Duma Key(61)

"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 I turned to ask Wireman what he thought, but Wireman had withdrawn and was talking quietly with Jack, both of them watching Nannuzzi look at my paintings.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 lookie-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 f**k 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.