Stephen King - Duma Key

“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.

“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?