Duma Key

  "What--" I began.

  "Shhh," he said, and I endured another thirty seconds of silence. At last he stood up. His knees popped. When he turned to face me, his eyes looked very large, and the left one was inflamed. Water--not a tear--was running from the inner corner. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped it away, the automatic gesture of a man who does the same thing a dozen or more times a day.

  "Holy God," he said, and walked toward the window, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  "Holy God what?" I asked. "Holy God what?"

  He stood looking out. "You don't know how good these are, do you? I mean you really don't."

  "Are they?" I asked. I had never felt so unsure of myself. "Are you serious?"

  "Did you put them in chronological order?" he asked, still looking out at the Gulf. The joking, joshing, wisecracking Wireman had taken a hike. I had an idea the one I was listening to now had a lot more in common with the one juries had heard . . . always assuming he'd been that kind of lawyer. "You did, didn't you? Other than the last couple, I mean. Those're obviously much earlier."

  I didn't see how anything of mine could qualify as "much earlier" when I'd only been doing pictures for a couple of months, but when I ran my eye over them, I saw he was right. I hadn't meant to put them in chronological order--not consciously--but that was what I had done.

  "Yes," I said. "Earliest to most recent."

  He indicated the last four paintings--the ones I'd come to think of as my sunset-composites. To one I'd added a nautilus shell, to one a compact disc with the word Memorex printed across it (and the sun shining redly through the hole), to the third a dead seagull I'd found on the beach, only blown up to pterodactyl size. The last was of the shell-bed beneath Big Pink, done from a digital photograph. To this I had for some reason felt the urge to add roses. There were none growing around Big Pink, but there were plenty of photos available from my new pal Google.

  "This last group of paintings," he said. "Has anyone seen these? Your daughter?"

  "No. These four were done after she left."

  "The guy who works for you?"

  "Nope."

  "And of course you never showed your daughter the sketch you made of her boyfr--"

  "God, no! Are you kidding?"

  "No, of course you didn't. That one has its own power, hasty as it obviously is. As for the rest of these things . . ." He laughed. I suddenly realized he was excited, and that was when I started to get excited. But cautious, too. Remember he used to be a lawyer, I told myself. He's not an art critic.

  "The rest of these fucking things . . ." He gave that little yipping laugh again. He walked in a circle around the room, stepping onto the treadmill and over it with an unconscious ease that I envied bitterly. He put his hands in his graying hair and pulled it out and up, as if to stretch his brains.

  At last he came back. Stood in front of me. Confronted me, almost. "Look. The world has knocked you around a lot in the last year or so, and I know that takes a lot of gas out of the old self-image airbag. But don't tell me you don't at least feel how good they are."

  I remembered the two of us recovering from our wild laughing fit while the sun shone through the torn umbrella, putting little scars of light on the table. Wireman had said I know what you're going through and I had replied I seriously doubt that. I didn't doubt it now. He knew. This memory of the day before was followed by a dry desire--not a hunger but an itch--to get Wireman down on paper. A combination portrait and still life, Lawyer with Fruit and Gun.

  He patted my cheek with one of his blunt-fingered hands. "Earth to Edgar. Come in, Edgar."

  "Ah, roger, Houston," I heard myself say. "You have Edgar."

  "So what do you say, muchacho? Am I lyin or am I dyin? Did you or did you not feel they were good when you were doing them?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I felt like I was kicking ass and taking down names."

  He nodded. "It's the simplest fact of art--good art almost always feels good to the artist. And the viewer, the committed viewer, the one who's really looking--"

  "I guess that'd be you," I said. "You took long enough."

  He didn't smile. "When it's good and the person who's looking opens up to it, there's an emotional bang. I felt the bang, Edgar."

  "Good."

  "You bet it is. And when that guy at the Scoto gets a load of these, I think he'll feel it, too. In fact, I'd bet on it."

  "They're really not so much. Re-heated Dali, when you get right down to it."

  He put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward the stairs. "I'm not going to dignify that. Nor are we going to discuss the fact that you apparently painted your daughter's boyfriend via some weird phantom-limb telepathy. I do wish I could see that tennis-ball picture, but what's gone is gone."

  "Good riddance, too," I said.

  "But you have to be very careful, Edgar. Duma Key is a powerful place for . . . certain kinds of people. It magnifies certain kinds of people. People like you."

  "And you?" I asked. He didn't answer immediately, so I pointed at his face. "That eye of yours is watering again."

  He took out the handkerchief and wiped it.

  "Want to tell me what happened to you?" I asked. "Why you can't read? Why it weirds you out to even look at pictures too long?"

  For a long time he said nothing. The shells under Big Pink had a lot to say. With one wave they said the fruit. With the next they said the gun. Back and forth like that. The fruit, the gun, the gun, the fruit.

  "No," he said. "Not now. And if you want to draw me, sure. Knock yourself out."

  "How much of my mind can you read, Wireman?"

  "Not much," he said. "You caught a break there, muchacho."

  "Could you still read it if we were off Duma Key? If we were in a Tampa coffee shop, for instance?"

  "Oh, I might get a tickle." He smiled. "Especially after spending over a year here, soaking up the . . . you know, the rays."

  "Will you go to the gallery with me? The Scoto?"

  "Amigo, I wouldn't miss it for all the tea in China."

  iv

  That night a squall blew in off the water and it rained hard for two hours. Lightning flashed and waves pounded the pilings under the house. Big Pink groaned but stood firm. I discovered an interesting thing: when the Gulf got a little crazy and those waves really poured in, the shells shut up. The waves lifted them too high for conversation.

  I went upstairs at the boom-and-flash height of the festivities, and--feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower--drew Wireman, using a plain old Venus Black pencil. Until the very end, that was. Then I used red and orange for the fruit in the bowl. In the background I sketched a doorway, and in the doorway I put Reba, standing there and watching. I supposed Kamen would have said Reba was my representative in the world of the picture. Maybe si, maybe no. The last thing I did was pick up the Venus Sky to color in her stupid eyes. Then it was done. Another Freemantle masterpiece is born.

  I sat looking at it while the diminishing thunder rolled away and the lightning flashed a few goodbye stutters over the Gulf. There was Wireman, sitting at a table. Sitting there, I had no doubt, at the end of his other life. On the table was a bowl of fruit and the pistol he kept either for target practice (back then his eyes had been fine) or for home protection or both. I had sketched the pistol and then scribbled it in, giving it a sinister, slightly blobby look. That other house was empty. Somewhere in that other house a clock was ticking. Somewhere in that other house a refrigerator was whining. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. The scent was terrible. The sounds were worse. The march of the clock. The relentless whine of the refrigerator as it went on making ice in a wifeless, childless world. Soon the man at the table would close his eyes, stretch out his hand, and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl. If it was an orange, he'd go to bed. If it was an apple, he would apply the muzzle of the gun to his right temple, pull the trigger, and air out his achi
ng brains.

  It had been an apple.

  v

  Jack showed up the next day with a borrowed van and plenty of soft cloth in which to wrap my canvases. I told him I'd made a friend from the big house down the beach, and that he'd be going with us. "No problem," Jack said cheerfully, climbing the stairs to Little Pink and trundling a hand-dolly along behind him. "There's plenty of room in the--whoa!" He had stopped at the head of the stairs.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Are these ones new? They must be."

  "Yeah." Nannuzzi from the Scoto had asked to see half a dozen pictures, no more than ten, so I'd split the difference and set out eight. Four were the ones that had impressed Wireman the night before. "What do you think?"

  "Dude, these are awesome!"

  It was hard to doubt his sincerity; he'd never called me dude before. I mounted a couple more steps and then poked his bluejeaned butt with the tip of my crutch. "Make room."

  He stepped aside, pulling the dolly with him, so I could climb the rest of the way up to Little Pink. He was still staring at the pictures.

  "Jack, is this guy at the Scoto really okay? Do you know?"

  "My Mom says he is, and that's good enough for me." Meaning, I think, that it should be good enough for me, too. I guessed it would have to be. "She didn't tell me anything about the other partners--I think there are two more--but she says Mr. Nannuzzi's okay."

  Jack had called in a favor for me. I was touched.

  "And if he doesn't like these," Jack finished, "he's wack."

  "You think so, huh?"

  He nodded.

  From downstairs, Wireman called cheerfully: "Knock-knock! I'm here for the field trip. Are we still going? Who's got my name-tag? Was I supposed to pack a lunch?"

  vi

  I had pictured a bald, skinny, professorial man with blazing brown eyes--an Italian Ben Kingsley--but Dario Nannuzzi turned out to be fortyish, plump, courtly, and possessed of a full head of hair. I was close on the eyes, though. They didn't miss a trick. I saw them widen once--slightly but perceptibly--when Wireman carefully unwrapped the last painting I'd brought, Roses Grow from Shells. The pictures were lined up against the back wall of the gallery, which was currently devoted mostly to photographs by Stephanie Shachat and oils by William Berra. Better stuff, I thought, than I could do in a century.

  Although there had been that slight widening of the eyes.

  Nannuzzi went down the line from first to last, then went again. I had no idea if that was good or bad. The dirty truth was that I had never been in an art gallery in my life before that day. I turned to ask Wireman what he thought, but Wireman had withdrawn and was talking quietly with Jack, both of them watching Nannuzzi look at my paintings.

  Nor were they the only ones, I realized. The end of January is a busy season in the pricey shops along Florida's west coast. There were a dozen or so look-ie-loos in the good-sized Scoto Gallery (Nannuzzi later used the far more dignified term "potential patrons"), eyeing the Shachat dahlias, William Berra's gorgeous but touristy oils of Europe, and a few eye-popping, cheerfully feverish sculptures I'd missed in the anxiety of getting my own stuff unwrapped--these were by a guy named David Gerstein.

  At first I thought it was the sculptures--jazz musicians, crazy swimmers, throbbing city scenes--that were drawing the casual afternoon browsers. And some glanced at them, but most didn't even do that. It was my pictures they were looking at.

  A man with what Floridians call a Michigan tan--that can mean skin that's either dead white or burned lobster red--tapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. The other was interlaced with his wife's fingers. "Do you know who the artist is?" he asked.

  "Me," I muttered, and felt my face grow hot. I felt as if I were confessing to having spent the last week or so downloading pictures of Lindsay Lohan.

  "Good for you!" his wife said warmly. "Will you be showing?"

  Now they were all looking at me. Sort of the way you might look at a new species of puffer-fish that may or may not be the sushi du jour. That was how it felt, anyway.

  "I don't know if I'll be snowing. Showing." I could feel more blood stacking up in my cheeks. Shame-blood, which was bad. Anger-blood, which was worse. If it spilled out, it would be anger at myself, but these people wouldn't know that.

  I opened my mouth to pour out words, and closed it. Take it slow, I thought, and wished I had Reba. These people would probably view a doll-toting artist as normal. They had lived through Andy Warhol, after all.

  Take it slow. I can do this.

  "What I mean to say is I haven't been working long, and I don't know what the procedure is."

  Quit fooling yourself, Edgar. You know what they're interested in. Not your pictures but your empty sleeve. You're Artie the One-Armed Artist. Why not just cut to the chase and tell them to fuck off?

  That was ridiculous, of course, but--

  But now I was goddamned if everyone in the gallery wasn't standing around. Those who'd been up front looking at Ms. Shachat's flowers had been drawn by simple curiosity. It was a familiar grouping; I had seen similar clusters standing around the peepholes in board fences at a hundred construction sites.

  "I'll tell you what the procedure is," said another fellow with a Michigan tan. He was swag-bellied, sporting a little garden of gin-blossoms on his nose, and wearing a tropical shirt that hung almost to his knees. His white shoes matched his perfectly combed white hair. "It's simple. Just two steps. Step one is you tell me how much you want for that one." He pointed to Sunset with Seagull. "Step two is I write the check."

  The little crowd laughed. Dario Nannuzzi didn't. He beckoned to me.

  "Excuse me," I said to the white-haired man.

  "Price of poker just went up, my friend," someone said to Gin-Blossoms, and there was laughter. Gin-Blossoms joined in, but didn't look really amused.

  I noticed all this as though in a dream.

  Nannuzzi smiled at me, then turned to the patrons, who were still looking at my paintings. "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Freemantle didn't come in to sell anything today, only for an opinion on his work. Please respect his privacy and my professional situation." Whatever that is, I thought, bemused. "May I suggest that you browse the works on display while we step into the rear quarters for a little while? Ms. Aucoin, Mr. Brooks, and Mr. Castellano will be pleased to answer all your questions."

  "My opinion is that you ought to sign this man up," said a severe-looking woman with her graying hair drawn back into a bun and a kind of wrecked beauty still lingering on her face. There was actually a smattering of applause. My feeling of being in a dream deepened.

  An ethereal young man floated toward us from the rear. Nannuzzi might have summoned him, but I was damned if I knew just how. They spoke briefly, and then the young man produced a big roll of stickers. They were ovals with the letters NFS embossed on them in silver. Nannuzzi removed one, bent toward the first painting, then hesitated and gave me a look of reproach. "These haven't been sealed in any way."

  "Uh . . . guess not," I said. I was blushing again. "I don't . . . exactly know what that is."

  "Dario, what you're dealing with here is a true American primitive," said the severe-looking woman. "If he's been painting longer than three years, I'll buy you dinner at Zoria's, along with a bottle of wine." She turned her wrecked but still almost gorgeous face to me.

  "When and if there's something for you to write about, Mary," Nannuzzi said, "I'll call you myself."

  "You'd better," she said. "And I'm not even going to ask his name--do you see what a good girl I am?" She twiddled her fingers at me and slipped through the little crowd.

  "Not much need to ask," Jack said, and of course he was right. I had signed each of the oils in the lower left corner, just as neatly as I had signed all invoices, work orders, and contracts in my other life: Edgar Freemantle.

  vii

  Nannuzzi settled for dabbing his NFS stickers on the upper righthand corners of the paintings, where they stuck up like the
tabs of file-folders. Then he led Wireman and me into his office. Jack was invited but elected to stay with the pictures.

  In the office, Nannuzzi offered us coffee, which we declined, and water, which we accepted. I also accepted a couple of Tylenol capsules.

  "Who was that woman?" Wireman asked.

  "Mary Ire," Nannuzzi said. "She's a fixture on the Suncoast art scene. Publishes a free culture-vulture newspaper called Boulevard. It comes out once a month during most of the year, once every two weeks during the tourist season. She lives in Tampa--in a coffin, according to some wits in this business. New local artists are her favorite thing."

  "She looked extremely sharp," Wireman said.

  Nannuzzi shrugged. "Mary's all right. She's helped a lot of artists, and she's been around forever. That makes her important in a town where we live--to a large extent--on the transient trade."

  "I see," Wireman said. I was glad someone did. "She's a facilitator."

  "More," Nannuzzi said. "She's a kind of docent. We like to keep her happy. If we can, of course."

  Wireman was nodding. "There's a nice artist-and-gallery economy here on the west coast of Florida. Mary Ire understands it and fosters it. So if the Happy Art Galleria down the street discovers they can sell paintings of Elvis done in macaroni on velvet for ten thousand dollars a pop, Mary would--"

  "She'd blow them out of the water," Nannuzzi said. "Contrary to the belief of the art snobs--you can usually pick them out by their black clothes and teeny-tiny cell phones--we're not venal."

  "Got it off your chest?" Wireman asked, not quite smiling.

  "Almost," he said. "All I'm saying is that Mary understands our situation. We sell good stuff, most of us, and sometimes we sell great stuff. We do our best to find and develop new artists, but some of our customers are too rich for their own good. I'm thinking of fellows like Mr. Costenza out there, who was waving his checkbook around, and the ladies who come in with their dogs dyed to match their latest coats." Nannuzzi showed his teeth in a smile I was willing to bet not many of his richer clients ever saw.

  I was fascinated. This was another world.

  "Mary reviews every new show she can get to, which is most of them, and believe me, not all her reviews are raves."

  "But most are?" Wireman said.

  "Sure, because most of the shows are good. She'd tell you very little of the stuff she sees is great, because that isn't what tourist-track areas as a rule produce, but good? Yes. Stuff anyone can hang, then point to and say 'I bought that' without a quaver of embarrassment."