“Nothing will happen to Fred,” I assured him. He just looked away.
“We never had any children,” he said ruefully.
“Our work was our children.”
I no longer remember the exact chronology of those last months. I stopped keeping a diary, perhaps losing heart. Fred and I drove back and forth from Detroit to New York, for our work and for Robert. He was rallying. He was working. He was in the hospital again. And eventually his loft became his sick bay.
Parting was always wrenching. I felt haunted by the idea that if I stayed with him he would live. Yet I also struggled with a mounting sense of resignation. I was ashamed of that, for Robert had fought as if he could be cured by his will alone. He had tried everything from science to voodoo, everything but prayer. That, at least, I could give him in abundance. I prayed ceaselessly for him, a desperate human prayer. Not for his life, no one could take that cup from him, but for the strength to endure the unendurable.
In mid-February, driven by a sense of urgency, we flew to New York. I went to see Robert by myself. It seemed so quiet. I realized it was the absence of his terrible cough. I lingered by his empty wheelchair. Lynn Davis’s image of an iceberg, rising like a torso turned by nature, dominated the wall. He had a white cat, a white snake, and there was a brochure of white stereo systems lying on the white table he had designed. I noticed he had added a white square in the blackness surrounding his image of a sleeping Cupid.
There was no one present save his nurse and she left us to ourselves. I stood by his bed and took his hand. We stayed like that for a long time, not saying anything. Suddenly he looked up and said, “Patti, did art get us?”
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.”
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint. Robert beckoned me to help him stand, and he faltered. “Patti,” he said, “I’m dying. It’s so painful.”
He looked at me, his look of love and reproach. My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die. He was suffering physical torment no man should endure. He looked at me with such deep apology that it was unbearable and I burst into tears. He admonished me for that, but he put his arms around me. I tried to brighten, but it was too late. I had nothing more to give him but love. I helped him to the couch. Mercifully, he did not cough, and he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder.
The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.
Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let go.
The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.
HE WOULD BE A SMOTHERING CLOAK, A VELVET PETAL. It was not the thought but the shape of the thought that tormented him. It entered him like a horrific spirit and caused his heart to pound so hard, so irregularly, that his skin vibrated and he felt as if he were beneath a lurid mask, sensual yet suffocating.
I thought I would be with him when he died, but I was not. I followed the stages of his passage until close to eleven, when I heard him for the last time, breathing with such force that it obscured the voice of his brother on the phone. For some reason, this sound filled me with a strange happiness as I climbed the stairs to go to sleep. He is still alive, I was thinking. He is still alive.
Robert died on March 9, 1989. When his brother called me in the morning, I was calm, for I knew it was coming, almost to the hour. I sat and listened to the aria from
This wild sensation stayed with me for some days. I was certain it couldn’t be detected. But perhaps my grief was more apparent than I knew, for my husband packed us all up and we drove south. We found a motel by the sea and camped there for the Easter holiday. Up and down the deserted beach I walked in my black wind coat. I felt within its asymmetrical roomy folds like a princess or a monk. I know Robert would have appreciated this picture: a white sky, a gray sea, and this singular black coat.
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert’s hand.
Words came and then a melody. I carried my moccasins and waded the water’s edge. I had transfigured the twisted aspects of my grief and spread them out as a shining cloth, a memorial song for Robert.
In the distance I heard a call, the voices of my children. They ran toward me. In this stretch of timelessness, I stopped. I suddenly saw him, his green eyes, his dark locks. I heard his voice above the gulls, the childish laughter, and the roar of the waves.
After Robert died, I agonized over his belongings, some of which had once been ours. I dreamed of his slippers. He wore them at the end of his life, black Belgian slippers with his initials stitched in burnished gold. I agonized over his desk and chair. They would be auctioned off with his other valuables at Christie’s. I lay awake thinking of them, so obsessed I became ill. I could have bid on them but I couldn’t bear to; his desk and chair passed to strange hands. I kept thinking of something Robert would say when he was obsessed with something he couldn’t have. “I’m a selfish bastard. If I can’t have it I don’t want anyone else to.”
Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortes. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.
