Page 122 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

110 Jack Fritscher

“Is that so? I know plenty. I’ve read articles.”
“So don’t throw Wyeth down. Read it,” Cleo said. She shoved
the book hard against his naked belly. “And you better not tear a
goddam page out of it.”
“I confess my secrets and you refuse to forgive me?”
“Fuck you and your sins.” She said it flatly and marched back
to her life-size canvas. “Tilt your head to the left.”
Robert obeyed. The Wyeth book hung in his right hand. It felt
cool against his thigh. Holding his pose, he raised it and fanned once
more through the pages. Print after print of paint-brushed faces
peopled Wyeth’s decaying afternoons. One painting, an immense
field, contained a solitary male figure. Everything was brown and
dead and spun out of sorrow. Wyeth had painted it the winter of
his own father’s death. The editor’s note explained the painting as
an exorcism of sadness. Robert stirred slightly from his pose. He
caught the sense of the painting, but he could hardly see the face of
the man in the field. Somehow Wyeth had lost his own face along
with the lost face of his father. The canvas was full of nothing so
much as his own grief.
Deep inside Robert that thin tensile strand of genera tions
snapped. In a moment of his own infinite sadness he realized that
he too had lost the face of his father. In the stead of the man who
pretended to sire him, and had really abused him, stood only shadow
images and half-remem bered sounds of the sweet times: the wet-
lipped kiss from that unshaved face in the dark over his bed. It was
all reduced to that: the memory of his father, home from the late
shift, leaning over to kiss him goodnight. As if he were again half-
asleep in his little boy’s sleep, Robert could feel his father’s ghostly
kiss on his face. He could not forget his father’s love, but he could
not forgive that one night of his father’s drunkenness.
Robert realized that he had been losing everything despite his
desperate collecting of folders of stolen clippings and magazines
purloined from under the eyes of cheery dental receptionists. In the
glory days of the large magazines, he had tried to save the images

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