The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  He’d installed direct lighting and a CD stereo system in the shed’s thin walls. He’d even built a cot, for catnaps during marathon sessions on one or another painting.

  The Rook’s journey came to rest on that cot the day it was delivered. Robert hadn’t expected it. A storage company, acting on Frederick’s months-old instructions, had just caught up with its inventory.

  Perhaps the woman’s belly – a pinch of prurience – or the violence of the shirt’s steel hem lured Robert’s eye. He couldn’t stop watching the piece.

  The paintings held him too, though they were, for Frederick, standard abstractions, variations on his life’s work. Unlike Newman and Kline, who’d slipped into easy repetition, Frederick managed to do what he’d always done while convincing his viewers that new discoveries were still being made. These final paintings had that promise of secrets revealed in the very textures of the brushstrokes.

  But The Rook’s journey was something else entirely, a break with pure abstraction, with paint itself, the smooth oily smell, the sticky skin clinging to canvas like flesh on bone, that had always intoxicated him.

  He’d reinvented himself at the end and Robert hadn’t seen it, staring at the pale sleeping man in his hospital bed, on his way to becoming a ghost.

  Historians, critics, fellow artists would soon cite Frederick’s transformation, reassess his career in light of the Rook, arguing the work’s final worth – “Becker’s Triumph?” “The Failures of Abstraction?” The Vultures of Cultural Value would soon be sifting his ashes.

  Robert scorned this debate in advance, though he’d already made the mistake of showing the Rook to Walter Hope, a curator for the Now Arts Museum. Hope pressed for a Becker retrospective as soon as he learned the man was sick. Weak with grief, Robert agreed to a show.

  Hope dropped by his studio the day the Rook arrived. He barely glanced at Frederick’s farewell oils – “Nice, nice,” he murmured, walking past them – but lost himself before the stunning steel woman, the man’s abandoned shirt. “This is his?” he whispered. He reached through the bars to touch the sagging castle. “This is Becker’s?”

  Robert wished he’d covered the piece in a corner by his trinket-shelves – he wasn’t ready to share it – but he hadn’t thought ahead. Since dawn he’d tried to invigorate his latest portrait of Sarah, a standing nude. Lines and circles interlaced at awkward points, lips and breasts bobbled out of balance. Colors ran, orange, red to blue, but there was no illusion of movement. He was bothered by the heat and the playful shouts of neighbor boys.

  Most of all, he was distracted by his father’s parting shot.

  “And this,” he said, tapping his portrait with a dry sable brush. “This is a Becker too.”

  Hope grinned. “I’ll be damned,” he said, touching again the giant collage. “The wily son of a bitch.” He wore a gray herringbone coat and pleated slacks. Slight squint. Crossed arms. The cool professional pose. “Forty years he hides his feelings with splashes and drips, then he gives us this raw confession.”

  Robert was annoyed. “What makes you think it’s autobiographical?”

  “Come on Robbie, we all knew about your dad and, you know –”

  “What?”

  “Women.”

  He turned away. He couldn’t afford to be angry with Hope.

  All the colors of his palette lay beyond his window. Yellow, purple, a smooth buttery brown, blazing now in full noon sun. Rhododendrons, columbines, a few late tulips; the pale icy cloud of an iris, waist-high, above its stalk. Wasps sealed gaps in their nests, to secure the eggs inside.

  “The missing heart,” Hope said, pacing for different angles, different light. “The shirt like wrinkled skin. And – obviously, right? – the rook’s a withered cock. It’s all about the loss of his virility.” He laughed, then caught himself. “Sorry, Robbie, I’m not ribbing the man. It’s the work, it’s so witty.”

  Robert didn’t smile. He’d formed a first impression of his own: knowing his father’s love of puns, he’d immediately grasped that The Rook’s journey was a play on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, about a young man’s dissolution.

  Here was an old rake’s tragic end.

  “Rook” as “fool.”

  “This has got to be part of the show,” Hope said.

  Robert didn’t want him looking anymore, especially as he was smart enough to see certain things.

  He’d once promised Robert his own show. “When the market’s stable. The Japanese are skittish about investing now, and there’s a shrinking national arts audience. Best to wait.”

  Frederick’s retrospective would draw record local crowds, he felt, spark the scene back to life.

  Once again, Robert would simply be the famous man’s son.

  “We’ll have a third of the museum’s space, and I’ve lined up some miracle carpenters,” Hope said. “Chronology’s a bore, but I’d like to convey a sense of progress leading up to –” He almost embraced the Rook. “Also, this is Houston, so we want your father’s rough side. The more genteel paintings … I don’t know, I see them displayed in D.C., setting off the neoclassicism there, but here … here we want the cowboy, the maverick, the iconoclast.”

  The heat and this cold dissection of his father dizzied Robert. He wouldn’t return to his portrait today. The Now Arts Museum already owned many of Frederick’s old works. Hope would arrange a time so he and Robert could go through the catalog together, and assemble, collage-like, the essential Becker.

  ______

  The show’s timing was bad for Robert and Sarah. They’d hit a rough spot in their marriage. Weeks passed without a caress or more than an affectionate kiss. Since Frederick’s death, Robert had been numb. Insensate, Sarah said. She was patient at first, then restless. Finally angry.

  “I can’t stand this moping anymore. I need you, Robbie, and you aren’t there for me.”

  “Honey, I can’t –”

  “You won’t. I’m living alone here. It’s morbid.” In bed she pulled his face to hers. Her cheeks were small and round, the color of varnished birch. The skin creme she rubbed into her thighs smelled of lemon. “I’m more naked in your paintings than I am in your life.”

  She bought Alvin Ailey tickets, tickets to a performance of Lear, sexy new dresses, chocolates. Nothing interested Robert. On their tenth wedding anniversary she went to a styling salon and had her bangs cut. “Eurohair,” she said. “It’s what all the Paris thirty-somethings are wearing.”

  “Very nice,” Robert said.

  She threw down her purse. “That’s it. I feel pathetic trying to please you.”

  Robert reached for her arm. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll snap out of it. I promise. Give me time.”

  “You’ve said that for months now, Robbie, but every day you’re back in that goddamn shed … you know, I didn’t complain when your father was sick. I fixed lunches for him, went to see him in the hospital. I spent a lot of time with him, and the truth is, that old man never really liked me. He didn’t like women.”

  Robert squeezed her hand. He’d just been painting; his fingers were the walnut brown of her hair. “He liked them too much.”

  “He liked fucking. That’s not the same.”

  Her remark recalled to him a talk he’d had with Frederick at his wedding. “Sarah’s a beautiful girl, Robbie, but she can’t be everything to you. That’s too much burden to place on one woman.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “A little fatherly advice. I suppose I’m not one to speak.” Thirty years ago he’d left for New York, stranding Robert and his mother in Houston. “But here’s the truth: show me a man who hasn’t picked a hundred flowers and I’ll show you a wretch who doesn’t deserve the world’s bounty.”

  Always, Robert came away from these talks feeling he was content with too little in life.

  The week the Rook arrived, Sarah flew to Seattle for a linguistics conference. She looked forward to this gathering each year, where she’d made a lot of
friends. They ate in the best restaurants, spent late nights in their hotel suites telling silly jokes. Like a slumber party, Sarah said.

  Before she left she memorized a poem. She had a conference-pal, a lanky New Yorker named Henry Martin, who shared her love of lit. Henry had never seen the virtues of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Hardy, his hero, left Sarah cold. So annually they agreed to learn a few stanzas by the other’s favorite poet and discuss them.

  “Stupid ghost story,” Sarah said of this year’s verse:

  He does not think that I haunt here nightly;

  How shall I let him know

  That whither his fancy sets him wandering

  I, too, alertly go? –

  “Henry’s got his work cut out for him, persuading me this is anything but drivel.”

  Robert noticed the lift in her voice whenever she mentioned her friend. In the past she’d told him the man was a shameless flirt, but she’d never taken his advances seriously.

  This year, Robert wondered if the haircut and the new Talbots dresses had more to do with Henry than their wedding anniversary.

  “I love you,” he told Sarah at the airport. “When you come back, we’ll start over, okay?”

  She nodded, kissed him quickly, then ran for her plane.

  ______

  Now she stared at him from his easel. He spread Permagel on the painting’s yellow background, an accretion of strokes thick as pitch. She was dead. Color and tone were right. He’d fixed the scale, balanced proportions. Maybe her pose was the problem. Straight-ahead frontal. Passive. A woman being ogled.

  Behind him, on the cot, the woman in his father’s collage blazed with vital presence.

  The sun had baked the shed. He was sweating, dizzy. He picked up his palette knife, thinned Sarah’s hips. The neighbor boys, Tommy and Steve, were shouting again as Tommy pulled his little brother in a wagon through the alley. Steve had a coloring book and some crayons. Robert watched them through his window.

  Recently he and Sarah had resolved not to have kids. She was a full-time career woman, he was devoted to his art. Robert believed the decision was right for them, but he felt a pang now, listening to the boys, a hollow whistling deep in his chest.

  Steve licked a piece of Raw Umber and apparently decided to eat it.

  Last week Robert had seen the boys asleep in their yard, on a cotton blanket beneath a pecan tree. He’d sketched their pretty faces, their tight, pink fists, the dragonflies weaving above them. Now, in a stack of paper, he found the sketch: the simplicity of it pleased him, reminded him of his love of charcoals, pencils, and pastels, and momentarily eased his frustration with the nude.

  He tacked the drawing next to his painting of Sarah. Could he even imagine-babies in his wife’s slender body? See her hugging boys like these? Perhaps he was more disappointed than he’d thought with their agreement.

  He wondered if he’d cooled to Sarah – had he cooled to Sarah? – not when he lost his father, but when she told him, once and for all, she didn’t want kids.

  He turned away from the empty figure on his canvas, toward Frederick’s collage. The woman’s torso gleamed like a coat of mail. Now there was a sensual image, he thought. Sexy and inviting. Nipples hard as rivets – lush, bold, riveting.

  Who was she? Someone Frederick knew, loved, fucked? A young artist charmed by the Old Master? Had he sworn to steer her through the New York art world and make her famous? Had he done it?

  How many others had he slept with and promised careers, while Robert languished in the cultural backwaters of Texas? How many women, since Robert’s mother, had he pledged his love to?

  Robert’s head was pounding. He wasn’t being fair to his father, and he’d wound himself up so much, the pain in his temples nearly blinded him. Loneliness, jealousy, anger, grief – a narrow range of colors. He needed to relax, as he had while sketching the boys. A simple pleasure, joyous, swift. Wasn’t that what Frederick meant at the wedding? Grab the world’s gifts?

  Women were the presents Frederick always gave himself. Easy to condemn, but (Robert thought now, content with too little) what was wrong with that? Before he met Sarah, he’d had only two serious love affairs; since his marriage, he’d been faithful to his wife, but Sarah had no right to tell him what to feel, or to demand total attention from him. He was hurting, goddammit, childless and forgotten as a painter – while his father moved on, played out his life. And became the better artist for it.

  The torso in the collage: it wasn’t one person, Robert saw now – it was a lifetime of women, a passionate engagement with their thoughts, words, buttocks, and ankles, their startling laughter and sighs, their lustrous sexuality – an abundance Robert hadn’t allowed himself, and now wished he’d explored.

  “Art,” Picasso said, “is never chaste.”

  ______

  Superman rang.

  Robert had moved the Rook to the floor and fallen asleep on the cot. His sweat soaked the pillow. He switched on a portable fan on a table near his shelves, then reached for the phone. The receiver was an eight-inch plastic replica of the Man of Steel. It had been on sale in the Galleria at an incredibly low price and Robert figured what the hell, as long as it works. He felt powerful, speaking to people while gripping all these muscles.

  “Robbie, hi, I wake you?”

  Hope.

  Robert had been waiting to hear from Sarah. Not a word since she’d left for Seattle. He’d tried her hotel room several times in the last three days.

  “The grand Becker,” Hope said. “The biggest, most arrogant canvases from each decade. How’s that for a theme? Fits Houston perfectly-the brash young city erupting out of nowhere, competing for world dominance with its oil wells, money, and swagger. Where else could your father have come from?”

  He wanted Robert to meet him at the museum tomorrow morning to help arrange the show. “And bring that beautiful Rook-baby, right? You’ll need a truck or a van. I’ll send some-one to pick you up, say nine?”

  Robert’s head was thrumming again. He felt heavy and chilled, as if shoved into a swift-running bayou. “I need more time,” he said.

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “No, I mean … I’m not ready for this. It’s too soon, Walter. It’s ghoulish. The man’s barely dead, for Christ’s sake –”

  “Robbie boy, I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Hope said. “If we don’t make a positive statement now about your father’s work, his enemies – the enemies of abstraction – will seize the initiative, brand him as a has-been, and that’ll be that. Frederick Becker will disappear from art history.”

  A fever, damp and yellow, lodged behind Robert’s eyes.

  “You hear what I’m saying? Aesthetic values, individual reputations – how do you think these things are made? Your father knew, Robbie. It’s political warfare. You better get with the program, man.”

  Hope was Robert’s best shot at a museum show of his own (though painting was passe with the hot young crowd Now Arts tended to promote), so he backed down, agreed to bring the Rook.

  “Good man,” Hope said.

  Robert hung up the phone, swallowed a couple of aspirin, then tried Sarah’s room. No luck. He left a message with the desk: “I love you. Please call me.”

  Off in a golden bower, he thought, whispering third-rate poems to her lover.

  He approached his portrait. Technically, it wasn’t bad now but it still inspired nothing in him. Frederick had once said of Robert’s work in general, “Striking a balance between having something real at issue and a wonderful surface isn’t easy, but you have the second, now go back and introduce the first. Art, we said, is a grid superimposed on another grid – both things are necessary.”

  How like his dad! The formal tone, the royal “we” as if he were God the Father and the Son of Man all in one!

  Robert challenged himself: what was at stake in this latest picture of Sarah? My desire for new sexual experiences, he thought. No wonder she didn’t dazzle.

  Where
was she each night? In Henry’s room? Thomas Hardy and sweet little nothings in her ear? He was probably overwrought again. Maybe he was projecting his own restlessness onto her. Or maybe at heart she also regretted their decision, and felt their sexual life had come to “zero at the bone.” If so, maybe a fling with Henry was just what she needed. Would Robert deny her that comfort?

  His earlier certainty that promiscuity fed the fires of art struck him now as silly. He laughed at himself “Promiscuity.” Even his thoughts were shy. In word, if not deed, he was as formal as his father.

  He couldn’t imagine himself courting another woman. He wouldn’t know how to begin. Want to see my sketches? And the women he’d loved before Sarah – they were happily married now, model mothers. When he’d known them, they were wild and confused, impulsively lustful, convinced that attention from Robert – or any man – was the only measure of their worth. They both told him, when they left him, he was “too nice,” as though they didn’t deserve tenderness and respect. Since then, they’d each tried Freudian therapy, and emerged from it healthier, more assured, capable of sustaining good marriages and raising children. Robert was happy for his old friends, but when he spoke to them now on the phone, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, he heard the price they’d paid for progress. They sounded dull, strident in their maturity, drained of sexuality. He’d seen the best women of his generation destroyed by psychoanalysis.

  “There’s no such thing as progress – in life or in art,” Frederick said at Robert’s first gallery reception, in ’79. He’d raised a glass of wine to toast his son’s future. “There’s only adding-on.”

  Robert stood now and added a few strokes to Sarah’s belly, a red highlight to her hair. The oil on his fingers smelled vaguely of her sex; surely a mental trick, a manifestation of his need to capture this woman.

  What if he blurred her calves, abstracted her a bit?

  Giacometti saw women’s bodies as towering trees.

  He tried, and failed, again to reach Sarah in Seattle. She must know she was driving him crazy, and this angered him all the more.