Duma Key (9 page)

iv

I couldn't quite get used to the
emptiness
of the place. “It's supposed to be very quiet,” Sandy Smith had told me, but I had still pictured the beach filling up by midday: couples sunning on blankets and slathering each other with tanning lotion, college kids playing volleyball with iPods strapped to their biceps, little kids in saggy swimsuits paddling at the edge of the water while Jet-Skis buzzed back and forth forty feet out.

Jack reminded me that it was only December. “When it comes to Florida tourism,” he said, “the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is Morgue City. Not as bad as August, but still pretty dead. Also . . .” He gestured with his arm. We were standing out by the mailbox with the red
13
on it, me leaning on my crutch, Jack looking sporty in a pair of denim cut-offs and a fashionably tattered Tampa Devil Rays shirt. “It's not exactly tourist country here. See any trained dolphins? What you got is seven houses, counting that big 'un down there . . . and the jungle. Where there's another house falling apart, by the way. That's according to some of the stories I've heard on Casey Key.”

“What's
with
Duma, Jack? Nine miles of prime Florida real estate, a great beach, and it's never been developed? What's up with that?”

He shrugged. “Some kind of long-running legal dispute is all I know. Want me to see if I can find out?”

I thought about it, then shook my head.

“Do you mind it?” Jack looked honestly curious. “All the quiet? Because it'd get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God's honest.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I've said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

“What do you do? If you don't mind me asking?”

“Exercise in the mornings. Read. Sleep in the afternoons. And I draw. I may eventually try painting, but I'm not ready for that yet.”

“Some of your stuff looks pretty good for an amateur.”

“Thank you, Jack, that's very kind.”

I didn't know if kind was all he was being or if he was telling me his version of the truth. Maybe it didn't matter. When it comes to things like pictures, it's always just someone's opinion, isn't it? I only knew that something was going on for me.
Inside
me. Sometimes it felt a little scary. Mostly it felt pretty goddam wonderful.

I did most of my drawing upstairs, in the room I'd come to think of as Little Pink. The only view from there was of the Gulf and that flat horizon-line, but I had a digital camera and I took pictures of other things sometimes, printed them out, clipped them to my easel (which Jack and I turned so the strong afternoon light would strike across the paper), and drew that stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to those snapshots, although when I told Kamen this in an e-mail, he responded that the unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

Maybe
sí,
maybe
no
.

I drew my mailbox. I drew the stuff growing
around Big Pink, then had Jack buy me a book—
Common Plants of the Florida Coast
—so I could put names to my pictures. Naming seemed to help—to add power, somehow. By then I was on my second box of colored pencils . . . and I had a third waiting in the wings. There was aloe vera; sea lavender with its bursts of tiny yellow flowers (each possessing a tiny heart of deepest violet); inkberry with its long spade-shaped leaves; and my favorite, sophora, which
Common Plants of the Florida Coast
also identified as necklace-bush, for the tiny podlike necklaces that grow on its branches.

I drew shells, too. Of course I did. There were shells everywhere, an eternity of shells just within my limited walking distance. Duma Key was made of shells, and soon I'd brought back dozens.

And almost every night when the sun went down, I drew the sunset. I knew sunsets were a cliché, and that's why I did them. It seemed to me that if I could break through that wall of been-there-done-that even once, I might be getting somewhere. So I piled up picture after picture, and none of them looked like much. I tried overlaying Venus Yellow with Venus Orange again, but subsequent efforts didn't work. The sullen furnace-glow was always missing. Each sunset was only a penciled piece of shit where the colors said
I'm trying to tell you the horizon's on fire
. You could undoubtedly have bought forty better ones at any sidewalk art show on a Saturday in Sarasota or Venice Beach. I saved some of those drawings, but I was so disgusted with most of them that I threw them away.

One evening after another bunch of failures, once again watching the top arc of the sun disappear, leaving that flush of Halloween color trailing behind, I
thought:
It was the ship. That was what gave my first one a little sip of magic. How the sunset seemed to be shining right through it.
Maybe, but there was no ship out there now to break the horizon; it was a straight line with darkest blue below and brilliant orange-yellow above, fading to a delicate greenish shade I could see but not duplicate, not out of my meager box of colored pencils.

There were twenty or thirty photo printouts scattered around the feet of my easel. My eye happened on a close-up of a sophora necklace. Looking at it, my phantom right arm began to itch. I clamped my yellow pencil between my teeth, bent over, picked up the sophora photo, and studied it. The light was failing now, but only by degrees—the upper room I called Little Pink held light for a long time—and there was more than enough to admire the details; my digital camera took exquisite close-ups.

Without thinking about what I was doing, I clamped the photo to the edge of the easel and added the sophora bracelet to my sunset. I worked quickly, first sketching—really nothing more than a series of arcs, that's sophora—and then coloring: brown overlaying black, then a bright dab of yellow, the remains of one flower. I remember my concentration being fined down to a brilliant cone, the way it sometimes was in the early days of my business, when every building (every bid, really) was make or break. I remember clamping a pencil in my mouth once again at some point, so I could scratch at the arm that wasn't there; I was always forgetting the lost part of me. When distracted and carrying something in my left hand, I sometimes reached out with my right one to open a door. Amputees forget, that's all. Their minds forget and as they heal, their bodies let them.

What I mostly remember about that evening is the wonderful, blissful sensation of having caught an actual bolt of lightning in a bottle for three or four minutes. By then the room had begun to dim out, the shadows seeming to swim forward over the rose-colored carpet toward the fading rectangle of the picture window. Even with the last light striking across my easel, I couldn't get a good look at what I'd done. I got up, limped around the treadmill to the switch by the door, and flipped on the overhead. Then I went back, turned the easel, and caught my breath.

The sophora bracelet seemed to rear over the horizon-line like the tentacle of a sea creature big enough to swallow a supertanker. The single yellow blossom could have been an alien eye. More important to me, it had somehow given the sunset back the truth of its ordinary I-do-this-every-night beauty.

That picture I set aside. Then I went downstairs, microwaved a Hungry Man fried chicken dinner, and ate it right down to the bottom of the box.

v

The following night I lined the sunset with bundles of witchgrass, and the brilliant orange shining through the green turned the horizon into a forest fire. The night after that I tried palm trees, but that was no good, that one was another cliché, I could almost see hula-hula girls and hear ukes strumming. Next I put a big old conch shell on the horizon with the sunset firing off around it like a corona, and the result was—to me, at least—almost unbearably creepy. That one I turned to the wall, thinking when I looked
at it the next day it would have lost its magic, but it hadn't. Not for me, anyway.

I snapped a picture of it with my digital camera, and attached it to an e-mail. It prompted the following exchange, which I printed out and stowed in a folder:

EFree19 to KamenDoc

10:14 AM

December 9

Kamen: I told you I was drawing pictures again. This is your fault, so the least you can do is look at the attached and tell me what you think. The view is from my place down here. Do
not
spare my feelings.

Edgar

KamenDoc to EFree19

12:09 PM

December 9

Edgar: I think you are getting better. A LOT.

Kamen

P.S. In truth the picture is amazing. Like an undiscovered Dalí. You have clearly found something. How big is it?

EFree19 to KamenDoc

1:13 PM

December 9

Don't know. Big, maybe.

EF

KamenDoc to EFree19

1:22 PM

December 9

Then MINE IT!

Kamen

Two days later, when Jack came by to ask if I wanted to run errands, I said I wanted to go to a bookstore and buy a book of Salman Dalí's art.

Jack laughed. “I think you mean
Salvador
Dalí,” he said. “Unless you're thinking about the guy who wrote the book that got him in so much hot water. I can't remember the name of it.”

“The Satanic Verses,”
I said at once. The mind's a funny monkey, isn't it?

When I got back with my book of prints—it cost a staggering one hundred and nineteen dollars, even with my Barnes & Noble discount card, good thing I'd saved a few million out of the divorce for myself—the MESSAGE WAITING lamp of my answering machine was flashing. It was Ilse, and the message was cryptic only at first listen.

“Mom's going to phone you,” she said. “I did my best talking, Dad—called in every favor she owed me, added my very best pretty-please and just about begged Lin, so say yes, okay? Say yes. For me.”

I sat down, ate a Table Talk pie I'd been looking forward to but no longer wanted, and leafed through my expensive picture-book, thinking—and I'm sure this wasn't original—
Well hello, Dalí
. I wasn't always
impressed. In many cases I thought I was looking at the work of a talented smartass who was doing little more than passing the time. Yet some of the pictures excited me and a few frightened me the way my looming conch shell had. Floating tigers over a reclining nude woman. A floating rose. And one picture,
Swans Reflecting Elephants,
that was so strange I could barely look at it . . . yet I kept flipping back to look some more.

And what I was really doing was waiting for my soon-to-be-ex-wife to call and invite me back to St. Paul, for Christmas with the girls. Eventually the phone rang, and when she said
I'm extending this invitation against my better judgment
I resisted the urge to smash that particular hanging curveball out of the park:
And I'm accepting it against mine
. What I said was
I understand that.
What I said was
How does Christmas Eve sound?
And when she said
That's fine,
some of the I'm-covered-up-and-ready-to-fight had gone out of her voice. The argument that might have nipped Christmas with the Family in the bud had been averted. Which did not make this trip back home a good idea.

MINE IT,
Kamen had said, and in big capital letters. I suspected that by leaving now I might kill it, instead. I could come back to Duma Key . . . but that didn't mean I'd get my groove back. The walks, the pictures. One was feeding the other. I didn't know exactly how, and I didn't need to know.

But Illy:
Say yes. For me
. She knew I would, not because she was my favorite (Lin was the one who knew that, I think), but because she had always been satisfied with so little and so seldom asked for anything. And because when I listened to her message,
I remembered how she'd started to cry that day she and Melinda had come out to Lake Phalen, leaning against me and asking why it couldn't be the way it was.
Because things never are,
I think I replied, but maybe for a couple of days they could be . . . or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ilse was nineteen, probably too old for one last childhood Christmas, but surely not too old to deserve one more with the family she'd grown up with. And that went for Lin, too. Her survival skills were better, but she was flying home from France yet again, and that told me something.

All right, then. I'd go, I'd make nice, and I would be sure to pack Reba, just in case one of my rages swept over me. They were abating, but of course on Duma Key there was really nothing to rage against except for my periodic forgetfulness and shitty limp. I called the charter service I'd used for the last fifteen years and confirmed a Learjet, Sarasota to MSP International, leaving at nine o'clock AM on the twenty-fourth of December. I called Jack, who said he'd be happy to drive me to Dolphin Aviation and pick me up again on the twenty-eighth. And then, just when I had all of my ducks in a row, Pam called to tell me the whole thing was off.

vi

Pam's father was a retired Marine. He and his wife had relocated to Palm Desert, California, in the last year of the twentieth century, settling in one of those gated communities where there's one token African-American couple and four token Jewish couples. Children and vegetarians are not allowed. Residents
must vote Republican and own small dogs with rhinestone collars, stupid eyes, and names that end in
i
. Taffi is good, Cassi is better, and something like Rififi is the total shit. Pam's father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn't surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you're going to find that going around.