Duma Key: A Novel Page 18

  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 eyepopping, 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 s
igned 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.”

  I thought Nannuzzi had just given a perfect definition of mediocrity—I had seen the principle at work in hundreds of architectural drawings—but again I kept silent.

  “Mary shares our interest in new artists. There may come a time when it would be in your interest to sit down with her, Mr. Freemantle. Prior to a showing of your work, let us say.”

  “Would you be interested in having such a showing here at the Scoto?” Wireman asked me.

  My lips were dry. I attempted to moisten them with my tongue, but that was dry, too. So I took a sip of my water and then said, “That’s getting the harm before the force.” I paused. Gave myself time. Took another sip of water. “Sorry. Cart before the horse. I came in to find out what you think, Signor Nannuzzi. You’re the expert.”

  He unlaced his fingers from the front of his vest and leaned forward. The squeak his chair made in the small room seemed very loud to me. But he smiled and the smile was warm. It brightened his eyes, made them compelling. I could see why he was a success when it came to selling pictures, but I don’t think he was selling just then. He reached across his desk and took my hand—the one I painted with, the only one I had left.

  “Mr. Freemantle, you do me honor, but my father Augustino is the Signor of our family. I am happy to be a mister. As for your paintings, yes, they’re good. Considering how long you’ve been at work, they are very good indeed. Maybe more than good.”

  “What makes them good?” I asked. “If they’re good, what makes them good?”

  “Truth,” he said. “It shines through in every stroke.”

  “But most of them are only sunsets! The things I added …” I lifted my hand, then dropped it. “They’re just gimmicks.”

  Nannuzzi laughed. “You’ve learned such mean words! Where? Reading The New York Times art pages? Listening to Bill O’Reilly? Both?” He pointed to the ceiling. “Lightbulb? Gimmick!” He pointed to his own chest. “Pacemaker? Gimmick!” He tossed his hands in the air. The lucky devil had two to toss. “Throw out your mean words, Mr. Freemantle. Art should be a place of hope, not doubt. And your doubts rise from inexperience, which is not a dishonorable thing. Listen to me. Will you listen?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s why I came.”

  “When I say truth, I mean beauty.”

  “John Keats,” Wireman said. “ ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn.’ All we know, all we need to know. An oldie but still a goodie.”

  Nannuzzi paid no attention. He was leaning forward over his desk and looking at me. “For me, Mr. Freemantle—”

  “Edgar.”

  “For me, Edgar, that sums up what all art is for, and the only way it can be judged.”

  He smiled—a trifle defensively, I thought.

  “I don’t want to think too much about art, you see. I don’t want to criticize it. I don’t want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties—although sometimes in my line of work I’m forced to do all those things. What I want to do is clutch my heart and fall down when I see it.”

  Wireman burst out laughing and raised both hands in the air. “Yes, Lawd!” he proclaimed. “I don’t know if that guy out there was clutching his heart and falling down, but he surely was ready to clutch his checkbook.”

  Nannuzzi said, “Inside himself, I think he did fall down. I think they all did.”

  “Actually, I do too,” Wireman said. He was no longer smiling.

  Nannuzzi remained fixed on me. “No talk of gimmicks. What you are after in most of these paintings is perfectly straightforward: you’re looking for a way to reinvent the most popular and hackneyed of all Florida subjects, the tropical sunset. You’ve been trying to find your way past the cliché.”

  “Yes, that’s pretty much it. So I copied Dalí—”

  Nannuzzi waved a hand. “Those paintings out there are nothing like Dalí. And I won’t discuss schools of art with you, Edgar, or stoop to using words ending in ism. You don’t belong to any school of art, because you don’t know any.”

  “I know buildings,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you paint buildings?”

  I shook my head. I could have told him the thought had never crossed my mind, but it would have been closer to the truth to say it had never crossed my missing arm.

  “Mary was right. You’re an American primitive. Nothing wrong with that. Grandma Moses was an American primitive. Jackson Pollock was another. The point is, Edgar, you’re talented.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. I simply couldn’t figure out what to say. Wireman helped me.

  “Thank the man, Edgar,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Very welcome. And if you do decide to show, Edgar, please come to the Scoto first. I’ll make you the best deal of any gallery on Palm Avenue. That’s a promise.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course I’ll come here first.”

  “And of course I’ll vet the contract,” Wireman said with a choirboy’s smile.

  Nannuzzi smiled in return. “You should and I welcome it. Not that you’ll find a lot to vet; the standard Scoto first-artist contract is a page and half long.”


  “Mr. Nannuzzi,” I said, “I really don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You already did,” he said. “I clutched my heart—what’s left of it—and fell down. Before you go, there’s one more matter.” He found a pad on his desk, scribbled on it, then tore off the sheet and handed it to me like a doctor handing a patient a prescription. The word written on it in large slanting capitals even looked like a word you’d see on a doctor’s prescription: LIQUIN.

  “What’s Liquin?” I asked.

  “A preservative. I suggest you begin by putting it on finished works with a paper towel. Just a thin coat. Let it dry for twenty-four hours, then put on a second coat. That will keep your sunsets bright and fresh for centuries.” He looked at me so solemnly I felt my stomach rise a little toward my chest. “I don’t know if they’re good enough to deserve such longevity, but maybe they are. Who knows? Maybe they are.”

  viii

  We ate dinner at Zoria’s, the restaurant Mary Ire had mentioned, and I let Wireman buy me a bourbon before the meal. It was the first truly stiff drink I’d had since the accident, and it hit me in a funny way. Everything seemed to grow sharper until the world was drenched with light and color. The angles of things—doors, windows, even the cocked elbows of the passing waiters—seemed sharp enough to cut the air open and allow some darker, thicker atmosphere to come flowing out like syrup. The swordfish I ordered was delicious, the green beans snapped between my teeth, and the crème brûlée was almost too rich to finish (but too rich to leave). The conversation among the three of us was cheerful; there was plenty of laughter. Still, I wanted the meal to be over. My head still ached, although the throb had slid to the back of my skull (like a weight in one of those barroom bowling games), and the bumper-to-bumper traffic we could see on Main Street was distracting. Every horn-honk sounded ill-tempered and menacing. I wanted Duma. I wanted the blackness of the Gulf and the quiet conversation of the shells below me as I lay in my bed with Reba on the other pillow.