The Woman in Oil Fields (11 page)

Before returning to his letters he clears a little space on his desk, finds, by coincidence, an old Xerox of a cablegram he'd sent Brezhnev in '74, when Solzhenitsyn was arrested. He remembers, two years later on an exchange tour, smuggling a packet of erotic lithographs by a banned artist out of Moscow. He feels a breath of nostalgia, the flush of success, enough to get him through the evening. He certainly would like some harpsichord music, though. For company he punches Channel Five. A man in a bad toupee leaps into a car from the roof of a bank. He punches it off.

He believes he smells Vietnamese cooking through the floor. The apartment below? Who lives there now? Probably just an aftershock of the day's thoughts. When he thinks of the war now, it seems to him a faraway, dissonant chord.

Someone shouts in the street. The first snow falls. He doesn't sleep well. At midnight, he's in the bathroom, throwing up his chili. In the toilet he sees a spot of blood. He lights a Camel, pours himself a Scotch.

______

He dreams of East Texas. His grandfather had a windmill that wouldn't move, even in a gale. The bolts were rusted fast. He'd sit with the old man and his gimpy mule all day, watching the sun course through the sky. The ranch's failure didn't much trouble the family. Or the mule. He admired his grandfather, immodestly: an eminently practical man with a natural gift for metaphor. “Nowadays,” he said, “I don't worry about which way the wind blows.”

______

Four
A.M.
: the hour of shuttered storefronts, vacant fire escapes. Sweats and chills. From his window he sees teens on the street, siphoning gas from a parked VW van. Sees smoke by the river. Hears a man and a woman through the wall-perhaps the couple he'd seen embracing in the courtyard a day or so ago. He pulls an El Patio from his freezer.

______

“How long have you been bleeding?” The doctor is stern with him, eavesdrops longer than usual on his heart and lungs (what
are
they gossiping about in there?). Taps his back, his chest, his throat. Orders tests. Endless tests. Forgoes the diet speech, the booze speech, the smokes speech. What's the point, now? The Holy Ghost is coming for dinner.

Robert says he'll buy him a plane ticket to Houston. “While you're sitting there in the snow, we're out drinking lemonade in the yard. It's eighty degrees here. The rest would do you good. We'd love to see you.”

“I can afford my own plane tickets. You can't.”

“That's not the point.”

“No, the point is I've got a new project and I can't get away just now. But thank you.”

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“Pure as a nun.”

When he'd asked the doctor if he believed in transcendence, the man just frowned at him.

The new project is not entirely a fiction. He imagines a small canvas with heroic proportions of paint. Brevity at length. An impossibility on the face of it, but of course that's what makes it worth trying.

Late in the afternoon, on his way home from the medical lab, he stops by the market, starts to buy ground beef, then figures what the hell? Go for the veal. Who's around to complain of extravagance? Maybe tomorrow he'll even visit a record store –
are
there record stores, still? – and choose a Kipnis album.

On the walk outside his building the neighbor girl passes him on her shiny purple bike. She waves.

His ceiling has torn another half-inch.

He reads in the paper that Phillip, Kenneth, and Jane have jumped ship. As a group they've signed with the Herstand Gallery for an undisclosed record sum. Well. Good for them.

Long after dinner (he's saved the veal, finished the chili), he picks up his pen. Last week, six painters and four writers joined a crowd of tourists waiting to see the White House, then stepped out of line and unfurled a banner urging nuclear disarmament. The protest was coordinated with a similar one in Moscow's Red Square. The Russian demonstrators were arrested then quickly released; their American counterparts were charged with illegal entry and jailed for thirty hours. The government has threatened them with one-year prison terms. All night he drafts a letter to the President, complaining about the ham-handed treatment his colleagues have received. Yapping at the heels of federal abuse. It is a grave and fitful business, being a citizen of the world, especially in the late twentieth century.

He uncorks a bottle of wine, beats a rapid drum solo on the dirty steel pot on his stove. His abdomen kinks. He is, of course, dying. There is much to be done. He toasts the seen, the known, the heard. It is four
A.M.

C
ANCER SLOWS PAINTER
. This headline appeared in the
Houston Post
a day after Frederick Becker arrived in Texas for treatment at the M. D. Anderson Medical Center. As he read about his illness, he wondered how soon his obituary would come, and how large it would be. Would it lift him or drown him in the mud? Early in his career he'd set a rule for himself based on his first bitter experiences in New York City: never speak to journalists. Like actresses, whom he also avoided, they burn for attention, so they're always indiscreet.

In the case of the
Post
reporter, an eager wreck of a man in his late forties, Frederick made an exception. The fellow had caught him in one of the med center's many parking lots; Frederick had just finished a frank discussion with a surgeon who'd told him his chances of surviving the cancer were slim, and he felt vulnerable, beyond all rules, in need of immediate human contact.

“All my life I've wanted to be Ernest Hemingway,” the reporter confided in him – a ploy to earn his trust? In the noon sun the men sat on a curb like a pair of melting lozenges. “As a result, I'm a tremendous fisherman, I have a permanent limp from a climbing accident, and I'm a recovering alcoholic. For all that, I'm still writing crap for a crappy paper.”

This was a standard profile of most male journalists Frederick had encountered over the years. Once, in the early seventies, a
New York Times
reporter who'd tried to interview him confessed, “I have a basement full of stuffed marlins I've caught, all because of Papa. Still, I'm stuck writing features. Does anyone take features seriously? Do you? Be honest.”

The man limped from an old boating accident. Frederick fled his misery, as he'd fled most writers since roughly 1959· On that hot afternoon in Houston, though, shaken and weak, he'd told the
Post
, “Here's the end of the story. I dribble a bit more paint, then go away.”

The reporter, no Papa, wrote: “In both his art and his personal demeanor, Frederick Becker has always strived to rise above conventional norms. Disease, however, is a great leveler. The well-known smirk is now a simple grin, and the rebellious, unruly beard has shriveled into a neat white square, the like of which might adorn the chin of any distinguished lawyer.”

Frederick was furious about the article, right up until the week he died.

On a steaming Houston morning, a first-of-the-month Tuesday, Robert Becker opened the
Times
and counted Frederick's columns.

Three and a half, page
A
22
. No photo.

When Motherwell died, he was granted a front page picture plus all six columns on B9. Of course, Motherwell had established himself as a prominent critic as well as a painter. Extra duty so he'd guarantee extra coverage, the sly, lovely son of a bitch.

Late in the day, reporters from all over the country phoned Robert for a reaction to his father's death. Tersely he shared his grief, then added, to perk himself up, “I'm also a painter. In a sense, my father lives on through me.”

“Right, son,” said a gritty old editor at the
Kansas City Star
. “I had ambitions once too. I used to hang around Spain's brightest bodegas, hoping to soak up the aura.
Nada nada nada
, you know what I mean? Now I got a liver the size of Madrid.”

All week the ghost in the nation's dailies failed to match the man Robert knew. The “brooding,” “enigmatic,” “reclusive,” “energetic talent” the memorialists celebrated was strictly the East Coast Frederick, the late-night worrier spotted with cadmium blue, not the pale pink part-time dad who returned to Texas whenever his boy needed a birthday gift, or a graduation party or a best man at his wedding – or finally, when he himself needed the finest cancer specialists in the world.

“These doctors deserve every bit of their brilliant reputation,” Frederick told Robert over dinner one evening after a day of machines at the med center. The famous gaze was fully glazed and Frederick's flesh looked tired. “Unfortunately, as with artists, it's in the nature of their work that most of the time they fail.”

The week Frederick died, Robert walked six miles each day from his house to Buffalo Bayou downtown. The muddy stream, running through most of the city's industrial neighborhoods, was junked with rusty old Weed-Eaters, car doors, freezers, twisted refrigerator shelves. Robert knew a shaded spot where he could be alone with the Frederick he remembered – not always pleasurably, he was startled to find. In fact, in these hours of quiet mourning, his most vivid memory turned out to be of a time, over twenty years ago, when he was certain his father would be murdered.

It started when Frederick agreed to teach a short course, in the winter of '71, at Houston's Now Arts Museum. At that point he'd been long away from Texas, in touch with Robert and his mother only on special occasions. The museum held a gala ball for what the
Post
later called “Becker's triumphant return to the city of his youth.”

Robert, then fifteen, had enrolled in Frederick's course (it was held after school) but he'd used the name “Smith” on all his official forms. He didn't want his classmates to know he was the great man's son; he hoped to sit quietly, unnoticed, in the rear of the studio and learn.

For the ball, the museum rented a spacious room at the Warwick Hotel. A jazz combo, hidden by two tall ficuses in a corner by the door, played “Misty.” Their every tune was “Misty.” Giant reproductions of Klimt and de Kooning women lined the walls, along with papier-mâché cowboys rustling steer.

“Ah, Ruth.” Frederick embraced Robert's mother as soon as she arrived. “How are you?”

“At sea,” Ruth said, stepping out of his arms. “Of course, Robbie and I read in the papers you were coming, but you didn't phone or write … will you be wanting my guest room?”

He'd stayed there once, years ago. The lilt in Ruth's voice didn't hide the heavy ordnance in her question.

“Thank you, Ruth, no. I'm only in town for a couple of weeks. The museum's putting me up here at the Warwick.”

“I see,” Ruth said. “In other words, you're traveling with a woman.”

Frederick frowned at her, then turned and shook Robert's hand.

All evening Ruth sat by a wall beneath a wild de Kooning siren, watching Frederick dance with one young lady after another. She'd never forgiven him for leaving her to further his career in New York. Sometimes Robert shared her resentment, but tonight he was simply glad to see his dad. He saw a tall, sharp-boned woman tug his sleeve by the ficuses. “I have a secret desire, almost a physical itch, to paint,” she said breath lessly, touching his arm. “But right now I'm pursuing a life in the theatre.”

“An actress.” Frederick smiled. Gently, he spun her around and pushed her toward the door. She walked away, confused.

Frederick brought Ruth a glass of iced apple cider. “Care to dance, Ruthie? They've played our song all night. Maybe this time they'll get it right.”

She didn't say anything. Robert was happy to see her rise and take his father's hand, but minutes later she was shoving him away. “Broadway babes!” she yelled above a shrill piano trill. “Selfish ambition!” She gripped her empty cider cup like an ice cream scoop and brought it perilously close to Frederick's right eye.

The other dancers stared. Ruth quickly recovered her calm. She told Frederick not to call her again. “I don't want to be there when some spurned little groupie finally decides to shoot you,” she said. After that, the ball whirled and sparkled warmly except for a brief incident which Robert later recalled as the first flicker of danger. A young man with thick red hair and a stiff suit approached Frederick to say hello. “I've enrolled in your class, Mr. Becker. My name's Raymond. Raymond Purcell. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to meet you. You hold a very special place in my heart.” His hands trembled so badly, he dropped and broke his cup. “I'm terribly sorry,” he said. “I'm nervous as a mouse. I think you're America's finest painter, really I do, the colors, the scope, the sweep of your work –”

Frederick smiled and nodded, embarrassed. Raymond swept the shattered glass into his palm, but never took his eyes off the man Robert thought of, proudly, as
mine
.

______

Frederick opened the first class pacing the airy studio. His steps echoed beneath the high wooden ceiling. With difficulty he pocketed a round car key, mumbled something about “too many churches in Texas” and “why I left this goddamn place.” He didn't seem to realize other people were in the room. His hands shook. Shaving cuts formed a little jigsaw puzzle on his neck, just below his beard. Robert smelled booze on his breath. Twenty minutes passed before Frederick settled down – before he'd even
look
at his class. Then, in the time it takes to clean a brush, he was focused, alert, all business. The lessons had begun.

He assigned each student individual projects. One woman's colors clashed; Frederick restricted her to different shades of brown. He forced another woman to slather oil on paper, to break her attachment to thin, pale lines.