Duma Key(98)

xviii

March fourth was hot all day, but I didn't bother turning on the air conditioning. I painted in nothing but a pair of gym shorts, with the sweat trickling down my face and sides. The telephone rang twice. The first time it was Wireman.

"We haven't seen much of you in these parts lately, Edgar. Come to supper?"

"I think I'm going to pass, Wireman. Thanks."

"Painting, or tired of our society down here at El Palacio? Or both?"

"Just the painting part. I'm almost done. Any change in the vision department?"

"The left lamp is still out, but I bought an eyepatch for it, and when I wear it, I can read with my right eye for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch. This is a great leap forward, and I think I owe it to you."

"I don't know if you do or not," I said. "This isn't the same as the picture I did of Candy Brown and Tina Garibaldi. Or of my wife and her... her friends, for that matter. This time there's no bam. Do you know what I mean when I say bam?"

"Yes, muchacho."

"But if something's going to happen, I think it'll happen soon. If not, you'll at least have a portrait of how you looked maybe how you looked when you were twenty-five."

"Are you kiddin, amigo?"

"No."

"I don't think I even remember what I looked like when I was twenty-five."

"How's Elizabeth? Any change in her?"

He sighed. "She seemed a little better yesterday morning, so I set her up in the back parlor there's a smaller table there, what I call the China Suburbs and she threw a set of Wallendorf ballerinas on the floor. Smashed all eight. Irreplaceable, of course."

"I'm sorry."

"Last fall I never thought it could get this bad, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine."

My second call came fifteen minutes later, and I threw my brush down on my work-table in exasperation. It was Jimmy Yoshida. It was hard to stay exasperated after being exposed to his excitement, which bordered on exuberance. He'd seen the slides, which he claimed were going to "knock everyone on their asses."

"That's wonderful," I said. "At my lecture I intend to tell them, 'Get up off your asses'... and then walk out."

He laughed as though this were the funniest thing he'd ever heard, then said, "Mainly I called to ask if there are any pictures you want marked NFS not for sale."

Outside there was a rumble that sounded like a big, heavily loaded truck crossing a plank bridge. I looked toward the Gulf where there were no plank bridges and realized I'd heard thunder far off to the west.

"Edgar? Are you still there?"

"Still here," I said. "Assuming anyone wants to buy, you can sell everything but the Girl and Ship series."

"Ah."

"That sounded like a disappointed ah."

"I was hoping to buy one of those for the gallery. I had my eye on Number 2." And considering the terms of the contract, he would be buying it at a fifty per cent discount. Not bad, lad, my father might have said.

"That series isn't done yet. Maybe when the rest of them are painted."

"How many more will there be?"

I'll keep painting them until I can read the f**king ghost-ship's name on the transom.

I might have said this aloud if more thunder hadn't rumbled out in the west. "I guess I'll know when the time comes. Now, if you'll excuse me-"

"You're working. Sorry. I'll let you get back to it."

When I killed the cordless, I considered whether or not I did want to go back to work. But... I was close. If I forged ahead, I might be able to finish tonight. And I sort of liked the idea of painting while a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf.

God help me, the idea struck me as romantic.

So I turned up the radio, which I'd turned down to talk on the phone, and there was Axl Rose, screaming ever deeper into "Welcome to the Jungle." I picked up a brush and put it behind my ear. Then I picked up another and began to paint.

xix

The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out. Little Pink filled with gloom. The radio began to bray static with each burst of lightning. I paused long enough to turn it off, but I didn't turn on the lights.

I don't remember exactly when it stopped being me that was doing the painting... and to this day I'm not sure that it ever stopped being me; maybe s , maybe no. All I know is that at some point I looked down and saw my right arm in the last of the failing daylight and the occasional stutters of lightning. The stump was tanned, the rest dead white. The muscles hung loose and flabby. There was no scar, no seam except the tan-line, but below there it itched like old dry fire. Then the lightning flashed again and there was no arm, there had never been an arm not on Duma Key, at least but the itch was still there, so bad it made you want to bite a piece out of something.

I turned back to the canvas and the second I did, the itch poured in that direction like water let out of a bag, and the frenzy fell on me. The storm dropped on the Key as the dark came down and I thought of certain circus acts where the guy throws knives blindfolded at a pretty girl spreadeagled on a spinning wooden platter, and I think I laughed because I was painting blindfold, or almost. Every now and then the lightning would flash and Wireman would leap at me, Wireman at twenty-five, Wireman before Julia, before Esmeralda, before la loter a.