Duma Key(133)

He nodded. "If you had decided to sell Girl and Ship No. 8, I believe that one alone would have fetched a hundred thousand dollars."

"Twice that," Jimmy said.

"To Edgar Freemantle, at the start of his brilliant career!" Rosenblatt said, and raised his glass. We raised our glasses and drank, not knowing that my brilliant career was, for all practical purposes, at an end.

We caught a break there, muchacho.

iv

Tom Riley fell in beside me as I moved back through the crowd toward my family, smiling and shaking conversational gambits as fast as I could. "Boss, these are incredible," he said, "but they're a little spooky, too."

"I guess that's a compliment," I said. The truth was, talking to Tom felt spooky, knowing what I did about him.

"It's definitely a compliment," he said. "Listen, you're headed for your family. I'll take a hike." And he started to do just that, but I grabbed him by the elbow.

"Stick with me," I said. "Together we can repel all boarders. On my own, I may not get to Pam and the girls until nine o'clock."

He laughed. Old Tommy looked good. He'd added some pounds since that day at Lake Phalen, but I'd read that antidepressants sometimes do that, especially to men. On him, a little more weight was okay. The hollows under his eyes had filled in.

"How've you been, Tom?"

"Well... in truth... depressed." He lifted one hand in the air, as if to wave off a commiseration I hadn't offered. "It's a chemical imbalance thing, and it's a bitch getting used to the pills. They muddy up your thinking at first they did mine, anyway. I went off them awhile, but I'm back on now and life's looking better. It's either the fake endorphins kicking in or the effect of springtime in The Land of a Billion Lakes."

"And The Freemantle Company?"

"The books are in the black, but it's not the same without you. I came down here thinking I might pitch you on coming back. Then I got a look at what you're doing and realized your days in the building biz are probably done."

"I think so, yeah."

He gestured toward the canvases in the main room. "What are they, really? I mean, no bullshit. Because I wouldn't say this to very many people they remind me of the way life was inside my head when I wasn't taking my pills."

"They're just make-believe," I said. "Shadows."

"I know about shadows," he said. "You just want to be careful they don't grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power's out."

"But you're better now."

"Yes," he said. "Pam had a lot to do with that. Can I tell you something about her you might already know?"

"Sure," I said, only hoping he wasn't going to share the fact that she sometimes laughed way down in her throat when she came.

"She has great insight but little kindness," Tom said. "It's a weirdly cruel mix."

I said nothing... but not necessarily because I thought he was wrong.

"She gave me a brisk talking-to about taking care of myself not so long ago, and it hit home."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And from the look of her, you might be in for a talking-to yourself, Edgar. I think I might find your friend Kamen and engage him in a bit of a discourse. Excuse me."

The girls and Ric were staring up at Wireman Looks West and chattering animatedly. Pam, however, was positioned about halfway down the line of Girl and Ship paintings, which hung like movie posters, and she looked disturbed. Not angry, exactly, just disturbed. Confused. She beckoned me over, and once I was there, she didn't waste time.

"Is the little girl in these pictures Ilse?" She pointed up at No. 1. "I thought at first this one with the red hair was supposed to be the doll Dr. Kamen gave you after your accident, but Ilse had a tic-tac-toe dress like that when she was little. I bought it at Rompers. And this one-" Now she pointed at No. 3. "I swear this is the dress she just had to have to start first grade in the one she was wearing when she broke her damn arm that night after the stock car races!"

Well, there you were. I remembered the broken arm as having come after church, but that was only a minor misstep in the grand dance of memory. There were more important things. One was that Pam was in a unique position to see through most of the smoke and mirrors that critics like to call art at least in my case she was. In that way, and probably in a great many others, she was still my wife. It seemed that in the end, only time could issue a divorce decree. And that the decree would be partial at best.

I turned her toward me. We were being watched by a great many people, and I suppose to them it looked like an embrace. And in a way, it was. I got one glimpse of her wide, startled eyes, and then I was whispering in her ear.

"Yes, the girl in the rowboat is Ilse. I never meant her to be there, because I never meant anything. I never even knew I was going to paint these pictures until I started doing them. And because she's back-to, no one else is ever going to know unless you or I tell them. And I won't. But-" I pulled back. Her eyes were still wide, her lips parted as if to receive a kiss. "What did Ilse say?"

"The oddest thing." She took me by the sleeve and pulled me down to No. 7 and No. 8. In both of these, Rowboat Girl was wearing the green dress with straps that crossed over her bare back. "She said you must be reading her mind, because she ordered a dress like that from Newport News just this spring."