The Woman in Oil Fields (19 page)

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 the 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.

“Listen.” Scott glanced at his wife then slowly shook his head. “I don't know who you are or what the hell you're doing, hauling this … this
obscenity
over here –”

Lenore gripped her husband's arm. “No, honey, he was –”

Robert saw the confusion on her face. He thought,
What have I done?
She turned away from the stark metal breasts. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Inside, the boys screamed for Quarter-Pounders. Scott said, “You keep your sicko stuff away from my kids, hear me? I don't want them seeing crap like this.”

Robert tried again to apologize to Lenore but she wouldn't look at him and he didn't know what to say.

In the shed he stripped once more and cursed his mother's face. If she hadn't been such a
princess
, so enamored of her suffering, if she'd humored Frederick, followed him to the City of Art – how different Robert's life would have been! He'd have seen the shapes his father saw, learned the joys of women.

As it was, he couldn't do a decent picture of his wife or even talk to the lady next door.

He threw the empty Anacin bottle at Ruth.

The goddamn collage! Perfect in conception and design, filled with slippery puns: Duchamp. His famous chess match with a nude young woman.

Robert
was the rook, torturing himself with the work. He'd call Hope tomorrow and have it carted out of here.

Big Sid rumbled all around him, floor tom to cymbal to snare, a fanfare fit for paradise. Monet's Eden was free of people – an ideal condition, Robert thought. “Leave me alone!” he shouted at his walls. He tore an old sketch of Ruth into shreds. Her eyes, her lips, her teeth fluttered to the floor. He slammed his hand on his desk. A sharp lance split his palm; he pulled away. A wasp had flown through his window and landed where he hit. The pain made his hand cramp again. He thought of his mother's sewing needle, the voices of his parents when they were both alive to soothe him.

______

The warm J & B seared his throat. Only a damn monster could drink this stuff.

He'd never painted drunk. Frederick used to say whiskey slapped him awake. Robert decided to try it – nothing else had pricked his imagination – though he didn't know if his swollen hand could hold a brush.

His mind crackled with fever and aspirin and booze.

On his knees he picked up his mother's parts. Her chalky skin smeared his palms. He clapped to clean them, wincing from the burn of the sting, and continued to clap, sitting by the Rook. The grand Becker. Bravo.

Woozy, he crawled toward the woman. She stood before him like a dare. He licked her steel-plated thigh.

He whispered his mother's name, then his wife's, over and over like a poem. Solid, familiar sounds. Sounds of comfort.

He reached for the metal shirt. His father's last trace. Where had the material come from? Part of a car door, an oven, a corrugated roof?

For a moment his anguish changed to wonder at his father's gift, as it did so often when he was a kid in New York. Frederick had taken what the world didn't want, a tossed-off scrap, and fashioned this image, nearly human.

An act of salvation, which moved Robert deeply. Rescue, redemption. A confession, Hope had called it. The piece seemed to touch him now with a quiet, abiding grace.

In the low evening glow, the woman was whole again, strong and assured. The shirt looked beaten and flat. Poor bastard, happy only as long as the light lasts.

Let him reach, Robert thought. Let him believe in possibilities.

He got to his feet near his easel, skin against paint, and ran his fingers over his portrait. “Come home,” he whispered. The woman had no face. “Please come home.”

Overwhelmed by his fever and the heat, he tumbled onto his cot. The scents from his garden, musky and sweet, reminded him of Frederick's R & B women, their rose perfume, their smoky mysteries like the textures of dreams. He didn't move all night (except once, when he thought he felt a warm, steel finger touch his face), and was awakened by Sarah's call.

A
drayman in an oak wagon offers me a ride to the square. On cloudy days, not much light, I still look young.

“Where are you going?” he says.

“To the prison.”

“What for?”

“My son,” I explain.

“Arrested?”

“For the second time.”

“What's he done?”

I've made him nervous. “His mother's a poet.”

“Is that so?” He flicks the reins; his horses shiver. “Maybe I know you.”

“I don't think so.”

“No, really, what's your name?”

“Akhmatova.”

He looks at me. “Anna Akhmatova?”

“Yes.”

“I was sorry to hear about your husband, Miss.”

“Thank you. This will be fine.”

Outside the prison, women in black shawls stand one behind the other.

“Come to the tavern with me,” says the drayman, trying to be cheerful. He pats the wagon's seat. “You can sit here under the feather blanket while I buy you a beer.”

I thank him for the ride.

“I'd like to hear a poem.”

I smile, shake my head, then take my place in line. The walls are scratched and gouged. The woman in front of me turns and asks, “Can you put this into words?”

I tell her, “I can.”

______

Women whisper that they bleed beneath their skirts. In Petersburg the men, in a hurry, won't listen. Instead they hear a clamor of crows, the bell of the gray cathedral. Irritable, quiet, I pass through their rooms, dreams replacing dreams all night.

Lena, I ask you again: Who can refuse to live her own life?

Lately I've dreamed of you as a child in your long white dress, trampling the wild-onion dirt in the hills above town. “He looked at me funny, Anya.” “Well, his brother touched my hand.” “Does Father pull your drawers down when he hits?”

When we were small I refused to wear white dresses so that people could tell us apart.

In one of my dreams Mother's talking again about the city of Kitezh, saved from the Tartars by prayer. “It was lifted straight into Heaven, just beyond those hills,” she says. “On days when the fish are still and all the mud has settled to the bottom you can see its reflection in the lake. Each man had a wagon. Their wives raised many, many children.”

You follow her pointing finger to the tip of one bald peak. Softly, to me: “She's telling it wrong.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“It wasn't saved. It was just a city of brides. Their husbands had gone to war.”

“What happened?”

“The Tartars raped and murdered all the women. Left only bones.”

“How do you know this?”

“Riga” – a girl in our school – “told me.”

Mother buttons her sweater. “It's getting colder. Let's go home now.” She takes my hand.

Rubbing your arms in the mist you warn me, “One day, Anya, we'll live in Kitezh.”

______

Dry snow, candlelight mirrored in a stranger's dining room window. First course (served in silver dishes by a dour maid): roast duck with apricots, cranberries, a light Gewürtztraminer. Next, mushrooms in lobster sauce, cream gravy, Jarlsberg cheese. Coffee and chocolate for dessert.

Afterwards we sit by the fire. The rug is soft and warm.

“I could treat you to meals like this every night,” says my host. He ships vegetables and fruits around the world, acres and acres of foodstuffs.

“And what would I have to do to earn them?”

He laughs. “Nothing. Enjoy yourself.”

I shake my head. “I
did
enjoy this evening. I'm glad you invited me.”

I'd seen him at the market earlier this week, supervising a dozen crates of Jonathan apples unloaded from a Dutch steamer.

“I'm not the first to ask you,” he says.

“I'm comfortable living by myself. Choosing my friends.”

“And your lovers? There must be several men.”

I smile.

“Poor bastards.”

“I don't lie to them.”

“Food's going to be scarce in the coming months-the army will need it. I can help …” he says.

“Thank you, no.”

“Tell me then.”

“What?”

“How do men kiss you?” He lifts my chin. “Tell me how you kiss.”

______

Lev is thin. Black bread and sugarless tea. I appeal to the authorities on behalf of my son, but my voice, in chorus with dozens of other women, is indecipherable. Day and night in the dank pine waiting room, the smell of mercurochrome, swabbed across the corns on our feet.

I've been a bad mother. When Nikolay first proposed marriage (he was cocky as a prince), I told him I hadn't the patience for courtship; I wanted to sit by the Neva, reading
Hamlet
.

“So you want to be a poet,” he said. “What are you going to write?”

“I don't know. Whatever interests me.”

“Pretty odes on wind chimes or cats?”

“Of course not. Why are you being so hateful?” I turned toward the river and opened my book.

He shook my shoulder. “Have you ever heard rifle fire? A young soldier moaning and clutching his guts in a field? My God, Anna, what do you know of the world?”

“Enough to tell you no,” I said. “Leave me alone. Go be a man.”

The following day he took a holiday train to France with six other young army recruits. Three weeks later I heard he'd swallowed a vial of strychnine. For nearly a day he lay unconscious in the Bois de Bologne before a young couple stumbled upon him. Three times he threatened suicide, twice I refused to marry him. But it turned out he was right.

A witness to one's time, Lena. What else is a poet but that?

When Lev was born (October, mild and warm) I discovered how little I possessed of the simple love by which people live day to day. Working for each other, eating together under the same roof. Nikolay spent half the year hunting in Abyssinia. I read my poems, shouting over drunks, in bars.

Our son grew up in his grandmother's house, eighty kilometers east of here. I didn't even visit.

______

“I want to see Kitezh.”

“Don't.” I pleaded with you to put your skirt back on, and to come away from the lake.

“Mother's wrong.”

“Please, Lena.”

“Someday …” You gazed at the waves.