“That was six months ago. He’s changed a lot since then, in case you haven’t noticed.” She smoothed her thin brown hair.
He stood unsteadily. “I’ve noticed everything, Ruth.”
“Good,” she said, folding her arms so they lifted her breasts, just slightly. “Because it’s all going to change, and you won’t be here to see it.” A sob caught her final word, like a trap folding in on a mouse, and she turned away, into the kitchen.
Robbie remained fascinated by the beautiful man talking doom, so Frederick left him in front of the screen.
“Ruth,” he whispered, placing his palms on her shoulders from behind. She wobbled, and they listed against the kitchen table. It moved an inch or two across the floor. Its wooden legs barked on the freshly waxed red tiles.
“Your fucking future,” she said through her hands.
He tried to laugh. “Don’t you want me to have one?”
“Not without us.”
“Then come with me. I offered.” But his offer hadn’t been real, and she’d known that.
Or more accurately: he’d meant it, but she knew already, from her life with him here — how could he deny it? the long nights in the studio, the brooding (Wittgenstein, Mickey Spillane, it didn’t matter), the drinking with Mark — she’d always be an afterthought to his burgeoning career.
New York was the place, by God, to burgeon! Mark was right about the art world. And Ruthie loved Houston. Frederick knew that. Her mother and father were here, in a nursing home now, needing her weekly visits. For a hundred reasons, she’d never leave.
“I’m sorry, Ruth.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Honey. What can I say?”
“Say it all.”
Free, unencumbered, without any words. He noticed their reflection in a mirror by the back door, the awkward distance between them like a bad dance step. “I have said it all. You knew, when we married, how vital painting was to me — ”
“I know. Go. Just get out. Have him back by seven.” She turned to a foggy pot on her stove. It smelled of cinnamon, all-spice — their earliest meals together, Frederick thought. Freshness and warmth and brimming contentment.
“I really will miss you,” he told her now, sincerely. Still, he couldn’t wait to soar into the clouds, toward Bliss.
His head spun. Did this split in his earthly desires mean he was crazy, or was he, perhaps, an angel? Pulled in all directions by the irrefutable beauty of each option?
He looked up, at the low, plastered ceiling.
“Seven,” Ruth said. “Or I’ll hunt you down like a dog.”
Robbie patted the bird’s steel wings. His crying jag had passed. He’d wanted to see the rodeo — his mother had described for him the stocky steer, the sleek, pretty horses steaming in the sun — but the thought of real animals frightened Frederick today. He wasn’t sure why. “The world is too much with us.” Wordsworth? Tennyson? With Ruth’s sad face — the collapse of her slight, lovely face — in his mind, he needed escape into folly.
So he walked his son through Griffith Park, pausing by each frozen shape to explain how Daddy’s friend had made them all. “This is a serving fork, see, but the way he’s twisted it here — ”
“Feathers! On a big bird’s head!”
“A cockatoo. Do you like it?”
“Yes!” Robbie ran among the beasts, releasing tiny bursts of rainwater left in the ground from an early-morning shower. He was bigger now, Frederick saw (Ruth had changed Robbie’s shirt), too big for a six-year-old. Ruth spoiled him. Overfed him. Well. This slow and creaky crisis pained them all.
In spite of his pudginess, Robbie seemed to float on a pillow of accumulated delight in the world, Frederick noticed, the way Mark’s statues appeared to violate gravity despite their weighty skins. When did disappointment — real awareness of the planet — set in? Eight? Twelve? Twenty?
When did roadrunners turn into red-blooded American patriots? Someday, as if from a witless winter sleep, Robbie would open his eyes and snap back at Frederick for the betrayal his father was about to commit.
But for now, the creatures were harmless, and so was his son.
“What’s this one, Daddy?”
“A mermaid.”
“And this?”
“What’s it look like?”
“A lion!”
He watched his son’s hands slide like starfish over the finely molded shapes, and wondered if the boy had artistry in his fingers.
Would any loving father wish the curse of talent on his child? Better, perhaps, to live a sane and simple life.
He remembered lunching last month with Mark and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. The director was a teetotaler; he watched uneasily as Frederick and Mark ordered glass after glass of glistering wine. Finally, he said, “Tell me, why do so many artists drink so much?”
Mark laughed, as if the question were predictable and silly. “Paraguay,” he said.
Frederick answered, “White.”
“I don’t understand,” said the director.
“All that white, waiting to be filled.” Frederick waved his glass at the waitress. “No matter how many canvases I cover, there’s always another one waiting. Another blank. Another void. All that goddamned, terrifying white.” He blushed then — you knucklehead, he thought. Showing off like a child. Pretentious and puerile. Clumps of heat spread like roots across his cheeks. Mark saved him, and the moment, by toasting the tablecloth. “Look!” he slurred. “See how terrifyingly white it is!” And they laughed.
Around a bench, now, Robbie chased a butterfly, a real one (its movement, its actuality, startled Frederick, surrounded here by so much stillness, and his thoughts). Yes. Sane and simple. Happy in the garden. “Daddy, I’m thirsty!”
“All right, we’ll stop somewhere and get you some lemonade.” He was parched too. The old adage, There’s no such thing as a large whiskey, drifted through his mind as he tottered after his child. Redbirds chittered in the trees.
Machinery yearning to breathe. Ponderous objects longing for the weightlessness of whimsy.
He was still searching for the perfect phrase, the right image, to capture Mark’s art for the catalog.
An army of metal rag mops.
A rusty, peaceable kingdom.
Sharpened toss-offs, born of our city’s inconsolable trash: a fair description of memory, if not Mark’s work, Frederick thought, glancing up now at the hospital Ruth had brought him to, years ago, here at the edge of the park.
“This one, Daddy?”
“A lamb.”
The shrapnel of time.
He’d been roughing out a geometric design one night after dinner, using blue construction paper, a possible study for a painting. He cut a delicate square with his X-Acto knife. Ruth, washing dishes at the kitchen sink, turned and said something to him; distracted, he dropped the point into the meat of his forearm. He protested that he wasn’t badly hurt, but he was bleeding wildly all over his favorite cotton shirt, so she insisted on driving him to the emergency room.
Staring at Robbie now, skipping beside him on the grass, he tried to recover what Ruth had said to him that evening, in a wreath of steam from the sink, and he believed — could this be true? — he recalled her announcing, “I’m pregnant.”
Surely not. Her most hurtful recent comment — the poison she’d slipped into his heart for him to carry to New York — was, “You never wanted a child, did you? You’re sorry he was ever born.” She’d been stitching a sweater when she’d said it, aiming her needle straight at him.