WHILE THE LIGHT LASTS

His 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.

Once again, Robert would simply be the famous man’s son.

“We’ll have a third of the museum’s space, and I’ve lined up some miracle carpenters,” Hope said. “Chronology’s a bore, but I’d like to convey a sense of progress leading up to –” He almost embraced the Rook. “Also, this is Houston, so we want your father’s rough side. The more genteel paintings … I don’t know, I see them displayed in D.C., setting off the neoclassicism there, but here … here we want the cowboy, the maverick, the iconoclast.”

The heat and this cold dissection of his father dizzied Robert. He wouldn’t return to his portrait today. The Now Arts Museum already owned many of Frederick’s old works. Hope would arrange a time so he and Robert could go through the catalog together, and assemble, collage-like, the essential Becker.

______

The show’s timing was bad for Robert and Sarah. They’d hit a rough spot in their marriage. Weeks passed without a caress or more than an affectionate kiss. Since Frederick’s death, Robert had been numb. Insensate, Sarah said. She was patient at first, then restless. Finally angry.

“I can’t stand this moping anymore. I need you, Robbie, and you aren’t there for me.”

“Honey, I can’t –”

“You won’t. I’m living alone here. It’s morbid.” In bed she pulled his face to hers. Her cheeks were small and round, the color of varnished birch. The skin creme she rubbed into her thighs smelled of lemon. “I’m more naked in your paintings than I am in your life.”

She bought Alvin Ailey tickets, tickets to a performance of Lear, sexy new dresses, chocolates. Nothing interested Robert. On their tenth wedding anniversary she went to a styling salon and had her bangs cut. “Eurohair,” she said. “It’s what all the Paris thirty-somethings are wearing.”

“Very nice,” Robert said.

She threw down her purse. “That’s it. I feel pathetic trying to please you.”

Robert reached for her arm. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll snap out of it. I promise. Give me time.”

“You’ve said that for months now, Robbie, but every day you’re back in that goddamn shed … you know, I didn’t complain when your father was sick. I fixed lunches for him, went to see him in the hospital. I spent a lot of time with him, and the truth is, that old man never really liked me. He didn’t like women.”

Robert squeezed her hand. He’d just been painting; his fingers were the walnut brown of her hair. “He liked them too much.”

“He liked fucking. That’s not the same.”

Her remark recalled to him a talk he’d had with Frederick at his wedding. “Sarah’s a beautiful girl, Robbie, but she can’t be everything to you. That’s too much burden to place on one woman.”

“What are you saying?”

“A little fatherly advice. I suppose I’m not one to speak.” Thirty years ago he’d left for New York, stranding Robert and his mother in Houston. “But here’s the truth: show me a man who hasn’t picked a hundred flowers and I’ll show you a wretch who doesn’t deserve the world’s bounty.”

Always, Robert came away from these talks feeling he was content with too little in life.

The week the Rook arrived, Sarah flew to Seattle for a linguistics conference. She looked forward to this gathering each year, where she’d made a lot of friends. They ate in the best restaurants, spent late nights in their hotel suites telling silly jokes. Like a slumber party, Sarah said.

Before she left she memorized a poem. She had a conference-pal, a lanky New Yorker named Henry Martin, who shared her love of lit. Henry had never seen the virtues of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Hardy, his hero, left Sarah cold. So annually they agreed to learn a few stanzas by the other’s favorite poet and discuss them.

“Stupid ghost story,” Sarah said of this year’s verse:

He does not think that I haunt here nightly;
How shall I let him know
That whither his fancy sets him wandering
I, too, alertly go? –

“Henry’s got his work cut out for him, persuading me this is anything but drivel.”

Robert noticed the lift in her voice whenever she mentioned her friend. In the past she’d told him the man was a shameless flirt, but she’d never taken his advances seriously.

This year, Robert wondered if the haircut and the new Talbots dresses had more to do with Henry than their wedding anniversary.

“I love you,” he told Sarah at the airport. “When you come back, we’ll start over, okay?”

She nodded, kissed him quickly, then ran for her plane.

______

Now she stared at him from his easel. He spread Permagel on the painting’s yellow background, an accretion of strokes thick as pitch. She was dead. Color and tone were right. He’d fixed the scale, balanced proportions. Maybe her pose was the problem. Straight-ahead frontal. Passive. A woman being ogled.

Behind him, on the cot, the woman in his father’s collage blazed with vital presence.

The sun had baked the shed. He was sweating, dizzy. He picked up his palette knife, thinned Sarah’s hips. The neighbor boys, Tommy and Steve, were shouting again as Tommy pulled his little brother in a wagon through the alley. Steve had a coloring book and some crayons. Robert watched them through his window.

Recently he and Sarah had resolved not to have kids. She was a full-time career woman, he was devoted to his art. Robert believed the decision was right for them, but he felt a pang now, listening to the boys, a hollow whistling deep in his chest.

Steve licked a piece of Raw Umber and apparently decided to eat it.

Last week Robert had seen the boys asleep in their yard, on a cotton blanket beneath a pecan tree. He’d sketched their pretty faces, their tight, pink fists, the dragonflies weaving above them. Now, in a stack of paper, he found the sketch: the simplicity of it pleased him, reminded him of his love of charcoals, pencils, and pastels, and momentarily eased his frustration with the nude.

He tacked the drawing next to his painting of Sarah. Could he even imagine-babies in his wife’s slender body? See her hugging boys like these? Perhaps he was more disappointed than he’d thought with their agreement.

He wondered if he’d cooled to Sarah – had he cooled to Sarah? – not when he lost his father, but when she told him, once and for all, she didn’t want kids.

He turned away from the empty figure on his canvas, toward Frederick’s collage. The woman’s torso gleamed like a coat of mail. Now there was a sensual image, he thought. Sexy and inviting. Nipples hard as rivets – lush, bold, riveting.

Who was she? Someone Frederick knew, loved, fucked? A young artist charmed by the Old Master? Had he sworn to steer her through the New York art world and make her famous? Had he done it?

How many others had he slept with and promised careers, while Robert languished in the cultural backwaters of Texas? How many women, since Robert’s mother, had he pledged his love to?

Robert’s head was pounding. He wasn’t being fair to his father, and he’d wound himself up so much, the pain in his temples nearly blinded him. Loneliness, jealousy, anger, grief – a narrow range of colors. He needed to relax, as he had while sketching the boys. A simple pleasure, joyous, swift. Wasn’t that what Frederick meant at the wedding? Grab the world’s gifts?

Women were the presents Frederick always gave himself. Easy to condemn, but (Robert thought now, content with too little) what was wrong with that? Before he met Sarah, he’d had only two serious love affairs; since his marriage, he’d been faithful to his wife, but Sarah had no right to tell him what to feel, or to demand total attention from him. He was hurting, goddammit, childless and forgotten as a painter – while his father moved on, played out his life. And became the better artist for it.

The torso in the collage: it wasn’t one person, Robert saw now – it was a lifetime of women, a passionate engagement with their thoughts, words, buttocks, and ankles, their startling laughter and sighs, their lustrous sexuality – an abundance Robert hadn’t allowed himself, and now wished he’d explored.

“Art,” Picasso said, “is never chaste.”

______

Superman rang.

Robert had moved the Rook to the floor and fallen asleep on the cot. His sweat soaked the pillow. He switched on a portable fan on a table near his shelves, then reached for the phone. The receiver was an eight-inch plastic replica of the Man of Steel. It had been on sale in the Galleria at an incredibly low price and Robert figured what the hell, as long as it works. He felt powerful, speaking to people while gripping all these muscles.

“Robbie, hi, I wake you?”

Hope.

Robert had been waiting to hear from Sarah. Not a word since she’d left for Seattle. He’d tried her hotel room several times in the last three days.

“The grand Becker,” Hope said. “The biggest, most arrogant canvases from each decade. How’s that for a theme? Fits Houston perfectly-the brash young city erupting out of nowhere, competing for world dominance with its oil wells, money, and swagger. Where else could your father have come from?”

He wanted Robert to meet him at the museum tomorrow morning to help arrange the show. “And bring that beautiful Rook-baby, right? You’ll need a truck or a van. I’ll send some-one to pick you up, say nine?”

Robert’s head was thrumming again. He felt heavy and chilled, as if shoved into a swift-running bayou. “I need more time,” he said.

“Nine-thirty.”

“No, I mean … I’m not ready for this. It’s too soon, Walter. It’s ghoulish. The man’s barely dead, for Christ’s sake –”

“Robbie boy, I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Hope said. “If we don’t make a positive statement now about your father’s work, his enemies – the enemies of abstraction – will seize the initiative, brand him as a has-been, and that’ll be that. Frederick Becker will disappear from art history.”

A fever, damp and yellow, lodged behind Robert’s eyes.

“You hear what I’m saying? Aesthetic values, individual reputations – how do you think these things are made? Your father knew, Robbie. It’s political warfare. You better get with the program, man.”

Hope was Robert’s best shot at a museum show of his own (though painting was passe with the hot young crowd Now Arts tended to promote), so he backed down, agreed to bring the Rook.

“Good man,” Hope said.

Robert hung up the phone, swallowed a couple of aspirin, then tried Sarah’s room. No luck. He left a message with the desk: “I love you. Please call me.”

Off in a golden bower, he thought, whispering third-rate poems to her lover.

He approached his portrait. Technically, it wasn’t bad now but it still inspired nothing in him. Frederick had once said of Robert’s work in general, “Striking a balance between having something real at issue and a wonderful surface isn’t easy, but you have the second, now go back and introduce the first. Art, we said, is a grid superimposed on another grid – both things are necessary.”

How like his dad! The formal tone, the royal “we” as if he were God the Father and the Son of Man all in one!

Robert challenged himself: what was at stake in this latest picture of Sarah? My desire for new sexual experiences, he thought. No wonder she didn’t dazzle.

Where was she each night? In Henry’s room? Thomas Hardy and sweet little nothings in her ear? He was probably overwrought again. Maybe he was projecting his own restlessness onto her. Or maybe at heart she also regretted their decision, and felt their sexual life had come to “zero at the bone.” If so, maybe a fling with Henry was just what she needed. Would Robert deny her that comfort?

His earlier certainty that promiscuity fed the fires of art struck him now as silly. He laughed at himself “Promiscuity.” Even his thoughts were shy. In word, if not deed, he was as formal as his father.

He couldn’t imagine himself courting another woman. He wouldn’t know how to begin. Want to see my sketches? And the women he’d loved before Sarah – they were happily married now, model mothers. When he’d known them, they were wild and confused, impulsively lustful, convinced that attention from Robert – or any man – was the only measure of their worth. They both told him, when they left him, he was “too nice,” as though they didn’t deserve tenderness and respect. Since then, they’d each tried Freudian therapy, and emerged from it healthier, more assured, capable of sustaining good marriages and raising children. Robert was happy for his old friends, but when he spoke to them now on the phone, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, he heard the price they’d paid for progress. They sounded dull, strident in their maturity, drained of sexuality. He’d seen the best women of his generation destroyed by psychoanalysis.

“There’s no such thing as progress – in life or in art,” Frederick said at Robert’s first gallery reception, in ’79. He’d raised a glass of wine to toast his son’s future. “There’s only adding-on.”

Robert stood now and added a few strokes to Sarah’s belly, a red highlight to her hair. The oil on his fingers smelled vaguely of her sex; surely a mental trick, a manifestation of his need to capture this woman.

What if he blurred her calves, abstracted her a bit?

Giacometti saw women’s bodies as towering trees.

He tried, and failed, again to reach Sarah in Seattle. She must know she was driving him crazy, and this angered him all the more.

Wasps and early fireflies circled his tulips. He heard Tommy and Steve’s mother calling them in to dinner, her voice as smooth and resonant as a wind chime.

He dropped a sheet on the Rook for tomorrow morning’s trip. His headache shrieked. He was about to betray the piece. After all, bad light filled the museum. And stupid crowds. They were a threat to his father’s work. They didn’t love art, Robert thought; they craved art world gossip. He imagined them at the opening, gulping wine, nibbling pale crackers smeared with brie. His father would share the space with scorched genitalia made of paper, framed subway doors covered with graffiti, human hair in shopping bags – the latest in “statement” art, though the only statements being made, Robert thought, were that violence sells, and that his peers’ imaginations were a bizarre mix of Pee Wee Herman and Ivan the Terrible.

Here the Rook was safe. The shed was like a greenhouse, warm and enclosed. To fully thrive, an imaginative object had to be watched over time. Its meaning or effect moved with the viewer’s emotions, with temperature and lighting. Hope would never understand, but Robert decided he had to live with the Rook one more day – to engage in an intense relationship with it, morning, noon, and night, the way his father did with women – and feel the many ways it changed him.

MORNING

Robert drew his blinds against the harsh and glary dawn. He stood in the middle of his shed with a fresh cup of coffee. From this distance, the piece seemed welcoming and soft. The background was pink and tan with a slight hint of yellow. A smoker’s sallow flesh.

He stepped closer. The narrative was clear. A torn, bloodied shirt reached hopelessly for a very young woman. Heavily shielded, emotionally cold, she had ripped out his heart, left him limp, like the rook.

Frederick rarely spoke of heartbreak, loss or regret; his last years might have been lonely. Robert didn’t know.

By midmorning, in stronger light, the shirt looked mean and hard, grabbing for the woman, who had softened. Robert saw a small tarnished streak on her belly, the color of skin. A break in her armor.

Or a Caesarean scar-a reference, perhaps, to Robert’s birth. The narrative shifted, and he saw his mother threatened by the swaying, drunken shirt.

She was small, thin, and quiet. Early in her marriage, against her wishes, Frederick spent late nights in Houston’s “colored” clubs, listening to Erskine Hawkins, Peck Kelly, Woody Herman, and his favorite, the great jazz drummer Big Sid Catlett. He and his friends were often the only white boys in the place, but they truly loved the music so they were welcome. Frederick claimed later he learned all he knew about freedom of gesture from these brilliant, inventive musicians.

But his nightly escapades shattered Ruth, who never fully recovered from Robert’s difficult birth. She grew weaker, nursing her baby, while her husband was God knows where. Twenty years later, as she was dying of breast cancer, she told Robert she wished she’d had the gumption then to kick Frederick out.

(“I wish,” said Joseph Cornell, the day he died, “I had not been so reserved.”)

She never understood why Frederick married her.

Robert learned the answer one night in New York. He was just a boy at the time, eleven or twelve; he loved his summer visits back east because his dad spoke to him like a grown-up. The black women in Houston’s R & B clubs were “mighty fine,” Frederick told him one August. “Sweet-smelling, like roses, and silky. Friendly as hell. You’d walk into one of those places, some lady’d kiss you, put a cold beer in your hand, and say, ‘Sit with me, sugar.’ Dark and mysterious, like someone had turned out a lamp in her, leaving a sexy silhouette.”

Eventually the club-girls lost their exotic aura, he needed something different, something special, and Ruth, a white woman raised in Africa, fit the bill.

She was the child of Baptist missionaries in Lagos. She didn’t see America until she was twenty. When Frederick met her in Houston, this young cafe waitress was unlike any woman he had ever seen, timid but self-possessed. She resisted his slickness at first, and entertained him with stories that later delighted Robert as a boy – about the python that dropped from a date palm onto her father’s pulpit one day, the deep-throated drums she fell asleep to each night.

She told Robert other stories once Frederick had moved to Manhattan. She’d pop a thimble onto her thumb, busy herself with buttons, and frighten Robert with tales of his father’s wild nights, his verbal cruelty. She seemed powerful, describing these events, almost regal in her mourning. One evening, sad for his mother, lonely for his father but terrified too, Robert crawled into her lap while she was sewing. She lost her balance in the chair and nicked his hand with her needle. The bleeding stopped quickly but he wouldn’t quit sobbing until Ruth phoned Frederick in New York and he heard both his parents’ voices, assuring him everything was all right.

Frederick’s Village studio was large and gloomy; its shadowy corners scared Robert as a child, and so did Frederick with his massive build and goatish beard. Once, he caught Robert crying in front of a violent red abstraction titled Self-Portrait, and asked him what was the matter. Robert repeated Ruth’s charges. Frederick laughed, hugged his boy, and said, “Don’t confuse the monster in the paint with the monster here beside you. And don’t listen to your mother.”

He didn’t drink before six. In the afternoons he’d take Robert to neighborhood fairs, or to watch the chess players in Washington Square Park. He’d dance with young women at block parties, give quarters to raggedy men on the streets, praise the stickmen he’d seen at the Village Gate or the Five Spot. Back in his studio, he’d show Robert how to hold a paintbrush, how to make a vanishing point on the canvas, using a picture he’d taken of the Ramblas on a visit to Barcelona. When Robert finished his first portrait, a copy of the photo, Frederick handed him two torn tickets from the Barcelona Metro. He’d kept them as souvenirs, and gave them to Robert for a job well done. At such times, Robert felt immense love for this man. He wasn’t the ogre Ruth had described. He was vital, fascinating, funny. And he belonged in New York. Even as a kid, Robert knew the city’s rhythms, its walking spaces, suited Frederick more than Houston ever could, though the City of Heat always held a special charm for him.

He did change when he drank. He’d rage at his paintings as if they were people he didn’t like. If Robert interrupted him, he’d snap, “What do you want?” then apologize.

Now and then he’d nod in grudging kindness at a mark he’d made on a little stretch of canvas.

Robert learned to dread the fall of night, the crack of a Scotch bottle seal. Shadows lengthened in the studio’s grim corners. But in the morning, Manhattan was once again a circus (cab fumes and pizza smells, laughter, women, store-front displays) and Frederick an amiable clown.

NOON

The light softened behind tall blue Gulf Coast clouds – a lull before the blast of full day.

Robert, wearing only cut-off jeans, ignored the phone as he leaned into his painting with an extra fine brush, dabbing pearls into the nude’s dark hair. She’d just walked out of the sea.

He no longer thought of her as Sarah. Ruth was there, too, in the pale legs, the vulnerable stance, though this was neither his mother nor his wife. He’d smudged her face, so personality, history, emotion wouldn’t shape his lines or choose his colors for him. He focused now on texture, the seductions of density and weight, inviting the viewer to leave the world and enter the frozen grace of paint. The figure was approaching a clarity he liked, but with a gentleness he remembered from Monet, the cool dappled shadows of the Giverny paintings.

Superman jumped in his cradle again. It might be Sarah, but Robert feared Hope was trying to track him. On the other hand, if he didn’t answer, the man might storm his shed later on.

“Robbie, I need you! Where the hell are you?” At first it sounded like his father, shouting from a near distance, and he knew he’d been haunted all day, like the man in the Hardy poem Sarah had left by the bed:

*… he goes and wants me with him
More than he used to do,
Never he sees my faithful phantom
Though he speaks thereto.

But it was only Hope. Robert explained he was learning from the Rook – techniques, new ways of seeing; he needed to keep it a while.

“We’re ready to go! The opening’s next week. We can’t wait.”

They argued further until Hope finally said, “I can help you, Robbie. Remember what I promised?”

Robert thought his skull would burst. It was suddenly clear to him: this asshole was going to string him along forever.

“I can get you a show. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Of course.” Robert’s hand began to cramp and he loosened his grip on the brush. He hadn’t realized he’d worked so long today. Hope didn’t care for his portraits – the man was just trying to get to Frederick. His pledge was a cynical bribe. “Look, Walter, you’ve got the paintings. Pick them without me,” Robert said. “The Rook stays here for now.”

He hung up and immediately regretted the damage he’d done. Hope could deliberately mount a weak show, tarnish his father’s image.

He started to call back but dialed Seattle instead. Ruth and Sarah – his portraits – stared at him from the walls of the shed. The collage was like his father’s presence in the room. Robert grew dizzy again. Cicadas throbbed in the pecan tree next door. Tommy and Steve’s mother was humming a tune, watering her fat tomatoes.

Sarah answered the phone.

“I don’t believe it,” Robert said.

“Robbie! I was about to call you.” She sounded out of breath. “We’ve had trouble with the phone in our room.”

“Right. No one’s there to answer it.”

“It was broken. Have you been trying to reach me?”

“You could’ve called me from a pay phone.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been so hectic. You know how it IS at conferences.”

He didn’t know. “How’s Henry?”

“Fine.”

“Did he convince you the poem was a gem? Maybe late one night in his room?”

She laughed, nervously. “Have you been into the booze?”

Robert never drank; she knew that. He picked up the bottle of Anacin. He’d been eating the things all day.

He said, “Are you happy, Sarah?”

She was silent. He heard the woman next door singing “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Linda? LuAnn? She was pretty – and young for a mother of two. Robert realized he’d never seen or heard a man over there.

“Sarah, would you like to have kids?”

“You’ve been sitting around brooding in that awful shed. We settled that. Didn’t we?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re having second thoughts?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh Robbie … is this serious? Do you really want to open this up again, because if so, it’s not something I can deal with on the phone –”

“Are you sleeping with Henry?”

As soon as he asked this, he knew he was really afraid, and he couldn’t stop pressing her. Maybe it was the fever or the aspirin or both. Or maybe he’d sensed the truth.

“I’m not even going to answer that,” Sarah said. “You’re the one who stopped sleeping with me, remember?”

“So you run to –”

“You must’ve strayed. Why else would you accuse me like this? I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” Robert heard tears in her voice. “What’s going on?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Robbie.”

His head seemed to thicken, like quick-drying glue. “Are you also in love with Henry?”

“For God’s sakes, no!”

He stood inches from the woman on his canvas, glaring at her unprotected breasts. “Are you sure?”

She tried a lighter tone. “Let’s stop this, okay? My flight arrives Friday at –”

“Sarah.”

“Goddammit, you want me to sleep with him? Is that what you want?” She fumbled the receiver. “All right, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time with him this week. He’s sweet. A lot sweeter than you’ve been lately. Jesus, Robbie, it’s like you want to drive me away …”

“I don’t want that. It’s been a difficult period.”

“For me too, all right? Yes, yes, I enjoy the attention of a man who still finds me attractive. I’m sorry about your father, Robbie, I truly am, but I’m not a ghost. I’m still here and I have needs.”

His knees wavered. He had to sit. He’d never felt so unsure of himself. The doubts had begun the day the Rook arrived. It was the source of all his anxiety. His marriage, his talent, his lost parents seemed as elusive now as the collage’s shifting narratives. He couldn’t grasp anything, and in his desperation, he couldn’t stop the pain he knew he was causing his wife.

“I’m up each dawn painting,” he told her. “I want you to call me tomorrow morning at five. From your room. I want to hear your voice first thing – maybe it’ll help me do good work.”

“That’s three Seattle time, Robbie. I’m not going to get up in the middle of the night.”

“If you don’t call me, I’ll know you’re with Henry.”

“Jesus, what is this? What’s gotten into you? We’re married ten years and you’re giving me a test?”

“Call me.”

“I will. But not at three A.M.

“All right, then.”

“Robbie, don’t take that tone with me. Listen to yourself. Do you hear how crazy this is?”

“Dawn, Sarah. I’m up at dawn.” He nearly snapped his receiver in half.

“Henry’s a lot easier,” she said, and cut their connection.

______

NIGHT

Naked and sweating, he turned the songs up loud: McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, 1933, with Big Sid Catlett on drums. Sid was known for his swing, a freer time-keeping style than most of his contemporaries played. Kicking and prodding bass drum and snare, he accented the solo lines of piano and horns.

Free-style swing. Robert wondered if he had it. His father certainly did. He stared at the Rook. The music lightened the woman, the shirt. They were caught in a giddy dance. The red setting sun cast a raw erotic glow on the floor.

Robert walked into his garden, shooing wasps from his head. His hair was tousled and damp, his face on fire. He’d eaten all the aspirin. He moved like a sleepwalker.

He picked cucumbers, radishes, greens. A few flowers. In the kitchen he whipped up a salad and a light vinaigrette. He showered, dressed. The fact that he didn’t know the woman next door, not even her name, occurred to him briefly, but he was floating, free of gravity and social convention.

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.