Duma Key Read online

  xv

  Sunsets.

  Sometimes it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black. When I woke up that evening, another day was going down in glory. I thudded into the big main room on my crutch, stiff and wincing (the first ten minutes were always the worst). The door to Ilse's room was standing open and her bed was empty.

  "Ilse?" I called.

  For a moment there was no answer. Then she called back from upstairs. "Daddy? Holy crow, did you do this? When did you do this?"

  All thought of aches and pains left me. I got up to Little Pink as fast as I could, trying to remember what I'd drawn. Whatever it was, I hadn't made any effort to put it out of sight. Suppose it was something really awful? Suppose I'd gotten the bright idea of doing a crucifixion caricature, with The Gospel Hummingbird riding the cross?

  Ilse was standing in front of my easel, and I couldn't see what was there. Her body was blocking it out. Even if she'd been standing to one side, the only light in the room was coming from that bloody sunset; the pad would have been nothing but a black rectangle against the glare.

  I flicked on the lights, praying I hadn't done something to distress the daughter who had come all this way to make sure I was okay. From her voice, I hadn't been able to tell. "Ilse?"

  She turned to me, her face bemused rather than angry. "When did you do this one?"

  "Well . . ." I said. "Stand aside a little, would you?"

  "Is your memory playing tricks again? It is, isn't it?"

  "No," I said. "Well, yeah." It was the beach outside the window, I could tell that much but no more. "As soon as I see it, I'm sure I'll . . . step aside, honey, you make a better door than a window."

  "Even though I am a pain, right?" She laughed. Rarely had the sound of laughter so relieved me. Whatever she'd found on the easel, it hadn't made her mad, and my stomach dropped back where it belonged. If she wasn't angry, the risk that I might get angry and spoil what had, on measure, been a pretty damned good visit went down.

  She stepped to the left, and I saw what I'd drawn while in my dazed, pre-nap state. Technically, it was probably the best thing I'd done since my first tentative pen-and-inks on Lake Phalen, but I thought it was no wonder she was puzzled. I was puzzled, too.

  It was the section of beach I could see through Little Pink's nearly wall-length window. The casual scribble of light on the water, achieved with a shade the Venus Company called Chrome, marked the time as early morning. A little girl in a tennis dress stood at the center of the picture. Her back was turned, but her red hair was a dead giveaway: she was Reba, my little love, that girlfriend from my other life. The figure was poorly executed, but you somehow knew that was on purpose, that she wasn't a real little girl at all, only a dream figure in a dream landscape.

  All around her feet, lying in the sand, were bright green tennis balls.

  Others floated shoreward on the mild waves.

  "When did you do it?" Ilse was still smiling--almost laughing. "And what the heck does it mean?"

  "Do you like it?" I asked. Because I didn't like it. The tennis balls were the wrong color because I hadn't had the right shade of green, but that wasn't why; I hated it because it felt all wrong. It felt like heartbreak.

  "I love it!" she said, and then did laugh. "C'mon, when did you do it? Give."

  "While you were sleeping. I went to lie down, but I felt queasy again, so I thought I better stay vertical for awhile. I decided to draw a little, see if things would settle. I didn't realize I had that thing in my hand until I got up here." I pointed to Reba, sitting propped against the window with her stuffed legs sticking out.

  "That's the doll you're supposed to yell at when you forget things, right?"

  "Something like that. Anyway, I drew the picture. It took maybe an hour. By the time I was finished, I felt better." Although I remembered very little about making the drawing, I remembered enough to know this story was a lie. "Then I lay down and took a nap. End of story."

  "Can I have it?"

  I felt a surge of dismay, but couldn't think of a way to say no that wouldn't hurt her feelings or sound crazy. "If you really want it. It's not much, though. Wouldn't you rather have one of Freemantle's Famous Sunsets? Or the mailbox with the rocking horse! I could--"

  "This is the one I want," she said. "It's funny and sweet and even a little . . . I don't know . . . ominous. You look at her one way and you say, 'A doll.' You look another way and say, 'No, a little girl--after all, isn't she standing up?' It's amazing how much you've learned to do with colored pencils." She nodded decisively. "This is the one I want. Only you have to name it. Artists have to name their pictures."

  "I agree, but I wouldn't have any idea--"

  "Come on, come on, no weaseling. First thing to pop into your mind."

  I said, "All right--The End of the Game."

  She clapped her hands. "Perfect. Perfect! And you have to sign it, too. Ain't I bossy?"

  "You always were," I said. "Tres bossy. You must be feeling better."

  "I am. Are you?"

  "Yes," I said, but I wasn't. All at once I had a bad case of the mean reds. Venus doesn't make that color, but there was a new, nicely sharpened Venus Black in the gutter of the easel. I picked it up and signed my name by one of back-to doll's pink legs. Beyond her, a dozen wrong-green tennis balls floated on a mild wave. I didn't know what those rogue balls meant, but I didn't like them. I didn't like signing my name to this picture, either, but after I had, I jotted The End of the Game up one side. And what I felt was what Pam had taught the girls to say when they were little, and had finished some unpleasant chore.

  Over-done with-gone.

  xvi

  She stayed two more days, and they were good days. When Jack and I took her back to the airport, she'd gotten some sun on her face and arms and seemed to give off her own benevolent radiation: youth, health, well-being.

  Jack had found a travel-tube for her new picture.

  "Daddy, promise you'll take care of yourself and call if you need me," she said.

  "Roger that," I said, smiling.

  "And promise me you'll get someone to give you an opinion on your pictures. Someone who knows about that stuff."

  "Well--"

  She lowered her chin and frowned at me. When she did that it was again like looking at Pam when I'd first met her. "You better promise, or else."

  And because she meant it--the vertical line between her eyebrows said so--I promised.

  The line smoothed out. "Good, that's settled. You deserve to get better, you know. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that."

  "Of course I do," I said.

  Ilse went on as if she hadn't heard. "Because what happened wasn't your fault."

  I felt tears well up at that. I suppose I did know, but it was nice to hear someone else say it out loud. Someone besides Kamen, that is, whose job it was to scrape caked-on grime off those troublesome unwashed pots in the sinks of the subconscious.

  She nodded at me. "You are going to get better. I say so, and I'm tres bossy."

  The loudspeaker honked: Delta flight 559, service to Cincinnati and Cleveland. The first leg of Ilse's trip home.

  "Go on, hon, better let em wand your bod and check your shoes."

  "I have one other thing to say first."

  I threw up the one hand I still had. "What now, precious girl?"

  She smiled at that: it was what I'd called both girls when my patience was finally nearing an end.

  "Thank you for not telling me that Carson and I are too young to be engaged."

  "Would it have done any good?"

  "No."

  "No. Besides, your mother will do an adequate job of that for both of us, I think."

  Ilse scrunched her mouth into an ouch shape, then laughed. "So will Linnie . . . but only cause I got ahead of her for once."

  She gave me one more strong hug. I breathed deep of her hair--that
good sweet smell of shampoo and young, healthy woman. She pulled back and looked at my man-of-all-work, standing considerately off to one side. "You better take good care of him, Jack. He's the goods."

  They hadn't fallen in love--no breaks there, muchacho--but he gave her a warm smile. "I'll do my best."

  "And he promised to get an opinion on his pictures. You're a witness."

  Jack smiled and nodded.

  "Good." She gave me one more kiss, this one on the tip of the nose. "Be good, father. Heal thyself." Then she went through the doors, festooned with bags but still walking briskly. She looked back just before they closed. "And get some paints!"

  "I will!" I called back, but I don't know if she heard me; in Florida, doors whoosh shut in a hurry to save the air conditioning. For a moment or two everything in the world blurred and grew brighter; there was a pounding in my temples and a damp prickle in my nose. I bent my head and worked briskly at my eyes with the thumb and second finger of my hand while Jack once more pretended to see something interesting in the sky. There was a word and it wouldn't come. I thought borrow, then tomorrow.

  Give it time, don't get mad, tell yourself you can do this, and the words usually come. Sometimes you don't want them, but they come, anyway. This one was sorrow.

  Jack said, "You want to wait for me to bring the car, or--"

  "No, I'm good to walk." I wrapped my fingers around the grip of my crutch. "Just keep an eye on the traffic. I don't want to get run down crossing the road. Been there, done that."

  xvii

  We stopped at Art & Artifacts of Sarasota on our way back, and while we were in there, I asked Jack if he knew anything about Sarasota art galleries.

  "Way ahead of you, boss. My Mom used to work in one called the Scoto. It's on Palm Avenue."

  "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

  "It's the hot-shit gallery on the arty side of town," he said, then re-thought that. "I mean that in a nice way. And the people who run it are nice . . . at least they always were to my Mom, but . . . you know . . ."

  "It is a hot-shit gallery."

  "Yeah."

  "Meaning big prices?"

  "It's where the elite meet." He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

  "Then that's settled," I said, "because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son."

  I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.

  xviii

  Back at Big Pink, he helped me into the house with my loot--five bags, two boxes, and a stack of nine stretched canvases. Almost a thousand dollars' worth of stuff. I told him we'd worry about getting it upstairs the next day. Painting was the last thing on earth I wanted to do that night.

  I limped across the living room toward the kitchen, meaning to put together a sandwich, when I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking. I thought it must be Ilse, saying her flight had been cancelled due to weather or equipment problems.

  It wasn't. The voice was pleasant but cracked with age, and I knew who it was at once. I could almost see those enormous blue sneakers propped on the bright footplates of her wheelchair.

  "Hello, Mr. Freemantle, welcome to Duma Key. It was a pleasure to see you the other day, if only briefly. One assumes the young lady with you was your daughter, given the resemblance. Have you taken her back to the airport? One rather hopes so."

  There was a pause. I could hear her breathing, the loud, not-quite-emphysemic respiration of a person who has probably spent a great deal of her life with a cigarette in one hand. Then she spoke again.

  "All things considered, Duma Key has never been a lucky place for daughters."

  I found myself thinking of Reba in a very unlikely tennis dress, surrounded by small fuzzy balls as more came in on the next wave.

  "One hopes we will meet, in the course of time. Goodbye, Mr. Freemantle."

  There was a click. Then it was just me and the restless grinding sound of the shells under the house.

  The tide was in.

  How to Draw a Picture (III)

  Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that may play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. There's nothing as human as hunger. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art. That little girl I was telling you about? She found hers and used it.

  She thinks No more bed all day now. I go Daddy room, Daddy's study. Sometimes I say study, sometimes I say groody. It has a nice big window. They sit me in the char. I can see down up. Birds and nice. Too nice for me, so it makes me sat. Some clouds have wings. Some have blue eyes. Every sunset I cry from sat. Hurts to see. Hurts the down up in me. I could never say what I see and that makes me sat.

  She thinks SAD, that word is SAD. Sat is for how you feel in the char.

  She thinks If I could stop the hurt. If I could get it out like weewee. I cry and beg beg beg to say what I mean. Nan can't hep. When I say "Color!" she touch her face and smile and say "Always was, always will be." Big girls don't help either. I'm so mad at them, why don't you listen, YOU BIG MEANIES! Then one day the twins come, Tessie and Lo-Lo. They talk special to each other, listen special to me. They don't understand me at first, but then. Tessie bring me paper. Lo-Lo bring me pencil and I "Ben-cil!" out my mouth and it makes them claff and lap their hands.

  She thinks I CAN ALMOST SAY THE NAME OF PENCIL!

  She thinks I can make the world on paper. I can draw what the words mean. I see tree, I make tree. I see bird, I make bird. It's good, like water from a glass.

  This is a little girl with a bandage wound around her head, wearing a little pink housecoat and sitting beside the window in her father's study. Her doll, Noveen, lies on the floor beside her. She has a board and on the board is a piece of paper. She has just succeeded in drawing a claw that actually does bear a resemblance to the dead loblolly pine outside the window.

  She thinks I will have more paper, please.

  She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

  It must have been like being given back your tongue after you thought it had been stilled forever. And more. Better. It was a gift of herself, of ELIZABETH. Even from those incredibly brave first drawings, she must have understood what was happening. And wanted more.

  Her gift was hungry. The best gifts--and the worst--always are.

  4--Friends with Benefits

  i

  On New Year's afternoon, I woke from a brief but refreshing nap thinking of a certain kind of shell--the orangey kind with white speckles. I don't know if I dreamed about it or not, but I wanted one. I was ready to start experimenting with paints, and I thought one of those orange shells would be just the thing to plop down in the middle of a Gulf of Mexico sunset.

  I began prospecting southward along the beach, accompanied only by my shadow and two or three dozen of the tiny birds--Ilse called them peeps--that prospect endlessly for food at the edge of the water. Farther out, pelicans cruised, then folded their wings and dropped like stones. I wasn't thinking of exercise that afternoon, I wasn't monitoring the pain in my hip, and I wasn't counting steps. I wasn't thinking of anything, really; my mind was gliding like the pelicans before they spotted dinner in the caldo largo below them. Consequently, when I finally spotted the kind of shell I wanted and looked back, I was stunned at how small Big Pink had become.

  I stood bouncing the orange shell up and down in my hand, all at once feeling the broken-glass throb in my hip. It started there and went pulsing all the way down my leg. Yet the tracks I saw stretching back toward my house hardly dragged at all. It occurred to me then that I'd been babying myself--maybe a little, maybe quite a lot. Me and my stupid little Numbers Game. Today I had forgotten about giving myself an anxious mini-physical e
very five minutes or so. I'd simply . . . gone for a walk. Like any normal person.

  So I had a choice. I could baby myself going back, stopping every now and then to do one of Kathi Green's side-stretches, which hurt like hell and didn't seem to do much of anything else, or I could just walk. Like any normal unhurt person.

  I decided to go with that. But before I started, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a striped beach chair a ways farther south. There was a table beside it with an umbrella, striped like the chair, over it. A man was sitting in the chair. What was only a speck glimpsed from Big Pink had become a tall, heavyset guy dressed in jeans and a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. His hair was long and blowing in the breeze. I couldn't make out his features; we were still too far apart for that. He saw me looking and waved. I waved back, then turned and began trudging for home along my own footprints. That was my first encounter with Wireman.

  ii

  My final thought before turning in that night was that I'd probably find myself hobbling through the second day of the New Year almost too sore to walk. I was delighted to find that wasn't true; a hot bath seemed to take care of the residual stiffness.

  So of course I struck off again the following afternoon. No set goal; no New Year's resolution; no Numbers Game. Just a guy strolling on the beach, sometimes veering close enough to the mild run of the waves to scatter the peeps aloft in a smutchy cloud. Sometimes I'd pick up a shell and put it in my pocket (in a week I'd be carrying a plastic bag to store my treasures in). When I got close enough to make out the heavyset guy in some detail--today wearing a blue shirt and khakis, almost certainly barefoot--I once again turned and headed back to Big Pink. But not before giving him a wave, which he returned.

  That was the real beginning of my Great Beach Walks. Every afternoon they got a little longer, and I saw the heavyset man in his striped beach chair a little more clearly. It seemed obvious to me that he had his own routine; in the mornings he came out with the old lady, pushing her down a wooden tongue of decking that I hadn't been able to see from Big Pink. In the afternoons he came out on his own. He never took off his shirt, but his arms and face were as dark as old furniture in a formal home. Beside him, on his table, were a tall glass and a pitcher that might have held ice water, lemonade, or gin and tonic. He always waved; I always waved back.