The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “We can adjust that.”

  “Marvelous. Much better. Of course, I recognize certain design elements from our previous evenings together: the crosswalks that fade in the center of the street, the diamond-shaped intersections. The statue in the fountain is new. Venus, is it? But what’s she made of?”

  “Chocolate,” Robert said.

  “Chocolate? Charming. Why doesn’t she melt in the spray?”

  “I don’t want her to,” Robert said. “This is my city.”

  “Fair enough. But why chocolate?”

  “I like chocolate.”

  Frederick nodded. “Always did. Remember your little weight problem as a kid? But I should caution you, Robbie, aesthetic choices can’t be made on personal whim. I get the impression you’re not thinking through your projects with enough discipline these days.”

  “You’ve always thought that.”

  “Well –”

  “Ever since I returned to representation.”

  Frederick sniffed. “Sentimental portraits of your mother and your wife.”

  – which the Old Man, the Master, the Famous Iconoclast who’d helped free American painting from Subject, always held against him. Frederick couldn’t abide the fact that his boy didn’t demonstrate the passion or the flair for the kinds of daring, monochrome abstractions he’d pioneered in the fifties. Robert was firmly attached to the human form.

  “We don’t disagree, do we, that art should lance the boil of the set-in-stone?” Frederick said.

  Robert laughed. “Lance the boil” had always been one of Frederick’s favorite expressions. To him, Conventionality, whatever guises it took – including straightforward figurative painting – was a hideous black blemish.

  “Dad, we’ve trampled this grass to death,” Robert said. “Abstraction was a cliché by the time I started painting.”

  “But there were other avenues you could’ve explored. Junk-sculpture. Stuffed goats, car bumpers, that sort of thing. The sixties were a fertile lab of ideas. And a hell of a lot of fun. You didn’t have to become Norman Rockwell.”

  Robert let that pass. “I’ll grant you, abstraction’s stock seems to be rising again,” he said. “At the Whitney this year –”

  “Balls. Dime-store imitations of Pollock and myself. The galleries are filled with stale piss instead of the wine of life.” Frederick snapped his fingers. “Waiter! A carafe of your finest piss, please!”

  ______

  Robert realized that in some cut-rate Freudian fashion he was using these talks to rehash unresolved arguments he’d had with his father over the years. He also recognized that dialogues, stripped to the bone, are power plays, often ugly: the dominant conversational partner sets the subject, tone and pace; the responder adds incidentals, details, counterweight, and heft. These recent discussions with Frederick were agitated both by habit and circumstance. Habit dictated that his father dominate. Circumstance required Robert to perform Take as well as Give.

  “Ruth” and “Art” remained the two most bitter topics between them. “Ruth was too young when she married me,” Frederick said in life, and again in these vivid after-death get-togethers. “Your mother had stars in her eyes. I knew we wouldn’t last – I was married to my own heroic gestures, as they say – but I didn’t want to crush the poor girl.”

  And on Robert’s recent efforts: “You do what you do with great skill, Robbie, but it’s merely decorative wallpaper. It doesn’t advance the cause of art.”

  Robert was tired of hearing this. “Screw art’s cause,” he said. “I paint what I paint because I like my mother’s face. I enjoy my wife’s honest smile.”

  And there it was, the real trouble between them: Frederick’s celebrated inconstancy and Robert’s faithfulness to women.

  “Vulnerability,” Frederick said. “A synonym for ‘marriage.’ Lance the boil, I say.”

  Now as always, personal topics gave way to theory as the two men spoke. The people they knew together – Robert’s wife and mother – became merely figures, then examples (what to do, what not to do in your lifelong fencing with women), then nothing even remotely identifiable – color streaks in the conversation.

  ______

  Tonight Robert’s city was almost Barcelona but it smelled of Cajun delights. Blackened redfish, filet gumbo. Female nudes mailed letters, trotted after cabs, popped open purple umbrellas. Frederick drained his glass and beamed. The ladies in their frank poses pleased him.

  Moved by his father’s happiness, Robert dropped his guard. “Maybe you’re right about my work,” he said. “It’s probably not as good as it could be. But I’ve been distracted lately.”

  “By what?” Frederick ordered more wine. He picked up his knife.

  Robert scraped at a mauve acrylic dab on his thumb. “The truth is, I’m having a hell of a time accepting the fact that you’re gone.”

  “Suffer,” Frederick said, and spryly sliced his fish.

  ______

  On the streets of Houston, Paris, Budapest, and the real Barcelona, women, sadly, weren’t naked. They wore scarves against the wind, tinted glasses against swirling dust and glare. They wore soft sneakers on the subways, saving their cruelly shaped high heels in plastic bags until they reached the office.

  They were harried and tired and angry, hungry, hurtling into or out of love.

  This was a world – of concrete, steel, and actuality – that Frederick didn’t feel at home in.

  “I’m a Romantic,” he’d once told Robert. “Romantics never stop believing in possibilities. That’s what makes us so appealing – but also, I confess, unfaithful and often irresponsible. We’re always running after the next new thing.”

  A rare moment of candor. Robert must’ve been twenty-four or five at the time – this was ten years ago in New York, in a hotel bar on Lexington. The subject, then as most often, was why Frederick left Ruth. “My heart,” he said. “It’s always yearning.”

  Robert remembered other actual conversations he’d had with his dad, brief moments when the walls were down, the screens of violent color washed clean.

  One evening, six or seven years ago, they’d walked to the Village Vanguard to hear Woody Shaw blow golden jazz. Old Max Gordon, the club owner, always hovering at the back of the room; Shaw; now Frederick – all dead, Robert realized with a start. The sights and sounds of a whole era, vanished.

  That night Frederick had clucked with pleasure whenever the drummer tickled the hi-hat. He got drunker than usual. After the band’s last set he stumbled on the cement steps rising to the street and roughed-up his shins. “Damn booze,” he said. “It’s made me clumsy and fat.” Later in his studio he admitted, “I stare at my canvases now and think, ‘This next series’ll drive a stake through my reputation.’”

  “You’ve said that about everything you’ve ever done,” Robert reminded him.

  “No, this is different. Age, maybe. Or too much whiskey. I worry they’ll see what a fake I am.”

  “Dad –”

  “But then I think, Fuck it, I’m going to see it through. I’m going to by God make it work.”

  And he always did.

  Another time, in Houston. They were sitting in a Tex-Mex place on Navigation Boulevard, near the shrimp-stinking Ship Channel. Margaritas, palm-leaf green; pinatas, red-and-yellow paper cutouts on the walls. The day before, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston had commissioned a skyline portrait from the city’s famous son. Frederick was nervous about it – normally he didn’t work on commission, but this was for a celebration of Texas images, and Frederick was touched to be included. He had a large and sincere civic conscience. Near the end of the meal he leaned over his enchiladas verdes and whispered to Robert, “The thing is, you know, I can’t paint the skyline.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how to paint figuratively – not really.” He looked around the restaurant. “I paint the only way I know. Don’t tell anyone.”

  Eventually he produced a large abstract canvas of b
rown and orange and gray. Houston Colors, he called it. The Arts Council was thrilled.

  And then, eight months ago: “I’m frightened of dying,” he said.

  He’d gone off Camels and Scotch, been through detox. Chemotherapy had left him gaunt and weak. His face seemed to re-emerge after years of sternness, puffiness, lack of sleep. He had high cheekbones, an angular chin, and wide, friendly blue eyes. It was at last a face that Robert wanted to paint.

  “Do I look like a cancer victim?” Frederick wanted to know one day. “How apparent is it?” He and Robert were strolling the corridors of the medical center together.

  “You look okay, Dad. You needed to lose some weight,” Robert said.

  “Hell of a way to do it, eh? People are different when you’re sick,” Frederick said. “You’re an embodiment of frailty so they feel they can confess all their weaknesses to you. Total strangers. In the last three months I’ve heard more about heart murmurs and limp pricks and lost ambitions than I care to mention. How do I look? Really?”

  Robert reached to steady him.

  “Don’t treat me like an invalid!” Frederick wheezed.

  Later in the car, on the way to Robert’s house, Frederick tried to make light of his illness. Snow fell in cotton-ball bursts from the sky. The streets were icing over. Robert’s windshield wipers barely moved; he couldn’t see the curves ahead. Frederick suggested they park the car and take a cab. “We don’t want to be badly killed,” he said.

  ______

  Robert didn’t hear his father’s final words, but a doctor later repeated for him Frederick’s last coherent sentence. He’d been given a series of disorienting drugs for his pain. The doctors kept asking him, “Do you know where you are? Mr. Becker?”

  Softly, and as gently ironic as ever, Frederick answered, “I’m in the lobby of Heaven.” Then he’d closed his eyes against the color of the light.

  ______

  “Nice buttocks, don’t you think?” Frederick is pointing across the central square of Almost-Barcelona. “That woman over there by the lamppost, trying to hail a taxi.”

  “Very nice, yes.”

  “She could be a model.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if you insist on painting –” His lips curled. “People.”

  “Can we not discuss my career?” Robert says.

  “Not going well, is it?”

  “Not at the moment, no.”

  “Perhaps if you took more risks.”

  “Precisely what the marketplace won’t tolerate.”

  “Balls to the marketplace.” Frederick raises his voice. “I’m talking about –”

  “I know. The cause of art. The cause of art doesn’t feed me.”

  “Spiritually or otherwise?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Frederick wipes his lips with a gold serviette. “So you’ve taken on graphic design?”

  “Temporarily. It helps pay the bills.”

  “I left you a tidy sum.”

  Robert laughs. “All tied up in the courts right now. Your dealer, your former dealer, the dealer before that – they each want a piece.”

  “I see. And you blame me?”

  Robert pours more wine.

  “Oh hell,” Frederick says. “You’re not going to be so tiresome as to be angry at me for dying on you?”

  No, Robert thinks. I’m furious at the fact of your birth.

  Frederick winces.

  “I’m sorry,” Robert says. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “The truth will out.”

  “I am a bit pissed –”

  “Only a bit?”

  Robert swivels his shoulders. The tension there cracks. “When Mother died I could’ve used a little help. She had medical bills up to here –”

  “Your mother didn’t want my help.”

  “Oh?”

  “She knew where I was. She could’ve called me.”

  “She’d never do that. Dignity was all she had at the end.”

  Frederick shrugs.

  “When you died, Fay and the others wouldn’t have anything to do with the arrangements –”

  “Fay’s a ninny and a prig.” Frederick coughs magnificently, as he was unable to do in his final days. “She stopped speaking to me when I ran out on your mother.”

  “Lance the boil?”

  “What?”

  “My engagement to Sarah,” Robert says. “That’s what you told me when you heard about it, remember? ‘A wife is an impediment to a painter. She’ll want more money than you can provide her, she’ll eat into your work-time.’”

  “Was I wrong?”

  Robert glares at his father.

  “All right, all right,” Frederick says. “The wording may have been excessively harsh, but the advice is sound, I think.”

  At the wedding Frederick shook Robert’s hand and said, “Here’s wishing you a happy and fruitful first marriage.”

  ______

  Sarah stirs in bed next to Robert. He kisses her shoulder while fixing his stare on a pair of nude women window-shopping at a bakery.

  “And these young lovelies?” Frederick waves at the women. “I’m not making them up.”

  “They’re here for your benefit.”

  “Oh, I see. You get no pleasure from them what so-damn-ever. Does Sarah know what you’re daydreaming?”

  “Shhh! You’ll wake her.”

  Now all the men in the city, except Robert and his father, are naked. Waiters, bird-sellers, traffic cops. Why not, Robert thinks.

  “I agree,” Frederick says. “Egalitarianism.”

  “Dad, I love you dearly but you’re a damn scrounge. You’re a rotten pork chop.”

  “No argument from me.” Frederick raises his glass.

  “I’ve always wanted to say that to your pointy little beard.”

  “These recent paintings of yours, Robbie – they’re like little plucked chickens from some aborted Grander Design, am I right?”

  Sarah snuffles in her sleep.

  Robert says, “Okay, enough of this Bad-boy Becker bullshit. It may play in the art press but not with me. What we really need to cover here – once and for all and let the dead horse rot – is Mother –”

  “How I left her with no options.”

  “Right. And me –”

  “How I never encouraged you on your own path. Does that just about do it?”

  “No, goddammit! You were afraid my work would be an embarrassment to yours!”

  Sarah’s eyes snap open in the dark. She moves a bare knee up Robert’s leg. “What’s the matter, sweetie? Can’t you sleep?”

  “Just thinking,” Robert says.

  “What about?”

  Frederick rolls his eyes and sips his wine. Mourning doves spin around the bedroom, the busy brick streets.

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep. It’s all right.”

  She’s already dozing again. Robert smooths her hair. She smells of jasmine – her perfume – soap, heat. This lovely, patient woman, he thinks. This beautiful, beautiful boil.

  Frederick sprouts unease. Open displays of emotion – messy, messy, he’d say.

  A bus picks up half-a-dozen naked women. In Robert’s backyard studio, a splashed-red canvas waits for morning light. He thinks of things to do with his painting, things to cook tomorrow for Sarah; he’s eager for the day to begin.

  He realizes he’s been staring at his father with restless, quaking fists. Frederick watches him slowly unroll his hands. Then the Maestro relaxes, sighs, gazes appreciatively at his son’s splendid city. Still too much Houston in the light, but what the hell. The earth-tones, the serrated windows, the statue in the fountain …

  “Chocolate?”

  “Chocolate.”

  “Charming.”

  WHILE THE LIGHT LASTS

  His father’s last great work wasn’t a painting at all, but a 42 × 80 × 8-inch collage fashioned of steel, wood, canvas, and magnesium. Titled The Rook’s journey, it featured a fla
t, wilted chess rook caged behind bars leaning toward an armored female torso. To her left, a string of wire and nails suggesting a barbed-wire fence blocked her from a rumpled man’s shirt (made of metal) with a hole in the heart.

  UPS brought The Rook’s journey, with seven large paintings, to Robert’s door nine weeks after his father’s cremation. He was still reeling from the death, though the cancer’s certain journey through Frederick’s body had long been diagnosed. Months ago, the elder artist had cleared and closed his West Village studio, shipping tables, chairs, and a few blank canvases to Robert’s Houston home. Robert’s own studio was cleaner and a good deal more austere than Frederick’s loft. On Robert’s last visit to New York, six years ago, Frederick had joked about the speckled acrylics darkening his windows, walls, and floors. “Looks like I blew my brains out in here,” he said. Instead, he’d slowly drunk and smoked away his health – two of the painter’s cliches, along with numerous affairs, he’d never overcome.

  Robert painted in a square tin shed behind his house, a one-bedroom tract home in south Houston paid for largely by Sarah’s teacher’s salary (occasionally Robert sold a painting). In the garden by the shed, near an overgrown flowerbed, he’d planted cucumbers. Each spring, wasps dug holes in the soil, down to the vegetables’ roots, and pulled out blackflies. He loved the little ritual. The wasps were shiny, with two white spots on their backs. They inserted their stingers into the flies’ tiny throats, then cradled them like babies all the way back to the nest.

  This busy routine contrasted nicely with the shed’s interior calm, the stillness Robert tried to bring to his portraits of Sarah and his mother. He could sit unmoving, studying the teasing shapes on his sketch pads – the way a shoulder shaded up into a neck, the way a muscle seemed to throb on the rippling white space of a page – and still feel energized by the activity in his garden.

  Through his window blinds, at different times of day, light changed depth and shape, grew loud then soft like a jazz improvisation, and played across shelves of objects Robert had collected over the years, like treasures in a Joseph Cornell box: a paper-sack cat, two tickets from the Barcelona Metro, a thimble from his mother’s sewing kit, a satin cricket in a glass.