The Woman in Oil Fields (16 page)

Robert reached to steady him.

“Don't treat me like an invalid!” Frederick wheezed.

Later in the car, on the way to Robert's house, Frederick tried to make light of his illness. Snow fell in cotton-ball bursts from the sky. The streets were icing over. Robert's windshield wipers barely moved; he couldn't see the curves ahead. Frederick suggested they park the car and take a cab. “We don't want to be badly killed,” he said.

______

Robert didn't hear his father's final words, but a doctor later repeated for him Frederick's last coherent sentence. He'd been given a series of disorienting drugs for his pain. The doctors kept asking him, “Do you know where you are? Mr. Becker?”

Softly, and as gently ironic as ever, Frederick answered, “I'm in the lobby of Heaven.” Then he'd closed his eyes against the color of the light.

______

“Nice buttocks, don't you think?” Frederick is pointing across the central square of Almost-Barcelona. “That woman over there by the lamppost, trying to hail a taxi.”

“Very nice, yes.”

“She
could be a model.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you insist on painting –” His lips curled. “People.”

“Can we not discuss my career?” Robert says.

“Not going well, is it?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Perhaps if you took more risks.”

“Precisely what the marketplace won't tolerate.”

“Balls to the marketplace.” Frederick raises his voice. “I'm talking about –”

“I know. The cause of art. The cause of art doesn't feed me.”

“Spiritually or otherwise?”

“You know what I mean.”

Frederick wipes his lips with a gold serviette. “So you've taken on graphic design?”

“Temporarily. It helps pay the bills.”

“I left you a tidy sum.”

Robert laughs. “All tied up in the courts right now. Your dealer, your former dealer, the dealer before that – they each want a piece.”

“I see. And you blame me?”

Robert pours more wine.

“Oh hell,” Frederick says. “You're not going to be so tiresome as to be angry at me for dying on you?”

No, Robert thinks. I'm furious at the fact of your birth.

Frederick winces.

“I'm sorry,” Robert says. “I didn't mean that.”

“The truth will out.”

“I
am
a bit pissed –”

“Only a bit?”

Robert swivels his shoulders. The tension there cracks. “When Mother died I could've used a little help. She had medical bills up to here –”

“Your mother didn't want my help.”

“Oh?”

“She knew where I was. She could've called me.”

“She'd never do that. Dignity was all she had at the end.”

Frederick shrugs.

“When
you
died, Fay and the others wouldn't have anything to do with the arrangements –”

“Fay's a ninny and a prig.” Frederick coughs magnificently, as he was unable to do in his final days. “She stopped speaking to me when I ran out on your mother.”

“Lance the boil?”

“What?”

“My engagement to Sarah,” Robert says. “That's what you told me when you heard about it, remember? ‘A wife is an impediment to a painter. She'll want more money than you can provide her, she'll eat into your work-time.'”

“Was I wrong?”

Robert glares at his father.

“All right, all right,” Frederick says. “The wording may have been excessively harsh, but the advice is sound, I think.”

At the wedding Frederick shook Robert's hand and said, “Here's wishing you a happy and fruitful first marriage.”

______

Sarah stirs in bed next to Robert. He kisses her shoulder while fixing his stare on a pair of nude women window-shopping at a bakery.

“And these young lovelies?” Frederick waves at the women.
“I'm
not making them up.”

“They're here for your benefit.”

“Oh, I see. You get no pleasure from them what so-damn-ever. Does Sarah know what you're daydreaming?”

“Shhh! You'll wake her.”

Now all the men in the city, except Robert and his father, are naked. Waiters, bird-sellers, traffic cops. Why not, Robert thinks.

“I agree,” Frederick says. “Egalitarianism.”

“Dad, I love you dearly but you're a damn scrounge. You're a rotten pork chop.”

“No argument from me.” Frederick raises his glass.

“I've always wanted to say that to your pointy little beard.”

“These recent paintings of yours, Robbie – they're like little plucked chickens from some aborted Grander Design, am I right?”

Sarah snuffles in her sleep.

Robert says, “Okay, enough of this
Bad-boy Becker
bullshit. It may play in the art press but not with me. What we
really
need to cover here – once and for all and let the dead horse rot – is Mother –”

“How I left her with no options.”

“Right. And me –”

“How I never encouraged you on your own path. Does that just about do it?”

“No, goddammit! You were afraid my work would be an embarrassment to yours!”

Sarah's eyes snap open in the dark. She moves a bare knee up Robert's leg. “What's the matter, sweetie? Can't you sleep?”

“Just thinking,” Robert says.

“What about?”

Frederick rolls his eyes and sips his wine. Mourning doves spin around the bedroom, the busy brick streets.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep. It's all right.”

She's already dozing again. Robert smooths her hair. She smells of jasmine – her perfume – soap, heat. This lovely, patient woman, he thinks. This beautiful, beautiful boil.

Frederick sprouts unease. Open displays of emotion – messy, messy, he'd say.

A bus picks up half-a-dozen naked women. In Robert's backyard studio, a splashed-red canvas waits for morning light. He thinks of things to do with his painting, things to cook tomorrow for Sarah; he's eager for the day to begin.

He realizes he's been staring at his father with restless, quaking fists. Frederick watches him slowly unroll his hands. Then the Maestro relaxes, sighs, gazes appreciatively at his son's splendid city. Still too much Houston in the light, but what the hell. The earth-tones, the serrated windows, the statue in the fountain …

“Chocolate?”

“Chocolate.”

“Charming.”

H
is father's last great work wasn't a painting at all, but a 42 × 80 × 8-inch collage fashioned of steel, wood, canvas, and magnesium. Titled
The Rook's journey
, it featured a flat, wilted chess rook caged behind bars leaning toward an armored female torso. To her left, a string of wire and nails suggesting a barbed-wire fence blocked her from a rumpled man's shirt (made of metal) with a hole in the heart.

UPS brought
The Rook's journey
, with seven large paintings, to Robert's door nine weeks after his father's cremation. He was still reeling from the death, though the cancer's certain journey through Frederick's body had long been diagnosed. Months ago, the elder artist had cleared and closed his West Village studio, shipping tables, chairs, and a few blank canvases to Robert's Houston home. Robert's own studio was cleaner and a good deal more austere than Frederick's loft. On Robert's last visit to New York, six years ago, Frederick had joked about the speckled acrylics darkening his windows, walls, and floors. “Looks like I blew my brains out in here,” he said. Instead, he'd slowly drunk and smoked away his health – two of the painter's cliches, along with numerous affairs, he'd never overcome.

Robert painted in a square tin shed behind his house, a one-bedroom tract home in south Houston paid for largely by Sarah's teacher's salary (occasionally Robert sold a painting). In the garden by the shed, near an overgrown flowerbed, he'd planted cucumbers. Each spring, wasps dug holes in the soil, down to the vegetables' roots, and pulled out blackflies. He loved the little ritual. The wasps were shiny, with two white spots on their backs. They inserted their stingers into the flies' tiny throats, then cradled them like babies all the way back to the nest.

This busy routine contrasted nicely with the shed's interior calm, the stillness Robert tried to bring to his portraits of Sarah and his mother. He could sit unmoving, studying the teasing shapes on his sketch pads – the way a shoulder shaded up into a neck, the way a muscle seemed to throb on the rippling white space of a page – and still feel energized by the activity in his garden.

Through his window blinds, at different times of day, light changed depth and shape, grew loud then soft like a jazz improvisation, and played across shelves of objects Robert had collected over the years, like treasures in a Joseph Cornell box: a paper-sack cat, two tickets from the Barcelona Metro, a thimble from his mother's sewing kit, a satin cricket in a glass.

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.