Stephen King - Duma Key

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.

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 fucking 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.