The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “All right, yes, yes,” Frederick answered. “She’s here with me, okay? She’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”

  Robert went again to his knees, this time with a harder pain to find, but no less solid than the bite in his lungs.

  “Robbie –”

  “You son of a bitch.” He reached up and slapped his dad. The stiff beard raked his fingers like the bristles of a camel’s-hair brush. Frederick was sleepy and drunk. He fell against the door, into the room. A shadow rustled by the bed. Robert felt Jill’s presence, vital and near. He remembered the golden shade of the tops of her breasts, her friendly smile, and kicked the tray again. “Robbie, for God’s sake, what’s gotten into you?” Frederick tried to sit up.

  “Mom was right about you all along!”

  “Your mother? What about her? Robbie, help me up.”

  “You and your not-so-beautiful bull and your actresses!” Robert yelled.

  Frederick grabbed the doorknob, raised himself nearly to his feet. “Robbie. Wait here. Let me get dressed, then we’ll go for a drink. Let’s talk, okay? Robbie? Please?”

  8.

  [Becker sniffs his fingers. “Every woman I’ve ever touched,” he says. “Every painting I’ve ever made. Amazing how they linger in the skin.” Pause.]

  Reporter: My sources here at the med center-friends, really – tell me you’re suffering from cancer.

  Becker: Bloody mort men.

  Reporter: Sir?

  Becker: Death-beat. Obits. The Post sent you to put me in the ground.

  Reporter: No.

  Becker: What’s your name, Papa?

  Reporter: Chuck.

  Becker: Chuck, what’s a good mort man earn these days?

  Reporter: I wouldn’t know.

  Becker: Life’s sweeter as there’s less and less time. You can print that.

  Reporter: If you were to sum up your career –

  Becker: I’m in no particular hurry, thanks.

  Reporter: It would help our readers if, in the article, I could pin you to certain historical –

  Becker: History’s already pinned me, Chuck. I don’t need any pinning from you.

  [Pause. Becker sniffs his fingers again.]

  Reporter: Okay, then, can you tell me what you feel is your finest achievement? Becker: The fact that I’ve accumulated only twenty years of regrets, rather than thirty or forty.

  Reporter: Regrets about what?

  Becker: Art and family. What else is there?

  9.

  Before the final class, Jill pulled Robert aside in a far, cobwebby corner of the studio to assure him she was the same person she always was. “I hope we can still be pals,” she said.

  Robert didn’t understand. “You slept with him,” he whispered. “How can you say you haven’t changed?”

  “Who’d you think I was?” She looked nervous and tired. “Robbie –”

  “I thought you liked me.” He knew he sounded childish, and he hated himself.

  “I do, but I’m so much older –”

  Robert shook his head then turned away.

  “And who are you,” Jill said, “to go banging on people’s doors in the middle of the night and to stand here like Jesus Christ, telling me my business … you have no right to judge me, Robert Becker!”

  His own name startled him.

  “That’s right, your father told me. Who’s the real actor here? If you’ve got a problem, it’s between the two of you.” She marched across the studio to her supply table; the sound of her steps bounced off the sheer, dusty walls. She found Robert’s drawings of her and shoved them at his chest. “Take these,” she said. “We’ll have to clear out all our stuff after class.”

  Remarkably, Frederick was fit and alert, no longer the bleeding drunk of the evening before, but king of his domain once more, witty, quick, and sure. He glanced at Robert once, but otherwise conducted himself with detachment and elan. “Fly, fly away,” he told the class. “And good luck.”

  At the break, Raymond offered Robert his hand. “I wish you well with your work,” he said. “I don’t know where you were off to in such a hurry last night, but I meant to give you this.” He reached into his pocket for a purple cloth sack of milk chocolates. He’d bought everyone in the class a tiny pouch of sweets. Later, Robert learned he’d given Frederick a cassette recording of Beethoven’s final string trios, Opus Three, E-Flat: Finale; Opus Eight, D-Major: Pollaca; and Opus Nine, Number One, G-Major, along with a note:

  Something for you. I edited Opus Numbers Three and Eight to keep the performance to ninety minutes, but feel justified because the Maestro didn’t hit his stride in this genre until Opus Nine anyway. May you find the same confidence and energy in them that I have.

  Thank you for your time these last two weeks. I’ve learned from you that art is a by-product of the artist’s struggle to understand his pain, and that both the struggle and the pain are meaningless.

  Mr. Becker, pick up your brush.

  Show us why we matter.

  Show us how to be.

  Paint us a picture.

  By session’s end, Raymond was twitching uncontrollably – nervousness? loneliness? uncertainty? He fumbled his palette, smearing black in the deep wrinkles of his dropcloth. Despite his dark disappointments, he watched Frederick with what Robert recognized as honest, eager love.

  He never posed any danger, Robert thought. I’m the one who wants to kill the old man.

  “I said goodbye to your mother. This morning, on the phone,” Frederick told Robert when the others had left.

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t mention –?”

  “Last night? No.” He capped a can of turpentine, packed his paints.

  Frederick nodded. “Still, she seems to think it’s best if I stay away from Texas for a while.”

  “Too many churches,” Robert said. “And not enough Broadway, I suppose.”

  Frederick smiled. “I’m a double-minded man, Robbie, always torn – like this music.” He tapped Raymond’s tape. “I know this. Sprightly and sad. It’s a good choice for me.” Years later, as he was dying in the hospital, he requested the string trios. Robert brought a portable tape player to his room. “Listen. Do you hear how harshly the melody fights itself?” Frederick said. “Like a madman shaking his fist at a world he knows he loves too much.”

  That day in the studio he opened his arms. “What can I say?” he told Robert. “Usually I resist because I’ve learned how much attention a woman like Jill demands – more than one man can give-but they’re so inherently dramatic. Spicy. Beats back the humdrum, temporarily.”

  Robert wiped his hands on a rag. “Are you going to see her before you leave?”

  “Your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Yes. She’s adept at pretending, Robbie. Gives me the illusion I’m desired. Again, temporarily.” The big, empty room was stuff)r and hot. It smelled like a freshly painted gymnasium. Frederick blotted his forehead with the back of his cotton sleeve. “Anyway, congratulations. You did good work in the course.”

  “I didn’t finish my assignment.”

  “No,” Frederick said. “And you never will. Consider that a blessing. You have an aesthetic problem, and the talent, to engage your imagination for the rest of your life. That’s more than most people have. More than that poor wretch, Raymond. Or Jill.” He stepped forward; after a moment’s hesitation he squeezed Robert’s shoulder, kissed his cheek. “And that’s the end of the story.”

  Robert watched him walk to the door. “One more thing,” Frederick said, turning, scratching his ear. “You might have a tendency, from now on, to mistrust women. That’s not the lesson.” He smoothed his wide, imposing beard. “The lesson is, don’t trust fathers.”

  10.

  Robbie, don’t leave me here.

  Go away, he whispers to himself. Time to forget.

  I’m drifting off …

  “So what?” he shouts. Muscles knot his neck. He fires an old soup
can into the stream – Campbell’s chicken with rice, Andy Warhol’s brand. It strikes Frederick’s head right at the hairline. He sinks in lemon-colored foam, among sewing machines, dentist’s drills, axles, wheels, ceramic brown ashtrays, picture frames, photo books – faces embedded, like flashbacks in a story, in the unforgiving movement of the present – corkscrews and can openers, steam boilers, petticoats.

  Endless possibilities.

  “Stay there!” Robert yells.

  A grackle lifts above the trees. Clouds huddle like big frozen birds wrapped in white plastic in a butcher’s bin.

  His beginnings are lost in careless waste. He snatches from the shallows a copper pocket watch. When he opens the scratched glass face, water pours out. “Drink me,” he remembers, a line from Alice in Wonderland. Ruth read him that story once, when he cried all night for his dad.

  He plucks out a hubcap, a carpenter’s file, an old apple crate, piles them together on the bank. He doesn’t know if he’s making a futile attempt to clean the place or if he’s building a ragged monument to his origin.

  He watches another grackle float above the water toward a steel-and-glass steeple miles away. The night he sat here with Frederick this particular chapel was hidden in the dark. Or maybe it hadn’t been built yet. “Sin and redemption,” he mutters.

  A blessing, Frederick says.

  Standing here in the muck and swell of his conception, he hears Beethoven’s melodies rise and fall. One more thing, the music says, using Frederick’s voice. He pictures his father in the studio, that beautiful, terrible winter of ’71. I didn’t just give you the hardest assignment in the class, Robbie. It was the only assignment.

  Cars rattle by on the freeway, shaking the concrete pylons. In the water, Frederick’s wedged against an old chest of drawers.

  You were the only one who had a chance of going on, who still has that chance. Go on.

  My life is full, Robert thinks.

  Your life is full Go on.

  He plants his feet firmly on the mud-and-gravel bank. Cello melodies soar in his mind. He reaches down, sighs, and pulls his father from the bayou.

  ALMOST BARCELONA

  At about the time his father’s cancer burst uncontrollably open in colon, brain and throat, his own health began to fail. Nothing life-threatening: restlessness – a sort of itching in the skin – lack of appetite, shifting bowels. “Sick with worry,” said Sarah. “Too much stress – Robbie, it’s hardly coincidence.”

  All winter she’d waited for Robert’s worries to break. In late January he’d brought his father home to Texas from the rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. He’d arranged for round the-clock care at the med center, and he’d temporarily suspended his own projects. His work wasn’t moving much anyway – one small showing in a local gallery where, predictably, he was promoted as the son of the famous Abstract Expressionist, Frederick Becker.

  Sarah, bless her, had been a tender anchor. She insisted that Robert was painting masterfully despite the slow market for his work; she patiently accepted the burden of Frederick’s sickness into her life. He’d been ebbing for two years, but the final dying – the last fatal push – occurred over a six-week period.

  In his dad’s last days, Robert recalled how his first-grade school reports arrived in the mail every six weeks – a time-frame, filled with swift judgment, that always terrified him. “Well now, Robbie, did you finally catch fire this term?” he remembered his hard father saying.

  For six weeks as Frederick shrank and Robert sat by (like a cook, he sometimes thought, watching a heavy stock boil down on a stove) Sarah paid the bills, cleaned the house – as efficiently as a Grand Prix mechanic she kept the details of Robert’s life running smoothly while he said his slow goodbye.

  One afternoon in the hospital, Frederick pulled Robert’s face to his own. He was pale as a dime on the starchy pillow. The room smelled of mercurochrome. “I’m sorry you had to bear all this alone,” Frederick whispered. The cancer had acted on his voice like a steel blade on an apple. Robert said, “Shhh” – but his father was right. His mother had died in ’82; what few relatives he knew about were as vague to him as the figures Frederick sometimes buried beneath the thick red and black surfaces of his canvases.

  (His father used to laugh at the “young guns” – the postwar critics – who asked in the pages of ARTnews, “Do these ghostly human shapes mean that Becker is abandoning pure abstraction?” In ’72 – several blown-apart art movements later – Frederick did a 6o Minutes interview in which he quipped, “Throughout my career I abandoned anything that even smacked of purity.” This statement was taken by a new generation of critics as his credo. As perhaps it was.)

  Despite his acclaim, the Becker family had always acted embarrassed by one another. Years ago they’d scattered to various poor jobs, various hills and valleys around the country. Frederick’s oldest sister, Fay, was the only relative Robert remembered with any certainty. He recalled her saying one afternoon (to whom was she speaking? where did the conversation take place?), “Modern art. It’s all about sex, that’s what it is. His paintings may not look like anything, but I know what the bastard’s thinking.”

  For some reason, Robert’s dad was the blackest sheep in a dark-wool family. Too “bohemian” perhaps, too much the “libertine” – words Robert imagined Fay using. Now that he had followed Frederick’s cadmium blue trail into the House of Art, Robert was a bad lamb too.

  Sarah volunteered to contact the funeral director and a lawyer. In the days immediately after Frederick’s death Robert simply stopped. He felt, when he was conscious of feeling at all, that he’d stepped into a late Rothko and was wrapped in a dry black mist that reeked of turpentine and linseed oil.

  ______

  Most of the last thirty years Frederick had lived in the West Village but Houston always had a strong, almost erotic, grip on the old bird. Wherever he traveled – Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona – wherever he was feted for his work, he spoke fondly of Houston’s trees, the wet, leafy arms of its wraparound willows. He loved too the beautiful brown skin of friendly young Chicanas in the barrios and mesquite-scented, lime-soaked fajitas. All his life he wore Tony Lama boots – a western affectation he never lost in the East.

  Initially, then, Robert decided to bury Frederick in Texas next to his first wife, Robert’s mother, under a sweeping live oak tree on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. At night a lighthouse beam cut through thick orange oil-refinery steam gathering in boxlike clouds over the Gulf; foghorns called in brief, sad bursts out at sea.

  Less than twenty-four hours before the memorial service, however, Robert changed his mind. He reheard in memory, “When I’m gone, set me to the torch and blow away my goddamn ashes, will you?”

  “Are you sure?” he asked his father.

  “Absolutely.”

  This turned out to be the first of several dialogues Robert continued to have with him.

  Frederick went on (words Robert didn’t remember, though they had his father’s stamp): “Collage. Random collision. I’ve devoted my whole life to them and I don’t see why death should stop me. So go ahead and toss my leftovers into the stratosphere. Maybe a pinch of my old ass’ll land in a lilac bush, a sniff in a pig’s snout, an ounce or two in an empty bucket. Who knows – I may drift through a bus window somewhere and settle on the lap of a lusty woman off to make a killing in the market, eh? Viva collage!”

  ______

  Sometimes at night now Robert and Sarah made slow, simple love together. More often they’d talk. Sarah told him she’d be patient until his grief let go, but he knew she was edgy and tired of the distance he’d shown since Frederick’s death – giant nothings (both the distance and the death) that seemed to be growing.

  ______

  This is how it started each night: he’d slide into bed, kiss Sarah’s forehead and cheeks, then stare for several minutes at a screened window opening onto his yard and the little tin shed he’d converted into a studio out back. He
imagined the blank or half-finished canvases in the cradles of their easels, the oily rags, the spattered palettes he’d left on his studio table.

  Incomplete sketches: Sarah, his mother.

  Then he’d recall, from fifteen or sixteen years ago, visits to his father’s studio in New York. The place was crammed with line drawings after Paul Klee (“One bone alone achieves nothing,” Klee wrote). There weren’t any studies of people, no familiar faces – just deep gray strokes and sheets of cascading color on the stark white walls. Red, green, purple, and black swayed from the ceiling on unseen hooks and wires. Robert remembered seeing, against a wire-mesh window, the famous series of cadmium blue sponge-mop streaks entitled Elegy.

  Each night now he stared, with burning eyes, at the memories of blue in his head. Lake, sea, iris blue. Eventually, the jumpy hues merged and became a sky unfolding like a blanket against his bedroom walls. He dropped his eyes toward the floor and found himself in a city of his own creation.

  It was an American (though ornately Old European-styled) city with sidewalk cafes. Black wrought-iron tables, aromatic coffees and teas, raisin-filled cakes on silver trays. Cars (Fords, mostly, from the 1920s to the present) cruised noiselessly down brick streets. The two men, Robert and his father, sipped white wine and praised the movements and lines of the handsome women strolling briskly together – sometimes arm-in-arm – up the walk.

  In recent days Robert had made a minor correction: the women now were naked – a natural phenomenon in my splendid city, Robert decided. This new touch greatly improved the tone and feel of the talks with his father.

  Usually, before ordering a second carafe of wine, Frederick commented on the architecture, which differed only slightly from one evening to the next. “Robbie, I really must congratulate you,” he said tonight. “This city is your best yet. It’s Barcelona, isn’t it?”

  “Almost. I’ve borrowed liberally from Gaudi.”

  “Yes, I noticed the corkscrew roofs, the waxlike folds in the granite. The lighting’s a bit harsh – too much Texas in your sunset.”