Duma Key (42 page)

I turned to the next page in the brochure. Two more of those amazing reproductions:
Sunset with Conch
on the left and an untitled sketch of my mailbox on the right. That was a very early one, done with Venus colored pencils, but I liked the flower growing up beside the wooden post—it was a brilliant yellow and black oxeye—and even the sketch looked good in reproduction, as if the man who'd done it knew his business. Or was getting to know it.
The copy here was brief.

If you can't come, I'll more than understand—Paris isn't just around the corner!—but I'm hoping that you will.

I was angry, but I wasn't stupid. Somebody had to take hold. Apparently Wireman had decided that was his job.

Ilse,
I thought.
It's got to be Ilse who helped him with this.

I expected to find another painting over the printed matter on the last page, but I didn't. What I saw there hurt my heart with surprise and love. Melinda was ever my hard girl, my project, but I had never loved her the less for that, and what I felt showed clearly in the black-and-white photo, which looked creased across the middle and dog-eared at two of its four corners. It had a right to look beat-up, because the Melinda standing next to me could have been no older than four. That made this snapshot at least eighteen years old. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a Western-style shirt, and a straw hat. Had we just come back from Pleasant Hill Farms, where she sometimes rode a Shetland pony named Sugar? I thought so. In any case, we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the little starter home we'd had in Brooklyn Park, me in faded jeans and a white tee-shirt with the short sleeves rolled up a turn and my hair combed back like a greaser. I had a can of Grain Belt beer in one hand and a smile on my face. Linnie had one hand hooked into the pocket of my jeans and a look of love—such love—on her upturned face that it made my throat ache. I smiled the way you do
when you're about an inch away from bursting into tears. Below the picture it said:

If you want to keep current on who else is coming, you can call me at 941-555-6166, or Jerome Wireman at 941-555-8191, or your Mom. She'll be coming down with the Minnesota contingent, by the way, and will meet you at the hotel.

Hope you can come—love you either way, Pony Girl—

Dad

I closed the letter that was also a brochure that was also an invitation and sat staring silently down at it for a few moments. I did not entirely trust myself to speak.

“That's just a rough draft, of course.” Wireman sounded tentative. In other words, not like himself at all. “If you hate it, I'll junk it and start again. No harm, no foul.”

“You didn't get that picture from Ilse,” I said.

“No,
muchacho
. Pam found it in one of her old photo albums.”

All at once everything made sense.

“How many times have you talked to her,
Jerome
?”

He winced. “That hurts, but maybe you have a right. Probably half a dozen times. I started by telling her you were getting yourself in a jam down here, and that you were taking a lot of other people with you—”

“What the
fuck
!” I cried, stung.

“People who'd invested a lot of hope and trust in you, not to mention money—”

“I'm perfectly capable of refunding any money the people at the Scoto may have laid out on—”

“Shut up,” he said, and I had never heard such coldness in his voice. Or seen it in his eyes. “You ain't an asshole,
muchacho,
so don't act like one. Can you refund their trust? Can you refund their prestige, if the great new artist they've promised their customers doesn't materialize for either the lecture or the show?”

“Wireman, I can do the
show,
it's just the goddam
lecture
—”

“
They
don't know that!” he shouted. He had a hell of a shouting voice on him, a real courtroom bellow. Elizabeth took no notice, but peeps took off from the water's edge in a brown sheet. “They have this funny idea that maybe on April fifteenth you'll be a
no
-show, or that you'll yank your stuff altogether and they'll have a bunch of empty rooms during the tenderloin of the tourist season, when they're used to doing a third of their yearly business.”

“They have no reason to think that,” I said, but my face was throbbing like a hot brick.

“No? How did you think about this kind of behavior in your other life,
amigo
? What conclusions did you draw about a supplier who contracted for cement and then didn't show up on the dime? Or a plumbing sub who got the job on a new bank and wasn't there on the day he was supposed to start? Did you feel real, I dunno, confident about guys like that? Did you believe their excuses?”

I said nothing.

“Dario sends you e-mails asking for decisions, he gets no answer. He and the others call on the phone and get vague replies like ‘I'll think about it.' This
would make them nervous if you were Jamie Wyeth or Dale Chihuly, and you're not. Basically you're just some guy who walked in off the street. So they call me, and I do the best I can—I'm your fuckin agent, after all—but I'm no artist, and neither are they, not really. We're like a bunch of cab-drivers trying to deliver a baby.”

“I get it,” I said.

“I wonder if you do.” He sighed. Big sigh. “You say it's just stage fright about the lecture and you're going to go through with the show. I'm sure part of you believes that, but
amigo,
I gotta say that I think part of you has no
intention
of showing up at the Scoto Gallery on April fifteenth.”

“Wireman, that's just—”

“Bullshit? Is it? I call the Ritz-Carlton and ask if a Mr. Freemantle has reserved any rooms for mid-April and get the big
non, non, Nannette
. So I take a deep breath and get in touch with your ex. She's no longer in the phone book, but your Realtor gives me the number when I tell her it's sort of an emergency. And right away I discover Pam still cares about you. She actually wants to call and tell you that, but she's scared you'll blow her off.”

I gaped at him.

“The first thing we establish once we get past the introductions is Pam Freemantle knows zip and zoop about a big art exhibition five weeks hence by her ex-husband. The second thing—she makes a phone call while Wireman dangles on hold and does a crossword puzzle with his newly restored vision—is that her ex has done
bupkes
about chartering a plane, at least with the company she knows. Which leads us to discuss if, deep down, Edgar Freemantle has decided
that when the time comes, he's just going to—in the words of my misspent youth—cry fuck it and crawl in the bucket.”

“No, you've got it all wrong,” I said, but these words came out in a listless drone that did not sound especially convincing. “It's just that all the organizational stuff drives me crazy, and I kept . . . you know, putting it off.”

Wireman was relentless. If I'd been on the witness stand, I think I'd have been a little puddle of grease and tears by then; the judge would have called a recess to allow the bailiff time to either mop me up or buff me to a shine. “Pam says if you subtracted The Freemantle Company buildings from the St. Paul skyline, it would look like Des Moines in nineteen seventy-two.”

“Pam exaggerates.”

He took no notice. “Am I supposed to believe that a guy who organized that much work couldn't organize some plane tickets and two dozen hotel rooms? Especially when he could reach out to an office staff that would absolutely love to hear from him?”

“They don't . . . I don't . . . they can't just . . .”

“Are you getting pissed?”

“No.” But I was. The old anger was back, wanting to raise its voice until it was shouting as loud as Axl Rose on The Bone. I raised my fingers to a spot just over my right eye, where a headache was starting up. There would be no painting for me today, and it was Wireman's fault. Wireman was to blame. For one moment I wished him blind. Not just half-blind but
blind
blind, and realized I could paint him that way. At that the anger collapsed.

Wireman saw my hand go to my head and let up
a little. “Look, most of the people she's contacted unofficially have already said hell yes, of course, they'd love to. Your old line foreman Angel Slobotnik told Pam he'd bring you a jar of pickles. She said he sounded thrilled.”

“Not pickles, pickled eggs,” I said, and Big Ainge's broad, flat, smiling face was for a moment almost close enough to touch. Angel, who had been right there beside me for twenty years, until a major heart attack sidelined him. Angel, whose most common response to any request, no matter how seemingly outrageous, was
Can do, boss.

“Pam and I made the flight arrangements,” Wireman said. “Not just for the people from Minneapolis–St. Paul, but from other places, as well.” He tapped the brochure. “The Air France and Delta flights in here are real, and your daughter Melinda is really booked on em. She knows what's going on. So does Ilse. They're only waiting to be officially invited. Ilse wanted to call you, and Pam told her to wait. She says you have to pull the trigger on this, and whatever she may have been wrong about in the course of your marriage,
muchacho,
she's right about that.”

“All right,” I said. “I'm hearing you.”

“Good. Now I want to talk to you about the lecture.”

I groaned.

“If you do a bunk on the lecture, you'll find it twice as hard to go to the opening-night party—”

I looked at him incredulously.

“What?” he asked. “You disagree?”

“Do a bunk?” I asked. “Do a
bunk
? What the fuck is that?”

“To cut and run,” he said, sounding slightly defensive.
“British slang. See for instance Evelyn Waugh,
Officers and Gentlemen,
1952.”

“See my ass and your face,” I said. “Edgar Freemantle, present day.”

He flipped me the bird, and just like that we were mostly okay again.

“You sent Pam the pictures, didn't you? You sent her the JPEG file.”

“I did.”

“How did she react?”

“She was blown away,
muchacho
.”

I sat silently, trying to imagine Pam blown away. I could do it, but the face I saw lighting up in surprise and wonder was a younger face. It had been quite a few years since I'd been able to generate that sort of wind.

Elizabeth was dozing off, but her hair was flying against her cheeks and she pawed at them like a woman troubled by insects. I got up, took an elastic from the pouch on the arm of her wheelchair—there was always a good supply of them, in many bright colors—and pulled her hair back into a horsetail. The memories of doing this for Melinda and Ilse were sweet and terrible.

“Thank you, Edgar. Thank you,
mi amigo
.”

“So how do I do it?” I asked. I was holding my palm on the side of Elizabeth's head, feeling the smoothness of her hair as I had often felt the smoothness of my daughters' after it had been shampooed; when memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts, haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves. “How do I talk about a process that's at least partially supernatural?”

There. It was out. The root of the matter.

Yet Wireman looked calm. “Edgar!” he exclaimed.

“Edgar
what
?”

The sonofabitch actually laughed. “If you tell them that . . . 
they will believe you.
”

I opened my mouth to refute this. Thought of Dalí's work. Thought of that wonderful Van Gogh picture,
Starry Night
. Thought of certain Andrew Wyeth paintings—not
Christina's World
but his interiors: spare rooms where the light is both sane and strange, as if coming from two directions at the same time. I closed my mouth again.

“I can't tell you just what to say,” Wireman said, “but I can give you something like this.” He held up the brochure/invitation. “I can give you a template.”

“That would help.”

“Yeah? Then listen.”

I listened.

iv

“Hello?”

I was sitting on the couch in the Florida room. My heart was beating heavily. This was one of those calls—everyone's made a few—where you simultaneously hope it will go through the first time, so you can get it over with, and hope it won't, so you can put off some hard and probably painful conversation a little while longer.

I got Option One; Pam answered on the first ring. All I could hope was this conversation would go better than the last one. Than the last couple, in fact.

“Pam, it's Edgar.”

“Hello, Edgar,” she said cautiously. “How are you?”

“I'm . . . all right. Good. I've been talking with my friend Wireman. He showed me the invitation the two of you worked up.”
The two of you worked up
. That sounded unfriendly. Conspiratorial, even. But what other way was there to put it?

“Yes?” Her voice was impossible to read.

I drew in a breath and jumped. God hates a coward, Wireman says. Among other things. “I called to say thanks. I was being a horse's ass. Your jumping in like that was what I needed.”

The silence was long enough for me to wonder if maybe she'd quietly hung up at some point. Then she said, “I'm still here, Eddie—I'm just picking myself up off the floor. I can't remember the last time you apologized to me.”

Had
I apologized? Well . . . never mind. Close enough, maybe. “Then I'm sorry about that, too,” I said.

“I owe you an apology myself,” she said, “so I guess this one's a wash.”