The Woman in Oil Fields (14 page)

Robert leaned against the wall. He felt foolish and weak. “Dad?”

“Robbie, what is it?”

“I need to know something.”

“What?”

“Have you seen Jill Ryne?”

Frederick blinked as if sprayed with a hose. He made a fist of his bloody hand. “Of course not. Why?”

Robert kicked the tray, crushing one of the champagne glasses. Frederick jumped. “I have to know the truth. Have you
seen
her?”

“All right, yes, yes,” Frederick answered. “She's here with me, okay? She's fine. Nothing to worry about.”

Robert went again to his knees, this time with a harder pain to find, but no less solid than the bite in his lungs.

“Robbie –”

“You son of a bitch.” He reached up and slapped his dad. The stiff beard raked his fingers like the bristles of a camel's-hair brush. Frederick was sleepy and drunk. He fell against the door, into the room. A shadow rustled by the bed. Robert felt Jill's presence, vital and near. He remembered the golden shade of the tops of her breasts, her friendly smile, and kicked the tray again. “Robbie, for God's sake, what's gotten into you?” Frederick tried to sit up.

“Mom was right about you all along!”

“Your mother? What about her? Robbie, help me up.”

“You and your not-so-beautiful bull and your
actresses!”
Robert yelled.

Frederick grabbed the doorknob, raised himself nearly to his feet. “Robbie. Wait here. Let me get dressed, then we'll go for a drink. Let's talk, okay? Robbie? Please?”

[Becker sniffs his fingers. “Every woman I've ever touched,” he says. “Every painting I've ever made. Amazing how they linger in the skin.” Pause.]

Reporter:
My sources here at the med center-friends, really – tell me you're suffering from cancer.

Becker:
Bloody mort men.

Reporter:
Sir?

Becker:
Death-beat. Obits. The
Post
sent you to put me in the ground.

Reporter:
No.

Becker:
What's your name, Papa?

Reporter:
Chuck.

Becker:
Chuck, what's a good mort man earn these days?

Reporter:
I wouldn't know.

Becker:
Life's sweeter as there's less and less time. You can print that.

Reporter:
If you were to sum up your career –

Becker:
I'm in no particular hurry, thanks.

Reporter:
It would help our readers if, in the article, I could pin you to certain historical –

Becker:
History's already pinned me, Chuck. I don't need any pinning from you.

[Pause. Becker sniffs his fingers again.]

Reporter:
Okay, then, can you tell me what you feel is your finest achievement?
Becker:
The fact that I've accumulated only twenty years of regrets, rather than thirty or forty.

Reporter:
Regrets about what?

Becker:
Art and family. What else is there?

Before the final class, Jill pulled Robert aside in a far, cobwebby corner of the studio to assure him she was the same person she always was. “I hope we can still be pals,” she said.

Robert didn't understand. “You slept with him,” he whispered. “How can you say you haven't changed?”

“Who'd you think I was?” She looked nervous and tired. “Robbie –”

“I thought you liked me.” He knew he sounded childish, and he hated himself.

“I do, but I'm so much older –”

Robert shook his head then turned away.

“And who are you,” Jill said, “to go banging on people's doors in the middle of the night and to stand here like Jesus Christ, telling me my business … you have no right to judge me, Robert Becker!”

His own name startled him.

“That's right, your father told me. Who's the
real
actor here? If you've got a problem, it's between the two of you.” She marched across the studio to her supply table; the sound of her steps bounced off the sheer, dusty walls. She found Robert's drawings of her and shoved them at his chest. “Take these,” she said. “We'll have to clear out all our stuff after class.”

Remarkably, Frederick was fit and alert, no longer the bleeding drunk of the evening before, but king of his domain once more, witty, quick, and sure. He glanced at Robert once, but otherwise conducted himself with detachment and elan. “Fly, fly away,” he told the class. “And good luck.”

At the break, Raymond offered Robert his hand. “I wish you well with your work,” he said. “I don't know where you were off to in such a hurry last night, but I meant to give you this.” He reached into his pocket for a purple cloth sack of milk chocolates. He'd bought everyone in the class a tiny pouch of sweets. Later, Robert learned he'd given Frederick a cassette recording of Beethoven's final string trios, Opus Three, E-Flat: Finale; Opus Eight, D-Major: Pollaca; and Opus Nine, Number One, G-Major, along with a note:

Something for you. I edited Opus Numbers Three and Eight to keep the performance to ninety minutes, but feel justified because the Maestro didn't hit his stride in this genre until Opus Nine anyway. May you find the same confidence and energy in them that I have.

Thank you for your time these last two weeks. I've learned from you that art is a by-product of the artist's struggle to understand his pain, and that both the struggle and the pain are meaningless.

Mr. Becker, pick up your brush.
Show us why we matter.
Show us how to be.
Paint us a picture.

By session's end, Raymond was twitching uncontrollably – nervousness? loneliness? uncertainty? He fumbled his palette, smearing black in the deep wrinkles of his dropcloth. Despite his dark disappointments, he watched Frederick with what Robert recognized as honest, eager love.

He never posed any danger, Robert thought.
I'm
the one who wants to kill the old man.

“I said goodbye to your mother. This morning, on the phone,” Frederick told Robert when the others had left.

“I know.”

“You didn't mention –?”

“Last night? No.” He capped a can of turpentine, packed his paints.

Frederick nodded. “Still, she seems to think it's best if I stay away from Texas for a while.”

“Too many churches,” Robert said. “And not enough Broadway, I suppose.”

Frederick smiled. “I'm a double-minded man, Robbie, always torn – like this music.” He tapped Raymond's tape. “I know this. Sprightly and sad. It's a good choice for me.” Years later, as he was dying in the hospital, he requested the string trios. Robert brought a portable tape player to his room. “Listen. Do you hear how harshly the melody fights itself?” Frederick said. “Like a madman shaking his fist at a world he knows he loves too much.”

That day in the studio he opened his arms. “What can I say?” he told Robert. “Usually I resist because I've learned how much attention a woman like Jill demands – more than one man can give-but they're so inherently dramatic. Spicy. Beats back the humdrum, temporarily.”

Robert wiped his hands on a rag. “Are you going to see her before you leave?”

“Your mother?”

“No.”

“Oh. Yes. She's adept at pretending, Robbie. Gives me the illusion I'm desired. Again, temporarily.” The big, empty room was stuff)r and hot. It smelled like a freshly painted gymnasium. Frederick blotted his forehead with the back of his cotton sleeve. “Anyway, congratulations. You did good work in the course.”

“I didn't finish my assignment.”

“No,” Frederick said. “And you never will. Consider that a blessing. You have an aesthetic problem, and the talent, to engage your imagination for the rest of your life. That's more than most people have. More than that poor wretch, Raymond. Or Jill.” He stepped forward; after a moment's hesitation he squeezed Robert's shoulder, kissed his cheek. “And that's the end of the story.”

Robert watched him walk to the door. “One more thing,” Frederick said, turning, scratching his ear. “You might have a tendency, from now on, to mistrust women. That's not the lesson.” He smoothed his wide, imposing beard. “The lesson is, don't trust fathers.”

Robbie, don't leave me here
.

Go away, he whispers to himself. Time to forget.

I'm drifting off …

“So what?” he shouts. Muscles knot his neck. He fires an old soup can into the stream – Campbell's chicken with rice, Andy Warhol's brand. It strikes Frederick's head right at the hairline. He sinks in lemon-colored foam, among sewing machines, dentist's drills, axles, wheels, ceramic brown ashtrays, picture frames, photo books – faces embedded, like flashbacks in a story, in the unforgiving movement of the present – corkscrews and can openers, steam boilers, petticoats.

Endless possibilities.

“Stay there!” Robert yells.

A grackle lifts above the trees. Clouds huddle like big frozen birds wrapped in white plastic in a butcher's bin.

His beginnings are lost in careless waste. He snatches from the shallows a copper pocket watch. When he opens the scratched glass face, water pours out. “Drink me,” he remembers, a line from
Alice in Wonderland
. Ruth read him that story once, when he cried all night for his dad.

He plucks out a hubcap, a carpenter's file, an old apple crate, piles them together on the bank. He doesn't know if he's making a futile attempt to clean the place or if he's building a ragged monument to his origin.

He watches another grackle float above the water toward a steel-and-glass steeple miles away. The night he sat here with Frederick this particular chapel was hidden in the dark. Or maybe it hadn't been built yet. “Sin and redemption,” he mutters.

A blessing
, Frederick says.

Standing here in the muck and swell of his conception, he hears Beethoven's melodies rise and fall.
One more thing
, the music says, using Frederick's voice. He pictures his father in the studio, that beautiful, terrible winter of '71.
I didn't just give you the hardest assignment in the class, Robbie. It was the
only
assignment
.

Cars rattle by on the freeway, shaking the concrete pylons. In the water, Frederick's wedged against an old chest of drawers.

You were the only one who had a chance of going on, who still has that chance. Go on
.

My life is full, Robert thinks.

Your life is full Go on
.

He plants his feet firmly on the mud-and-gravel bank. Cello melodies soar in his mind. He reaches down, sighs, and pulls his father from the bayou.

A
t about the time his father's cancer burst uncontrollably open in colon, brain and throat, his own health began to fail. Nothing life-threatening: restlessness – a sort of itching in the skin – lack of appetite, shifting bowels. “Sick with worry,” said Sarah. “Too much stress – Robbie, it's hardly coincidence.”

All winter she'd waited for Robert's worries to break. In late January he'd brought his father home to Texas from the rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. He'd arranged for round the-clock care at the med center, and he'd temporarily suspended his own projects. His work wasn't moving much anyway – one small showing in a local gallery where, predictably, he was promoted as the son of the famous Abstract Expressionist, Frederick Becker.

Sarah, bless her, had been a tender anchor. She insisted that Robert was painting masterfully despite the slow market for his work; she patiently accepted the burden of Frederick's sickness into her life. He'd been ebbing for two years, but the final dying – the last fatal push – occurred over a six-week period.

In his dad's last days, Robert recalled how his first-grade school reports arrived in the mail every six weeks – a time-frame, filled with swift judgment, that always terrified him. “Well now, Robbie, did you finally catch fire this term?” he remembered his hard father saying.

For six weeks as Frederick shrank and Robert sat by (like a cook, he sometimes thought, watching a heavy stock boil down on a stove) Sarah paid the bills, cleaned the house – as efficiently as a Grand Prix mechanic she kept the details of Robert's life running smoothly while he said his slow goodbye.

One afternoon in the hospital, Frederick pulled Robert's face to his own. He was pale as a dime on the starchy pillow. The room smelled of mercurochrome. “I'm sorry you had to bear all this alone,” Frederick whispered. The cancer had acted on his voice like a steel blade on an apple. Robert said, “Shhh” – but his father was right. His mother had died in '82; what few relatives he knew about were as vague to him as the figures Frederick sometimes buried beneath the thick red and black surfaces of his canvases.

(His father used to laugh at the “young guns” – the postwar critics – who asked in the pages of
ARTnews
, “Do these ghostly human shapes mean that Becker is abandoning pure abstraction?” In '72 – several blown-apart art movements later – Frederick did a
6o Minutes
interview in which he quipped, “Throughout my career I abandoned anything that even
smacked
of purity.” This statement was taken by a new generation of critics as his credo. As perhaps it was.)

Despite his acclaim, the Becker family had always acted embarrassed by one another. Years ago they'd scattered to various poor jobs, various hills and valleys around the country. Frederick's oldest sister, Fay, was the only relative Robert remembered with any certainty. He recalled her saying one afternoon (to whom was she speaking? where did the conversation take place?), “Modern art. It's all about sex, that's what it is. His paintings may not
look
like anything, but I know what the bastard's thinking.”