Duma Key

  That evening I took both the contract and the tape recorder back down to El Palacio. Wireman was making supper. Elizabeth was sitting in the China Parlor. The gimlet-eyed heron--which was a kind of unofficial housepet--stood on the walk outside, peering in with grim disapproval. The late-day sun filled the room with light. Yet it was not light. China Town was in disarray, the people and animals tumbled here and there, the buildings scattered to the four corners of the bamboo table. The pillared plantation-house was actually overturned. In her chair beside it, wearing her Captain Bligh expression, Elizabeth seemed to dare me to put things right.

  Wireman spoke from behind me, making me jump. "If I try to set things back up in any kind of pattern, she sweeps it apart again. She's knocked a bunch to the floor and broken them."

  "Are they valuable?"

  "Some, but that's really not the point. When she's herself, she knows every one of them. Knows and loves. If she comes around and asks where Bo Peep is . . . or the Coaling Man . . . and I have to tell her she broke them, she'll be sad all day."

  "If she comes around."

  "Yes. Well."

  "Think I'll head on home, Wireman."

  "Gonna paint?"

  "That's the plan." I turned to the disarray on the table. "Wireman?"

  "Right here, vato."

  "Why does she mess them up when she's like this?"

  "I think . . . because she can't stand looking at what she's not."

  I started to turn around. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  "I'd just as soon you didn't look at me just now," he said. His voice was barely under control. "I'm not myself just now. Go out the front door and then cut back through the courtyard, if you want to take the beach. Would you do that?"

  I did that. And when I got back, I worked on his portrait. It was all right. By which I suppose I mean it was good. I could see his face in there, wanting to come out. Starting to rise. There was nothing special, but that was fine. It was always best when it was nothing special. I was happy, I remember that. I was at peace. The shells murmured. My right arm itched, but very low and deep. The window giving on the Gulf was a rectangle of blackness. Once I went downstairs and ate a sandwich. I turned on the radio and found The Bone: J. Geils doing "Hold Your Lovin." J. Geils was nothing special, only great--a gift from the gods of rock and roll. I painted and Wireman's face rose a little more. It was a ghost now. It was a ghost haunting the canvas. But it was a harmless ghost. If I turned around, Wireman wouldn't be standing at the head of the stairs where Tom Riley had been standing, and down the beach at El Palacio de Asesinos, the left side of Wireman's world was still dark; it was just a thing I knew. I painted. The radio played. Below the music, the shells whispered.

  At some point I quit, showered, and went to bed. There were no dreams.

  When I think back to my time on Duma Key, those days in February and March when I was working on Wireman's portrait seem like the best days.

  xvi

  Wireman called the next day at ten. I was already at my easel. "Am I interrupting?"

  "It's okay," I said. "I can use a break." This was a lie.

  "We missed you this morning." A pause. "Well, you know. I missed you. She . . ."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "The contract's a bunny-hug. Very little to fuck with. It says you and the gallery split right down the middle, but I'm gonna cap that. Fifty-fifty shall not live after gross sales reach a quarter-mil. Once you pass that point, the split goes to sixty-forty, your favor."

  "Wireman, I'll never sell a quarter of a million dollars' worth of paintings!"

  "I'm hoping they'll feel exactly the same way, muchacho, which is why I'm also going to propose that the split goes to seventy-thirty at half a million."

  "Plus a handjob from Miss Florida," I said feebly. "Get that in there."

  "Noted. The other thing is this one-hundred-and-eighty-day termination clause. It ought to be ninety. I don't foresee a problem there, but I think it's interesting. They're afraid some big New York gallery is going to swoop down and carry you off."

  "Anything else about the contract I should know?"

  "Nope, and I sense you want to get back to work. I'll get in touch with Mr. Yoshida about these changes."

  "Any change in your vision?"

  "No, amigo. Wish I could say there was. But you keep painting."

  I was taking the phone away from my ear when he said, "Did you happen to see the news this morning?"

  "No, never turned it on. Why?"

  "County coroner says Candy Brown died of congestive heart failure. Just thought you'd like to know."

  xvii

  I painted. It was a slow go but far from a no go. Wireman swam into existence around the window where his brain swam on the Gulf. It was a younger Wireman than the one in the photos clipped to the sides of my easel, but that was okay; I consulted them less and less, and on the third day I took them down altogether. I didn't need them anymore. Still, I painted the way I supposed most other artists painted: as if it were a job instead of some speed-trip insanity that came and went in spasms. I did it with the radio on, now always tuned to The Bone.

  On the fourth day, Wireman brought me a revised contract and told me I could sign. He said Nannuzzi wanted to photograph my paintings and make slides for a lecture at the Selby Library in Sarasota in mid-March, a month before my show opened. The lecture, Wireman said, would be attended by sixty or seventy art patrons from the Tampa-Sarasota area. I told him fine and signed the contract.

  Dario came out that afternoon. I was impatient for him to click his pix and be gone so I could go back to work. Mostly to make conversation, I asked him who would be giving the lecture at the Selby Library.

  Dario looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, as if I had made a joke. "The one person in the world who is now conversant with your work," he said. "You."

  I gaped at him. "I can't give a lecture! I don't know anything about art!"

  He swept his arm at the paintings, which Jack and two part-timers from the Scoto were going to crate and transport to Sarasota the following week. They would remain crated, I assumed, in the storage area at the back of the gallery, until just before the show opened. "These say different, my friend."

  "Dario, these people know stuff! They've taken courses! I'll bet most of them were art majors, for Christ's sake! What do you want me to do, stand up there and say duh?"

  "That's pretty much what Jackson Pollock did when he talked about his work. Often while drunk. And it made him rich." Dario came over to me and took me by the stump. That impressed me. Very few people will touch the stump of a limb; it's as if they believe, down deep, that amputation might be catching. "Listen, my friend, these are important people. Not just because they have money, but because they're interested in new artists and each one knows three more who feel the same. After the lecture--your lecture--the talk will start. The kind of talk that almost always turns into that magical thing called 'buzz.' "

  He paused, twiddling the strap of his camera and smiling a little.

  "All you have to do is talk about how you began, and how you grew--"

  "Dario, I don't know how I grew!"

  "Then say that. Say anything! You're an artist, for God's sake!"

  I left it at that. The threatened lecture still seemed distant to me, and I wanted him out of there. I wanted to turn on The Bone, pull the cloth off the painting on the easel, and go back to work on Wireman Looks West. Want the dirty-ass truth? The painting was no longer about some hypothetical magic trick. Now it was its own magic trick. I had become very selfish about it, and anything that might come after--a promised interview with Mary Ire, the lecture, the show itself--seemed to be not ahead of me but somehow far above me. The way rain on the surface of the Gulf must seem to a fish.

  During that first week of March, it was all about daylight. Not sunset light but daylight. How it filled Little Pink and seemed to lift it. That week it was about the music from the radio, anything by the Allman Brothers, Molly H
atchet, Foghat. It was about J. J. Cale beginning "Call Me the Breeze" by saying "Here's another of your old rock n roll favorites; shuffle on down to Broadway," and how when I turned the radio off and cleaned my brushes, I could hear the shells under the house. It was about the ghostface I saw, the one belonging to a younger man who had yet to see the view from Duma. There was a song--I think by Paul Simon--with the line If I'd never loved, I never would have cried. That was this face. It wasn't a real face, not quite real, but I was making it real. It was growing around the brain that was floating on the Gulf. I didn't need photographs anymore, because this was a face I knew. This one was a memory.

  xviii

  March fourth was hot all day, but I didn't bother turning on the air conditioning. I painted in nothing but a pair of gym shorts, with the sweat trickling down my face and sides. The telephone rang twice. The first time it was Wireman.

  "We haven't seen much of you in these parts lately, Edgar. Come to supper?"

  "I think I'm going to pass, Wireman. Thanks."

  "Painting, or tired of our society down here at El Palacio? Or both?"

  "Just the painting part. I'm almost done. Any change in the vision department?"

  "The left lamp is still out, but I bought an eyepatch for it, and when I wear it, I can read with my right eye for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch. This is a great leap forward, and I think I owe it to you."

  "I don't know if you do or not," I said. "This isn't the same as the picture I did of Candy Brown and Tina Garibaldi. Or of my wife and her . . . her friends, for that matter. This time there's no bam. Do you know what I mean when I say bam?"

  "Yes, muchacho."

  "But if something's going to happen, I think it'll happen soon. If not, you'll at least have a portrait of how you looked--maybe how you looked--when you were twenty-five."

  "Are you kiddin, amigo?"

  "No."

  "I don't think I even remember what I looked like when I was twenty-five."

  "How's Elizabeth? Any change in her?"

  He sighed. "She seemed a little better yesterday morning, so I set her up in the back parlor--there's a smaller table there, what I call the China Suburbs--and she threw a set of Wallendorf ballerinas on the floor. Smashed all eight. Irreplaceable, of course."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Last fall I never thought it could get this bad, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine."

  My second call came fifteen minutes later, and I threw my brush down on my work-table in exasperation. It was Jimmy Yoshida. It was hard to stay exasperated after being exposed to his excitement, which bordered on exuberance. He'd seen the slides, which he claimed were going to "knock everyone on their asses."

  "That's wonderful," I said. "At my lecture I intend to tell them, 'Get up off your asses' . . . and then walk out."

  He laughed as though this were the funniest thing he'd ever heard, then said, "Mainly I called to ask if there are any pictures you want marked NFS--not for sale."

  Outside there was a rumble that sounded like a big, heavily loaded truck crossing a plank bridge. I looked toward the Gulf--where there were no plank bridges--and realized I'd heard thunder far off to the west.

  "Edgar? Are you still there?"

  "Still here," I said. "Assuming anyone wants to buy, you can sell everything but the Girl and Ship series."

  "Ah."

  "That sounded like a disappointed ah."

  "I was hoping to buy one of those for the gallery. I had my eye on Number 2." And considering the terms of the contract, he would be buying it at a fifty per cent discount. Not bad, lad, my father might have said.

  "That series isn't done yet. Maybe when the rest of them are painted."

  "How many more will there be?"

  I'll keep painting them until I can read the fucking ghost-ship's name on the transom.

  I might have said this aloud if more thunder hadn't rumbled out in the west. "I guess I'll know when the time comes. Now, if you'll excuse me--"

  "You're working. Sorry. I'll let you get back to it."

  When I killed the cordless, I considered whether or not I did want to go back to work. But . . . I was close. If I forged ahead, I might be able to finish tonight. And I sort of liked the idea of painting while a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf.

  God help me, the idea struck me as romantic.

  So I turned up the radio, which I'd turned down to talk on the phone, and there was Axl Rose, screaming ever deeper into "Welcome to the Jungle." I picked up a brush and put it behind my ear. Then I picked up another and began to paint.

  xix

  The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out. Little Pink filled with gloom. The radio began to bray static with each burst of lightning. I paused long enough to turn it off, but I didn't turn on the lights.

  I don't remember exactly when it stopped being me that was doing the painting . . . and to this day I'm not sure that it ever stopped being me; maybe si, maybe no. All I know is that at some point I looked down and saw my right arm in the last of the failing daylight and the occasional stutters of lightning. The stump was tanned, the rest dead white. The muscles hung loose and flabby. There was no scar, no seam except the tan-line, but below there it itched like old dry fire. Then the lightning flashed again and there was no arm, there had never been an arm--not on Duma Key, at least--but the itch was still there, so bad it made you want to bite a piece out of something.

  I turned back to the canvas and the second I did, the itch poured in that direction like water let out of a bag, and the frenzy fell on me. The storm dropped on the Key as the dark came down and I thought of certain circus acts where the guy throws knives blindfolded at a pretty girl spreadeagled on a spinning wooden platter, and I think I laughed because I was painting blindfold, or almost. Every now and then the lightning would flash and Wireman would leap at me, Wireman at twenty-five, Wireman before Julia, before Esmeralda, before la loteria.

  I win, you win.

  A huge flash of lightning lit my window purple-white, and a great whooping gust of gale rode that electricity in from the Gulf, driving rain against the glass so hard I thought (in the part of my mind still capable of thought) that it must surely break. A munitions dump exploded directly overhead. And beneath me the murmur of the shells had become the gossip of dead things telling secrets in bone voices. How could I not have heard that before? Dead things, yes! A ship had come here, a ship of the dead with rotted sails, and it had offloaded living corpses. They were under this house, and the storm had brought them to life. I could see them pushing up through the boneyard blanket of the shells, pallid jellies with green hair and seagull eyes, crawling over each other in the dark and talking, talking, talking. Yes! Because they had a lot to catch up on, and who knew when the next storm might come and bring them to life again?

  Yet still I painted. I did it in terror and in the dark, my arm moving up and down so that for a little while there I seemed to actually be conducting the storm. I couldn't have stopped. And at some point, Wireman Looks West was done. My right arm told me so. I slashed my initials--EF--in the lower left corner and then broke the brush in two, using both hands to do it. The pieces I dropped on the floor. I staggered away from my easel, crying out for whatever was going on to stop. And it would; surely it would; the picture was done and surely now it would.

  I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. I thought: Apple, orange. I thought, I win, you win. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and surely Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors.

  I knew where they had come from.
They had crawled out of the shells.

  They started up the stairs toward me, hand in hand. Thunder exploded a mile overhead. I tried to scream. I couldn't. I thought, I am not seeing this. I thought, I am.

  "I can do this," one of the girls said. She spoke in the voice of the shells.

  "It was red," the other girl said. She spoke in the voice of the shells. They were halfway up now. Their heads were little more than skulls with wet hair draggling down the sides.

  "Sit in the char," they said together, like girls chanting a skip-rope rhyme . . . but they spoke in the voice of the shells. "Sit in the burn."

  They reached up for me with terrible fishbelly fingers.

  I fainted at the head of the stairs.

  xx

  The telephone was ringing. That was my Telephone Winter.

  I opened my eyes and groped for the bedside lamp, wanting light right away because I'd just had the worst nightmare of my life. Instead of finding the lamp, my fingers struck a wall. At the moment they did, I became aware that my head was cocked at a strange, painful angle against that same wall. Thunder rumbled--but faint and sullen; it was going-away thunder now--and that was enough to bring everything back with painful, frightening clarity. I wasn't in bed. I was in Little Pink. I had fainted because--

  My eyes flew open. My ass was on the landing, my legs trailing down the stairs. I thought of the two drowned girls--no, it was more, it was an instant of total, brilliant recall--and shot to my feet without feeling my bad hip at all. My concentration was fixed entirely on the three light-switches at the head of the stairs, but even as my fingers found them I thought: Won't work, the storm will have knocked out the power.

  But they did work, banishing the dark in the studio and the stairwell. I had a nasty moment when I saw sand and water at the foot of the stairs, but the light reached far enough for me to see that the front door had blown open.

  Surely it had just blown open.

  In the living room, the phone quit and the answering machine kicked in. My recorded voice invited the caller to leave a message at the sound of the beep. The caller was Wireman.

  "Edgar, where are you?" I was too disoriented to tell if I was hearing excitement, dismay, or terror in his voice. "Call me, you need to call me right away!" And then a click.