The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  Wasps and early fireflies circled his tulips. He heard Tommy and Steve’s mother calling them in to dinner, her voice as smooth and resonant as a wind chime.

  He dropped a sheet on the Rook for tomorrow morning’s trip. His headache shrieked. He was about to betray the piece. After all, bad light filled the museum. And stupid crowds. They were a threat to his father’s work. They didn’t love art, Robert thought; they craved art world gossip. He imagined them at the opening, gulping wine, nibbling pale crackers smeared with brie. His father would share the space with scorched genitalia made of paper, framed subway doors covered with graffiti, human hair in shopping bags – the latest in “statement” art, though the only statements being made, Robert thought, were that violence sells, and that his peers’ imaginations were a bizarre mix of Pee Wee Herman and Ivan the Terrible.

  Here the Rook was safe. The shed was like a greenhouse, warm and enclosed. To fully thrive, an imaginative object had to be watched over time. Its meaning or effect moved with the viewer’s emotions, with temperature and lighting. Hope would never understand, but Robert decided he had to live with the Rook one more day – to engage in an intense relationship with it, morning, noon, and night, the way his father did with women – and feel the many ways it changed him.

  MORNING

  Robert drew his blinds against the harsh and glary dawn. He stood in the middle of his shed with a fresh cup of coffee. From this distance, the piece seemed welcoming and soft. The background was pink and tan with a slight hint of yellow. A smoker’s sallow flesh.

  He stepped closer. The narrative was clear. A torn, bloodied shirt reached hopelessly for a very young woman. Heavily shielded, emotionally cold, she had ripped out his heart, left him limp, like the rook.

  Frederick rarely spoke of heartbreak, loss or regret; his last years might have been lonely. Robert didn’t know.

  By midmorning, in stronger light, the shirt looked mean and hard, grabbing for the woman, who had softened. Robert saw a small tarnished streak on her belly, the color of skin. A break in her armor.

  Or a Caesarean scar-a reference, perhaps, to Robert’s birth. The narrative shifted, and he saw his mother threatened by the swaying, drunken shirt.

  She was small, thin, and quiet. Early in her marriage, against her wishes, Frederick spent late nights in Houston’s “colored” clubs, listening to Erskine Hawkins, Peck Kelly, Woody Herman, and his favorite, the great jazz drummer Big Sid Catlett. He and his friends were often the only white boys in the place, but they truly loved the music so they were welcome. Frederick claimed later he learned all he knew about freedom of gesture from these brilliant, inventive musicians.

  But his nightly escapades shattered Ruth, who never fully recovered from Robert’s difficult birth. She grew weaker, nursing her baby, while her husband was God knows where. Twenty years later, as she was dying of breast cancer, she told Robert she wished she’d had the gumption then to kick Frederick out.

  (“I wish,” said Joseph Cornell, the day he died, “I had not been so reserved.”)

  She never understood why Frederick married her.

  Robert learned the answer one night in New York. He was just a boy at the time, eleven or twelve; he loved his summer visits back east because his dad spoke to him like a grown-up. The black women in Houston’s R & B clubs were “mighty fine,” Frederick told him one August. “Sweet-smelling, like roses, and silky. Friendly as hell. You’d walk into one of those places, some lady’d kiss you, put a cold beer in your hand, and say, ‘Sit with me, sugar.’ Dark and mysterious, like someone had turned out a lamp in her, leaving a sexy silhouette.”

  Eventually the club-girls lost their exotic aura, he needed ‘ something different, something special, and Ruth, a white woman raised in Africa, fit the bill.

  She was the child of Baptist missionaries in Lagos. She didn’t see America until she was twenty. When Frederick met her in Houston, this young cafe waitress was unlike any woman he had ever seen, timid but self-possessed. She resisted his slickness at first, and entertained him with stories that later delighted Robert as a boy – about the python that dropped from a date palm onto her father’s pulpit one day, the deep-throated drums she fell asleep to each night.

  She told Robert other stories once Frederick had moved to Manhattan. She’d pop a thimble onto her thumb, busy herself with buttons, and frighten Robert with tales of his father’s wild nights, his verbal cruelty. She seemed powerful, describing these events, almost regal in her mourning. One evening, sad for his mother, lonely for his father but terrified too, Robert crawled into her lap while she was sewing. She lost her balance in the chair and nicked his hand with her needle. The bleeding stopped quickly but he wouldn’t quit sobbing until Ruth phoned Frederick in New York and he heard both his parents’ voices, assuring him everything was all right.

  Frederick’s Village studio was large and gloomy; its shadowy corners scared Robert as a child, and so did Frederick with his massive build and goatish beard. Once, he caught Robert crying in front of a violent red abstraction titled Self-Portrait, and asked him what was the matter. Robert repeated Ruth’s charges. Frederick laughed, hugged his boy, and said, “Don’t confuse the monster in the paint with the monster here beside you. And don’t listen to your mother.”

  He didn’t drink before six. In the afternoons he’d take Robert to neighborhood fairs, or to watch the chess players in Washington Square Park. He’d dance with young women at block parties, give quarters to raggedy men on the streets, praise the stickmen he’d seen at the Village Gate or the Five Spot. Back in his studio, he’d show Robert how to hold a paintbrush, how to make a vanishing point on the canvas, using a picture he’d taken of the Ramblas on a visit to Barcelona. When Robert finished his first portrait, a copy of the photo, Frederick handed him two torn tickets from the Barcelona Metro. He’d kept them as souvenirs, and gave them to Robert for a job well done. At such times, Robert felt immense love for this man. He wasn’t the ogre Ruth had described. He was vital, fascinating, funny. And he belonged in New York. Even as a kid, Robert knew the city’s rhythms, its walking spaces, suited Frederick more than Houston ever could, though the City of Heat always held a special charm for him.

  He did change when he drank. He’d rage at his paintings as if they were people he didn’t like. If Robert interrupted him, he’d snap, “What do you want?” then apologize.

  Now and then he’d nod in grudging kindness at a mark he’d made on a little stretch of canvas.

  Robert learned to dread the fall of night, the crack of a Scotch bottle seal. Shadows lengthened in the studio’s grim corners. But in the morning, Manhattan was once again a circus (cab fumes and pizza smells, laughter, women, store-front displays) and Frederick an amiable clown.

  NOON

  The light softened behind tall blue Gulf Coast clouds – a lull before the blast of full day.

  Robert, wearing only cut-off jeans, ignored the phone as he leaned into his painting with an extra fine brush, dabbing pearls into the nude’s dark hair. She’d just walked out of the sea.

  He no longer thought of her as Sarah. Ruth was there, too, in the pale legs, the vulnerable stance, though this was neither his mother nor his wife. He’d smudged her face, so personality, history, emotion wouldn’t shape his lines or choose his colors for him. He focused now on texture, the seductions of density and weight, inviting the viewer to leave the world and enter the frozen grace of paint. The figure was approaching a clarity he liked, but with a gentleness he remembered from Monet, the cool dappled shadows of the Giverny paintings.

  Superman jumped in his cradle again. It might be Sarah, but Robert feared Hope was trying to track him. On the other hand, if he didn’t answer, the man might storm his shed later on.

  “Robbie, I need you! Where the hell are you?” At first it sounded like his father, shouting from a near distance, and he knew he’d been haunted all day, like the man in the Hardy poem Sarah had left by the bed:

  *… he goes and wants me with
him

  More than he used to do,

  Never he sees my faithful phantom

  Though he speaks thereto.

  But it was only Hope. Robert explained he was learning from the Rook – techniques, new ways of seeing; he needed to keep it a while.

  “We’re ready to go! The opening’s next week. We can’t wait.”

  They argued further until Hope finally said, “I can help you, Robbie. Remember what I promised?”

  Robert thought his skull would burst. It was suddenly clear to him: this asshole was going to string him along forever.

  “I can get you a show. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.” Robert’s hand began to cramp and he loosened his grip on the brush. He hadn’t realized he’d worked so long today. Hope didn’t care for his portraits – the man was just trying to get to Frederick. His pledge was a cynical bribe. “Look, Walter, you’ve got the paintings. Pick them without me,” Robert said. “The Rook stays here for now.”

  He hung up and immediately regretted the damage he’d done. Hope could deliberately mount a weak show, tarnish his father’s image.

  He started to call back but dialed Seattle instead. Ruth and Sarah – his portraits – stared at him from the walls of the shed. The collage was like his father’s presence in the room. Robert grew dizzy again. Cicadas throbbed in the pecan tree next door. Tommy and Steve’s mother was humming a tune, watering her fat tomatoes.

  Sarah answered the phone.

  “I don’t believe it,” Robert said.

  “Robbie! I was about to call you.” She sounded out of breath. “We’ve had trouble with the phone in our room.”

  “Right. No one’s there to answer it.”

  “It was broken. Have you been trying to reach me?”

  “You could’ve called me from a pay phone.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s been so hectic. You know how it IS at conferences.”

  He didn’t know. “How’s Henry?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did he convince you the poem was a gem? Maybe late one night in his room?”

  She laughed, nervously. “Have you been into the booze?”

  Robert never drank; she knew that. He picked up the bottle of Anacin. He’d been eating the things all day.

  He said, “Are you happy, Sarah?”

  She was silent. He heard the woman next door singing “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Linda? LuAnn? She was pretty – and young for a mother of two. Robert realized he’d never seen or heard a man over there.

  “Sarah, would you like to have kids?”

  “You’ve been sitting around brooding in that awful shed. We settled that. Didn’t we?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re having second thoughts?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh Robbie … is this serious? Do you really want to open this up again, because if so, it’s not something I can deal with on the phone –”

  “Are you sleeping with Henry?”

  As soon as he asked this, he knew he was really afraid, and he couldn’t stop pressing her. Maybe it was the fever or the aspirin or both. Or maybe he’d sensed the truth.

  “I’m not even going to answer that,” Sarah said. “You’re the one who stopped sleeping with me, remember?”

  “So you run to –”

  “You must’ve strayed. Why else would you accuse me like this? I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” Robert heard tears in her voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Robbie.”

  His head seemed to thicken, like quick-drying glue. “Are you also in love with Henry?”

  “For God’s sakes, no!”

  He stood inches from the woman on his canvas, glaring at her unprotected breasts. “Are you sure?”

  She tried a lighter tone. “Let’s stop this, okay? My flight arrives Friday at –”

  “Sarah.”

  “Goddammit, you want me to sleep with him? Is that what you want?” She fumbled the receiver. “All right, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time with him this week. He’s sweet. A lot sweeter than you’ve been lately. Jesus, Robbie, it’s like you want to drive me away …”

  “I don’t want that. It’s been a difficult period.”

  “For me too, all right? Yes, yes, I enjoy the attention of a man who still finds me attractive. I’m sorry about your father, Robbie, I truly am, but I’m not a ghost. I’m still here and I have needs.”

  His knees wavered. He had to sit. He’d never felt so unsure of himself. The doubts had begun the day the Rook arrived. It was the source of all his anxiety. His marriage, his talent, his lost parents seemed as elusive now as the collage’s shifting narratives. He couldn’t grasp anything, and in his desperation, he couldn’t stop the pain he knew he was causing his wife.

  “I’m up each dawn painting,” he told her. “I want you to call me tomorrow morning at five. From your room. I want to hear your voice first thing – maybe it’ll help me do good work.”

  “That’s three Seattle time, Robbie. I’m not going to get up in the middle of the night.”

  “If you don’t call me, I’ll know you’re with Henry.”

  “Jesus, what is this? What’s gotten into you? We’re married ten years and you’re giving me a test?”

  “Call me.”

  “I will. But not at three A.M.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Robbie, don’t take that tone with me. Listen to yourself. Do you hear how crazy this is?”

  “Dawn, Sarah. I’m up at dawn.” He nearly snapped his receiver in half.

  “Henry’s a lot easier,” she said, and cut their connection.

  ______

  NIGHT

  Naked and sweating, he turned the songs up loud: McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, 1933, with Big Sid Catlett on drums. Sid was known for his swing, a freer time-keeping style than most of his contemporaries played. Kicking and prodding bass drum and snare, he accented the solo lines of piano and horns.

  Free-style swing. Robert wondered if he had it. His father certainly did. He stared at the Rook. The music lightened the woman, the shirt. They were caught in a giddy dance. The red setting sun cast a raw erotic glow on the floor.

  Robert walked into his garden, shooing wasps from his head. His hair was tousled and damp, his face on fire. He’d eaten all the aspirin. He moved like a sleepwalker.

  He picked cucumbers, radishes, greens. A few flowers. In the kitchen he whipped up a salad and a light vinaigrette. He showered, dressed. The fact that he didn’t know the woman next door, not even her name, occurred to him briefly, but he was floating, free of gravity and social convention.

  He poured the salad into a nice wooden bowl, then snatched the paper cat from his shed. His father had made the animal years ago, when Robert was a child. Perhaps if he offered it to Tommy and Steve, their mother would be pleased.

  He didn’t ask himself what he’d say when she came to the door, or what he intended to do. He was self-conscious enough to go around back, through the alley.

  Webworm silk drifted like lace in the branches of the tree. Pecans – and a plastic soldier – crunched beneath his feet. He was buoyed by the music in his head, the mint smell from the woman’s herb garden. The air cooled his fevered skin.

  He tapped on the sliding glass door. Steve laughed at something in the living room. The woman, in a T-shirt and jeans, smiled in recognition when she saw him. They’d waved a few times across the fence. She stepped onto the patio.

  For a moment he didn’t breathe. “Hi, I was in my garden, and I thought you’d like –”

  “Oh, how sweet of you,” she said, taking the flowers and the bowl from his hands. Her short dark hair smelled of lilacs, her skin the warmth of vanilla.

  Sweet. Sarah’s word for Henry. He gave her the cat. “For the kids.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  He’d start with her mouth: at first, just a fine, dark line to center t
he face, then a dab of Alizarin Crimson …

  “Scott and I’ve meant to have you and your wife over,” she said. “We’re just, with the kids and all, our schedules aren’t easy. I’m Lenore.”

  “Robert.”

  A man called from the kitchen, “Honey, who’s that?”

  Robert’s stomach clenched. He caught a glimpse of his own fiery cheeks in the sliding glass door. He looked like shit.

  “Lenny, honey, let’s go,” the man said. He sounded like Frederick when Robert was little. Whenever Frederick wanted something he’d shout, “Robbie, I need you. Get over here. Let’s go!”

  Lenore shrugged. “We were just out the door. The boys, you know, McDonalds.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll enjoy this later, though. It’s really nice of you.”

  Her smile nearly knocked him over, onto sharp, ripe pecans in the grass. “Wait a minute,” he said, thinking quickly. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  He ran through a tangle of ivy in the alley and thought again of Giverny: Monet’s dense, cluttered greens, a sensual paradise.

  He picked up the Rook and lugged it back next door. “I want you to have this too,” he told Lenore.

  She placed a hand on her throat, looked curious then nervous. “It’s so large. I couldn’t possibly … what is it?”

  “A gift. Take it. Take it, please.”

  Her husband poked his head out the door. He was blond and fair. “Lenny –”

  “Scott, honey, this is Robert.” She spoke carefully. “He lives next door.”

  Scott started to shake Robert’s hand then saw the naked torso. “Whoa. What the hell have you got there?” he said. His lip twitched as though he’d just tasted something bitter and hot. “What the hell are you … who are you?”

  “My father was a very famous man,” Robert explained. “This piece is worth a lot of money.”

  Scott laughed – a short, angry burst. “Right,” he said.

  “I’ve decided I can’t have it around. If you don’t want it, sell it. The museum –”

  “We can’t …” said Lenore.