Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  And by the time the waiter came to ask if we wanted more coffee, Jack was carrying the conversation almost single-handed. In my state of hyper-awareness I could see that I wasn’t the only one who needed a change of venue. Given the low lighting in the restaurant and Wireman’s mahogany tan, it was hard to tell just how much color he’d lost, but I thought quite a bit. Also, that left eye of his was weeping again.

  “Just the check,” Wireman said, and then managed a smile. “Sorry to cut the celebration short, but I want to get back to my lady. If that’s okay with you guys.”

  “Fine by me,” Jack said. “A free meal and home in time to watch SportsCenter? Such a deal.”

  Wireman and I waited outside the parking garage while Jack went to get the rented van. Here the light was brighter, but what it showed didn’t make me feel better about my new friend; in the glow spilling out of the garage, his complexion looked almost yellow. I asked him if he was okay.

  “Wireman’s as fine as paint,” he said. “Miss Eastlake, on the other hand, has put in a few restless, shitty nights. Calling for her sisters, calling for her Pa, calling for everything but her pipe and bowl and fiddlers three. There’s something to that full-moon shit. It makes no logical sense, but there it is. Diana calls on a wavelength to which only the tottering mind is attuned. Now that it’s in its last quarter, she’ll start sleeping through again. Which means I can start sleeping through again. I hope.”

  “Good.”

  “If I were you, Edgar, I’d sleep on this gallery thing, and for more than one night. Also, keep painting. You’ve been a busy bee, but I doubt if you have enough pictures yet to—”

  There was a tiled pillar behind him. He staggered back against it. If it hadn’t been there, I’m pretty sure he would have gone down. The effects of the bourbon were wearing off a little, but there was enough of that hyper-reality left for me to see what happened to his eyes when he lost his equilibrium. The right one looked down, as if to check out his shoes, while the bloodshot and weepy left one rolled up in its socket until the iris was no more than an arc. I had time to think that what I was seeing was surely impossible, eyes couldn’t go in two completely different directions like that. And that was probably true for people who were healthy. Then Wireman started to slide.

  I grabbed him. “Wireman? Wireman!”

  He gave his head a shake, then looked at me. Eyes front and all accounted for. The left one was glistening and bloodshot, that was all. He took out his hankie and wiped his cheek. He laughed. “I’ve heard of putting other people to sleep with a boring line of quack, but oneself? That’s ridiculous.”

  “You weren’t dozing off. You were … I don’t know what you were.”

  “Don’t be seely, dollink,” Wireman said.

  “No, your eyes got all funny.”

  “That’s called going to sleep, muchacho.” He gave me one of his patented Wireman looks: head cocked, eyebrows raised, corners of the mouth dimpled in the beginnings of a smile. But I thought he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “I have to see a doctor, have a checkup,” I said. “Do the MRI thing. I promised my friend Kamen. How about I make it a twofer?”

  Wireman was still leaning against the pillar. Now he straightened up. “Hey, here’s Jack with the van. That was quick. Step lively, Edgar—last bus to Duma Key, leaving now.”

  ix

  It happened again, on the way back, and worse, although Jack didn’t see it—he was busy piloting the van along Casey Key Road—and I’m pretty sure Wireman himself never knew. I had asked Jack if he minded skipping the Tamiami Trail, which is west coast Florida’s engagingly tacky Main Street, in favor of the narrower, twistier way. I wanted to watch the moon on the water, I said.

  “Gettin those little artist eccentricities, muchacho,” Wireman said from the back seat, where he was stretched out with his feet up. He wasn’t much of a stickler when it came to seatbelts, it seemed. “Next thing we know, you’ll be wearing a beret.” He pronounced it so it rhymed with garret.

  “Fuck you, Wireman,” I said.

  “I been fucked to the east and I been fucked to the west,” Wireman recited in tones of sentimental recollection, “but when it comes to the fuckin, yo mamma’s the best.” With that he lapsed into silence.

  I watched the moon go swimming through the black water to my right. It was hypnotic. I wondered if it would be possible to paint it the way it looked from the van: a moon in motion, a silver bullet just beneath the water.

  I was thinking these thoughts (and maybe drifting toward a doze) when I became aware of ghostly movement above the moon in the water. It was Wireman’s reflection. For a moment I had the crazy idea that he was jerking off back there, because his thighs appeared to be opening and closing and his hips seemed to be moving up and down. I shot a peek at Jack, but the Casey Key Road is a symphony of curves and Jack was absorbed in his driving. Besides, most of Wireman was right behind Jack’s seat, not even visible in the rear-view mirror.

  I looked over my left shoulder. Wireman wasn’t masturbating. Wireman wasn’t sleeping and having a vivid dream. Wireman was having a seizure. It was quiet, probably petit mal, but it was a seizure, all right; I’d employed an epileptic draftsman during the first ten years of The Freemantle Company’s existence, and I knew a seizure when I saw one. Wireman’s torso lifted and dropped four or five inches as his buttocks clenched and released. His hands jittered on his stomach. His lips were smacking as though he tasted something particularly good. And his eyes looked as they had outside the parking garage. By starlight that one-up, one-down look was weird beyond my ability to describe. Spittle ran from the left corner of his mouth; a tear from his welling left eye trickled into his shaggy sideburn.

  It went on for perhaps twenty seconds, then ceased. He blinked, and his eyes went back where they belonged. He was completely quiet for a minute. Maybe two. He saw me looking at him and said, “I’d kill for another drink or a peanut butter cup, and I suppose a drink is out of the question, huh?”

  “I guess it is if you want to make sure you hear her ring in the night,” I said, hoping I sounded casual.

  “Bridge to Duma Key dead ahead,” Jack told us. “Almost home, guys.”

  Wireman sat up and stretched. “It’s been a hell of a day, but I won’t be sorry to see my bed tonight, boys. I guess I’m getting old, huh?”

  x

  Although my leg was stiff, I got out of the van and stood next to him while he opened the door of the little iron box beside the gate to reveal a state-of-the-art security keypad.

  “Thanks for coming with me, Wireman.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But if you thank me again, muchacho, I’m going to have to punch you in the mouth. Sorry, but that’s just the way it’s gotta be.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “Thanks for sharing.”

  He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “I like you, Edgar. You got style, you got class, you got the lips to kiss my ass.”

  “Beautiful. I may cry. Listen, Wireman …”

  I could have told him about what had just happened to him. I came close. In the end, I decided not to. I didn’t know if it was the right decision or the wrong one, but I did know he might have a long night with Elizabeth Eastlake ahead of him. Also, that headache was still sitting in the back of my skull. I settled for asking him again if he wouldn’t consider letting me turn my promised doctor’s appointment into a double date.

  “I will consider it,” he said. “And I’ll let you know.”

  “Well don’t wait too long, because—”

  He raised a hand, stilling me, and for once his face was unsmiling. “Enough, Edgar. Enough for one night, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. I watched him go in, then went back to the van.

  Jack had the volume up. It was “Renegade.” He went to turn it down and I said, “No, that’s okay. Crank it.”

  “Really?” He turned around and headed back up the road. “Great band. You ever heard em before?”
r />   “Jack,” I said, “that’s Styx. Dennis DeYoung? Tommy Shaw? Where have you been all your life? In a cave?”

  Jack smiled guiltily. “I’m into country and even more into old standards,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’m a Rat Pack kind of guy.”

  The idea of Jack Cantori hanging with Dino and Frank made me wonder—and not for the first time that day—if any of this was really happening. I also wondered how I could remember that Dennis DeYoung and Tommy Shaw had been in Styx—that Shaw had in fact written the song currently blasting out of the van’s speakers—and sometimes not be able to remember my own ex-wife’s name.

  xi

  Both lights on the answering machine next to the living room phone were blinking: the one indicating that I had messages and the one indicating that the tape for recording messages was full. But the number in the MESSAGES WAITING window was only 1. I considered this with foreboding while the weight with my headache inside it slid a little closer to the front of my skull. The only two people I could think of who might call and leave a message so long it would use up the whole tape were Pam and Ilse, and in neither case would hitting PLAY MESSAGES be apt to bring me good news. It doesn’t take five minutes of recording-time to say Everything’s fine, call when you get a chance.

  Leave it until tomorrow, I thought, and a craven voice I hadn’t even known was in my mental repertoire (maybe it was new) was willing to go further. It suggested I simply delete the message without listening to it at all.

  “That’s right, sure,” I said. “And when whichever one it is calls back, I can just tell her the dog ate my answering machine.”

  I pushed PLAY. And as so often happens when we are sure we know what to expect, I drew a wild card. It wasn’t Pam and it wasn’t Ilse. The wheezy, slightly emphysematic voice coming from the answering machine belonged to Elizabeth Eastlake.

  “Hello, Edgar,” she said. “One hopes you had a fruitful afternoon and are enjoying your evening out with Wireman as much as I am my evening in with Miss … well, I forget her name, but she’s very pleasant. And one hopes you’ll notice that I have remembered your name. I’m enjoying one of my clear patches. I love and treasure them, but they make me sad, as well. It’s like being in a glider and rising on a gust of wind above a lowlying groundmist. For a little while one can see everything so clearly … and at the same time one knows the wind will die and one’s glider will sink back into the mist again. Do you see?”

  I saw, all right. Things were better for me now, but that was the world I’d woken up to, one where words clanged senselessly and memories were scattered like lawn furniture after a windstorm. It was a world where I had tried to communicate by hitting people and the only two emotions I really seemed capable of were fear and fury. One progresses beyond that state (as Elizabeth might say), but afterward one never quite loses the conviction that reality is gossamer. Behind its webwork? Chaos. Madness. The real truth, maybe, and the real truth is red.

  “But enough of me, Edgar. I called to ask a question. Are you one who creates art for money, or do you believe in art for art’s sake? I’m sure I asked when I met you—I’m almost positive—but I can’t remember your answer. I believe it must be art for art’s sake, or Duma should not have called you. But if you stay here for long …”

  Clear anxiety crept into her voice.

  “Edgar, one is sure you’ll make a very nice neighbor, I have no doubts on that score, but you must take precautions. I think you have a daughter, and I believe she visited you. Didn’t she? I seem to remember her waving to me. A pretty thing with blond hair? I may be confusing her with my sister Hannah—I tend to do that, I know I do—but in this case, I think I’m right. If you mean to stay, Edgar, you mustn’t invite your daughter back. Under no circumstances. Duma Key isn’t a safe place for daughters.”

  I stood looking down at the recorder. Not safe. Before she had said not lucky, or at least that was my recollection. Did those two things come to the same or not?

  “And your art. There is the matter of your art.” She sounded apologetic and a little breathless. “One does not like to tell an artist what to do; really, one cannot tell an artist what to do, and yet … oh dear …” She broke out in the loose, rattlebox cough of the lifelong smoker. “One does not like to speak of these things directly … or even know how to speak of them directly … but might I give you a word of advice, Edgar? As one who only appreciates, to one who creates? Might I be allowed that?”

  I waited. The machine was silent. I thought perhaps the tape had run its course. Under my feet the shells murmured quietly, as if sharing secrets. The gun, the fruit. The fruit, the gun. Then she began again.

  “If the people who run the Scoto or the Avenida should offer you a chance to show your work, I would advise you most strongly to say yes. So others can enjoy it, of course, but mainly to get as much of it off Duma as soon as you can.” She took a deep, audible breath, sounding like a woman preparing to finish some arduous chore. She also sounded completely and utterly sane, totally there and in the moment. “Do not let it accumulate. That is my advice to you, well-meant and without any … any personal agenda? Yes, that’s what I mean. Letting artistic work accumulate here is like letting too much electricity accumulate in a battery. If you do that, the battery may explode.”

  I didn’t know if that was actually true or not, but I took her meaning.

  “I can’t tell you why that should be, but it is,” she went on … and I had a sudden intuition that she was lying about that. “And surely if you believe in art for art’s sake, the painting is the important part, isn’t it?” Her voice was almost wheedling now. “Even if you don’t need to sell your paintings to buy your daily bread, sharing work … giving it to the world … surely artists care about such things, don’t they? The giving?”

  How would I know what was important to artists? I had only that day learned what sort of finish to put on my pictures to preserve them when I was done with them. I was a … what had Nannuzzi and Mary Ire called me? An American primitive.

  Another pause. Then: “I think I’ll stop now. I’ve said my piece. Just please think about what I’ve said if you mean to stay, Edward. And I look forward to you reading to me. Many poems, I hope. That will be a treat. Goodbye for now. Thank you for listening to an old woman.” A pause. Then she said, “The table is leaking. It must be. I’m so sorry.”

  I waited twenty seconds, then thirty. I had just about decided that she’d forgotten to hang up on her end and was reaching to push the STOP button on the answering machine when she spoke again. Just six words, and they made no more sense than the thing about the leaking table, but still they brought gooseflesh out on my arm and turned the hair on the nape of my neck into hackles.

  “My father was a skin diver,” Elizabeth Eastlake said. Each word was clearly enunciated. Then came the clear click of the phone being hung up on her end.

  “No more messages,” the phone robot said. “The message tape is full.”

  I stood staring down at the machine, thought of erasing the tape, then decided to save it and play it for Wireman. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I lay in the dark, feeling the soft throb of my head, while below me the shells whispered the last thing she’d said over and over: My father was a skin diver.

  8—Family Portrait

  i

  Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand—God, fate, maybe plain coincidence—lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

  I thought he’d go with me to see a doctor and we’d find out what was wrong with him. I thought he’d tell me why he’d shot himself in the head and how a man survives that sort of thing. The answer seemed to be, “With seizures and a lot of trouble reading the fine print.” Maybe he’d even be able to tell me why his employer had a be
e in her bonnet about keeping Ilse off the island. And the capper: I’d decide on what came next in the life of Edgar Freemantle, the Great American Primitive.

  None of those things actually happened, at least for awhile. Life does produce changes, and the end results are sometimes explosive, but in soap operas and in real life, big bangs often have a long fuse.

  Wireman did agree to go see a doctor with me and “get his head examined,” but not until March. February was too busy, he said. Winter residents—what Wireman called “the monthlies,” as if they were menstrual periods instead of tenants—would start moving into all the Eastlake properties the coming weekend. The first snowbirds to arrive would be the ones Wireman liked least. These were the Godfreys from Rhode Island, known to Wireman (and hence to me) as Joe and Rita Mean Dog. They came for ten weeks every winter and stayed in the house closest to the Eastlake estate. The signs warning of their Rotties and their Pit Bull were out; Ilse and I had seen them. Wireman said Joe Mean Dog was an ex–Green Beret, in a tone of voice which seemed to indicate that explained everything.

  “Mr. Dirisko won’t even get out of his car when he has a package for them,” Wireman said. He was referring to the U.S. Postal Service’s fat and jolly representative on the south end of Casey and all of Duma Key. We were sitting on the sawhorses in front of the Mean Dog house a day or two before the Godfreys were scheduled to arrive. The crushed-shell driveway was glistening a damp pink. Wireman had turned on the sprinklers. “He just leaves whatever he’s got at the foot of the mailbox post, honks, and then rolls wheels for El Palacio. And do I blame him? Non, non, Nannette.”

  “Wireman, about the doctor—”

  “March, muchacho, and before the Ides. I promise.”

  “You’re just putting it off,” I said.

  “I’m not. I have only one busy season, and this be it. I got caught a little off-guard last year, but it’s not going to happen this time around. It can’t happen this time around, because this year Miss Eastlake’s going to be far less capable of pitching in. At least the Mean Dogs are returners, known quantities, and so are the Baumgartens. I like the Baumgartens. Two kids.”