Angel whispers, “Why bother coming?”
Because her dear sweet stupid husband, he didn’t leave a suicide note.
Because this is part of him she never knew.
Because she wants to understand who he was. She wants to find out what happened.
Misty tells Angel, “I don’t know.”
Old-school building contractors, she tells him, they’d never start a new house on a Monday. Only on a Saturday. After the foundation is laid, they’ll toss in a handful of rye seed. After three days, if the seed doesn’t sprout, they’ll build the house. They’ll bury an old Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They’ll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won’t know the house is done until it’s already being lived in.
Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It’s square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal’s smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.
On the tall thin side of the flask, it’s engraved: To Angel—Te Amo .
Misty says, “So? Why are you here?”
As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.
Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
And Angel says, “It’s gin.”
The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What’s inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner’s feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.
Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.
Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase g or y for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you’re stuck in the past and looking at yourself.
You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It’s all art. What you do with your hands, you’re always blabbing your life story.
It’s gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.
Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase e or x, those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your l or h or dot your i, that shows what you aspire to become.
Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they’re crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.
Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.
And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”
Peter’s words say, “... it’s with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations ...”
Your words. Your art.
Angel’s fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there’s the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.
Misty’s fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “... I’ve done my part. I found her . . .”
It says: “... it’s not my job to kill anybody. She’s the executioner ...”
To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Gericault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.
The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he’s going to jail for this shit.”
Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.
Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”
From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn’t Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”
And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”
And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”
July 4
JUST SO YOU KNOW, this looks so sweet. It’s Independence Day, and the hotel is full. The beach, teeming. The lobby is crowded with summer people, all of them milling around, waiting for the fireworks to launch from the mainland.
Your daughter, Tabbi, she has a strip of masking tape over each eye. Blind, she’s clutching and patting her way around the lobby. From the fireplace to the reception desk, she’s whispering, “... eight, nine, ten ...” counting her steps from each landmark to the next.
The summer outsiders, they jump a little, startled by her little hands copping a feel. They give her tight-lipped smiles and step away. This girl in a sundress of faded pink and yellow plaid, her dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, she’s the perfect Waytansea Island child. All pink lipstick and nail polish. Playing some lovely and old-fashioned game.
She runs her open hands along a wall, feeling across a framed picture, fingering a bookcase.
Outside the lobby windows, there’s a flash and a boom. The fireworks shot from the mainland, arching up and out toward the island. As if the hotel were under attack.
Big pinwheels of yellow and orange flame. Red bursts of fire. Blue and green trails and sparks. The boom always comes late, the way thunder follows lightning. And Misty goes to her kid and says, “Honey, it’s started.” She says, “Open your eyes and come watch.”
Her eyes still taped shut, Tabbi says, “I need to learn the room while everyone’s here.” Feeling her way from stranger to stranger, all of them frozen and watching the sky, Tabbi’s counting her steps toward the lobby doors and the porch outside.
July 5
ON YOUR FIRST REAL DATE, you and Misty, you stretched a canvas for her.
Peter Wilmot and Misty Kleinman, on a date, sitting in the tall weeds in a big vacant lot. The summer bees and flies drifting around them. Sitting on a plaid blanket Misty brought from her apartment. Her box of paints, made of pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, Misty has the legs pulled out to make it an easel.
If this is stuff you already remember, skip ahead.
If you remember, the weeds were so high you had to stomp them down to make a nest in the sun.
It was spring term, and everyone on campus seemed to have the same idea. To weave a compact disc player or a computer mainframe using only native grasses and sticks. Bits of root. Seedpods. You could smell a lot of rubber cement in the air.
Nobody was stretching canvas, painting landscapes. There was nothing witty in that. But Peter sat on that blanket in the sun. He opened his jacket and pulled up the hem of his baggy sweater. And inside, against the skin of his chest and belly, there was a blank canvas stapled around a stretcher bar.