Stephen King - Duma Key

“You wouldn’t change it?”

People kept asking me that question. “No.”

“If you could go back… would you?”

I paused, but not long. Sometimes there’s no time to decide what’s the best answer. Sometimes you can only give the true answer. “No, honey.”

“Okay. But I miss you, Dad.”

“I miss you, too.”

“Sometimes I miss the old times, too. When things were less complicated.” She paused. I could have spoken — wanted to — but kept silent. Sometimes silence is best. “Dad, do people ever deserve second chances?”

I thought of my own second chance. How I had survived an accident that should have killed me. And I was doing more than just hanging out, it seemed. I felt a rush of gratitude. “All the time.”

“Thanks, Daddy. I can’t wait to see you.”

“Back atcha. You’ll get an official invitation soon.”

“Okay. I really have to go. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I sat for a moment with the phone at my ear after she hung up, listening to the nothing. “Do the day and let the day do you,” I said. Then the dial tone kicked in, and I decided I had one more call to make, after all.

This time when Alice Aucoin came to the phone, she sounded a lot more lively and a lot less cautious. I thought that was a nice change.

“Alice, we never talked about a name for the show,” I said.

“I was sort of assuming you meant to call it ‘Roses Grow from Shells,’” she said. “That’s good. Very evocative.”

“It is,” I said, looking out to the Florida room and the Gulf beyond. The water was a brilliant blue-white plate; I had to squint against the glare. “But it’s not quite right.”

“You have one you like better, I take it?”

“Yes, I think so. I want to call it ‘The View from Duma.’ What do you think?”

Her response was immediate. “I think it sings.” So did I.

I had sweat through my LOSE IT IN THE VIRGIN ISLANDS tee-shirt in spite of Big Pink’s efficient air conditioning, and I was more exhausted than a brisk walk to El Palacio and back left me these days. My ear felt hot and throbby from the telephone. I felt uneasy about Ilse — the way parents are always uneasy about the problems of their children, I suppose, once they’re too old to be called home when it starts to get dark and the baths are being drawn — but I also felt satisfied with the work I’d put in, the way I used to feel after a good day on a hard construction job.

I didn’t feel particularly hungry, but I made myself slop a few tablespoons of tuna salad onto a lettuce leaf and washed it down with a glass of milk. Whole milk — bad for the heart, good for the bones. I guess that one’s a wash, Pam would have said. I turned on the kitchen TV and learned that Candy Brown’s wife was suing the City of Sarasota over her husband’s death, claiming negligence. Good luck on that one, sweetheart, I thought. The local meteorologist said the hurricane season might start earlier than ever. And the Devil Rays had gotten their low-rent asses kicked by the Red Sox in an exhibition game — welcome to baseball reality, boys.

I considered dessert (I had Jell-O Pudding, sometimes known as The Last Resort of the Single Man), then just put my plate in the sink and limped off to the bedroom for a nap. I considered setting the alarm, then didn’t bother; I’d probably only doze. Even if I actually slept, the light would wake me up in an hour or so, when it got over to the western side of the house and came angling in the bedroom window.

So thinking, I lay down and slept until six o’clock that evening.

There was no question of supper; I didn’t even consider it. Below me the shells were whispering paint, paint .

I went upstairs to Little Pink like a man in a dream, wearing only my undershorts. I turned on The Bone, set Girl and Ship No. 7 against the wall, and put a fresh canvas — not as big as the one I’d used for Wireman Looks West, but big — on my easel. My missing arm was itching, but this no longer bothered me the way it had at first; the truth was, I’d almost come to look forward to it.

Shark Puppy was on the radio: “Dig.” Excellent song. Excellent lyrics. Life is more than love and pleasure.

I remember clearly how the whole world seemed to be waiting for me to begin — that was how much power I felt running through me while the guitars screamed and the shells murmured.

I came here to dig for treasure.

Treasure, yes. Loot.

I painted until the sun was gone and the moon cast its bitter rind of white light over the water and after that was gone, too.

And the next night.

And the next.

And the next.

Girl and Ship No. 8.

If you want to play you gotta pay.

I unbottled.

The sight of Dario in a suit and a tie, with his lush hair tamed and combed straight back from his forehead, scared me even more than the murmuring audience that filled Geldbart Auditorium, where the lights had just been turned down to half… except for the spotlight shining down on the lectern standing at center stage, that was. The fact that Dario himself was nervous — going to the podium he had nearly dropped his note-cards — scared me even worse.

“Good evening, my name is Dario Nannuzzi,” he said. “I am cocurator, and chief buyer at the Scoto Gallery on Palm Avenue. More importantly, I have been a part of the Sarasota art community for thirty years, and I hope you will excuse my brief descent into what some might call Bobbittry when I say there is no finer art community in America.”

This brought enthusiastic applause from an audience which — as Wireman said later — might know the difference between Monet and Manet, but apparently didn’t have a clue that there was a difference between George Babbitt and John Bobbitt. Standing in the wings, suffering through that purgatory only frightened main speakers experience as their introducers wind their slow and peristaltic courses, I hardly noticed.

Dario shifted his top file-card to the bottom, once again nearly dropped the whole stack, recovered, and looked out at his audience again. “I hardly know where to begin, but to my relief I need say very little, for true talent seems to blaze up from nowhere, and serves as its own introduction.”

That said, he proceeded to introduce me for the next ten minutes as I stood in the wings with my one lousy page of notes clutched in my remaining hand. Names went past like floats in a parade. A few, like Edward Hopper and Salvador Dalí, I knew. Others, like Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage, I didn’t. Each unknown name made me feel more of an impostor. The fear I felt was no longer mental; it clamped a deep and stinking hold in my bowels. I felt like I needed to pass gas, but I was afraid I might load my pants instead. And that wasn’t the worst. Every word I had prepared had gone out of my mind except for the very first line, which was hideously appropriate: My name is Edgar Freemantle, and I have no idea how I wound up here . It was supposed to elicit a chuckle. It wouldn’t, I knew that now, but at least it was true.

While Dario droned on — Joan Miró this, Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto that — a terrified ex-contractor stood with his pathetic page of notes clutched in his cold fist. My tongue was a dead slug that might croak but would speak no coherent word, not to two hundred art mavens, many of whom held advanced degrees, some of whom were motherfucking professors . Worst of all was my brain. It was a dry socket waiting to be filled with pointless, flailing anger: the words might not come, but the rage was always on tap.