Diary

  July 14

  ANGEL HOLDS THE SHEET of watercolor paper, pinching the corners with the tips of his fingers. He looks at it and looks at Misty and says, “You drew a chair?”

  Misty shrugs and says, “It's been years. It was the first thing that came to me.”

  Angel turns his back to her, holding the picture so the sunlight hits it from different angles. Still looking at it, he says, “It's good. It's very good. Where did you find the chair?”

  “I drew it from my imagination,” Misty says, and she tells him about being stranded out on Waytansea Point all day with just her paints and two bottles of wine.

  Angel squints at the picture, holding it so close he's almost cross-eyed, and he says, “It looks like a Hershel Burke.” Angel looks at her and says, “You spent the day in a grassy meadow and imagined a Hershel Burke Renaissance Revival armchair?”

  This morning, a woman in Long Beach called to say she was repainting her laundry room so they'd better come see Peter's mess before she got started.

  Right now, Misty and Angel are in the missing laundry room. Misty's sketching the fragments of Peter's doodles. Angel's supposed to be photographing the walls. The minute Misty opened her portfolio to take out a sketch pad, Angel saw the little watercolor and asked to see it. Sunlight comes through a window of frosted glass, and Angel holds the picture in that light.

  Spray-painted across the window, it says: “. . . set foot on our island and you'll die . . .”

  Angel says, “It's a Hershel Burke, I swear. From 1879 Philadelphia. Its twin is in the Vanderbilt country house, Biltmore.”

  It must've stuck in Misty's memory from Art History 101, or the Survey of Decorative Arts 236 or some other useless class from art school. Maybe she saw it on television, a video tour of famous houses on some public television program. Who knows where an idea comes from. Our inspiration. Why do we imagine what we imagine.

  Misty says, “I'm lucky I drew anything. I got so sick. Food poisoning.”

  Angel's looking at the picture, turning it. The corrugator muscle between his eyebrows contracts into three deep wrinkles. His glabellar furrows. His triangularis muscle pulls his lips until marionette lines run down from each corner of his mouth.

  Sketching the doodles off the walls, Misty doesn't tell Angel about the stomach cramps. That entire sucky afternoon, she tried to sketch a rock or a tree, and crumpled the paper, disgusted. She tried to sketch the town in the distance, the church steeple and clock on the library, but crumpled that. She crumpled a shitty picture of Peter she tried to draw from memory. She crumpled a picture of Tabbi. Then, a unicorn. She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent. Then ate another chicken salad sandwich with its weird cilantro taste.

  Even the idea of walking into the dim woods to sketch a falling, crumbling statue made the little hairs stand up behind her neck. The fallen sundial. That locked grotto. Christ. Here in the meadow, the sun was warm. The grass was humming with bugs. Somewhere beyond the woods, the ocean waves hissed and burst.

  Just looking into the dark edges of the forest, Misty could imagine the towering bronze man parting the brush with his stained arms and watching her with his pitted blind eyes. As if he's killed the marble Diana and cut the body to pieces, Misty could see him stalking out of the treeline toward her.

  According to the rules of the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game, when you start thinking a naked bronze statue is going to bend its metal arms around you and crush you to death with its kiss while you claw your fingernails off and beat your hands bloody against its mossy chest—well, it's time you took another drink.

  When you find yourself half naked and shitting in a little hole you dig behind a bush, then wiping your ass with a linen hotel napkin, then take another drink.

  The stomach cramps hit, and Misty was sweating. Her head spiked in pain with every heartbeat. Her guts shifted, and she couldn't drop her underwear fast enough. The mess splashed around her shoes and against her legs. The smell gagged her, and Misty pitched forward, her open hands against the warm grass, the little flowers. Black flies found her from miles away, crawling up and down her legs. Her chin dropped to her chest, and a double handful of pink vomit heaved out on the ground.

  When you find yourself, a half hour later, with shit still running down your leg, a cloud of flies around you, take another drink.

  Misty doesn't tell Angel any of that part.

  Her sketching and him taking pictures here in the missing laundry room, he says, “What can you tell me about Peter's father?”

  Peter's dad, Harrow. Misty loved Peter's dad. Misty says, “He's dead. Why?”

  Angel snaps another picture and cranks the film forward in his camera. He nods at the writing on the wall and says, “The way a person makes their i means so much. The first stroke means their attachment to their mother. The second stroke, the downstroke, means their father.”

  Peter's dad, Harrow Wilmot, everybody called him Harry. Misty only met him the one time she came to visit before they were married. Before Misty got pregnant. Harry took her on a long tour of Waytansea Island, walking and pointing out the peeling paint and saggy roofs on the big shingled houses. Using a car key, he picked loose mortar from between the granite blocks of the church. They saw how the Merchant Street sidewalks were cracked and buckled. The storefronts streaked with growing mold. The closed hotel looked black inside, most of it gutted by a fire. The outside, shabby with its window screens rusted dark red. The shutters crooked. The gutters sagging. Harrow Wilmot kept saying, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” He said, “No matter how well we invest it, this is how long the money ever lasts.”

  Peter's father died after Misty went back to college.

  And Angel says, “Can you get me a sample of his handwriting?”

  Misty keeps sketching the doodles, and she says, “I don't know.”

  Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

  And neither do hallucinations. Out on Waytansea Point, with the cramps and the sweat rolling out of her hair and down the sides of her face, Misty started seeing things. With the hotel napkins she was trying to clean herself up. She rinsed her mouth with wine. Waved away the cloud of flies. The vomit still burned in her nose. It's stupid, too stupid to tell Angel, but the shadows at the edge of the forest moved.

  The metal face was there in the trees. The figure took a step forward and the terrible weight of its bronze foot sunk into the soft edge of the meadow.

  If you go to art school, you know a bad hallucination. You know what a flashback is. You've done plenty of chemicals that can stay in your fatty tissues, ready to flood your bloodstream with bad dreams in broad daylight.

  The figure took another step, and its foot sunk into the ground. The sun made its arms bright green in places, dull brown in other places. The top of its head and its shoulders were heaped white with bird shit. The muscles in each bronze thigh stood up, tensed in high relief as each leg lifted, and the figure stepped forward. With each step, the bronze leaf shifted between its thighs.

  Now, looking at the watercolor picture sitting on top of Angel's camera bag, it's more than embarrassing. Apollo, the god of love. Misty sick and drunk. The naked soul of a horny middle-aged artist.

  The figure coming another step closer. A stupid hallucination. Food poisoning. It naked. Misty naked. Both of them filthy in the circle of trees around the meadow. To clear her head, to make it go away, Misty started sketching. To concentrate. It was a drawing of nothing. Her eyes closed, and Misty put the pencil to the pad of watercolor paper and felt it scratching there, laying down straight lines, rubbing with the side of her thumb to create shaded contour.

  Automatic writing.

  When her pencil stopped, Misty was done. The figure was gone. Her stomach felt better. The mess had dried enough she could brush the worst of it away and bury the napkins, her ruined
underwear, and her crumpled drawings. Tabbi and Grace arrived. They'd found their missing teacup or cream pitcher or whatever. By then the wine was gone. Misty was dressed and smelling a little better.

  Tabbi said, “Look. For my birthday,” and held out her hand to show a ring shining on one finger. A square green stone, cut to sparkle. “It's a peridot,” Tabbi said, and she held it above her head, making it catch the sunset.

  Misty fell asleep in the car, wondering where the money came from, Grace driving them back along Division Avenue to the village.

  It wasn't until later that Misty looked at the sketch pad. She was as surprised as anybody. After that, Misty just added a few colors, watercolors. It's amazing what the subconscious mind will create. Something from her growing up, some picture from art history lessons.

  The predictable dreams of poor Misty Kleinman.

  Angel says something.

  Misty says, “Pardon?”

  And Angel says, “What will you take for this?”

  He means money. A price. Misty says, “Fifty?” Misty says, “Fifty dollars?”

  This picture Misty drew with her eyes closed, naked and scared, drunk and sick to her stomach, it's the first piece of art she's ever sold. It's the best thing Misty has ever done.

  Angel opens his wallet and takes out two twenties and a ten. He says, “Now what else can you tell me about Peter's father?”

  For the record, walking out of the meadow, there were two deep holes next to the path. The holes were a couple of feet apart, too big to be footprints, too far apart to be a person. A trail of holes went back into the forest, too big, too far apart to be anybody walking. Misty doesn't tell Angel that. He'd think she was crazy. Crazy, like her husband.

  Like you, dear sweet Peter.

  Now, all that's left of her food poisoning is a pounding headache.

  Angel holds the picture close to his nose and sniffs. He scrunches his nose and sniffs it again, then slips the picture into a pocket on the side of his camera bag. He catches her watching and says, “Oh, don't mind me. I thought for a second I smelled shit.”

  July 15

  IF THE FIRST MAN who looks at your boobs in four years turns out to be a cop, take a drink. If it turns out he already knows what you look like naked, take another drink.

  Make that drink a double.

  Some guy sits at table eight in the Wood and Gold Room, just some your-aged guy. He's beefy with stooped shoulders. His shirt fits okay, a little tight across his gut, a white poly-cotton balloon that bumps over his belt a little. His hair, he's balding at the temples, and his recessions trail back into long triangles of scalp above each eye. Each triangle is sunburned bright red, making long pointed devil's horns that poke up from the top of his face. He's got a little spiral notebook open on the table, and he's writing in it while he watches Misty. He's wearing a striped tie and a navy blue sport coat.

  Misty takes him a glass of water, her hand shaking so hard you can hear the ice rattle. Just so you know, her headache is going on its third day. Her headache, it's the feeling of maggots rooting into the big soft pile of her brain. Worms boring. Beetles tunneling.

  The guy at table eight says, “You don't get a lot of men in here, do you?”

  His aftershave has the smell of cloves. He's the man from the ferry, the guy with the dog who thought Misty was dead. The cop. Detective Clark Stilton. The hate crimes guy.

  Misty shrugs and gives him a menu. Misty rolls her eyes at the room around them, the gold paint and wood paneling, and says, “Where's your dog?” Misty says, “Can I get you anything to drink?”

  And he says, “I need to see your husband.” He says, “You're Mrs. Wilmot, aren't you?”

  The name on her name tag, pinned to her pink plastic uniform—Misty Marie Wilmot.

  Her headache, it's the feeling of a hammer tap, tap, tapping a long nail into the back of your head, a conceptual art piece, tapping harder and harder in one spot until you forget everything else in the world.

  Detective Stilton sets his pen down on his notebook and offers his hand to shake, and he smiles. He says, “The truth is, I am the county's task force on hate crimes.”

  Misty shakes his hand and says, “Would you like some coffee?”

  And he says, “Please.”

  Her headache is a beach ball, pumped full of too much air. More air is being forced in, but it's not air. It's blood.

  Just for the record, Misty's already told the detective that Peter's in the hospital.

  You're in a hospital.

  On the ferry the other evening, she told Detective Stilton how you were crazy, and you left your family in debt. How you dropped out of every school and stuck jewelry through your body. You sat in the car parked in your garage with the engine running. Your graffiti, all your ranting and sealing up people's laundry rooms and kitchens, it was all just another symptom of your craziness. The vandalism. It's unfortunate, Misty told the detective, but she's been screwed on this as bad as anybody.

  This is around three o'clock, the lull between lunch and dinner.

  Misty says, “Yeah. Sure, go see my husband.” Misty says, “Did you want coffee?”

  The detective, he looks at his pad while he writes and asks, “Did you know if your husband was part of any neo-Nazi organization? Any radical hate groups?”

  And Misty says, “Was he?” Misty says, “The roast beef is good here.”

  Just for the record, it's kinda cute. Both of them holding pads, their pens ready to write. It's a duel. A shoot-out.

  If he's seen Peter's writing, this guy knows what Peter thought of her naked. Her dead fish breasts. Her legs crawling with veins. Her hands smelling like rubber gloves. Misty Wilmot, queen of the maids. What you thought of your wife.

  Detective Stilton writes, saying, “So you and your husband weren't very close?”

  And Misty says, “Yeah, well, I thought we were.” She says, “But go figure.”

  He writes, saying, “Are you aware if Peter's a member of the Ku Klux Klan?”

  And Misty says, “The chicken and dumplings is pretty good.”

  He writes, saying, “Are you aware if such a hate group exists on Waytansea Island?”

  Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail into the back of her head.

  Somebody at table five waves, and Misty says, “Could I get you some coffee?”

  And Detective Stilton says, “Are you okay? You don't look so hot right now.”

  Just this morning over breakfast, Grace Wilmot said she feels terrible about the spoiled chicken salad—so terrible that she made Misty an appointment to see Dr. Touchet tomorrow. A nice gesture, but another fucking bill to pay.

  When Misty shuts her eyes, she'd swear her head is glowing hot inside. Her neck is one cast-iron muscle cramp. Sweat sticks together the folds of her neck skin. Her shoulders are bound, pulled up tight around her ears. She can only turn her head a little in any direction, and her ears feel on fire.

  Peter used to talk about Paganini, possibly the best violin player of all time. He was tortured by tuberculosis, syphilis, osteomyelitis in his jaw, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones. Paganini, not Peter. The mercury that doctors gave him for the syphilis poisoned him until his teeth fell out. His skin turned gray-white. He lost his hair. Paganini was a walking corpse, but when he played the violin, he was beyond mortal.

  He had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a congenital disease that left his joints so flexible he could bend his thumb back far enough to touch his wrist. According to Peter, what tortured him made him a genius.

  According to you.

  Misty brings Detective Stilton an iced tea he didn't order, and he says, “Is there some reason why you're wearing sunglasses indoors?”

  And jerking her head at the big windows, she says, “It's the light.” She refills his water and says, “It hurts my eyes today.” Her hand shakes so much she drops her pen. One hand clamped to the edge of the table for support, she stoops to pick it up. She sniffs and says, “Sorry.”

&nbsp
; And the detective says, “Do you know an Angel Delaporte?”

  And Misty sniffs and says, “Want to order now?”

  Stilton's handwriting, Angel Delaporte should see it. His letters are tall, soaring up, ambitious, idealistic. The writing slants hard to the right, aggressive, stubborn. His heavy pressure against the page shows a strong libido. That's what Angel would tell you. The tails of his letters, the lowercase y's and g's, hang straight down. This means determination and strong leadership.

  Detective Stilton looks at Misty and says, “Would you describe your neighbors as hostile to outsiders?”

  Just for the record, if you have masturbation down to less than three minutes because you share a bathtub with fourteen people, take another drink.

  In art theory, you learn that women look for men with prominent brows and large, square chins. This was some study a sociologist did at West Point Academy. It proved that rectangular faces, deep-set eyes, and ears that lie close to their heads, this is what makes men attractive.

  This is how Detective Stilton looks, plus a few extra pounds. He's not smiling now, but the wrinkles that crease his cheeks and his crow's-feet prove he smiles a lot. He smiles more than he frowns. The scars of happiness. It could be his extra weight, but the corrugator wrinkles between his eyes and the brow-lift wrinkles across his forehead, his worry lines, are almost invisible.

  All that, and the bright red horns on his forehead.

  These are all little visual cues you respond to. The code of attraction. This is why we love who we love. Whether or not you're consciously aware of them, this is the reason we do what we do.

  This is how we know what we don't know.

  Wrinkles as handwriting analysis. Graphology. Angel would be impressed.

  Dear sweet Peter, he grew his black hair so long because his ears stuck out.

  Your ears stick out.

  Tabbi's ears are her father's. Tabbi's long dark hair is his.

  Yours.

  Stilton says, “Life's changing around here and plenty of people won't like that. If your husband isn't acting alone, we could see assault. Arson. Murder.”