And Angel said, “The handwriting is different here. It's changing.” He snapped another picture and cranked to the next frame of film, saying, “Do you know what order your husband worked on these houses?”
Misty told Angel how a new owner should move in only after the full moon. According to carpenter tradition, the first to enter a new house should always be the family's favorite pet. Then should enter the family's cornmeal, the salt, the broom, the Bible, and the crucifix. Only then can the family and their furniture move in. According to superstition.
And Angel, snapping pictures, said, “What? The cornmeal's supposed to walk in by itself?”
Beverly Hills, the Upper East Side, Palm Beach, these days, Angel Delaporte says, even the best part of any city is just a deluxe luxury suite in hell. Outside your front gates, you still have to share the same gridlocked streets. You and the homeless drug addicts, you still breathe the same stinking air and hear the same police helicopters chasing criminals all night. The stars and moon erased by the lights from a million used car lots. Everyone crowds the same sidewalks, scattered with garbage, and sees the same sunrise bleary and red behind smog.
Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché. Flowers and Christmas lights, it's what we're programmed to love. Someone young and lovely. The women on Spanish television with big boobs and a tiny waist like they've been twisted three times. The trophy wives eating lunch at the Waytansea Hotel.
The words on the walls say: “. . . you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you've ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine . . .”
The trouble is, Angel says, we're running out of places to hide. It's why Will Rogers used to tell people to buy land: Nobody's making it anymore.
This is why every rich person has discovered Waytansea Island this summer.
It used to be Sun Valley, Idaho. Then it was Sedona, Arizona. Aspen, Colorado. Key West, Florida. Lahaina, Maui. All of them crowded with tourists and the natives left waiting tables. Now it's Waytansea Island, the perfect escape. For everyone except the people already living there.
The words say: “. . . you with your fast cars stuck in traffic, your rich food that makes you fat, your houses so big you always feel lonely . . .”
And Angel says, “See here, how his writing is crowded. The letters are squeezed together.” He snaps a picture, cranks the film, and says, “Peter's very frightened of something.”
Mr. Angel Delaporte, he's flirting, putting his hand over hers. He gives her the flask until it's empty. All this is just fine so long as he doesn't sue her like all your other clients from the mainland. All the summer people who lost bedrooms and linen closets. Everybody whose toothbrush you stuck up your butt. Half the reason why Misty gifted the house so fast to the Catholics was so nobody could put a lien against it.
Angel Delaporte says our natural instinct is to hide. As a species, we claim ground and defend it. Maybe we migrate, to follow the weather or some animal, but we know it takes land to live, and our instinct is to stake our claim.
It's why birds sing, to mark their territory. It's why dogs pee.
Sedona, Key West, Sun Valley, the paradox of a half million people going to the same place to be alone.
Misty still tracing the black paint with her index finger, she says, “What did you mean when you talked about Stendhal syndrome?”
And still snapping pictures, Angel says, “It's named after the French writer Stendhal.”
The words she's tracing, they say, “. . . Misty Wilmot will send you all to hell . . .”
Your words. You fucker.
Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.
Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It's when a painting, or any work of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse.
Just for the record, Misty thinks Angel Delaporte is a little full of shit.
“If you read contemporary accounts,” he says, “Maura Kincaid's work supposedly brought about a kind of mass hysteria.”
“And now?” Misty says.
And Angel shrugs, “Search me.” He says, “From what I've seen, it's okay, just some very pretty landscapes.”
Looking at her finger, he says, “Do you feel anything?” He snaps another picture and says, “Funny how tastes change.”
“. . . we're poor,” Peter's words say, “but we have what every rich person craves . . . peace, beauty, quiet . . .”
Your words.
Your life after death.
Going home tonight, it's Will Tupper who gives Misty the beer in the paper bag. He lets her drink on deck despite the rules. He asks if she's working on any paintings lately. Any landscapes, maybe?
On the ferryboat, the man with the dog, he says the dog's trained to find dead people. When somebody dies, they give off this huge stink of what the man calls epinephrine. He said it's the smell of fear.
The beer in the brown bag Misty is holding, she just drinks it and lets him talk.
The man's hair, the way it recedes above each temple, the way the skin on his exposed scalp is bright red from the cold wind, it looks like he has devil's horns. He has devil's horns, and his whole face is red and squinting into wrinkles. Dynamic wrinkling. Lateral canthal rhytides.
The dog twists his head back over one shoulder, trying to get away from her. The man's aftershave has the smell of cloves. Hooked on his belt, under the edge of his jacket, you can see a pair of chromed handcuffs.
Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.
Holding his dog's leash, the man says, “Are you sure you're okay?”
And Misty tells him, “Trust me, I'm not dead.”
“Maybe just my skin's dead,” she says.
Stendhal syndrome. Epinephrine. Graphology. The coma of details. Of education.
The man nods at her beer in the brown paper bag, and he says, “You know you're not supposed to drink in public?”
And Misty says, What? Is he a cop?
And he says, “You know? As a matter of fact, yeah, I am.”
The guy flips open his wallet to flash her a badge. Engraved on the silver badge, it says: Clark Stilton. Detective. Seaview County Hate Crimes Task Force.
July 13—
The Full Moon
TABBI AND MISTY, they're walking through the woods. This is the tangle of land out on Waytansea Point. It's alders here, generations of trees grown and fallen and sprouting again out of their own dead. Animals, maybe deer, have cut a path that winds around the heaps of complicated trees and edges between rocks big as architecture and padded with thick moss. Above all this, the alder leaves come together in a shifting bright green sky.
Here and there, sunlight breaks through in shafts as big around as crystal chandeliers. Here's just a messier version of the lobby of the Waytansea Hotel.
Tabbi wears a single old earring, gold filigree and a haze of sparkling red rhinestones around a red enameled heart. It's pinned through her pink sweatshirt, like a brooch, but it's the earring that Peter's blond friend tore out of his ear. Will Tupper from the ferry.
Your friend.
She keeps the junk jewelry in a shoe box under her bed and wears it on special days. The chipped glass rubies pinned to her shoulder glitter with the bright green above them. The rhinestones, spotted with dirt, they reflect p
ink from Tabbi's sweatshirt.
Your wife and kid, they step over a rotting log that's crawling with ants, stepping around ferns that brush Misty's waist and flop on Tabbi's face. They're quiet, looking and listening for birds, but there's nothing. No birds. No little frogs. No sounds except the ocean, the hiss and burst of waves somewhere else.
They push through a thicket of green stalks, something with soft yellow leaves rotting around its base. You have to look down with every step because the ground's slippery and puddled with water. How long Misty's been walking, keeping her eyes on the ground, holding branches so they don't whip Tabbi, Misty doesn't know how long, but when she looks up, a man's standing there.
Just for the record, her levator labii muscles, the snarl muscles, the fight-or-flight muscles, all spasm, all those smooth muscles freeze into the landscape of growling, Misty's mouth squared so all her teeth show.
Her hand grabs the back of Tabbi's shirt. Tabbi, she's still looking down at the ground, walking forward, and Misty yanks her back.
And Tabbi slips and pulls her mother to the ground, saying, “Mom.”
Tabbi pressed to the wet ground, the leaves and moss and beetles, Misty crouched over her, the ferns arch above them.
The man is maybe another ten steps ahead, and facing away from them. He doesn't turn. Through the curtain of ferns, he must be seven feet tall, dark and heavy with brown leaves in his hair and mud splashed up his legs.
He doesn't turn, but he doesn't move. He must've heard them, and he stands, listening.
Just for the record, he's naked. His naked butt is right there.
Tabbi says, “Let go, Mom. There's bugs.”
And Misty shushes her.
The man waits, frozen, one hand held out at waist height as if he's feeling the air for movement. No birds sing.
Misty's crouched, squatting with her hands open against the muddy ground, ready to grab Tabbi and run.
Then Tabbi slips past her, and Misty says, “No.” Reaching fast, Misty clutches the air behind her kid.
It's one, maybe two seconds before Tabbi gets to the man, puts her hand in his open hand.
In that two seconds, Misty knows she's a shitty mother.
Peter, you married a coward. Misty's still here, crouched. If anything, Misty's leaning back, ready to run the other way. What they don't teach you in art school is hand-to-hand combat.
And Tabbi turns back, smiling, and says, “Mom, don't be such a spaz.” She wraps both her hands around the man's one outstretched hand and pulls herself up so she can swing her legs in the air. She says, “It's just Apollo, is all.”
Near the man, almost hidden in fallen leaves, is a dead body. A pale white breast with fine blue veins. A severed white arm.
And Misty's still crouched here.
Tabbi drops from the man's hand and goes to where Misty's looking. She brushes leaves off a dead white face and says, “This is Diana.”
She looks at Misty crouching and rolls her eyes. “They're statues, Mom.”
Statues.
Tabbi comes back to take Misty's hand. She lifts her mom's arm and pulls her to her feet, saying, “You know? Statues. You're the artist.”
Tabbi pulls her forward. The standing man is dark bronze, streaked with lichen and tarnish, a naked man with his feet bolted to a pedestal buried in the bushes beside the trail. His eyes have recessed irises and pupils, Roman irises, cast into them. His bare arms and legs are perfect in proportion to his torso. The golden mean of composition. Every rule of art and proportion applied.
The Greeks' formula for why we love what we love. More of that art school coma.
The woman on the ground is broken white marble. Tabbi's pink hand brushes the leaves and grass back from the long white thighs, the coy folds of the pale marble groin meet at a carved leaf. The smooth fingers and arms, the elbows without a wrinkle or crease. Her carved marble hair hangs in sculpted white curls.
Tabbi points her pink hand at an empty pedestal across the path from the bronze, and she says, “Diana fell down a long time before I met her.”
The man's bronze calf muscle feels cold, but cast with every tendon defined, every muscle thick. As Misty runs her hand up the cold metal leg, she says, “You've been here before?”
“Apollo doesn't have a dick,” Tabbi says. “I already looked.”
And Misty yanks her hand back from the leaf cast over the statue's bronze crotch. She says, “Who brought you here?”
“Granmy,” Tabbi says. “Granmy brings me here all the time.”
Tabbi stoops to rub her cheek against the smooth marble cheek of the Diana.
The bronze statue, Apollo, it must be a nineteenth-century reproduction. Either that or late eighteenth century. It can't be real, not an actual Greek or Roman piece. It would be in a museum.
“Why are these here?” Misty says. “Did your grandmother tell you?”
And Tabbi shrugs. She holds out her hand toward Misty and says, “There's more.” She says, “Come, and I can show you.”
There is more.
Tabbi leads her through the woods that circle the point, and they find a sundial lying in the weeds, crusted a thick dark green with verdigris. They find a fountain as wide across as a swimming pool, but filled with windfall branches and acorns.
They walk past a grotto dug into a hillside, a dark mouth framed in mossy pillars and blocked with a chained iron gate. The cut stone is fitted into an arch that rises to a keystone in the middle. Fancy as a little bank building. The front of a moldy, buried state capitol building. It's cluttered with carved angels that hold stone garlands of apples, pears, and grapes. Stone wreaths of flowers. All of it streaked with dirt, it's cracked and pried apart by tree roots.
In between are plants that shouldn't be here. A climbing rose chokes an oak tree, scrambling up fifty feet to bloom above the tree's crown. Withered yellow tulip leaves are wilted in the summer heat. A towering wall of sticks and leaves turns out to be a huge lilac bush.
Tulips and lilacs aren't native to here.
None of this should be here.
In the meadow at the center of the point, they find Grace Wilmot sitting on a blanket spread over the grass. Around her bloom pink and blue bachelor buttons and little white daisies. The wicker picnic hamper is open, and flies buzz over it.
Grace rises to her knees, holding out a glass of red wine, and says, “Misty, you're back. Come take this.”
Misty takes the wine and drinks some. “Tabbi showed me the statues,” Misty says. “What used to be here?”
Grace gets to her feet and says, “Tabbi, get your things. It's time for us to go.”
Tabbi picks up her sweater off the blanket.
And Misty says, “But we just got here.”
Grace hands her a plate with a sandwich on it and says, “You're going to stay and eat. You're going to have the whole day to do your art.”
The sandwich is chicken salad, and it feels warm from sitting in the sun. The flies landed on it, but it smells okay. So Misty takes a bite.
Grace nods at Tabbi and says, “It was Tabbi's idea.”
Misty chews and swallows. She says, “It's a sweet idea, but I didn't bring any supplies.”
And Tabbi goes to the picnic hamper and says, “Granmy did. We packed them to surprise you.”
Misty drinks some wine.
Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink. That's the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game.
“Tabbi and I are going on a mission,” Grace says.
And Tabbi says, “We're going to tag sales.”
The chicken salad tastes funny. Misty chews and swallows and says, “This sandwich has a weird taste.”
“That's just cilantro,” Grace says. She says, “Tabbi and I have to find a sixteen-inch platter in Lenox's Silver Wheat Spray pattern.” She shuts her eyes and shakes her head, saying, “Why is it that no one wants their s
erving pieces until their pattern is discontinued?”
Tabbi says, “And Granmy is going to buy me my birthday present. Anything I want.”
Now, Misty is going to be stuck out here on Waytansea Point with two bottles of red wine and a batch of chicken salad. Her heap of paints and watercolors and brushes and paper, she hasn't touched them since her kid was a baby. The acrylics and oils have to be hard by now. The watercolors, dried up and cracked. The brushes stiff. All of it useless.
Misty included.
Grace Wilmot holds her hand out and says, “Tabbi, come along. Let's leave your mother to enjoy her afternoon.”
Tabbi takes her grandmother's hand, and the two of them start back across the meadow to the dirt road where they left the car parked.
The sun's warm. The meadow's up high enough that you can look down and see the waves hiss and burst on the rocks below. Down the coastline, you can see the town. The Waytansea Hotel is a smudge of white clapboard. You can almost see the little dormer windows of the attic rooms. From here, the island looks pleasant and perfect, not crowded and busy with tourists. Ugly with billboards. It looks how the island must've looked before the rich summer people arrived. Before Misty arrived. You can see why people born here never move away. You can see why Peter was so ready to protect it.
“Mom,” Tabbi calls out.
She's running back from her grandmother. Both her hands are clutching at her pink sweatshirt. Panting and smiling, she gets to where Misty is sitting on the blanket. The gold filigree earring in her hands, she says, “Hold still.”
Misty holds still. A statue.
And Tabbi stoops to pin the earring through her mother's earlobe, saying, “I almost forgot until Granmy reminded me. She says you'll need this.” The knees of her blue jeans are muddy and stained green from when Misty panicked and pulled them to the ground, when Misty tried to save her.
Misty says, “You want a sandwich to take with you, honey?”
And Tabbi shakes her head, saying, “Granmy told me not to eat them.” Then she turns and runs away, waving one arm over her head until she's gone.