The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  This was a standard profile of most male journalists Frederick had encountered over the years. Once, in the early seventies, a New York Times reporter who’d tried to interview him confessed, “I have a basement full of stuffed marlins I’ve caught, all because of Papa. Still, I’m stuck writing features. Does anyone take features seriously? Do you? Be honest.”

  The man limped from an old boating accident. Frederick fled his misery, as he’d fled most writers since roughly 1959· On that hot afternoon in Houston, though, shaken and weak, he’d told the Post, “Here’s the end of the story. I dribble a bit more paint, then go away.”

  The reporter, no Papa, wrote: “In both his art and his personal demeanor, Frederick Becker has always strived to rise above conventional norms. Disease, however, is a great leveler. The well-known smirk is now a simple grin, and the rebellious, unruly beard has shriveled into a neat white square, the like of which might adorn the chin of any distinguished lawyer.”

  Frederick was furious about the article, right up until the week he died.

  2.

  On a steaming Houston morning, a first-of-the-month Tuesday, Robert Becker opened the Times and counted Frederick’s columns.

  Three and a half, page A22. No photo.

  When Motherwell died, he was granted a front page picture plus all six columns on B9. Of course, Motherwell had established himself as a prominent critic as well as a painter. Extra duty so he’d guarantee extra coverage, the sly, lovely son of a bitch.

  Late in the day, reporters from all over the country phoned Robert for a reaction to his father’s death. Tersely he shared his grief, then added, to perk himself up, “I’m also a painter. In a sense, my father lives on through me.”

  “Right, son,” said a gritty old editor at the Kansas City Star. “I had ambitions once too. I used to hang around Spain’s brightest bodegas, hoping to soak up the aura. Nada nada nada, you know what I mean? Now I got a liver the size of Madrid.”

  All week the ghost in the nation’s dailies failed to match the man Robert knew. The “brooding,” “enigmatic,” “reclusive,” “energetic talent” the memorialists celebrated was strictly the East Coast Frederick, the late-night worrier spotted with cadmium blue, not the pale pink part-time dad who returned to Texas whenever his boy needed a birthday gift, or a graduation party or a best man at his wedding – or finally, when he himself needed the finest cancer specialists in the world.

  “These doctors deserve every bit of their brilliant reputation,” Frederick told Robert over dinner one evening after a day of machines at the med center. The famous gaze was fully glazed and Frederick’s flesh looked tired. “Unfortunately, as with artists, it’s in the nature of their work that most of the time they fail.”

  3.

  The week Frederick died, Robert walked six miles each day from his house to Buffalo Bayou downtown. The muddy stream, running through most of the city’s industrial neighborhoods, was junked with rusty old Weed-Eaters, car doors, freezers, twisted refrigerator shelves. Robert knew a shaded spot where he could be alone with the Frederick he remembered – not always pleasurably, he was startled to find. In fact, in these hours of quiet mourning, his most vivid memory turned out to be of a time, over twenty years ago, when he was certain his father would be murdered.

  It started when Frederick agreed to teach a short course, in the winter of ’71, at Houston’s Now Arts Museum. At that point he’d been long away from Texas, in touch with Robert and his mother only on special occasions. The museum held a gala ball for what the Post later called “Becker’s triumphant return to the city of his youth.”

  Robert, then fifteen, had enrolled in Frederick’s course (it was held after school) but he’d used the name “Smith” on all his official forms. He didn’t want his classmates to know he was the great man’s son; he hoped to sit quietly, unnoticed, in the rear of the studio and learn.

  For the ball, the museum rented a spacious room at the Warwick Hotel. A jazz combo, hidden by two tall ficuses in a corner by the door, played “Misty.” Their every tune was “Misty.” Giant reproductions of Klimt and de Kooning women lined the walls, along with papier-mâché cowboys rustling steer.

  “Ah, Ruth.” Frederick embraced Robert’s mother as soon as she arrived. “How are you?”

  “At sea,” Ruth said, stepping out of his arms. “Of course, Robbie and I read in the papers you were coming, but you didn’t phone or write … will you be wanting my guest room?”

  He’d stayed there once, years ago. The lilt in Ruth’s voice didn’t hide the heavy ordnance in her question.

  “Thank you, Ruth, no. I’m only in town for a couple of weeks. The museum’s putting me up here at the Warwick.”

  “I see,” Ruth said. “In other words, you’re traveling with a woman.”

  Frederick frowned at her, then turned and shook Robert’s hand.

  All evening Ruth sat by a wall beneath a wild de Kooning siren, watching Frederick dance with one young lady after another. She’d never forgiven him for leaving her to further his career in New York. Sometimes Robert shared her resentment, but tonight he was simply glad to see his dad. He saw a tall, sharp-boned woman tug his sleeve by the ficuses. “I have a secret desire, almost a physical itch, to paint,” she said breath lessly, touching his arm. “But right now I’m pursuing a life in the theatre.”

  “An actress.” Frederick smiled. Gently, he spun her around and pushed her toward the door. She walked away, confused.

  Frederick brought Ruth a glass of iced apple cider. “Care to dance, Ruthie? They’ve played our song all night. Maybe this time they’ll get it right.”

  She didn’t say anything. Robert was happy to see her rise and take his father’s hand, but minutes later she was shoving him away. “Broadway babes!” she yelled above a shrill piano trill. “Selfish ambition!” She gripped her empty cider cup like an ice cream scoop and brought it perilously close to Frederick’s right eye.

  The other dancers stared. Ruth quickly recovered her calm. She told Frederick not to call her again. “I don’t want to be there when some spurned little groupie finally decides to shoot you,” she said. After that, the ball whirled and sparkled warmly except for a brief incident which Robert later recalled as the first flicker of danger. A young man with thick red hair and a stiff suit approached Frederick to say hello. “I’ve enrolled in your class, Mr. Becker. My name’s Raymond. Raymond Purcell. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to meet you. You hold a very special place in my heart.” His hands trembled so badly, he dropped and broke his cup. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I’m nervous as a mouse. I think you’re America’s finest painter, really I do, the colors, the scope, the sweep of your work –”

  Frederick smiled and nodded, embarrassed. Raymond swept the shattered glass into his palm, but never took his eyes off the man Robert thought of, proudly, as mine.

  ______

  Frederick opened the first class pacing the airy studio. His steps echoed beneath the high wooden ceiling. With difficulty he pocketed a round car key, mumbled something about “too many churches in Texas” and “why I left this goddamn place.” He didn’t seem to realize other people were in the room. His hands shook. Shaving cuts formed a little jigsaw puzzle on his neck, just below his beard. Robert smelled booze on his breath. Twenty minutes passed before Frederick settled down – before he’d even look at his class. Then, in the time it takes to clean a brush, he was focused, alert, all business. The lessons had begun.

  He assigned each student individual projects. One woman’s colors clashed; Frederick restricted her to different shades of brown. He forced another woman to slather oil on paper, to break her attachment to thin, pale lines.

  “Anyone in the country can paint a beautiful picture,” he announced. “We’re after the not-so-beautiful that’s also somehow lovely.”

  He told Robert to “paint the unpaintable.” When Robert asked for details, Frederick answered, “You show me, Mr. Smith. If you want to pass this course, get t
o work.”

  Robert’s talent was for portraits – faces, profiles, surfaces. He assumed his father meant for him to get inside the people he painted, to expose the edges and hues of their angers and loves.

  In the sunny studio, Raymond Purcell’s spongy red hair was afire. His body bobbed with excitement whenever Frederick spoke, as if buffeted by the sound of his voice. Raymond didn’t receive an assignment; Frederick said he had a remarkable style, and should just keep painting what he wanted. Robert felt jealous, especially as he’d landed the hardest task of all. Did this mean he had the most to learn?

  He was shocked to see the actress in class, the woman Frederick had pushed from the room the night of the ball. “It turns out, she’s serious about learning,” Frederick told Robert when the first meeting was over. They were driving in a rented Dodge, on their way to the Warwick. “In my experience, actresses are the least serious people in the world. Jill is a pleasant surprise.”

  In his room, Frederick fixed himself a Scotch and soda. Robert grabbed a Milky Way bar and a Coke from the portable refrigerator by the bed. When he was nine or ten, his father scolded him for eating too much candy, for being overweight. Robert was thin now, but he held the candy bar out of sight between his knees, still anticipating disapproval.

  “It was a shaky start,” Frederick admitted. “It’s been years since I’ve spoken to a group. I was nervous. Needed a little something to steel myself. Did I embarrass you?”

  “You did fine.”

  Frederick opened the closet door. “See?” he said. “No harem. No hidden mistresses. Just lonely old me.”

  Through the window Robert watched the looping grids of Houston’s streets.

  “How is your mother?” Frederick asked. “Since she won’t speak to me, you’ll have to be my spy.”

  “She’s okay. She says you left her high and dry, but I think she’s learned to live without you all right.”

  “And you?”

  Robert shrugged. “I guess you knew what you needed.”

  “The thing is, when two people live together as long as we did, one’s voice becomes background noise to the other, like an all-day radio,” Frederick said. “Soon, they’re only half listening to each other. ‘What, what?’ – the single most common utterance in marriage. I couldn’t stand a lifetime of ‘what,’ Robbie. It’s as simple as that.”

  He poured himself another Scotch. Below and all around, Houston’s lights throbbed like clusters of fireflies swimming out of the dark. “On the other hand, comfort’s harder to find than you think. I’m an old man now.” He was forty in ’71. “These days I’ll see an attractive woman on the street and try to catch her attention, but she glides right by. It’s shameless, the way the young only want the young, like some abominable herding instinct. What about the rest of us?” He sipped his drink. “You definitely know when you’re out of the hunt. It’s not a choice you make.”

  Robert recalled all the young women eager to dance with his father at the ball, and the actress, Jill Ryne, placing her hand on his arm, but he didn’t say anything. Frederick seemed convinced of being, as he put it, a “sexual cast-off.” The more he drank, the more depressed he became. Robert wanted to ask his dad’s opinion of his work, but the Old Master was clearly stuck in his sadness.

  In the next few days Robert got to know his classmates. They’d go for sandwiches, share what they’d learned. They all agreed that Mr. Becker was a magnificent teacher, magnetic and inspiring (if a little offbeat). They wanted to ask him to join them some night, but were too intimidated to approach him personally. Robert could’ve asked, but he was enjoying meeting new friends; he knew if Frederick came along he’d dominate every conversation. At the end of each class he watched his father frown and slink away to the parking lot alone, to go drink in his room. Robert had seen the roses Frederick sent Ruth after the ball. She’d tossed them out with the coffee grounds. “All drunks are sentimental,” she said. Still, it was hard to believe that a man as brilliant as his dad could remain unhappy for long.

  Raymond Purcell was the only member of the class who didn’t socialize with the others. He always looked spent when the sessions were through, limp in his chair, as though he’d been beaten instead of steadily encouraged.

  As Frederick said, Jill Ryne was the nicest surprise in the group. “I used to be a painter’s model,” she told Robert. “One morning I realized the painter was having more fun than I was, playing with his colors while I sat there freezing my ass off in that big, drafty room.” She always wore a black ribbon around her neck to highlight her bone-white skin, the most erotic sight Robert had ever seen. She joked about being old – at twenty-five, and with a birthday just around the bend, she was the senior member of the class. Robert felt giddy whenever she laughed or looked at him and smiled. She was kind to everyone, but seemed especially warm with him. One night after dinner with their pals she dropped him off at Ruth’s house. When he opened the car door she kissed his cheek, just a friendly peck, but he was so excited he couldn’t find the curb, and slipped on the soft front lawn.

  4.

  Buffalo Bayou winds around cotton warehouses, rice mills, freeway overpasses, clumps of blooming dogwood. Herons rise from thin brown reeds along its banks, possums skitter over plastic garbage bags, Pepsi, Coors, and tuna fish cans. Flies circle an old, abandoned shoe, buzzing like cracked cellos.

  Robert sits and stares into the water. Brown and orange eddies – mud and rust – stir wild rose petals in pools around warped coffee tables, Volkswagen fenders, jackets and knives, tires and old bicycle pumps. People dump this stuff for convenience or fun; the stream is a living collage of color and shape.

  Frederick, dredged from memory, drifts near the bottom by a hot water heater, wearing a striped wool shirt and khaki-colored pants. He claws his way toward the surface, past the city’s cast-offs, the auto parts and toaster plugs. Twigs and silt tangle in the once-thick beard, the firm, ironic smile is now an O of fear.

  A black four-door Chevy pulls swiftly off the freeway, stops, raising dust. Robert slaps mosquitoes from his wrists. Two young men drag a busted vacuum cleaner from the Chevy’s trunk and heave it into the bayou, at the spot where Robert imagined his father. The men grunt and spit. When they’re gone, Robert stands and watches the ripples. Frederick, cut and bleeding, paddles back into his head. He lifts his arms to the sky. Robbie, he mouths. Lend me a hand. Please, Robbie. Save me. Bubbles erupt from his throat. O. O.

  5.

  One day, in the second week of class, Jill leaned past Robert to smooth a charcoal line on her sketch pad, and he caught a shot of her breasts beneath her smock. She saw him look, smiled. He turned away, embarrassed, but felt he’d received a brief, sweet blessing.

  “He assigned me set designs, backdrops for plays,” she said. “Sunsets, stars.”

  She drew perfectly lovely clouds, Robert thought, but how hard is a cloud? She’d gotten off lightly. Nothing like painting the unpaintable. Frustrated with his own assignment, he spent studio time sketching Jill’s neck. Her birthday was two days away. “An early gift,” he said, handing her the drawings. She blushed. “You’re a sweet boy,” she told him, and kissed his cheek.

  Frederick asked Robert to go help Raymond. Robert caught a tang of Scotch in the air, beneath the drifting smells of chalk dust and oils, radiator heat and fresh breezes from the windows. “I can show you a better sky,” Frederick promised Jill, pulling up a stool. She beamed.

  Under his smock, Raymond had on the same stiff suit he’d worn at the ball, and to every class so far. His hands twitched with nervous energy, rattling the legs of his easel. “I want to kill him,” he whispered. “Wring his goddamn neck. I’m letting him down, letting him down …”

  Robert was astonished by the work: flat, nearly colorless eggs curled across solid black backgrounds. Raymond had gouged each canvas with a palette knife, to interrupt the surface. Robert saw no balance here. This was a remarkable style?

  Raymond laughed when Robert des
cribed his own project. “That’s not an assignment, it’s a chisel in the heart, man.” His red hair bounced above his ears.

  A tight, cold pain seized Robert’s stomach and balls. He rose, mumbling “water” and “excuse me.” Raymond returned to his canvases, whispering, “Twist his silly neck till his Adam’s apple pops to the floor.”

  ______

  That evening Robert heated himself a chicken pot pie, scarfed it down, and told his mother he was going to catch a bus to the Warwick. Ruth had meant to serve stew. She stood in a bright orange apron, holding a spoon, watching Robert finish his pie. “If you’re looking for his approval, Robbie, you might as well know he’ll never give it. That’s him, not you. God forbid he should ever admit he cares for anyone.”

  Robert set his plate in the sink.

  Softly, Ruth touched his shoulder, his back. “I should’ve thought twice about letting you take this class.”

  “He’s a good teacher.”

  “Good to all the young women, I’ll bet. He’s never learned to act his age.”

  Her bitterness was like an extra roll of insulation in the ceiling, trapping heat. Robert snatched a sweater from his closet and ran from the house.

  Late-season fireflies swirled above Buffalo Bayou; Houston’s winter was typically mild. The bus chugged past the stream, under live oaks and willows, streetlights haloed in mist. Robert drew his father’s face in the moisture on the glass. A stern, disenchanted stare.

  The Warwick looked like a party cake, bright yellow windows in curves of smooth white stone. The moment he stepped off the elevator near Frederick’s room, Robert saw Raymond Purcell pacing by a failed ficus in a corner of the hallway. His suit was wrinkled and dirty. He held a large portfolio case. “Smith!” he said, moving quickly as a bee, grabbing Robert’s arm. “What are you doing here?” His breath smelled of coffee and pickles.

  “I’m … I have an appointment,” Robert said.