The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  Next, a note to the American Library Association protesting the handiwork of a librarian in the Caldwell Parish Library in Louisiana. She has hand-painted diapers on the illustrations of Mickey, the naked little hero in Maurice Sendak’s popular children’s book In the Night Kitchen, on the grounds that the library’s patrons might object to the nudity.

  This second bit of business he takes as seriously as the first. The world does not distinguish between Evil and simple malfeasance, and one does well to heed the world.

  In the afternoon he walks to the market on West Eleventh. Jalapenos, cigarettes, Scotch. Ground beef – the veal is too expensive. He’ll make a pot of chili, freeze some for later. As he climbs back up the stairs inside his building he feels a pain in his lower abdomen. He stops to rest on a landing next to a neighbor kid’s broken bike.

  In his apartment he clicks on his radio. In a few minutes, at five, “Jazz Today” will start. He decides it’s not too early for his first evening drink. In the courtyard below, behind his building, which he can see from his kitchen window, a man and a woman embrace, oblivious to sirens from somewhere, he guesses, in mid-Manhattan.

  ______

  He puts his faith in things that don’t quite work. Politics. Spiritual quests. His thirty-year-old apartment.

  In his kitchen, while chopping peppers for the chili, he notices the ceiling is so badly cracked it appears to be leaving the wall. His landlord is harder to reach than the President. He wonders if he can spackle the gaps and let it go at that. In his twenties and thirties he was a pretty good handyman. He even built a harpsichord once, for the fun of using tools. He couldn’t play it.

  In Catholic school, when he was ten, the Jesuits steered him from his interest in music to the “higher discipline” of philosophy. He’d wanted to be a jazz drummer. Music was fine, they said, but God was in Ideas. After years of pleasurable exposure to both metaphysical ideas and live musical performances, he believes it takes a lot more discipline to be a drummer than to be a philosopher. Any fool can prattle on about the soul. Paradiddles are divine.

  On the other hand, the Holy Ghost is the meanest cat he knows. A messy concept, the Holy Ghost, hard to pin down. It refuses to sit still on the specimen board. He prefers things messy – food, relationships, art. The too-tidy, the ali-in-place are as stiff and unhappy as plastic. The ragged is much more human, he thinks, the never-finished nearly sublime!

  Once, in a sidewalk tapas bar in the great city of Barcelona, a waiter gave him and his fellow Americans a stack of waxy napkins and said, in Catalan, “Just toss them on the ground when you’re done.” His companions, fastidious New Yorkers, tasted the olives and shrimp one by one, never mixing the dishes, carefully piled their napkins by their plates. Later, the waiter passed the table and, with a mighty sweep of his arm, knocked most of the paper into the street; it swirled with unruly pigeons high above a nearby cathedral, dipped and dodged between black cabs with the madness of confetti at a wedding. Few gestures he has seen in this world have delighted him as much.

  After a bowl of his four-alarm chili he sets about, once more, the messy business of the planet: a piece for the op-ed page of the Times, which is running this month a series of guest columns by artists discussing their personal political fears. Which of the poisons to choose? The public seems tired, just now, of the large, perennial topics (refugees, famine). Contributions to national aid agencies declined last quarter. As every parent knows, at a certain point in the lesson the child shuts down and doesn’t hear another word. He picks an old standby, an ongoing scandal but one that hasn’t been in the news much lately-questionable payments by the aerospace industry to several U.S. senators. A call to action, effective education – the kind that gets results – is always a matter of timing. Success is fleeting. The issue is jacklighted then lost until some worried person at four A.M. notices nothing’s changed.

  He remembers his son, years ago, learning to ride a bike. One day, perfect execution; cries and crashes the next. Teaching is a hopeless process, full of hope. He believes in it, though often it leads only to sleepless dawns.

  ______

  He walks to the market, he walks to museums. Like the great flaneurs of history – Baudelaire, Breton, Cornell – he is a connoisseur of the merveilleux in the ordinary. He understands that Broadway, Lexington, Fifth, in the swift march of their trades, are rich sites of libidinal possibility. He is simultaneously excited and terrified in a crowd, sprouting desire, tendrils of lust in all directions – that pushy redhead wrestling the Scribners’ sacks, those slender brunettes in the cab – but the poor flesh can only hold so much, his heart will explode, so he dips into a neighborhood bar for refreshment and rest.

  In the leather seat trimmed with warm applewood, he recalls three lines from the published excerpts of Joseph Cornell’s diary: “Into the city … the buoyant feeling aroused by the buildings in their quiet uptown setting … an abstract feeling of geography and voyaging ….”

  He downs his friendly drink then sets out again, past glum storefront mannequins, handshakes and shouts, paupers and dog shit and mint. Mint? Yes, a faint whiff from somewhere, around the corner, beyond the tail-exhaust of that speeding pizza truck. A miracle in a flux of commodities.

  Was it Wittgenstein who spoke of the senses as ghosts in the night, glowing with weak whitish light? The city always strikes him this way, even in the flush of day. A sourceless luminous spirit, ever-moving, warping and woofing with his own inner needs.

  A sculpture show at the MOMA. Giacometti’s Palace at Four A.M., crude yet elegant spires suggesting an empty castle where the king paces alone. Giacometti had in mind, while fashioning this piece, a lost lover, or so the story goes. In the museum’s spiffy restaurant, still riding the artist’s shapes in his mind, he recalls a recent phone talk with his son down in Texas. “Hey Dad, hired any topless canvas-stretchers yet?” Robert is grown now, married. A painter, like his father. I tried to talk him out of it. I was a light-handed monarch, with simple expectations.

  “No. My cock dropped off at Lent.”

  “Seriously, Dad, are you dating? You’re not too old.”

  “Thank you very much. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get my ankles realigned. Past a certain age, you know, they slip –”

  “I’m sorry. I just thought you’d want to get out. Any more pains in the belly?”

  “No.” A lie. Accompanied now by nosebleeds.

  “I’ll call again next week.”

  Robert never forgave him for the divorce, but his concern, so many hard years later, is touching. First wife, second wife. One’s in Europe now, one’s in the grave, poor Ruth. He really did try to love them both, each in her turn. He really did fail. The palace has been empty for more than a decade.

  In the food line, a young East Indian woman in a red halter dress, waiting for a slice of quiche, gives him a smile then moves on. Silently, with a moderately priced chardonnay, he toasts life’s simple ecstacies.

  ______

  Back on the street – chillier now, snow expected tonight – he’s approached by a man he doesn’t want to see, a fellow painter named Phillip, who shares his gallery. Phillip once challenged his remark that conceptual art is too easy. They’d been debating Robert Morris’s Box With the Sound of Its Own Making, a nine-inch walnut cube containing a tape recorder which played, over and over, the hammering and sawing of its construction. The effect was of an artist trapped by his own artifact, sealed from the world – too neat, and he’d said so. “Besides, it’s a one-joke piece.”

  Phillip disagreed. “I know, I know, you’re active in all these international organizations, and you think art should be morally engaged.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t morally engaged. I said it was too neat.”

  Phillip, in a bright yellow muffler, is pumping his hand now in front of the musuem. “What are you doing tonight?” he says.

  He mentions the follow-up letter to Poland.

  Phillip doesn’t hear. “I know. No
thing-how could you? The city’s dead this time of year. Come on over to my place. Kenneth and Jane’ll be there. We could play a little poker.”

  He sighs. Phillip seems to have a better time than he does.

  The man looks genuinely crushed when he says he’ll take a rain check. He should socialize. He knows he’s losing touch with his friends, and he’s surprised he doesn’t worry about it more than he does.

  “How’s your work?”

  He shrugs.

  “Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I think old Jansen” – their dealer – “is screwing us. I mean, I know the market’s depressed, but come on! Kenneth and Jane and I want a show–down. Maybe next week. Are you with us? We’re going to talk about it tonight.”

  “Some other time, Phillip, thanks.”

  Phillip’s dark little mouth twists with disappointment. He tightens his muffler, nods then walks away.

  Shuffling home, he remembers the streets at the height of the war: “Angry Arts Week” in ’67. Poets moved in caravans shouting their outraged lyrics; postering brigades plastered windows with Guernica-like lithographs. Town Hall, he recalls, sponsored a conductorless performance of The Eroica, to symbolize the individual’s responsibility for the brutality in Vietnam.

  The Collage of Indignation, his own project with over a hundred other artists, was a “wailing wall,” according to one critic, “alienated and homeless in style, embattled in content.” Its contents – ugly, sordid and beautiful, as befits a cry of conscience – included a coil of barbed wire, a draft card and a rusty metal slab engraved with the words “Johnson is a Murderer.” His spine tingles with the memory of its textures, its dangerous hues.

  He thinks fondly of the heroes of the day. Meredith Monk. Her “dance protest” for draft-age boys. Alan Alda, Ruby Dee, John Henry Faulk and their “Broadway Dissents.” Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth.

  Such imagination! And such false, fragile hopes, believing the pictures they made, the songs they sang could heal the planet’s cancer. He doesn’t see his buddies from that era any more. Most stopped singing. Others lost their minds.

  He feels a marrow-chill, a lonely burst. Perhaps he should have accepted Phillip’s invitation, after all. Jane is a good-looking woman, well-disposed toward him. Maybe he could charm her into …

  A twinge in the throat. His nose is bleeding, damn it. He doesn’t have a Kleenex. He wipes the blood on his hand, scrabbles in his pocket for his keys. In the stairwell the neighbor kid is moving her bike. “My daddy’s going to fix the spokes,” she says. The bike is too heavy for her; he helps her carry it to the next landing, all the while trying to stanch the stream from his nose. The child smiles at him, broadly. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” This is still a world worth preserving, he thinks, though-as he’d like to say to the girl-we must never stop arguing with it for the general improvement of its behavior and health.

  He bloodies two handkerchiefs, cleaning his face. His favorite shirt’s spotted red. Leftover chili. It’s just as well he didn’t ask Jane to come by.

  “Jazz Today” is featuring The Matterhorn Suite in Four Movements by the Louie Bellson Drum Explosion. A whip-crack of golden cornets, then softer, slower, the purr of the bass, the slide of the hi-hat, smooth as K-Y Jelly. He saw Louie Bellson once, in the village. Working hard at the Vanguard. The memory is so pleasant he laughs out loud.

  Later, his head hurts so he kisses the drums goodbye and searches through his records for harpsichord tunes. Something sacred and soothing. Is anything more sacred than the lambent strains of a harpsichord? He used to have an Igor Kipnis collection – or did he give it to a friend? He used to buy music, prints for his walls. He used to see movies. He remembers the title of a particularly gripping film, The Onion Field, but the story’s a blank to him now, the actors unknown. His life is getting leaner. The cupboard bare. When did this start? How did it happen? He feels vaguely upset about it, but not enough to change anything. At least not tonight.

  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; t
heir 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.

  PAINT US A PICTURE

  CANCER 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.”