It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  On a silver hook in the wall, Mark’s tin snake coiled around a radiator cap. He’d finished the piece last year, soon after leaving the hospital. The old altar boy in Frederick, long dormant, revived whenever he saw it. It reminded him of Bible illustrations he’d seen as a kid of the serpent of temptation, locked around the limb of a tree.

  Its body was a garden hose painted silver. Slowly, Frederick edged away from it. “Need a cat?” he asked.

  “Hoffmann? Sure. Leave that tiger with me,” Mark said.

  “I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the move.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  Mark picked up the screwdriver. “Freddie, you just told me you’d shipped your stuff. The magazine’s waiting for you, right? The editors?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ballsiest thing you ever did, man, flying out there. I couldn’t believe it. Ruth thought you were—what—zipping up to Dallas that week?”

  “To meet a gallery owner who’d liked my work.” Actually, he’d seen an ad in Art-News, phoned, and arranged an interview in the Village with the magazine’s founding editors. “She was very excited for me. Always supportive.”

  “It’s not her support you need.”

  In the last year, she’d had no idea how completely he’d left her already. Desire in me—ambition—is stronger than self-sacrifice, Frederick thought. He felt clammy.

  “All the art world’s there. It’s your chance, man. No choice.” Mark licked his ravaged thumb. “Freddie, you’re too good to wither away here in Texas. Houstonians, they don’t know Picasso from Pecos Bill.”

  “The sin of pride.”

  “Hm?”

  “A biggie back in Catholic school. A real land mine. Did I ever tell you, the Jesuits—”

  “Oh Christ, man, let it go. You’ve found steady work in the only city that matters for a painter. You won’t get another shot like this, I guarantee it. It’s your career, man.”

  “I’m abandoning my kid.”

  “He’s a kid. Right. That’s the point. I’ve told you this. He’ll adjust. Nothing’s fixed in his world. He’ll grow up not knowing any better.”

  “Schizophrenia,” Frederick said.

  “Are you still in love with Ruth?”

  “Yes. No.”

  Mark lifted the bottle. The snake hung, ready to spring. “I’ll be waiting for that cat,” he said.

  Kennedy claimed that the entire southern quarter of the United States, including Texas, could be vaporized by nuclear attack if the Russians got a foothold in Cuba.

  Robbie watched the jumpy television screen. His eyes wouldn’t leave the president’s face, even while Frederick knelt beside him on the living-room floor, tugging a T-shirt over his pale little arms. Kennedy’s eyes looked puffy, Frederick thought. He wondered how much Robbie understood. To Robbie, the Leader of the Free World was probably just another cartoon; after all, the man’s charming good looks, the huge white house he lived in, were larger than life. Even Frederick found them hard to believe.

  Now Khrushchev was Wile E. Coyote, scheming to capture the world’s freedoms. A furry finger on a button. Beep beep.

  “It’s too small,” Ruth said from the doorway into the kitchen. She leaned against the jamb in a yellow cotton dress that stirred companionable feelings in Frederick. He guessed she’d worn it one night to a wonderful dinner, or prior to making love, back in the days before their own awful fallout.

  Finger on a button, indeed.

  It hadn’t taken much gentle stroking to set her off, when she was just a blushing young bride. Frederick remembered simmering nights with the shades up and the sheets in a desperate bedside tussle.

  Now, she wouldn’t hold his gaze.

  He checked the shirt’s torn package. “How can it be too small?” he said. “This is the same size I bought him before.”

  “That was six months ago. He’s changed a lot since then, in case you haven’t noticed.” She smoothed her thin brown hair.

  He stood unsteadily. “I’ve noticed everything, Ruth.”

  “Good,” she said, folding her arms so they lifted her breasts, just slightly. “Because it’s all going to change, and you won’t be here to see it.” A sob caught her final word, like a trap folding in on a mouse, and she turned away, into the kitchen.

  Robbie remained fascinated by the beautiful man talking doom, so Frederick left him in front of the screen.

  “Ruth,” he whispered, placing his palms on her shoulders from behind. She wobbled, and they listed against the kitchen table. It moved an inch or two across the floor. Its wooden legs barked on the freshly waxed red tiles.

  “Your fucking future,” she said through her hands.

  He tried to laugh. “Don’t you want me to have one?”

  “Not without us.”

  “Then come with me. I offered.” But his offer hadn’t been real, and she’d known that.

  Or more accurately: he’d meant it, but she knew already, from her life with him here—how could he deny it? the long nights in the studio, the brooding (Wittgenstein, Mickey Spillane, it didn’t matter), the drinking with Mark—she’d always be an afterthought to his burgeoning career.

  New York was the place, by God, to burgeon! Mark was right about the art world. And Ruthie loved Houston. Frederick knew that. Her mother and father were here, in a nursing home now, needing her weekly visits. For a hundred reasons, she’d never leave.

  “I’m sorry, Ruth.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Honey. What can I say?”

  “Say it all.”

  Free, unencumbered, without any words. He noticed their reflection in a mirror by the back door, the awkward distance between them like a bad dance step. “I have said it all. You knew, when we married, how vital painting was to me—”

  “I know. Go. Just get out. Have him back by seven.” She turned to a foggy pot on her stove. It smelled of cinnamon, all-spice—their earliest meals together, Frederick thought. Freshness and warmth and brimming contentment.

  “I really will miss you,” he told her now, sincerely. Still, he couldn’t wait to soar into the clouds, toward Bliss.

  His head spun. Did this split in his earthly desires mean he was crazy, or was he, perhaps, an angel? Pulled in all directions by the irrefutable beauty of each option?

  He looked up, at the low, plastered ceiling.

  “Seven,” Ruth said. “Or I’ll hunt you down like a dog.”

  Robbie patted the bird’s steel wings. His crying jag had passed. He’d wanted to see the rodeo—his mother had described for him the stocky steer, the sleek, pretty horses steaming in the sun—but the thought of real animals frightened Frederick today. He wasn’t sure why. “The world is too much with us.” Wordsworth? Tennyson? With Ruth’s sad face—the collapse of her slight, lovely face—in his mind, he needed escape into folly.

  So he walked his son through Griffith Park, pausing by each frozen shape to explain how Daddy’s friend had made them all. “This is a serving fork, see, but the way he’s twisted it here—”

  “Feathers! On a big bird’s head!”

  “A cockatoo. Do you like it?”

  “Yes!” Robbie ran among the beasts, releasing tiny bursts of rainwater left in the ground from an early-morning shower. He was bigger now, Frederick saw (Ruth had changed Robbie’s shirt), too big for a six-year-old. Ruth spoiled him. Overfed him. Well. This slow and creaky crisis pained them all.

  In spite of his pudginess, Robbie seemed to float on a pillow of accumulated delight in the world, Frederick noticed, the way Mark’s statues appeared to violate gravity despite their weighty skins. When did disappointment—real awareness of the planet—set in? Eight? Twelve? Twenty?

  When did roadrunners turn into red-blooded American patriots? Someday, as if from a witless winter sleep, Robbie would open his eyes and snap back at Frederick for the betrayal his father was abou
t to commit.

  But for now, the creatures were harmless, and so was his son.

  “What’s this one, Daddy?”

  “A mermaid.”

  “And this?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “A lion!”

  He watched his son’s hands slide like starfish over the finely molded shapes, and wondered if the boy had artistry in his fingers.

  Would any loving father wish the curse of talent on his child? Better, perhaps, to live a sane and simple life.

  He remembered lunching last month with Mark and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. The director was a teetotaler; he watched uneasily as Frederick and Mark ordered glass after glass of glistering wine. Finally, he said, “Tell me, why do so many artists drink so much?”

  Mark laughed, as if the question were predictable and silly. “Paraguay,” he said.

  Frederick answered, “White.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the director.

  “All that white, waiting to be filled.” Frederick waved his glass at the waitress. “No matter how many canvases I cover, there’s always another one waiting. Another blank. Another void. All that goddamned, terrifying white.” He blushed then—you knucklehead, he thought. Showing off like a child. Pretentious and puerile. Clumps of heat spread like roots across his cheeks. Mark saved him, and the moment, by toasting the tablecloth. “Look!” he slurred. “See how terrifyingly white it is!” And they laughed.

  Around a bench, now, Robbie chased a butterfly, a real one (its movement, its actuality, startled Frederick, surrounded here by so much stillness, and his thoughts). Yes. Sane and simple. Happy in the garden. “Daddy, I’m thirsty!”

  “All right, we’ll stop somewhere and get you some lemonade.” He was parched too. The old adage, There’s no such thing as a large whiskey, drifted through his mind as he tottered after his child. Redbirds chittered in the trees.

  Machinery yearning to breathe. Ponderous objects longing for the weightlessness of whimsy.

  He was still searching for the perfect phrase, the right image, to capture Mark’s art for the catalog.

  An army of metal rag mops.

  A rusty, peaceable kingdom.

  Sharpened toss-offs, born of our city’s inconsolable trash: a fair description of memory, if not Mark’s work, Frederick thought, glancing up now at the hospital Ruth had brought him to, years ago, here at the edge of the park.

  “This one, Daddy?”

  “A lamb.”

  The shrapnel of time.

  He’d been roughing out a geometric design one night after dinner, using blue construction paper, a possible study for a painting. He cut a delicate square with his X-Acto knife. Ruth, washing dishes at the kitchen sink, turned and said something to him; distracted, he dropped the point into the meat of his forearm. He protested that he wasn’t badly hurt, but he was bleeding wildly all over his favorite cotton shirt, so she insisted on driving him to the emergency room.

  Staring at Robbie now, skipping beside him on the grass, he tried to recover what Ruth had said to him that evening, in a wreath of steam from the sink, and he believed—could this be true?—he recalled her announcing, “I’m pregnant.”

  Surely not. Her most hurtful recent comment—the poison she’d slipped into his heart for him to carry to New York—was, “You never wanted a child, did you? You’re sorry he was ever born.” She’d been stitching a sweater when she’d said it, aiming her needle straight at him.

  He tightened his grip on Robbie’s hand. Needles and knives. Too much symmetry. She must have said something else while he sliced his thick paper. He didn’t trust his memory on this; no, not at all.

  She’d helped him out of the car in the hospital parking lot, right over there, just beyond those trees—touching him more gently that night than at any other moment in their life together.

  Throwaways. Tender provisions. Refuse of a sad and patchwork existence.

  Laughter. He turned. Buddy Holly and the angels on an afternoon constitutional.

  The doctor approached him, wiping his thick black glasses on his smock. “Hello,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

  Frederick introduced him to Robbie. The three of them sat on a bench and watched the patients stroll, stretch, wave their hands at the clouds. “I bring them out in small groups once a week for about thirty minutes of exercise,” Porter, the doctor, explained. “There’s not much room on the ward.”

  Frederick tried to locate correspondences between the men’s mannerisms and his own. Defensive jokes. Fidgeting fists. Is this me? “So … all these men are schizophrenics?” he asked.

  “Not all. I treat a variety of mental disorders. Human frailties, it seems, are ubiquitous.” Porter laughed sadly. “For some of these fellows, the biggest problem is loneliness. Their families have tossed them off. We—whoops, excuse me.” He rose and walked swiftly to a knot of bony men scuffling in the grass.

  “What’s … schizophrenics?” Robbie asked his father, twisting his mouth around the hard, skittery word.

  “Double-minded men,” Frederick said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sand from a nearby playbox blew into his eyes. He blinked. “Well, let’s say you’re in a store and you need two different things, right?”

  “What things?”

  “Oh … a cabbage-sized pearl or a pair of paper shorts.”

  Robbie laughed.

  “But you don’t have enough money. You have to choose just one, though living without the other is really going to hurt you. So you stand there and you stand there and you can’t make up your mind?”

  “Uh-huh,” Robbie said slowly.

  “That’s what I mean. But that’s not it, exactly.” He scratched the back of his head. He rubbed his eyes.

  “I’d take the pearl. Paper shorts would itch.”

  “I don’t know what I want, exactly. I mean, I don’t know what I mean.” Frederick felt annoyed. He couldn’t explain. “Wait a minute.” His breath quickened. “Stay here,” he said.

  He’d glimpsed the Head Angel, the man he guessed was Sal, from Porter’s description. Tall. Fair. Sal wore a faded orange blanket over a white pajama gown. He was humming “Amazing Grace,” stepping regally around the grounds. Frederick approached him carefully, from the side. “Hello,” he said.

  Sal beamed at him. His blond hair, thin over a flat, shiny pate, curled in the breeze.

  “I admire your … effulgence.” Frederick laughed, touching the blanket with just the tip of his thumb: a gentle, probing joke.

  Sal hummed. At his feet, a ceramic tortoise; brassy doorknob legs.

  “I’ve seen your blessings at night,” Frederick said.

  The angel continued to smile, the hollowest expression Frederick had ever seen, except for Mark’s when he was lying in the hospital, snakebit and babbling.

  Was illness a state of grace? Or vice-versa? Could a blessing be a wound?

  Why do so many artists drink so much?

  “Maybe you have …” Frederick felt silly now. “A special blessing? Just for me?”

  Porter called, “All right, guys, time to pack it in.” Sal looked bewildered for a moment, then wandered off, still grinning, nearly tripping on the tortoise.

  Frederick felt his face grow hot. He nearly sagged to the ground, shocked at himself. He hadn’t experienced such crushing disappointment since his first church confession as a kid, when admitting his sins—cigarettes, lustful thoughts, excessive pleasure in the fleshy smell of paint (surely a distraction from God’s glories)—changed nothing.

  Holy fools.

  What did you expect, he grilled himself now, watching Porter gather his patients. He’d known they weren’t really angels, these poor, stricken men.

  Still, he’d been so enchanted by the evening displays, the fragments of flowers fluttering down in the dark. The reckless, unreasoning part of him that always found beauty in paint, romance in a casual smile on the street, democracy in the la
test election, had hoped for a miracle, a benediction, thick as pancake batter, to smother his transgressions.

  “They’re a little too energetic today. Gotta cut it short,” Porter said. He called goodbye. Sal’s blanket dragged the ground, leaving a muddy trail, spiraling, strange, as if from a curious mammal rarely glimpsed.

  “Those men were funny,” Robbie said. “Their heads were too big.”

  Frederick knelt, shaking, by the bench near his son. He rubbed his sandy eyes until he saw only white. “Robbie? Listen, honey, we don’t have much time together. There’s something—”

  What? What did he have to say? The perfect phrase? What was it? Would it change anything?

  “I’m thirsty, Daddy! You said lemonade.”

  “Right. Yes. In a minute, I promise. But first there’s something I want you to know. Are you listening?”

  Robbie puffed his bottom lip.

  “You understand, we’ll have to tell each other goodbye pretty soon,” Frederick said.

  “Like those men? Goodbye, goodbye!”

  “I mean bigger than that.” Frederick’s knees hurt. “Just because Daddy’s moving, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. You know that, don’t you, son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “What?” Robbie squinched his eyes.

  “I want you to forgive me.”

  “Okay.”

  An automatic, unknowing response. But it was better than nothing. Better than the void. “Let’s get that lemonade now.”

  On his last day in town, he walked to the half-price bookstore, sold his mystery novels, rebought Wittgenstein, added Hegel on the cycles of history, and an early Kant: airplane reading, companions for his first few days in Manhattan while he unpacked everything else. No more escape fare. Time to be rigorous.

  That meant the whiskey too. Out it went, savoring one last drop before the toss into the trash; the booze sizzled in his gullet; the toss, he thought, was heroic.

  He’d written Kenneth Koch, Walker Percy, Maurice Natanson, Joseph Lyons, soliciting articles for Bliss. Though the editors referred to it as an art journal, they’d told Frederick they wanted to cover contemporary politics, literature, philosophy as well. They’d been impressed by Frederick’s knowledge of these matters—impressed that anyone from Texas knew such things.