Duma Key(97)

At some point I quit, showered, and went to bed. There were no dreams.

When I think back to my time on Duma Key, those days in February and March when I was working on Wireman's portrait seem like the best days.

xvi

Wireman called the next day at ten. I was already at my easel. "Am I interrupting?"

"It's okay," I said. "I can use a break." This was a lie.

"We missed you this morning." A pause. "Well, you know. I missed you. She..."

"Yeah," I said.

"The contract's a bunny-hug. Very little to f**k with. It says you and the gallery split right down the middle, but I'm gonna cap that. Fifty-fifty shall not live after gross sales reach a quarter-mil. Once you pass that point, the split goes to sixty-forty, your favor."

"Wireman, I'll never sell a quarter of a million dollars' worth of paintings!"

"I'm hoping they'll feel exactly the same way, muchacho, which is why I'm also going to propose that the split goes to seventy-thirty at half a million."

"Plus a handjob from Miss Florida," I said feebly. "Get that in there."

"Noted. The other thing is this one-hundred-and-eighty-day termination clause. It ought to be ninety. I don't foresee a problem there, but I think it's interesting. They're afraid some big New York gallery is going to swoop down and carry you off."

"Anything else about the contract I should know?"

"Nope, and I sense you want to get back to work. I'll get in touch with Mr. Yoshida about these changes."

"Any change in your vision?"

"No, amigo. Wish I could say there was. But you keep painting."

I was taking the phone away from my ear when he said, "Did you happen to see the news this morning?"

"No, never turned it on. Why?"

"County coroner says Candy Brown died of congestive heart failure. Just thought you'd like to know."

xvii

I painted. It was a slow go but far from a no go. Wireman swam into existence around the window where his brain swam on the Gulf. It was a younger Wireman than the one in the photos clipped to the sides of my easel, but that was okay; I consulted them less and less, and on the third day I took them down altogether. I didn't need them anymore. Still, I painted the way I supposed most other artists painted: as if it were a job instead of some speed-trip insanity that came and went in spasms. I did it with the radio on, now always tuned to The Bone.

On the fourth day, Wireman brought me a revised contract and told me I could sign. He said Nannuzzi wanted to photograph my paintings and make slides for a lecture at the Selby Library in Sarasota in mid-March, a month before my show opened. The lecture, Wireman said, would be attended by sixty or seventy art patrons from the Tampa-Sarasota area. I told him fine and signed the contract.

Dario came out that afternoon. I was impatient for him to click his pix and be gone so I could go back to work. Mostly to make conversation, I asked him who would be giving the lecture at the Selby Library.

Dario looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, as if I had made a joke. "The one person in the world who is now conversant with your work," he said. "You."

I gaped at him. "I can't give a lecture! I don't know anything about art!"

He swept his arm at the paintings, which Jack and two part-timers from the Scoto were going to crate and transport to Sarasota the following week. They would remain crated, I assumed, in the storage area at the back of the gallery, until just before the show opened. "These say different, my friend."

"Dario, these people know stuff! They've taken courses! I'll bet most of them were art majors, for Christ's sake! What do you want me to do, stand up there and say duh?"

"That's pretty much what Jackson Pollock did when he talked about his work. Often while drunk. And it made him rich." Dario came over to me and took me by the stump. That impressed me. Very few people will touch the stump of a limb; it's as if they believe, down deep, that amputation might be catching. "Listen, my friend, these are important people. Not just because they have money, but because they're interested in new artists and each one knows three more who feel the same. After the lecture your lecture the talk will start. The kind of talk that almost always turns into that magical thing called 'buzz.'"

He paused, twiddling the strap of his camera and smiling a little.

"All you have to do is talk about how you began, and how you grew-"

"Dario, I don't know how I grew!"

"Then say that. Say anything! You're an artist, for God's sake!"

I left it at that. The threatened lecture still seemed distant to me, and I wanted him out of there. I wanted to turn on The Bone, pull the cloth off the painting on the easel, and go back to work on Wireman Looks West. Want the dirty-ass truth? The painting was no longer about some hypothetical magic trick. Now it was its own magic trick. I had become very selfish about it, and anything that might come after a promised interview with Mary Ire, the lecture, the show itself seemed to be not ahead of me but somehow far above me. The way rain on the surface of the Gulf must seem to a fish.

During that first week of March, it was all about daylight. Not sunset light but daylight. How it filled Little Pink and seemed to lift it. That week it was about the music from the radio, anything by the Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet, Foghat. It was about J. J. Cale beginning "Call Me the Breeze" by saying "Here's another of your old rock n roll favorites; shuffle on down to Broadway," and how when I turned the radio off and cleaned my brushes, I could hear the shells under the house. It was about the ghostface I saw, the one belonging to a younger man who had yet to see the view from Duma. There was a song I think by Paul Simon with the line If I'd never loved, I never would have cried. That was this face. It wasn't a real face, not quite real, but I was making it real. It was growing around the brain that was floating on the Gulf. I didn't need photographs anymore, because this was a face I knew. This one was a memory.