If they don’t tip, take another.
These summer women. They wear so much black eyeliner they could be wearing glasses. They wear dark brown lip liner, then eat until the lipstick inside is worn away. What’s left is a table of skinny children, each with a dirty ring around her mouth. Their long hooked fingernails the pastel color of Jordan almonds.
When it’s summer and you still have to stoke the smoking fireplace, remove an article of clothing.
When it’s raining and the windows rattle in the cold draft, put on an article of clothing.
A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
When Peter’s mother comes in with your daughter, Tabbi, and expects you to wait on your own mother-in-law and your own kid like their own personal slave, take two drinks. When they both sit there at table eight, Granmy Wilmot telling Tabbi, “Your mother would be a famous artist if she’d only try, ” take a drink.
The summer women, their diamond rings and pendants and tennis bracelets, all their diamonds dull and greasy with sunblock, when they ask you to sing “Happy Birthday” to them, take a drink.
When your twelve-year-old looks up at you and calls you “ma’am” instead of Mom ...
When her grandmother, Grace, says, “Misty dear, you’d have more money and dignity if you’d go back to painting ...”
When the whole dining room hears this ...
A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
Anytime Grace Wilmot orders the deluxe selection of tea sandwiches with cream cheese and goat cheese and walnuts chopped into a fine paste and spread on paper-thin toast, then she eats only a couple bites and leaves the rest to waste and then charges this and a pot of Earl Grey tea and a piece of carrot cake, she charges all this to you and you don’t even know she’s done this until your paycheck is only seventy-five cents because of all the deductions and some weeks you actually end up owing the Waytansea Hotel money, and you realize you’re a sharecropper trapped in the Wood and Gold Dining Room probably for the rest of your life, then take five drinks.
Anytime the dining room is crowded with every little gold brocade chair filled with some woman, local or mainland, and they’re all bitching about how the ferry ride takes too long and there’s not enough parking on the island and how you never used to need a reservation for lunch and how come some people don’t just stay home because it’s just too, too much, all these elbows and needy, strident voices asking for directions and asking for nondairy creamer and sundresses in size 2, and the fireplace still has to be blazing away because that’s hotel tradition, then remove another article of clothing.
If you’re not drunk and half naked by this point, you’re not paying attention.
When Raymon the busboy catches you in the walk-in freezer putting a bottle of sherry in your mouth and says, “Misty, carino . Salud !”
When that happens, toast him with the bottle, saying, “To my brain-dead husband. To the daughter I never see. To our house, about to go to the Catholic church. To my batty mother-in-law, who nibbles Brie and green onion finger sandwiches ...” then say, “ Te amo,Raymon.”
Then take a bonus drink.
Anytime some crusty old fossil from a good island family tries to explain how she’s a Burton but her mother was a Seymour and her father was a Tupper and his mother was a Carlyle and somehow that makes her your second cousin once removed, and then she flops a cold, soft, withered hand on your wrist while you’re trying to clear the dirty salad plates and she says, “Misty, why aren’t you painting anymore?” and you can see yourself just getting older and older, your whole life spiraling down the garbage disposal, then take two drinks.
What they don’t teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint.
A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
Just for the record, today your poor wife, she drops a butter knife in the hotel dining room. When she bends to pick it up, something’s reflected in the silver blade. It’s some words written on the underside of table six. On her hands and knees, she lifts the edge of the tablecloth. On the wood, there with the dried chewing gum and crumbs of snot, it says, “Don’t let them trick you again.”
Written in pencil, it says, “Choose any book at the library.”
Somebody’s homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.
Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation.
The message under table six, the faint penciled handwriting, it’s signed Maura Kincaid .
June 29— The New Moon
IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He’s wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they’re almost not there.
Just for the record, this is how they met, Mr. Angel Delaporte and Misty Marie.
In art school, you learn that Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa, it has no eyebrows because they were the last detail the artist added. He was putting wet paint onto dry. In the seventeenth century, a restorer used the wrong solvent and wiped them off forever.
A pile of suitcases sits just inside the front door, the real leather kind, and the man points past them, back into the house with his flashlight in hand, and says, “You can tell Peter Wilmot that his grammar is atrocious.”
These summer people, Misty Marie tells them carpenters are always writing inside walls. It’s the same idea every man gets, to write his name and the date before he seals the wall with Sheetrock. Sometimes they leave the day’s newspaper. It’s tradition to leave a bottle of beer or wine. Roofers will write on the decking before they cover it with tar paper and shingles. Framers will write on the sheathing before they cover it with clapboard or stucco. Their name and the date. Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.
Call it custom or superstition or feng shui.
It’s a kind of sweet homespun immortality.
In art history, they teach how Pope Pius V asked El Greco to paint over some nude figures Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. El Greco agreed, but only if he could paint over the entire ceiling. They teach that El Greco is only famous because of his astigmatism. That’s why he distorted his human bodies, because he couldn’t see right, he stretched everybody’s arms and legs and got famous for the dramatic effect.
From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death.
We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.
That day in Ocean Park, Angel Delaporte shows Misty the dining room, the wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. Halfway up one wall is a busted hole of curling, torn paper and plaster dust.
Masons, she tells him, they’ll mortar a charm, a religious medal on a chain, to hang inside a chimney and keep evil spirits from coming down the flue. Masons in the Middle Ages would seal a live cat inside the walls of a new building to bring good luck. Or a live woman. To give the building a soul.
Misty, she’s watching his glass of wine. She’s talking to it instead of his face, following it around with her eyes, hoping he’ll notice and offer her a drink.