Diary

  When you find the rhinestone bracelet she's pushed under the door, take another.

  When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how's the painting coming along?” it's pill time.

  When the headaches won't let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don't recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you're holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you're half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.

  When you just cannot stop working. When completing this one project is all you can imagine. Then take a pill.

  Because Peter's right.

  You're right.

  Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don't know why yet.

  Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.

  Everything you do shows your hand.

  Peter used to say, an artist's job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.

  July 21—

  The Third-Quarter Moon

  ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They're different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of sunny fields. Pine forests. The shape of a house or a village in the middle distance. In his face, only Angel's eyes move, jumping back and forth on every sheet of paper.

  “Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work . . . my God.”

  Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they're in Oysterville. This is somebody's missing family room. They've crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.

  Your graffiti.

  The way Misty looks, how she can't get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It's some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she's wearing sunglasses.

  Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It's her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.

  Angel's snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand's shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It's for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”

  Across the sofa, Peter's spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He's pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.

  You have.

  Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”

  The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.

  Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for the record, she drank his booze. What you learn in art school is there's an etiquette to drugs. You have to share.

  Misty says, “Help yourself. Take one.”

  And Angel pops the bottle open and shakes out two. He slips one in his pocket, saying, “For later.” He swallows the other with gin and makes a terrible gagging face, leaning forward with his red and white tongue stuck out. His eyes squeezed shut.

  Immanuel Kant and his gout. Karen Blixen and her syphilis. Peter would tell Angel Delaporte that suffering is his key to inspiration.

  Getting the sketches and watercolors spread out across the sofa, Misty says, “What do you think?”

  Angel sets each picture down and lifts the next. Shaking his head no. Just a hair side to side, a kind of palsy. He says, “Simply unbelievable.” He lifts another picture and says, “What kind of software are you using?”

  Her brush? “Sable,” Misty says. “Sometimes squirrel or oxtail.”

  “No, silly,” he says, “on your computer, for the drafting. You can't be doing this with hand tools.” He taps his finger on the castle in one painting, then taps on the cottage in another.

  Hand tools?

  “You don't use just a straightedge and a compass, do you?” Angel says. “And a protractor? Your angles are identical, perfect. You're using a stencil or a template, right?”

  Misty says, “What's a compass?”

  “You know, like in geometry, in high school,” Angel says, spreading his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “It has a point on one leg, and you put a pencil in the other leg and use it to draw perfect curves and circles.”

  He holds up a picture of a house on a hillside above the beach, the ocean and trees just different shades of blue and green. The only warm color is a dot of yellow, a light in one window. “I could look at this one forever,” he says.

  Stendhal syndrome.

  He says, “I'll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

  And Misty says, “I can't.”

  He takes another from the portfolio and says, “Then how about this one?”

  She can't sell any of them.

  “How about a thousand?” he says. “I'll give you a thousand just for this one.”

  A thousand bucks. But still, Misty says, “No.”

  Looking at her, Angel says, “Then I'll give you ten thousand for the whole batch. Ten thousand dollars. Cash.”

  Misty starts to say no, but—

  Angel says, “Twenty thousand.”

  Misty sighs, and—

  Angel says, “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  Misty looks at the floor.

  “Why,” Angel says, “do I get the feeling that you'd say no to a million dollars?”

  Because the pictures aren't done. They're not perfect. People can't see them, not yet. There are more she hasn't even started. Misty can't sell them because she needs them as studies for something bigger. They're all parts of something she can't see yet. They're clues.

  Who knows why we do what we do.

  Misty says, “Why are you offering me so much money? Is this some kind of test?”

  And Angel zippers open his camera bag and says, “I want you to see something.” He takes out some shiny tools made of metal. One is two sharp rods that join at one end to make a V. The other is a half circle of metal, shaped like a D and marked with inches along the straight side.

  Angel holds the metal D against a sketch of a farmhouse and says, “All your straight lines are absolutely straight.” He sets the D flat against a watercolor of a cottage, and her lines are all perfect. “This is a protractor,” he says. “You use it to measure angles.”

  Angel sets the protractor against picture after picture and says, “Your angles are all perfect. Perfect ninty-degree angles. Perfect forty-five-degree angles.” He says, “I noticed this on the chair painting.”

  He picks up the V-shaped tool and says, “This is a compass. You use it to draw perfect curves and circles.” He stabs one pointed leg of the compass in the center of a charcoal sketch. He spins the other leg around the first leg and says, “Every circle is perfect. Every sunflower and birdbath. Every curve, perfect.”

  Angel points at her pictures spread across the green sofa, and he says, “You're drafting perfect figures. It isn't possible.”


  Just for the record, the weather today is getting really, really pissy right about now.

  The only person who doesn't expect Misty to be a great painter, he's telling her it's impossible. When your only friend says no way can you be a great artist, a naturally talented, skilled artist, then take a pill.

  Misty says, “Listen, my husband and I both went to art school.” She says, “We were trained to draw.”

  And Angel asks, was she tracing a photograph? Was Misty using an opaque projector? A camera obscura?

  The message from Constance Burton: “You can do this with your mind.”

  And Angel takes a felt-tipped pen from his camera bag and gives it to her, saying, “Here.” He points at the wall and says, “Right there, draw me a circle with a four-inch diameter.”

  With the pen, without even looking, Misty draws him a circle.

  And Angel sets the straight edge of the protractor, the edge marked in inches, against the circle. And it's four inches. He says, “Draw me a thirty-seven-degree angle.”

  Slash, slash, and Misty marks two intersecting lines on the wall.

  He sets on the protractor and it's exactly thirty-seven degrees.

  He asks for an eight-inch circle. A six-inch line. A seventy-degree angle. A perfect S curve. An equilateral triangle. A square. And Misty sketches them all in an instant.

  According to the straightedge, the protractor, the compass, they're all perfect.

  “Do you see what I mean?” he says. He pokes the point of his compass in her face and says, “Something's wrong. First it was wrong with Peter, and now it's wrong with you.”

  Just for the record, it seems Angel Delaporte liked her loads better when she was just the fat fucking slob. A maid at the Waytansea Hotel. A sidekick he could lecture about Stanislavski or graphology. First she's Peter's student. Then Angel's.

  Misty says, “The only thing I see is how you can't deal with my maybe having this incredible natural gift.”

  And Angel jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.

  As if some dead body just spoke.

  He says, “Misty Wilmot, would you just listen to yourself?”

  Angel shakes his compass point at her and says, “This isn't just talent.” He points his finger at the perfect circles and angles doodled on the wall and says, “The police need to see this.”

  Stuffing the paintings and sketches back in her portfolio, Misty says, “How come?” Zippering it shut, she says, “So they can arrest me for being too good an artist?”

  Angel takes his camera out and cranks to the next frame of film. He snaps a flash attachment to the top. Watching her through the viewfinder, he says, “We need more proof.” He says, “Draw me a hexagon. Draw me a pentagram. Draw me a perfect spiral.”

  And with the felt-tipped pen, Misty does one, then the next. The only time her hands don't shake is when she draws or paints.

  On the wall in front of her, Peter's scrawled: “. . . we will destroy you with your own neediness and greed . . .”

  You scrawled.

  The hexagon. The pentagram. The perfect spiral. Angel snaps a picture of each.

  With the flash blinding them, they don't see the homeowner stick her head through the hole. She looks at Angel standing there, snapping photos. Misty, drawing on the wall. And the homeowner clutches her own head in both hands and says, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” She says, “Has this become an ongoing art project for you people?”

  July 24

  JUST SO YOU KNOW, Detective Stilton phoned Misty today. He wants to pay Peter a little visit.

  He wants to pay you a little visit.

  On the phone, he says, “When did your father-in-law die?”

  The floor around Misty, the bed, her whole room, it's cluttered with wet balls of watercolor paper. The crumpled wads of azure blue and Winsor green, they fill the brown shopping bag she brought her art supplies home in. Her graphite pencils, her colored pencils, her oils and acrylics and gouache watercolors, she's wasted them all to make trash. Her greasy oil pastels and chalky soft pastels, they're worn down to just nubs so small you can't hold them anymore. Her paper's almost gone.

  What they don't teach you in art school is how to hold a telephone conversation and still paint. Holding the phone in one hand and a brush in her other, Misty says, “Peter's dad? Fourteen years ago, right?”

  Smearing the paints with the side of her hand, blending with the pad of her thumb, Misty's as bad as Goya, setting herself up for lead encephalopathy. Deafness. Depression. Topical poisoning.

  Detective Stilton, he says, “There's no record that Harrow Wilmot ever died.”

  To give her brush a sharp point, Misty twists it in her mouth. Misty says, “We scattered his ashes.” She says, “It was a heart attack. Maybe a brain tumor.” Against her tongue, the paint tastes sour. The color feels gritty between her back teeth.

  And Detective Stilton says, “There's no death certificate.”

  Misty says, “Maybe they faked his death.” She's all out of guesses. Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet, this whole island is about image control.

  And Stilton says, “Who do you mean, they?”

  The Nazis. The Klan.

  With a number 12 camel-hair sky brush, she's putting a perfect wash of blue above the trees on a perfect jagged horizon of perfect mountains. With a number 2 sable brush, she's putting sunlight on the top of each perfect wave. Perfect curves and straight lines and exact angles, so fuck Angel Delaporte.

  Just for the record, on paper, the weather is what Misty says it will be. Perfect.

  Just for the record, Detective Stilton says, “Why do you think your father-in-law would fake his death?”

  Misty says she's just joking. Of course Harry Wilmot's dead.

  With a number 4 squirrel brush, she's dabbing shadows into the forest. Days she's wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she's done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants. Out on Waytansea Point. Being menaced by a hallucination. With her eyes shut, food-poisoned.

  That only sketch, she's sold it for a lousy fifty bucks.

  On the phone, Detective Stilton says, “Are you still there?”

  Misty says, “Define there.”

  She says, “Go. See Peter.” She's putting perfect flowers in a perfect meadow with a number 2 nylon brush. Where Tabbi is, Misty doesn't know. If Misty's supposed to be at work right now, she doesn't care. The only fact she's sure about is she's working. Her head doesn't hurt. Her hands don't shake.

  “The problem is,” Stilton says, “the hospital wants you to be present when I see your husband.”

  And Misty says she can't. She has to paint. She has a thirteen-year-old kid to raise. She's on the second week of a migraine headache. With a number 4 sable brush, she's wiping a band of gray-white across the meadow. Paving over the grass. She's excavating a pit. Sinking in a foundation.

  On the paper in front of her, the paintbrush kills trees and hauls them away. With brown paint, Misty cuts into the slope of the meadow. Misty regrades. The brush plows under the grass. The flowers are gone. White stone walls rise out of the pit. Windows open in the walls. A tower goes up. A dome swells over the center of the building. Stairs run down from the doorways. A railing runs along the terraces. Another tower shoots up. Another wing spreads out to cover more of the meadow and push the forest back.

  It's Xanadu. San Simeon. Biltmore. Mar a Lago. It's what people with money build to be protected and alone. The places people think will make them happy. This new building is just the naked soul of a rich person. It's the alternate heaven for people too rich to get into the real thing.

  You can paint anything because the only thing you ever reveal is yourself.

  And on the phone, a voice says, “Can we say three o'clock tomorrow, Mrs. Wilmot?”

  Statues appear along the perfect roofline of one wing. A pool opens in one perfect terrace. The meadow is almost gone as a new flight of steps runs down to
the edge of the perfect woods.

  Everything is a self-portrait.

  Everything is a diary.

  And the voice on the phone says, “Mrs. Wilmot?”

  Vines scramble up the walls. Chimneys sprout from the slates on the roof.

  And the voice on the phone says, “Misty?” The voice says, “Did you ever request the medical examiner's records for your husband's suicide attempt?” Detective Stilton says, “Do you know where your husband might have gotten sleeping pills?”

  Just for the record, the problem with art school is that it can teach you technique and craft, but it can't give you talent. You can't buy inspiration. You can't reason your way to an epiphany. Develop a formula. A road map to enlightenment.

  “Your husband's blood,” Stilton says, “was loaded with sodium phenobarbital.”

  And there's no evidence of drugs at the scene, he says. No pill bottle or water. No record of Peter ever having a prescription.

  Still painting, Misty asks where this is going.

  And Stilton says, “You might think about who'd want to kill him.”

  “Only me,” Misty says. Then she wishes she hadn't.

  The picture is finished, perfect, beautiful. It's no place Misty's ever seen. Where it came from, she has no idea. Then, with a number 12 cat's-tongue brush full of ivory black, she wipes out everything in sight.

  July 25

  ALL THE HOUSES along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.

  “Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival façades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.