The Woman in Oil Fields (15 page)

For some reason, Robert's dad was the blackest sheep in a dark-wool family. Too “bohemian” perhaps, too much the “libertine” – words Robert imagined Fay using. Now that he had followed Frederick's cadmium blue trail into the House of Art, Robert was a bad lamb too.

Sarah volunteered to contact the funeral director and a lawyer. In the days immediately after Frederick's death Robert simply stopped. He felt, when he was conscious of feeling at all, that he'd stepped into a late Rothko and was wrapped in a dry black mist that reeked of turpentine and linseed oil.

______

Most of the last thirty years Frederick had lived in the West Village but Houston always had a strong, almost erotic, grip on the old bird. Wherever he traveled – Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona – wherever he was feted for his work, he spoke fondly of Houston's trees, the wet, leafy arms of its wraparound willows. He loved too the beautiful brown skin of friendly young Chicanas in the barrios and mesquite-scented, lime-soaked fajitas. All his life he wore Tony Lama boots – a western affectation he never lost in the East.

Initially, then, Robert decided to bury Frederick in Texas next to his first wife, Robert's mother, under a sweeping live oak tree on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. At night a lighthouse beam cut through thick orange oil-refinery steam gathering in boxlike clouds over the Gulf; foghorns called in brief, sad bursts out at sea.

Less than twenty-four hours before the memorial service, however, Robert changed his mind. He reheard in memory, “When I'm gone, set me to the torch and blow away my goddamn ashes, will you?”

“Are you sure?” he asked his father.

“Absolutely.”

This turned out to be the first of several dialogues Robert continued to have with him.

Frederick went on (words Robert
didn't
remember, though they had his father's stamp): “Collage. Random collision. I've devoted my whole life to them and I don't see why death should stop me. So go ahead and toss my leftovers into the stratosphere. Maybe a pinch of my old ass'll land in a lilac bush, a sniff in a pig's snout, an ounce or two in an empty bucket. Who knows – I may drift through a bus window somewhere and settle on the lap of a lusty woman off to make a killing in the market, eh? Viva collage!”

______

Sometimes at night now Robert and Sarah made slow, simple love together. More often they'd talk. Sarah told him she'd be patient until his grief let go, but he knew she was edgy and tired of the distance he'd shown since Frederick's death – giant
nothings
(both the distance and the death) that seemed to be growing.

______

This is how it started each night: he'd slide into bed, kiss Sarah's forehead and cheeks, then stare for several minutes at a screened window opening onto his yard and the little tin shed he'd converted into a studio out back. He imagined the blank or half-finished canvases in the cradles of their easels, the oily rags, the spattered palettes he'd left on his studio table.

Incomplete sketches: Sarah, his mother.

Then he'd recall, from fifteen or sixteen years ago, visits to his father's studio in New York. The place was crammed with line drawings after Paul Klee (“One bone alone achieves nothing,” Klee wrote). There weren't any studies of people, no familiar faces – just deep gray strokes and sheets of cascading color on the stark white walls. Red, green, purple, and black swayed from the ceiling on unseen hooks and wires. Robert remembered seeing, against a wire-mesh window, the famous series of cadmium blue sponge-mop streaks entitled
Elegy
.

Each night now he stared, with burning eyes, at the memories of blue in his head. Lake, sea, iris blue. Eventually, the jumpy hues merged and became a sky unfolding like a blanket against his bedroom walls. He dropped his eyes toward the floor and found himself in a city of his own creation.

It was an American (though ornately Old European-styled) city with sidewalk cafes. Black wrought-iron tables, aromatic coffees and teas, raisin-filled cakes on silver trays. Cars (Fords, mostly, from the 1920s to the present) cruised noiselessly down brick streets. The two men, Robert and his father, sipped white wine and praised the movements and lines of the handsome women strolling briskly together – sometimes arm-in-arm – up the walk.

In recent days Robert had made a minor correction: the women now were naked – a natural phenomenon in my splendid city, Robert decided. This new touch greatly improved the tone and feel of the talks with his father.

Usually, before ordering a second carafe of wine, Frederick commented on the architecture, which differed only slightly from one evening to the next. “Robbie, I really must congratulate you,” he said tonight. “This city is your best yet. It's Barcelona, isn't it?”

“Almost. I've borrowed liberally from Gaudi.”

“Yes, I noticed the corkscrew roofs, the waxlike folds in the granite. The lighting's a bit harsh – too much Texas in your sunset.”

“We can adjust that.”

“Marvelous. Much better. Of course, I recognize certain design elements from our previous evenings together: the crosswalks that fade in the center of the street, the diamond-shaped intersections. The statue in the fountain is new. Venus, is it? But what's she made of?”

“Chocolate,” Robert said.

“Chocolate? Charming. Why doesn't she melt in the spray?”

“I don't want her to,” Robert said. “This
is
my city.”

“Fair enough. But why chocolate?”

“I like chocolate.”

Frederick nodded. “Always did. Remember your little weight problem as a kid? But I should caution you, Robbie, aesthetic choices can't be made on personal whim. I get the impression you're not
thinking through
your projects with enough discipline these days.”

“You've always thought that.”

“Well –”

“Ever since I returned to representation.”

Frederick sniffed. “Sentimental portraits of your mother and your wife.”

– which the Old Man, the Master, the Famous Iconoclast who'd helped free American painting from Subject, always held against him. Frederick couldn't abide the fact that his boy didn't demonstrate the passion or the flair for the kinds of daring, monochrome abstractions he'd pioneered in the fifties. Robert was firmly attached to the human form.

“We don't disagree, do we, that art should lance the boil of the set-in-stone?” Frederick said.

Robert laughed. “Lance the boil” had always been one of Frederick's favorite expressions. To him, Conventionality, whatever guises it took – including straightforward figurative painting – was a hideous black blemish.

“Dad, we've trampled this grass to death,” Robert said. “Abstraction was a cliché by the time I started painting.”

“But there were other avenues you could've explored. Junk-sculpture. Stuffed goats, car bumpers, that sort of thing. The sixties were a fertile lab of ideas.
And
a hell of a lot of fun. You didn't have to become Norman Rockwell.”

Robert let that pass. “I'll grant you, abstraction's stock seems to be rising again,” he said. “At the Whitney this year –”

“Balls. Dime-store imitations of Pollock and myself. The galleries are filled with stale piss instead of the wine of life.” Frederick snapped his fingers. “Waiter! A carafe of your finest piss, please!”

______

Robert realized that in some cut-rate Freudian fashion he was using these talks to rehash unresolved arguments he'd had with his father over the years. He also recognized that dialogues, stripped to the bone, are power plays, often ugly: the dominant conversational partner sets the subject, tone and pace; the responder adds incidentals, details, counterweight, and heft. These recent discussions with Frederick were agitated both by habit and circumstance.
Habit
dictated that his father dominate.
Circumstance
required Robert to perform Take as well as Give.

“Ruth” and “Art” remained the two most bitter topics between them. “Ruth was too young when she married me,” Frederick said in life, and again in these vivid after-death get-togethers. “Your mother had stars in her eyes. I knew we wouldn't last – I was married to my own heroic gestures, as they say – but I didn't want to crush the poor girl.”

And on Robert's recent efforts: “You do what you do with great skill, Robbie, but it's merely decorative wallpaper. It doesn't advance the cause of art.”

Robert was tired of hearing this. “Screw art's cause,” he said. “I paint what I paint because I like my mother's face. I enjoy my wife's honest smile.”

And there it was, the
real
trouble between them: Frederick's celebrated inconstancy and Robert's faithfulness to women.

“Vulnerability,” Frederick said. “A synonym for ‘marriage.' Lance the boil, I say.”

Now as always, personal topics gave way to theory as the two men spoke. The people they knew together – Robert's wife and mother – became merely figures, then examples (what to do, what not to do in your lifelong fencing with women), then nothing even remotely identifiable – color streaks in the conversation.

______

Tonight Robert's city was almost Barcelona but it smelled of Cajun delights. Blackened redfish, filet gumbo. Female nudes mailed letters, trotted after cabs, popped open purple umbrellas. Frederick drained his glass and beamed. The ladies in their frank poses pleased him.

Moved by his father's happiness, Robert dropped his guard. “Maybe you're right about my work,” he said. “It's probably not as good as it could be. But I've been distracted lately.”

“By what?” Frederick ordered more wine. He picked up his knife.

Robert scraped at a mauve acrylic dab on his thumb. “The truth is, I'm having a hell of a time accepting the fact that you're gone.”

“Suffer,” Frederick said, and spryly sliced his fish.

______

On the streets of Houston, Paris, Budapest, and the
real
Barcelona, women, sadly, weren't naked. They wore scarves against the wind, tinted glasses against swirling dust and glare. They wore soft sneakers on the subways, saving their cruelly shaped high heels in plastic bags until they reached the office.

They were harried and tired and angry, hungry, hurtling into or out of love.

This was a world – of concrete, steel, and actuality – that Frederick didn't feel at home in.

“I'm a Romantic,” he'd once told Robert. “Romantics never stop believing in possibilities. That's what makes us so appealing – but also, I confess, unfaithful and often irresponsible. We're always running after the next new thing.”

A rare moment of candor. Robert must've been twenty-four or five at the time – this was ten years ago in New York, in a hotel bar on Lexington. The subject, then as most often, was why Frederick left Ruth. “My heart,” he said. “It's always yearning.”

Robert remembered other actual conversations he'd had with his dad, brief moments when the walls were down, the screens of violent color washed clean.

One evening, six or seven years ago, they'd walked to the Village Vanguard to hear Woody Shaw blow golden jazz. Old Max Gordon, the club owner, always hovering at the back of the room; Shaw; now Frederick – all dead, Robert realized with a start. The sights and sounds of a whole era, vanished.

That night Frederick had clucked with pleasure whenever the drummer tickled the hi-hat. He got drunker than usual. After the band's last set he stumbled on the cement steps rising to the street and roughed-up his shins. “Damn booze,” he said. “It's made me clumsy and fat.” Later in his studio he admitted, “I stare at my canvases now and think, ‘This next series'll drive a stake through my reputation.'”

“You've said that about everything you've ever done,” Robert reminded him.

“No, this is different. Age, maybe. Or too much whiskey. I worry they'll see what a fake I am.”

“Dad –”

“But then I think, Fuck it, I'm going to see it through. I'm going to by God
make it work
.”

And he always did.

Another time, in Houston. They were sitting in a Tex-Mex place on Navigation Boulevard, near the shrimp-stinking Ship Channel. Margaritas, palm-leaf green; pinatas, red-and-yellow paper cutouts on the walls. The day before, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston had commissioned a skyline portrait from the city's famous son. Frederick was nervous about it – normally he didn't work on commission, but this was for a celebration of Texas images, and Frederick was touched to be included. He had a large and sincere civic conscience. Near the end of the meal he leaned over his enchiladas verdes and whispered to Robert, “The thing is, you know, I can't paint the skyline.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know
how
to paint figuratively – not really.” He looked around the restaurant. “I paint the only way I know. Don't tell anyone.”

Eventually he produced a large abstract canvas of brown and orange and gray.
Houston Colors
, he called it. The Arts Council was thrilled.

And then, eight months ago: “I'm frightened of dying,” he said.

He'd gone off Camels and Scotch, been through detox. Chemotherapy had left him gaunt and weak. His face seemed to re-emerge after years of sternness, puffiness, lack of sleep. He had high cheekbones, an angular chin, and wide, friendly blue eyes. It was at last a face that Robert wanted to paint.

“Do I look like a cancer victim?” Frederick wanted to know one day. “How apparent is it?” He and Robert were strolling the corridors of the medical center together.

“You look okay, Dad. You needed to lose some weight,” Robert said.

“Hell of a way to do it, eh? People are different when you're sick,” Frederick said. “You're an embodiment of frailty so they feel they can confess all their weaknesses to you. Total strangers. In the last three months I've heard more about heart murmurs and limp pricks and lost ambitions than I care to mention. How do I look? Really?”