Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  I didn’t waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

  I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn’t know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

  “Let me clean off the side of your car,” Ilse said.

  “You’re going to lie down. You look beat half to death.”

  She offered a wan smile. “That’s just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that?”

  I nodded. “Go on, now. I’ll do the rinsing.” I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. “It’s all hooked up and ready to go.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did.”

  She managed another smile. “I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I’d kiss you, but my breath …”

  I kissed her. On the forehead. The skin was cool and damp. “Put your feet up, Miss Cookie—orders from headquarters.”

  She went. I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don’t really—that’s what Wireman says.

  Maybe sí, maybe no—that’s what Freemantle says.

  xiv

  There was something pulling me—maybe something that had been in me since the accident, but surely something that had come back from Duma Key Road with me. I let it pull. I’m not sure I could have stood against it in any case, but I didn’t even try; I was curious.

  My daughter’s purse was on the coffee table in the living room. I opened it, took out her wallet, and flipped through the pictures inside. Doing this made me feel a little like a cad, but only a little. It’s not as if you’re stealing anything, I told myself, but of course there are many ways of stealing, aren’t there?

  Here was the photo of Carson Jones she’d shown me at the airport, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him by himself. I wanted him with her. I wanted a picture of them as a couple. And I found one. It looked as if it had been taken at a roadside stand; there were baskets of cucumbers and corn behind them. They were smiling and young and beautiful. Their arms were around each other, and one of Carson Jones’s palms appeared to be resting on the swell of my daughter’s blue jeans–clad ass. Oh you crazy Christian. My right arm was still itching, a low, steady skin-crawl like prickly heat. I scratched at it, scratched through it, and got my ribs instead for the ten thousandth time. This picture was also in a protective see-through envelope. I slid it out, glanced over my shoulder—nervous as a burglar on his first job—at the partially open door of the room where Ilse was sleeping, then turned the picture over.

  I love you, Punkin!

  “Smiley”

  Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn’t think so. It might not be fair, but no—I didn’t think so. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for. Not one, but both. I turned the picture over again, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching their Kodachrome images with my right hand. Although pretending wasn’t what it felt like; I suppose I don’t have to tell you that by now.

  After some passage of time—I don’t know exactly how long—I returned the picture to its plastic sleeve and submerged her wallet beneath the tissues and cosmetics to approximately the same depth at which I had found it. Then I put her purse back on the coffee table and went into my bedroom to get Reba the Anger-Management Doll. I limped upstairs to Little Pink with her clamped between my stump and my side. I think I remember saying “I’m going to make you into Monica Seles” when I set Reba down in front of the window, but it could as easily have been Monica Goldstein; when it comes to memory, we all stack the deck. The gospel according to Wireman.

  I’m clearer than I want to be about most of what happened on Duma, but that particular afternoon seems very vague to me. I know that I fell into a frenzy of drawing, and that the maddening itch in my nonexistent right arm disappeared completely while I was working; I do not know but am almost sure that the reddish haze which always hung over my vision in those days, growing thicker when I was tired, disappeared for awhile.

  I don’t know how long I was in that state. I think quite awhile. Long enough so I was both exhausted and famished when I was finished.

  I went back downstairs and gobbled lunchmeat by the fridge’s frosty glow. I didn’t want to make an actual sandwich, because I didn’t want Ilse to know I’d felt well enough to eat. Let her go on thinking our problems had been caused by bad mayonnaise. That way we wouldn’t have to spend time hunting for other explanations.

  None of the other explanations I could think of were rational.

  After eating half a package of sliced salami and swilling a pint or so of sweet tea, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and fell into a sodden sleep.

  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 th
e 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. “Très 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 très 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 eli
te 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.