Duma Key(66)

"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 low-lying 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 arms 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.