As he swam out from the shore, Tim Redfield thought of many things—self promotion and artistry, his girlfriend Patty left sitting on the sand, his almost ex-wife Gillian’s most recent rant, the long wait of his career and now, finally, success. He had been up all night. His arms ached with each stroke, yet he liked the burning in his muscles, a minimal sacrifice to know he was alive, very much alive. He had been lucky, though of course he had worked for it. God knew, he had worked.
The night before, a group had gathered on the shore to watch him burn one of his paintings in a ritual he had long considered, but which seemed more potent now because they were fetching six figures. With the arrival of the curator, his dealer and the others documenting the evening, he had no choice but to embrace the fame. It would be that way from now on. He was in the public eye, his every gesture captured and added to an oeuvre known as Redfield. Tim Redfield. He had finally made a name for himself. He wondered if the morning Times would mention it.
But he was getting ahead of himself. All he’d ever wanted was to be part of a dialogue. He could hear himself phrase it for the critics—“All I ever wanted was to be part of a dialogue, a participant in the scene and to be seen.” He cringed at the pompous voice in his head. Redfield screamed into the water—“Dumb fuck!” The ocean absorbed the sound.
Redfield’s left leg throbbed and he wondered about the small blood clot lodged on that side of his groin. The doctors had given him the go ahead with his usual activities. No big deal. Though wouldn’t it be ironic, no poignant, no, actually downright tragic, for him to die of a heart attack in Long Island Sound on the morning after his now famous ritual and just after the Whitney—always moderately encouraging since his first Biennial ten years earlier—had finally offered him a one man show of his Gillian series? No question then that both the ritual and his untimely demise would make the papers.
Redfield stretched his arms forward and pulled. He needed to stay fit. Take care of himself. He had a future to protect now. Before, he could have tossed his life away and virtually had—just get his almost-ex Gillian going on the disposable years of Redfield’s past. Now, he owed it to himself, to art, to posterity. “Listen to me,” he muttered into the waves, “Such an ass.”
His girlfriend Patty had called him that the night before and worse. She shouted that he was too earnest, too sincere, quoting meanly from an Artforum review that had almost torpedoed his career. Cruel of her, really, but he needed to get back before she left for the city without him. She was hard to satisfy, a bit out of his league and perhaps more trouble than she was worth. Every artist had his cross to bear for his muse or hoped-for muse. Gillian had been his first and only, so far. Patty didn’t want the job. Who needed a reluctant muse when he had the most important show of his career to prepare for? Redfield had to get down to work. He turned in the water and headed towards shore.
For fifty-four, he was quite fit, usually able to swim close to an hour without fatigue. Redfield remembered his father at his age, standing tall and robust, taking the train into the city to make a living in advertising. In the prime of life, his old man had been a cog in the wheel of commerce and proud of it. Redfield never wanted any part of that and Gillian agreed, until the girls were born and New York became exorbitant. The time came for Redfield to buckle down and make a living, only he hadn’t. He wished she had understood the selfishness required to be an artist. But it had led him to leave her and the girls, so no wonder she hated him. Who could say if he would have gotten to where he was now if he hadn’t done that? No, his choices had paid off, were finally paying off now.
He pictured Gillian skimming The Times later that morning, ignoring the usual depressing headlines from Iraq and the most recent Bush fiasco at home. She would flip to the Arts section, hoping for relief and hone in on the Arts, Briefly column on the section’s second page. After glancing over the latest Metropolitan Opera gossip, news of a celebrity caught drunk driving over Labor Day and the staggering numbers grossed by the latest blockbuster, her eye would shoot to the indistinct photo of Redfield at what looked like a Boy Scout jamboree, a bonfire blazing behind him.
He could hear it—Gillian would let out a growl, at first softly and then louder, until her voice crackled the way the fire had the night before. Her hands would shake as she crumpled the edges of the paper. So that’s why he had needed the beach house over the weekend, she would think. “Irresponsible charlatan,” Gillian would hiss, throwing the paper onto the breakfast dishes.
Across the table, their daughter Cassy would look up from Harry Potter, reach for the section gingerly and squint into the grainy photo. Redfield could picture a gigantic smile blooming across his girl’s face as she called to her little sister. “Frida! Come quick, Daddy’s famous!”
Redfield turned onto his front again and let out a long, pleased sigh. Gillian would see—he gotten some things right. Then he dipped his head and started swimming in earnest. His father had taught him the proper way to do it—arms extended, legs pushing all the way through. Had he ever thanked his old man? Redfield suspected not nearly enough.
With the next smooth kick, his left leg suddenly cramped. A shocking pain shot from his groin down to his knee. At first he thought he had been bitten and searched the water around him. No one had mentioned sharks this summer, but you never knew. There was no sign of a creature, no blood. The pain subsided and he let himself use the leg again. The next kick caused another sharp pain. He treaded water and looked back towards the beach, trying to get his bearings. He had swum a half mile straight out from the coast. No one was out this early on the foggy morning. Patty, gone. With his left leg weakened, he relied on the rest of his body to move him forward.
It occurred to him he was hobbled, not truly crippled, and that reminded him of Gillian when she was pregnant. Both times she had sciatica down her legs that had worsened to an unbearable state. Yet, she had insisted she wasn’t disabled just because she was carrying a child. Her body, anyone could plainly see, had become an altar of sacrifice to the next generation. Every part of her strained with both life and misery. That was what he had wanted to capture in his portraits of her—the Gillian series the Whitney had finally agreed to show. In that body of work, he explored the contradictory elements of elation and degradation, success and failure, life and death.
In one of their fights she had shouted that he was a misogynist, tearing her apart and setting her down in pieces on his canvas. He had wanted to show a body, her body, both vibrantly alive and succumbing. She was the everyday, heroic embodiment of the survival of the species. How had she not understood that, when the critics had seen it right off? He supposed, though, that their troubles had less to do with her misunderstandings of his art than with the rest of it—the rent, Patty, the children. Him—the choices he had made.
Another stabbing pain caught Redfield, shooting upward from his groin. The damn clot, he thought, though the doctors had been calm. A healthy guy like Redfield wasn’t supposed to have problems. But the pain was enough to make him go under for a moment, the waves splashing his lips. He swallowed without thinking and cold salt water scratched the back of his throat. His fingers felt numb, his toes, too. A shiver went down his body and he flipped onto his back and felt the pale sun through the fog. He tried to think of something calm—his daughters. His little girls.
At the Central Park Zoo they had watched the walrus together. Such a ridiculous animal. No real use for it, but there it was. Redfield had asked them, “Doesn’t it look like it’s from another time? Maybe prehistoric? Remarkable how some creatures survive while others go extinct.”
Cassy had squinted at the animal and got what he meant. She always got it. She said it was like a lot of other large animals—hippos and rhinos and giraffes all left over from another time, too. Such a smart kid.
“What’s extinct?” little Frida had asked.
Redfield parted Frida’s bangs and started to answer in a soft voice, because she was still so young.
But Cassy interrupted. “You’re going extinct, aren’t you, Daddy? We won’t see you anymore.”
Redfield had sucked in air through his teeth. “Not true. Has your mother been saying that? Girls, you have to believe I’ll always—”
But Frida’s eyes had gone wide and she burst into a howl. Cassy turned back to the walrus and glared—“I think you deserve to go extinct.”
The pain flowed now into Redfield’s hips and ribs. He realized that all he wanted was to read to them before bed like he used to. Tuck them in. Gillian’s lawyer had seen to it that he had no overnight privileges. All because of Patty. He flipped back onto his belly and searched the shore again. She wasn’t there and suddenly, it didn’t matter. He had staked a lot on her, this new life of his, and now he just didn’t care. Redfield tried to erase his girlfriend from his mind. He had to focus on the positive. If he had learned anything, it was that painful single-mindedness paid off. He had worked with a crazed devotion. That was what it took.
Redfield’s arms were cramping, the cold taking over. The difficulty seemed to be mostly on his left side, so he turned on his right to do the side-stroke. The current was mild, but it smashed against him, pushing him back from the shore. By working his one good leg and keeping his neck raised, no more water went into his mouth. He tried to steady his breath, insist on his breath, and it worked.
Then a pain shot up his left side and struck his chest. It fired all the way to his cheek and he involuntarily bit down on his tongue, letting out a scream which the ocean silenced as it slipped down his open throat. His right hand felt numb and his right leg was burning with overuse. Redfield gulped air and tried not to become too alarmed. He glanced towards shore again. His eyes blurred and he made them focus by noticing where the grey of the land met the grey of the water. Redfield concentrated on that line, so elegant from a distance as it separated the two parts. That clean line was what it was all about. A clean line and getting it right, he told himself to keep from panicking.
He kicked hard with his better leg and paddled with his better arm. He considered shouting again, although no one was around to hear. Had he tried, his voice would have been drowned by the crashing waves. He stopped straining and listened. The waves struck the shore. He could hear them. That must mean he had almost made it.
What an ass he had been for having gone out so far out on his own. What had he been thinking, so cavalier, as if he had many lives and not just one? Only a fool assumes so much. He was a father, for God’s sake. Why hadn’t he been able to understand that? Gillian was right about him. Redfield was a decent guy like his father and yet he wasn’t. He was incorrigible and yet also not so terribly bad.
Redfield panted for air, using only his right arm to keep himself afloat. He had always assumed he would turn out like his father in the end, not in terms of career, but as a man. He had meant to be like that, solid and well-loved. It might not happen. He might not be understood or even all that liked, really, even by the people closest to him. In the end, Redfield told himself, the only reliable thing was the work. Thank God, he had the work.
The pain rose up from his leg and rested like a weight on his chest. His body felt stiff and cold and a metallic taste that was blood filled his mouth. Another thought came to him. A thought he hadn’t let himself consider for some time. He still wanted his wife, a person he had spent an inordinate amount of time hating. She got him all wrong, seeing him in the worst possible light and yet Gillian would know how to breathe into his mouth right now. She would understand that he was drowning. No one else could see it, but Gillian had seen it and it had made her angry and cruel, but she had been right. She had sensed a part of him had been dying all along.
He wouldn’t want to bother the girls with all this. He had hurt them enough already. He wanted them to be proud of him. To have a father people knew and admired. But for now, they were too young to care about that. For now, they should play. Let them keep playing, Redfield thought, and it helped him pull towards shore.
Below him hung the shelf where swimmers caught the waves and rode them in. He had instructed Cassy and Frida that from the shore to here was the Safety Zone. They were never allowed to swim beyond it. Redfield had made it to the Safety Zone, yet he could not get his legs under him to stand. The water would only come up to his waist if he did, but his body would not let him.
He was all pain now, left and right sides, arms and legs, disconnected from each other in any useful way. He could see why Gillian had disliked the idea. A body, a person, was more than its disparate, desperate hurting parts. He hadn’t meant it that way, but that was how she took it. She thought he wanted to exploit her, exploit them both. But that was how things went these days. You had to give yourself over to it. She thought he did it all for show. Yet all along he was the one becoming some primitive sacrifice, a cog in the wheel of life, a participant in a dialogue with death, a body tossed onto the fire of time. He was the one pinned writhing to the canvas, not her.
Redfield’s thoughts swirled around him, a whirlpool of nonsense. He worried that was all it had ever been. His art work, his plans, those crucial notions he had relied upon to convince himself and others he was worth something—all of it mere confusion. He tried to fight off such destructive thoughts, but they washed over him like the sea wrack floating past. It couldn’t be true. It hadn’t been true. It had to have amounted to more than that.
Redfield’s only hope was that the waves might be kind and push him up onto the sand. As water filled his ears, he tried listening for the patient sucking in and the pulling back out of the breaking ocean. Nothing could save him now but those low sounds by the shore. The repetitive song echoed in his mind and he thought that the waves gently crashing were speaking to him, saying, Shush, shush, trying to silence his worries. They were the sweet words spoken to a troubled child before sleep. The waves were tucking him in.
Redfield let the water flow in and out of his gaping mouth. The waves sounded stronger now and harsher—Sorry, they seemed to say, so sorry. Redfield did not understand. He tried coughing the water from his throat, but could not. Were the waves singing to him one last endless apology? Or, was the song one of his own making, the one he had stubbornly pushed to the back of his mind and tried to ignore although it had played softly, continuously, for years?
Yes, the ocean was singing Redfield’s apology. He had meant to sing it to his father and his daughters and Gillian. His Gillian—the woman, not the artwork. He recognized in the sibilant sounds the ache of his shame.
Halted by the starkness of it, Redfield’s throat opened and the water rushed in. Sorry, he gurgled with an open mouth, So sorry. He was becoming another low sound, a human offering to something larger than himself. He was part sea now, part land—both body of water and just plain body. He had become a note in the ocean’s song. It was his best and most real effort. It was who he had meant to be. Yet no one was there to hear. No one there to see. No one would know him after all.
© 2008 Virginia Pye
