied. She wants her to do more, somehow, with poor dear aimless Ruk. Does she want her to tell her how it was to fuck him? That was not what Ruk was about—his lovemaking was good, when he was halfway sober, but had less heart in it than his dancing; he had to be on show, that was his weakness, and even though he was Hope’s first lover she soon felt herself bringing the greater conviction to their bed, the greater willingness to risk embarrassment for the sake of sensations that couldn’t be sprayed with fixative and put on display, that were beautiful but not lasting. She says, “He was beautiful,” which was what he would have wanted her to say. “He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Six foot four at least, high white forehead, these almond-shaped Russian eyes, pale blue like those of a husky dog, frosty around the pupil. The hair on his head was as lank and pampered as a woman’s, and he loved his own legs, they were so long, the ankles so skinny. He was always taking off his pants at parties, not to be sexy but the way a male ballet dancer shows his legs. He said he was White Russian, but, then, that means so little to an American, all the Russians one met back then were White, as opposed to Red. The Red ones were in Russia, slugging it out with the Germans. Does that do him for you?”
    Kathryn lifts her luminous matte face and bats her lubricated eyelids one beat, to register Hope’s hostility and toshow that she can take it. “Not entirely,” she admits. “Did you love him?”
    “Oh, of course, I’m sure. Isn’t that what one does, a young woman, early twenties, romantic about art and artists? I will say this for Ruk—he showed me things. He showed me New York. He had a yellow Lincoln, God knows how he got gas for it. He drove me up and down the avenues, all the way up to the spots in Harlem, the cafés, the parties. He would dress me. I absolutely submitted—he knew what he was doing. One costume party, he had me go as a nun, an outfit he had made or stolen. Maybe he stole it from a real nun—he told me his sisters were Russian Orthodox and very fanatic, like the Empress Alexandra. He liked me in black dresses, with bright stockings to show off my legs. Legs—though I wasn’t tall I had a tall woman’s legs, he said. He would paint stripes of color on my face, and put a few feathers in my hair; he called me his Quaker Pocahontas. He made me a
presence
, in our little set at Cooper Union. He took me to openings, and told me what was good, what was not so good: Picasso not so good, he could do too much, too easily. Matisse was good because everything was at the outer limit, attained with effort, by a simple bourgeois man. Picasso was a gypsy, a bandit, a Bolshevik.” She can begin to hear Ruk’s voice, his skimming voice with its deep tonic, a Russian choir voice, vibrant through his screen of sophistries.