Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  “What’s with Duma, Jack? Nine miles of prime Florida real estate, a great beach, and it’s never been developed? What’s up with that?”

  He shrugged. “Some kind of long-running legal dispute is all I know. Want me to see if I can find out?”

  I thought about it, then shook my head.

  “Do you mind it?” Jack looked honestly curious. “All the quiet? Because it’d get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God’s honest.”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.” And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I’ve said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

  “What do you do? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Exercise in the mornings. Read. Sleep in the afternoons. And I draw. I may eventually try painting, but I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “Some of your stuff looks pretty good for an amateur.”

  “Thank you, Jack, that’s very kind.”

  I didn’t know if kind was all he was being or if he was telling me his version of the truth. Maybe it didn’t matter. When it comes to things like pictures, it’s always just someone’s opinion, isn’t it? I only knew that something was going on for me. Inside me. Sometimes it felt a little scary. Mostly it felt pretty goddam wonderful.

  I did most of my drawing upstairs, in the room I’d come to think of as Little Pink. The only view from there was of the Gulf and that flat horizon-line, but I had a digital camera and I took pictures of other things sometimes, printed them out, clipped them to my easel (which Jack and I turned so the strong afternoon light would strike across the paper), and drew that stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to those snapshots, although when I told Kamen this in an e-mail, he responded that the unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.

  Maybe sí, maybe no.

  I drew my mailbox. I drew the stuff growing around Big Pink, then had Jack buy me a book—Common Plants of the Florida Coast—so I could put names to my pictures. Naming seemed to help—to add power, somehow. By then I was on my second box of colored pencils … and I had a third waiting in the wings. There was aloe vera; sea lavender with its bursts of tiny yellow flowers (each possessing a tiny heart of deepest violet); inkberry with its long spade-shaped leaves; and my favorite, sophora, which Common Plants of the Florida Coast also identified as necklace-bush, for the tiny podlike necklaces that grow on its branches.

  I drew shells, too. Of course I did. There were shells everywhere, an eternity of shells just within my limited walking distance. Duma Key was made of shells, and soon I’d brought back dozens.

  And almost every night when the sun went down, I drew the sunset. I knew sunsets were a cliché, and that’s why I did them. It seemed to me that if I could break through that wall of been-there-done-that even once, I might be getting somewhere. So I piled up picture after picture, and none of them looked like much. I tried overlaying Venus Yellow with Venus Orange again, but subsequent efforts didn’t work. The sullen furnace-glow was always missing. Each sunset was only a penciled piece of shit where the colors said I’m trying to tell you the horizon’s on fire. You could undoubtedly have bought forty better ones at any sidewalk art show on a Saturday in Sarasota or Venice Beach. I saved some of those drawings, but I was so disgusted with most of them that I threw them away.

  One evening after another bunch of failures, once again watching the top arc of the sun disappear, leaving that flush of Halloween color trailing behind, I thought: It was the ship. That was what gave my first one a little sip of magic. How the sunset seemed to be shining right through it. Maybe, but there was no ship out there now to break the horizon; it was a straight line with darkest blue below and brilliant orange-yellow above, fading to a delicate greenish shade I could see but not duplicate, not out of my meager box of colored pencils.

  There were twenty or thirty photo printouts scattered around the feet of my easel. My eye happened on a close-up of a sophora necklace. Looking at it, my phantom right arm began to itch. I clamped my yellow pencil between my teeth, bent over, picked up the sophora photo, and studied it. The light was failing now, but only by degrees—the upper room I called Little Pink held light for a long time—and there was more than enough to admire the details; my digital camera took exquisite close-ups.

  Without thinking about what I was doing, I clamped the photo to the edge of the easel and added the sophora bracelet to my sunset. I worked quickly, first sketching—really nothing more than a series of arcs, that’s sophora—and then coloring: brown overlaying black, then a bright dab of yellow, the remains of one flower. I remember my concentration being fined down to a brilliant cone, the way it sometimes was in the early days of my business, when every building (every bid, really) was make or break. I remember clamping a pencil in my mouth once again at some point, so I could scratch at the arm that wasn’t there; I was always forgetting the lost part of me. When distracted and carrying something in my left hand, I sometimes reached out with my right one to open a door. Amputees forget, that’s all. Their minds forget and as they heal, their bodies let them.

  What I mostly remember about that evening is the wonderful, blissful sensation of having caught an actual bolt of lightning in a bottle for three or four minutes. By then the room had begun to dim out, the shadows seeming to swim forward over the rose-colored carpet toward the fading rectangle of the picture window. Even with the last light striking across my easel, I couldn’t get a good look at what I’d done. I got up, limped around the treadmill to the switch by the door, and flipped on the overhead. Then I went back, turned the easel, and caught my breath.

  The sophora bracelet seemed to rear over the horizon-line like the tentacle of a sea creature big enough to swallow a supertanker. The single yellow blossom could have been an alien eye. More important to me, it had somehow given the sunset back the truth of its ordinary I-do-this-every-night beauty.

  That picture I set aside. Then I went downstairs, microwaved a Hungry Man fried chicken dinner, and ate it right down to the bottom of the box.

  v

  The following night I lined the sunset with bundles of witchgrass, and the brilliant orange shining through the green turned the horizon into a forest fire. The night after that I tried palm trees, but that was no good, that one was another cliché, I could almost see hula-hula girls and hear ukes strumming. Next I put a big old conch shell on the horizon with the sunset firing off around it like a corona, and the result was—to me, at least—almost unbearably creepy. That one I turned to the wall, thinking when I looked at it the next day it would have lost its magic, but it hadn’t. Not for me, anyway.

  I snapped a picture of it with my digital camera, and attached it to an e-mail. It prompted the following exchange, which I printed out and stowed in a folder:

  EFree19 to KamenDoc

  10:14 AM

  December 9

  Kamen: I told you I was drawing pictures again. This is your fault, so the least you can do is look at the attached and tell me what you think. The view is from my place down here. Do not spare my feelings.

  Edgar

  KamenDoc to EFree19

  12:09 PM

  December 9

  Edgar: I think you are getting better. A LOT.

  Kamen

  P.S. In truth the picture is amazing. Like an undiscovered Dalí. You have clearly found something. How big is it?

  EFree19 to KamenDoc

  1:13 PM

  December 9

  Don’t know. Big, maybe.

  EF

  KamenDoc to EFree19

  1:22 PM

  December 9

  Then MINE IT!

  Kamen

  Two days later, when Jack came by to ask if I wanted to run errands, I said I wanted to go to a bookstore and buy a book of Salman Dalí’s art.

  Jack laughed. “I think you mean Salvador Dalí,” he said. “Unless you’re thinking about the guy who wrote the book that got him in so much hot water. I can’t remember the name of it.”

  “The S
atanic Verses,” I said at once. The mind’s a funny monkey, isn’t it?

  When I got back with my book of prints—it cost a staggering one hundred and nineteen dollars, even with my Barnes & Noble discount card, good thing I’d saved a few million out of the divorce for myself—the MESSAGE WAITING lamp of my answering machine was flashing. It was Ilse, and the message was cryptic only at first listen.

  “Mom’s going to phone you,” she said. “I did my best talking, Dad—called in every favor she owed me, added my very best pretty-please and just about begged Lin, so say yes, okay? Say yes. For me.”

  I sat down, ate a Table Talk pie I’d been looking forward to but no longer wanted, and leafed through my expensive picture-book, thinking—and I’m sure this wasn’t original—Well hello, Dalí. I wasn’t always impressed. In many cases I thought I was looking at the work of a talented smartass who was doing little more than passing the time. Yet some of the pictures excited me and a few frightened me the way my looming conch shell had. Floating tigers over a reclining nude woman. A floating rose. And one picture, Swans Reflecting Elephants, that was so strange I could barely look at it … yet I kept flipping back to look some more.

  And what I was really doing was waiting for my soon-to-be-ex-wife to call and invite me back to St. Paul, for Christmas with the girls. Eventually the phone rang, and when she said I’m extending this invitation against my better judgment I resisted the urge to smash that particular hanging curveball out of the park: And I’m accepting it against mine. What I said was I understand that. What I said was How does Christmas Eve sound? And when she said That’s fine, some of the I’m-covered-up-and-ready-to-fight had gone out of her voice. The argument that might have nipped Christmas with the Family in the bud had been averted. Which did not make this trip back home a good idea.

  MINE IT, Kamen had said, and in big capital letters. I suspected that by leaving now I might kill it, instead. I could come back to Duma Key … but that didn’t mean I’d get my groove back. The walks, the pictures. One was feeding the other. I didn’t know exactly how, and I didn’t need to know.

  But Illy: Say yes. For me. She knew I would, not because she was my favorite (Lin was the one who knew that, I think), but because she had always been satisfied with so little and so seldom asked for anything. And because when I listened to her message, I remembered how she’d started to cry that day she and Melinda had come out to Lake Phalen, leaning against me and asking why it couldn’t be the way it was. Because things never are, I think I replied, but maybe for a couple of days they could be … or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ilse was nineteen, probably too old for one last childhood Christmas, but surely not too old to deserve one more with the family she’d grown up with. And that went for Lin, too. Her survival skills were better, but she was flying home from France yet again, and that told me something.

  All right, then. I’d go, I’d make nice, and I would be sure to pack Reba, just in case one of my rages swept over me. They were abating, but of course on Duma Key there was really nothing to rage against except for my periodic forgetfulness and shitty limp. I called the charter service I’d used for the last fifteen years and confirmed a Learjet, Sarasota to MSP International, leaving at nine o’clock AM on the twenty-fourth of December. I called Jack, who said he’d be happy to drive me to Dolphin Aviation and pick me up again on the twenty-eighth. And then, just when I had all of my ducks in a row, Pam called to tell me the whole thing was off.

  vi

  Pam’s father was a retired Marine. He and his wife had relocated to Palm Desert, California, in the last year of the twentieth century, settling in one of those gated communities where there’s one token African-American couple and four token Jewish couples. Children and vegetarians are not allowed. Residents must vote Republican and own small dogs with rhinestone collars, stupid eyes, and names that end in i. Taffi is good, Cassi is better, and something like Rififi is the total shit. Pam’s father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn’t surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you’re going to find that going around.

  I did not say this to my wife, who started off strong and then broke down in tears. “He’s started the chemo, but Momma says it might already have metas … mesass … oh, whatever that fucking word is, I sound like you!” And then, still sniffing but sounding shocked and humbled: “I’m sorry, Eddie, that was terrible.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t terrible at all. And the word is metastasized.”

  “Yes. Thank you. Anyway, they’re doing the surgery to take out the main tumor tonight.” She was starting to cry again. “I can’t believe this is happening to my Dad.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “They do miracles these days. I’m Exhibit A.”

  Either she didn’t consider me a miracle or didn’t want to go there. “Anyway, Christmas here is off.”

  “Of course.” And the truth? I was glad. Glad as hell.

  “I’m flying out to Palm tomorrow. Ilse is coming Friday, Melinda on the twentieth. I’m assuming … considering the fact that you and my father never really saw eye to eye …”

  Considering the fact that we had once almost come to blows after my father-in-law had referred to the Democrats as “the Commiecrats,” I thought that was putting it mildly. I said, “If you’re thinking I don’t want to join you and the girls for Christmas in Palm Desert, you’re correct. You’ll be helping financially, and I hope your folks will understand that I had something to do with that—”

  “I hardly think this is the time to drag your goddam checkbook into the discussion!”

  And the anger was back, just like that. Jack, almost out of his stinking little box. I wanted to say Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you loudmouth bitch. But I didn’t. At least partly because it would have come out loudmouf birch or maybe broadmouth lurch. I somehow knew this.

  Still, it was close.

  “Eddie?” She sounded truculent, more than ready to get into it if I wanted to.

  “I’m not dragging my checkbook into anything,” I said, carefully listening to each word. They came out all right. That was a relief. “I’m just saying that my face at your father’s bedside would not be likely to speed his recovery.” For a moment the anger—the fury—almost added that I hadn’t seen his face at mine, either. Once more I managed to stop the words, but by then I was sweating.

  “All right. Point taken.” She paused. “What will you do for Christmas, Eddie?”

  Paint the sunset, I thought. Maybe get it right.

  “I believe that if I’m a good boy, I may be invited to Christmas dinner with Jack Cantori and his family,” I said, believing no such thing. “Jack’s the young fellow who works for me.”

  “You sound better. Stronger. Are you still forgetting things?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember,” I said.

  “That’s very funny.”

  “Laughter’s the best medicine. I read it in Reader’s Digest.”

  “What about your arm? Are you still having phantom sensations?”

  “Nope,” I lied, “that’s pretty well stopped.”

  “Good. Great.” A pause. Then: “Eddie?”

  “Still here,” I said. And with dark red half-moons in the palms of my hands, from clenching my fists.

  There was a long pause. The phone lines no longer hiss and crackle as they did when I was a kid, but I could hear all the miles sighing gently between us. It sounded like the Gulf when the tide is out. Then she said, “I’m sorry things turned out this way.”

  “I am, too,” I said, and when she hung up, I picked up one of my bigger shells and came very close to heaving it through the screen of the TV. Instead, I limped across the room, opened the door, and chucked it across the deserted road. I didn’t hate Pam—not really—but I seemed to still hate something. Maybe that other life.

  Maybe only myself.

  vii

  ifsogirl88 to EFree19

  9:05 AM

  December 23
<
br />   Dear Daddy, The docs aren’t saying a lot but I’m not getting a real good vibe about Grampy’s surgery. Of course that might only be Mom, she goes in to visit Grampa every day, takes Nana and tries to stay “upbeat” but you know how she is, not the silver lining type. I want to come down there and see you. I checked the flights and can get one to Sarasota on the 26th. It gets in at 6:15 PM your time. I could stay 2 or 3 days. Please say yes! Also I could bring my prezzies instead of mailing them. Love …

  Ilse

  P.S. I have some special news.

  Did I think about it, or only consult the ticking of instinct? I can’t remember. Maybe it was neither. Maybe the only thing that mattered was that I wanted to see her. In any case, I replied almost at once.

  EFree19 to ifsogirl88

  9:17 AM

  December 23

  Ilse: Come ahead! Finalize your arrangements and I’ll meet you with Jack Cantori, who happens to be my own Christmas Elf. I hope you will like my house, which I call Big Pink. One thing: do not do this w/o your mother’s knowledge & approval. We have been through some bad times, as you well know. I am hoping those bad times are now in the past. I think you understand.

  Dad

  Her own reply was just as quick. She must have been waiting.

  ifsogirl88 to EFree19

  9:23 AM

  December 23

  Already cleared it w/Mom, she says okay. Tried to talk Lin into it, but she’d rather stay here before flying back to France. Don’t hold it against her.

  Ilse

  PS: Yippee! I’m excited!!

  Don’t hold it against her. It seemed that my If-So-Girl had been saying that about her older sister ever since she could talk. Lin doesn’t want to go on the weenie roast because she doesn’t like hot dogs … but don’t hold it against her. Lin can’t wear that kind of sneakers because none of the kids in her class wear hightops anymore … so don’t hold it against her. Lin wants Ryan’s Dad to take them to the prom … but don’t hold it against her. And you know the bad part? I never did. I could have told Linnie that preferring Ilse was like growing up lefthanded—something over which I had no control—and that would only have made it worse, even though it was the truth. Maybe especially because it was the truth.