Chuck Palahniuk - Diary

Peter, you married a coward. Misty’s still here, crouched. If anything, Misty’s leaning back, ready to run the other way. What they don’t teach you in art school is hand-to-hand combat.

And Tabbi turns back, smiling, and says, “Mom, don’t be such a spaz.” She wraps both her hands around the man’s one outstretched hand and pulls herself up so she can swing her legs in the air. She says, “It’s just Apollo, is all.”

Near the man, almost hidden in fallen leaves, is a dead body. A pale white breast with fine blue veins. A severed white arm.

And Misty’s still crouched here.

Tabbi drops from the man’s hand and goes to where Misty’s looking. She brushes leaves off a dead white face and says, “This is Diana.”

She looks at Misty crouching and rolls her eyes. “They’re statues, Mom.”

Statues.

Tabbi comes back to take Misty’s hand. She lifts her mom’s arm and pulls her to her feet, saying, “You know? Statues . You’re the artist.”

Tabbi pulls her forward. The standing man is dark bronze, streaked with lichen and tarnish, a naked man with his feet bolted to a pedestal buried in the bushes beside the trail. His eyes have recessed irises and pupils, Roman irises, cast into them. His bare arms and legs are perfect in proportion to his torso. The golden mean of composition. Every rule of art and proportion applied.

The Greeks’ formula for why we love what we love. More of that art school coma.

The woman on the ground is broken white marble. Tabbi’s pink hand brushes the leaves and grass back from the long white thighs, the coy folds of the pale marble groin meet at a carved leaf. The smooth fingers and arms, the elbows without a wrinkle or crease. Her carved marble hair hangs in sculpted white curls.

Tabbi points her pink hand at an empty pedestal across the path from the bronze, and she says, “Diana fell down a long time before I met her.”

The man’s bronze calf muscle feels cold, but cast with every tendon defined, every muscle thick. As Misty runs her hand up the cold metal leg, she says, “You’ve been here before?”

“Apollo doesn’t have a dick,” Tabbi says. “I already looked.”

And Misty yanks her hand back from the leaf cast over the statue’s bronze crotch. She says, “Who brought you here?”

“Granmy,” Tabbi says. “Granmy brings me here all the time.”

Tabbi stoops to rub her cheek against the smooth marble cheek of the Diana.

The bronze statue, Apollo, it must be a nineteenth-century reproduction. Either that or late eighteenth century. It can’t be real, not an actual Greek or Roman piece. It would be in a museum.

“Why are these here?” Misty says. “Did your grandmother tell you?”

And Tabbi shrugs. She holds out her hand toward Misty and says, “There’s more.” She says, “Come, and I can show you.”

There is more.

Tabbi leads her through the woods that circle the point, and they find a sundial lying in the weeds, crusted a thick dark green with verdigris. They find a fountain as wide across as a swimming pool, but filled with windfall branches and acorns.

They walk past a grotto dug into a hillside, a dark mouth framed in mossy pillars and blocked with a chained iron gate. The cut stone is fitted into an arch that rises to a keystone in the middle. Fancy as a little bank building. The front of a moldy, buried state capitol building. It’s cluttered with carved angels that hold stone garlands of apples, pears, and grapes. Stone wreaths of flowers. All of it streaked with dirt, it’s cracked and pried apart by tree roots.

In between are plants that shouldn’t be here. A climbing rose chokes an oak tree, scrambling up fifty feet to bloom above the tree’s crown. Withered yellow tulip leaves are wilted in the summer heat. A towering wall of sticks and leaves turns out to be a huge lilac bush.

Tulips and lilacs aren’t native to here.

None of this should be here.

In the meadow at the center of the point, they find Grace Wilmot sitting on a blanket spread over the grass. Around her bloom pink and blue bachelor buttons and little white daisies. The wicker picnic hamper is open, and flies buzz over it.

Grace rises to her knees, holding out a glass of red wine, and says, “Misty, you’re back. Come take this.”

Misty takes the wine and drinks some. “Tabbi showed me the statues,” Misty says. “What used to be here?”

Grace gets to her feet and says, “Tabbi, get your things. It’s time for us to go.”

Tabbi picks up her sweater off the blanket.

And Misty says, “But we just got here.”

Grace hands her a plate with a sandwich on it and says, “You’re going to stay and eat. You’re going to have the whole day to do your art.”

The sandwich is chicken salad, and it feels warm from sitting in the sun. The flies landed on it, but it smells okay. So Misty takes a bite.

Grace nods at Tabbi and says, “It was Tabbi’s idea.”

Misty chews and swallows. She says, “It’s a sweet idea, but I didn’t bring any supplies.”

And Tabbi goes to the picnic hamper and says, “Granmy did. We packed them to surprise you.”

Misty drinks some wine.

Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink. That’s the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game.

“Tabbi and I are going on a mission,” Grace says.

And Tabbi says, “We’re going to tag sales .”

The chicken salad tastes funny. Misty chews and swallows and says, “This sandwich has a weird taste.”

“That’s just cilantro,” Grace says. She says, “Tabbi and I have to find a sixteen-inch platter in Lenox’s Silver Wheat Spray pattern.” She shuts her eyes and shakes her head, saying, “Why is it that no one wants their serving pieces until their pattern is discontinued?”

Tabbi says, “And Granmy is going to buy me my birthday present. Anything I want.”

Now, Misty is going to be stuck out here on Waytansea Point with two bottles of red wine and a batch of chicken salad. Her heap of paints and watercolors and brushes and paper, she hasn’t touched them since her kid was a baby. The acrylics and oils have to be hard by now. The watercolors, dried up and cracked. The brushes stiff. All of it useless.

Misty included.

Grace Wilmot holds her hand out and says, “Tabbi, come along. Let’s leave your mother to enjoy her afternoon.”

Tabbi takes her grandmother’s hand, and the two of them start back across the meadow to the dirt road where they left the car parked.

The sun’s warm. The meadow’s up high enough that you can look down and see the waves hiss and burst on the rocks below. Down the coastline, you can see the town. The Waytansea Hotel is a smudge of white clapboard. You can almost see the little dormer windows of the attic rooms. From here, the island looks pleasant and perfect, not crowded and busy with tourists. Ugly with billboards. It looks how the island must’ve looked before the rich summer people arrived. Before Misty arrived. You can see why people born here never move away. You can see why Peter was so ready to protect it.

“Mom,” Tabbi calls out.

She’s running back from her grandmother. Both her hands are clutching at her pink sweatshirt. Panting and smiling, she gets to where Misty is sitting on the blanket. The gold filigree earring in her hands, she says, “Hold still.”

Misty holds still. A statue.

And Tabbi stoops to pin the earring through her mother’s earlobe, saying, “I almost forgot until Granmy reminded me. She says you’ll need this.” The knees of her blue jeans are muddy and stained green from when Misty panicked and pulled them to the ground, when Misty tried to save her.