Diary

  As he hovers close to her, the doctor's breath is warm against the side of Misty's face. The smell of ham and garlic.

  Her paintbrush stops, and Misty says, “This is done.”

  Someone knocks at the door. The lock clicks. Then Grace, her voice says, “How is she, Doctor?”

  “She's working,” he says. “Here, number this one—eighty-four. Then, put it with the others.”

  And Grace says, “Misty dear, we thought you might like to know, but we've been trying to reach your family. About Tabbi.”

  You can hear someone lift the canvas off the easel. Footsteps carry it across the room. How it looks, Misty doesn't know.

  They can't bring Tabbi back. Maybe Jesus could or the Jain Buddhists, but nobody else could. Misty's leg crippled, her daughter dead, her husband in a coma, Misty herself trapped and wasting away, poisoned with headaches, if the doctor is right she could be walking on water. She could raise the dead.

  A soft hand closes over her shoulder and Grace's voice comes in close to her ear. “We'll be dispersing Tabbi's ashes this afternoon,” she says. “At four o'clock, out on the point.”

  The whole island, everybody will be there. The way they were for Harrow Wilmot's funeral. Dr. Touchet embalming the body in his green-tiled examining room, with his steel accountant's desk and the flyspecked diplomas on the wall.

  Ashes to ashes. Her baby in an urn.

  Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

  The tape tight over each eye, keeping her face relaxed, a mask, Misty says, “Has anyone gone to tell Peter?”

  Someone sighs, one long breath in, then out. And Grace says, “What would that accomplish?”

  He's her father.

  You're her father.

  The gray cloud of Tabbi will drift off on the wind. Drifting back down the coastline toward the town, the hotel, the houses and church. The neon signs and billboards and corporate logos and trademarked names.

  Dear sweet Peter, consider yourself told.

  August 15

  JUST FOR THE RECORD, one problem with art school is it makes you so much less of a romantic. All that garbage about painters and garrets, it disappears under the load you have to learn about chemistry, about geometry and anatomy. What they teach you explains the world. Your education leaves everything so neat and tidy.

  So resolved and sensible.

  Her whole time dating Peter Wilmot, Misty knew it wasn't him she loved. Women just look for the best physical specimen to father their children. A healthy woman is wired to seek out the triangle of smooth muscle inside Peter's open collar because humans evolved hairless in order to sweat and stay cool while outrunning some hot and exhausted form of furry animal protein.

  Men with less body hair are also less likely to harbor lice, fleas, and mites.

  Before their dates, Peter would take a painting of hers. It would be framed and matted. And Peter would press two long strips of extrastrong double-sided mounting tape onto the back of the frame. Careful of the sticky tape, he'd tuck the painting up inside the hem of his baggy sweater.

  Any woman would love how Peter ran his hands through her hair. It's simple science. Physical touch mimics early parent-child grooming practices. It stimulates your release of growth hormone and ornithine decarboxylase enzymes. Inversely, Peter's fingers rubbing the back of her neck would naturally lower her levels of stress hormones. This has been proved in a laboratory, rubbing baby rats with a paintbrush.

  After you know about biology, you don't have to be used by it.

  On their dates, Peter and Misty, they'd go to art museums and galleries. Just the two of them, walking and talking, Peter looking a little square in front, a little pregnant with her painting.

  There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.

  Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

  Walking the galleries looking for a blank wall space, Peter was a living example of the golden section, the formula used by ancient Greek sculptors for perfect proportion. His legs were 1.6 times longer than his torso. His torso is 1.6 times longer than his head.

  Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second, then the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is called Phi, after the sculptor Phidias.

  The architecture of you.

  Walking, Misty told Peter about the chemistry of painting. How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, “creating” a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

  When people look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they need to know that carbon black paint is the soot from natural gas. The color rose madder is the ground root of the madder plant. Emerald green is copper acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and used as an insecticide. A poison. Tyrian purple is made from clams.

  And Peter, he slid the painting out from under his sweater. Alone in the gallery with no one around to see, the painting of a stone house behind a picket fence, he pressed it to the wall. And there it was, the signature of Misty Marie Kleinman. And Peter said, “I told you someday your work would hang in a museum.”

  His eyes are deep Egyptian brown, the paint made from ground-up mummies, bone ash and asphalt, and used until the nineteenth century, when artists discovered that icky reality. After twisting years of brushes between their lips.

  Peter kissing the back of her neck, Misty said how when you look at the Mona Lisa, you need to remember that burnt sienna is just clay colored with iron and manganese and cooked in an oven. Sepia brown is the ink sacs from cuttlefish. Dutch pink is crushed buckhorn berries.

  Peter's perfect tongue licked the back of her ear. Something, but not a painting, felt stiff inside his clothes.

  And Misty whispered, “Indian yellow is the urine of cattle fed mango leaves.”

  Peter wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his other arm, he pressed the back of her knee so it buckled. He lowered her to the gallery's marble floor, and Peter said, “Te amo, Misty.”

  Just for the record, this came as a little surprise.

  His weight on top of her, Peter said, “You think you know so much,” and he kissed her.

  Art, inspiration, love, they're all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

  The paint colors iris green and sap green are the juice of flowers. The color of Cappagh brown is Irish dirt, Misty whispered. Cinnabar is vermilion ore shot from high Spanish cliffs with arrows. Bistre is the yellowy brown soot of burnt beech wood. Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  Even while they kissed, you closed your eyes.

  And Misty kept hers open, not watching you, but the earring in your ear. Silver tarnished almost brown, holding a knot of square-cut glass diamonds, twinkling and buried in the black hair falling over your shoulders—that's what Misty loved.

  That first time, Misty kept telling you, “The paint color Davy's gray is powdered slate. Bremen blue is copper hydroxide and copper carbonate—a deadly poison.” Misty said, “Brilliant scarlet is iodine and mercury. The color bone black is charred bones . . .”

  August 16

  THE COLOR BONE BLACK is charred bones.

  Shellac is the shit aphids leave on leaves and twigs. Drop black is burnt grapevines. Oil paints use the oil of crushed walnuts or poppy seeds. The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft. Everything crushed and mixed and baked, the more it could be cooking.

  Misty was still talking, talking, talking, but this was days later, in gallery after gallery. This was in a museum, with her painting of a tall ston
e church pasted to the wall between a Monet and a Renoir. With Misty sitting on the cold floor straddling Peter between her legs. It was late afternoon, and the museum was deserted. Peter's perfect head of black hair pressed hard on the floor, he was reaching up, both his hands inside her sweater, thumbing her nipples.

  Both your hands.

  Behavioral psychologists say that humans copulate face-to-face because of breasts. Females with larger breasts attracted more partners, who insisted on breast play during intercourse. More sex bred more females, who inherited the larger breasts. That begat more face-to-face sex.

  Now, here on the floor, Peter's hands, his breast play, his erection sliding around inside his pants, Misty's thighs spread above him, she said how when William Turner painted his masterpiece of Hannibal crossing the Alps to slaughter the Salassian army, Turner based it on a hike he took in the Yorkshire countryside.

  Another example of everything being a self-portrait.

  Misty told Peter what you learn in art history. That Rembrandt slopped his paint on so thick that people joked you could lift each portrait by its nose.

  Her hair hung heavy with sweat down over her face. Her chubby legs trembled, exhausted but still holding her up. Dry-humping the lump in his pants.

  Peter's fingers clutched her breasts tighter. His hips pushed up, and his face, his orbicularis oculi, squeezed his eyes shut. His triangularis pulled the corners of his mouth down so his bottom teeth showed. His coffee-yellowed teeth bit at the air.

  A hot wetness pulsed out of Misty, and Peter's erection was pulsing inside his pants, and everything else stopped. They both stopped breathing for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven long moments.

  Then they both wilted. Withering. Peter's body relaxed onto the wet floor. Misty's flattened onto him. Both of them, their clothes were pasted together with sweat.

  The painting of the tall church looked down from the wall.

  And right then, a museum guard walked up.

  August 20—

  The Third-Quarter Moon

  GRACE'S VOICE, in the dark, it tells Misty, “The work you're doing will buy your family freedom.” It says, “No summer people will come back here for decades.”

  Unless Peter wakes up someday, Grace and Misty are the only Wilmots left.

  Unless you wake up, there won't be any more Wilmots.

  You can hear the slow, measured sound of Grace cutting something with scissors.

  Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. There's no point rebuilding the family fortune. Let the house go to the Catholics. Let the summer people swarm over the island. With Tabbi dead, the Wilmots have no stake in the future. No investment.

  Grace says, “Your work is a gift to the future, and anyone who tries to stop you will be cursed by history.”

  While Misty paints, Grace's hands circle her waist with something, then her arms, her neck. It's something that rubs her skin, light and soft.

  “Misty dear, you have a seventeen-inch waist,” Grace says.

  It's a tape measure.

  Something smooth slips between her lips, and Grace's voice says, “It's time you took another pill.” A drinking straw pokes into her mouth, and Misty sips enough water to swallow the capsule.

  In 1819, Théodore Géricault painted his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa. It showed the ten castaways that survived out of one hundred and forty-seven people left adrift on a raft for two weeks after their ship sank. At the time, Géricault had just abandoned his pregnant mistress. To punish himself, he shaved his head. He saw no friends for almost two years, never going out in public. He was twenty-seven and lived in isolation, painting. Surrounded by the dying people and cadavers he studied for his masterpiece. After several suicide attempts, he died at thirty-two.

  Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

  She runs the tape measure down the length of Misty's legs.

  Something cold and smooth slides against Misty's cheek, and Grace's voice tells her, “Feel.” Grace says, “It's satin. I'm sewing your gown for the opening.”

  Instead of “gown,” Misty hears shroud.

  Just from the feel, Misty knows it's white satin. Grace is cutting down Misty's wedding dress. Remaking it. Making it last forever. Born again. Reborn. Misty's Wind Song perfume still on it, Misty recognizes herself.

  Grace says, “We've invited everyone. All the summer people. Your opening will be the biggest social event in a hundred years.”

  The same as her wedding. Our wedding.

  Instead of “opening,” Misty hears offering.

  Grace says, “You're almost done. Only eighteen more paintings to complete.”

  To make an even one hundred.

  Instead of “done,” Misty hears dead.

  August 21

  TODAY IN THE DARKNESS behind Misty's eyelids, the hotel's fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell in the hallway, it comes through the door so loud Grace has to shout, “Oh, what is it now?” She puts a hand on Misty's shoulder and says, “Keep working.”

  The hand squeezes, and Grace says, “Just finish this last picture. That's all we need.”

  Her footsteps go away, and the door to the hall opens. The alarm is louder for a moment, ringing, shrill as the recess bell at Tabbi's school. At her own grade school, growing up. The ringing is soft, again, as Grace shuts the door behind her. She doesn't lock it.

  But Misty keeps painting.

  Her mom in Tecumseh Lake, when Misty told her about maybe marrying Peter Wilmot and moving to Waytansea Island, her mom told Misty that all big-money fortunes are based on fooling people and pain. The bigger the fortune, she said, the more people got hurt. For rich people, she said, the first marriage was just about reproduction. She asked, did Misty really want to spent the rest of her life surrounded by that kind of person?

  Her mom asked, “Don't you want to be an artist anymore?”

  Just for the record, Misty told her, Yeah, sure.

  It wasn't even that Misty was so in love with Peter. Misty didn't know what it was. She just couldn't go home to that trailer park, not anymore.

  Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

  They don't teach you that in art school.

  The fire alarm keeps ringing.

  The week Peter and Misty eloped, it was over Christmas break. That whole week, Misty let her mom worry. The minister looked at Peter and said, “Smile, son. You look as though you're facing a firing squad.”

  Her mom, she called the college. She called the hospitals. One emergency room had the body of a dead woman, a young woman found naked in a ditch and stabbed a hundred times in the stomach. Misty's mom, she spent Christmas Day driving across three counties to look at the mutilated dead body of this Jane Doe. While Peter and Misty marched down the main aisle of the Waytansea church, her mom held her breath and watched a police detective pull down the zipper on a body bag.

  Back in that previous life, Misty called her mom a couple days after Christmas. Sitting in the Wilmot house behind a locked door, Misty fingered the junk jewelry Peter had given her during their dating, the rhinestones and fake pearls. On her answering machine, Misty listened to a dozen panicked messages from her mom. When Misty finally got around to dialing their number in Tecumseh Lake, her mom just hung up.

  It was no big deal. After a little cry, Misty never called her mom again.

  Already Waytansea Island felt more like home than the trailer ever had.

  The hotel fire alarm keeps ringing, and through the door someone says, “Misty? Misty Marie?” There's a knock. It's a man's voice.

  And Misty says, Yes?

  The alarm is loud with the door opening, then quiet. A man says, “Christ, it stinks in here!” And it's Angel Delaporte come to her rescue.

  Just for the record, the weather today is frantic, panicked, and slightly rushed with Angel pulling the tape off her face. He takes the paintbrush out of her hand. Ange
l slaps her one time, hard on each cheek, and says, “Wake up. We don't have much time.”

  Angel Delaporte slaps her the way you'd slap a bimbo on Spanish television. Misty all skin and bones.

  The hotel fire alarm just keeps ringing and ringing.

  Squinting against the sunlight from her one tiny window, Misty says, Stop. Misty says he doesn't understand. She has to paint. It's all she has left.

  The picture in front of her is a square of sky, smudged blue and white, nothing complete, but it fills the whole sheet of paper. Stacked against the wall near the doorway are other pictures, their faces to the wall. A number penciled on the back of each. Ninety-seven on one. Ninety-eight. Another is ninety-nine.

  The alarm just ringing and ringing.

  “Misty,” Angel says. “Whatever this little experiment is, you are done.” He goes to her closet and gets out a bathrobe and sandals. He comes back and sticks each of her feet in one, saying, “It's going to take about two minutes for people to find out this is a false alarm.”

  Angel slips a hand under each of her arms and heaves Misty to her feet. He makes a fist and knocks it against her cast, saying, “What is this all about?”

  Misty asks, What is he here for?

  “That pill you gave me,” Angel says, “it gave me the worst migraine of my life.” He's throwing the bathrobe over her shoulders and says, “I had a chemist analyze it.” Dropping each of her tired arms into a bathrobe sleeve, he says, “I don't know what kind of doctor you have, but those capsules contain powdered lead with trace amounts of arsenic and mercury.”

  The toxic parts of oil paints: Vandyke red, ferrocyanide; iodine scarlet, mercuric iodide; flake white, lead carbonate; cobalt violet, arsenic—all those beautiful compounds and pigments that artists treasure but turn out to be deadly. How your dream to create a masterpiece will drive you nuts and then kill you.

  Her, Misty Marie Wilmot, the poisoned drug addict possessed by the devil, Carl Jung, and Stanislavski, painting perfect curves and angles.