“About the painting?” Misty said. The craggy stone house. She reached out and turned it straight again.
And Peter looked sideways without turning his head. His eyes rolled to see the painting just past his shoulder, and he said, “I grew up next door to that house. The guy with the book, that’s Brett Petersen.” Then loud, he said, too loud, “I want to know if you’ll marry me.”
That’s how Peter proposed.
How you proposed. The first time.
He was from the island, everybody said. The whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, all those fine old island families going back to the Mayflower Compact. Those fine old family trees where everybody was everybody’s cousin once removed. Where nobody’s had to buy any silverware since two hundred years ago. They ate something meat with every meal, and all the sons seemed to wear the same shabby old jewelry. Their kind-of regional fashion statement. Their old shingle and stone family houses towered along Elm Street, Juniper Street, Hornbeam Street, weathered just so by the salt air.
Even all their golden retrievers were inbred cousins to each other.
People said everything on Waytansea Island was just-so museum quality. The funky old ferryboat that held six cars. The three blocks of red brick buildings along Merchant Street, the grocer, the old library clock tower, the shops. The white clapboards and wraparound porches of the closed old Waytansea Hotel. The Waytansea church, all granite and stained glass.
There in the art school gallery, Peter was wearing a brooch made from a circle of dirty blue rhinestones. Inside that was a circle of fake pearls. Some blue stones were gone, and the empty fittings looked sharp with ragged little teeth. The metal was silver, but bent and turning black. The point of the long pin, it stuck out from under one edge and looked pimpled with rust.
Peter held a big plastic mug of beer with some sports team stenciled on the side, and he took a drink. He said, “If you’d never consider marrying me, there’s no point in me taking you to dinner, is there?” He looked at the ceiling and then at her and said, “I find this approach saves everybody a shitload of time.”
“Just for the record,” Misty told him, “that house doesn’t exist. I made it up.”
Misty told you.
And you said, “You remember that house because it’s still in your heart.”
And Misty said, “How the fuck do you know what’s in my goddamn heart?”
The big stone houses. Moss on the trees. Ocean waves that hiss and burst below cliffs of brown rock. All that was in her little white trash heart.
Maybe because Misty was still standing here, maybe because you thought she was fat and lonely and she hadn’t run away, you looked down at the brooch on your chest and smiled. You looked at her and said, “You like it?”
And Misty said, “How old is it?”
And you said, “Old.”
“What kind of stones are those?” she said.
And you said, “Blue.”
Just for the record, it wasn’t easy to fall in love with Peter Wilmot. With you.
Misty said, “Where did it come from?”
And Peter shook his head a little bit, grinning at the floor. He chewed his bottom lip. He looked around at the few people left in the gallery, his eyes narrow, and he looked at Misty and said, “You promise you won’t be grossed out if I show you something?”
She looked back over her shoulder at her friends; they were off by a picture across the room, but they were watching.
And Peter whispered, his butt still against the wall, he leaned forward toward her and whispered, “You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.”
Just for the record, Peter once asked Misty if she knew why she liked the art she liked. Why is it a terrible battle scene like Picasso’s Guernica can be beautiful, while a painting of two unicorns kissing in a flower garden can look like crap.
Does anybody really know why they like anything?
Why people do anything?
There in the gallery, with her friends spying, one of the paintings had to be Peter’s, so Misty said, “Yeah. Show me some real art.”
And Peter chugged some of his beer and handed her the plastic mug. He said, “Remember. You promised.” With both hands, he grabbed the ragged hem of his sweater and pulled it up. A theater curtain lifting. An unveiling. The sweater showed his skinny belly with a little hair going up the middle. Then his navel. The hair spread out sideways around two pink nipples starting to show.
The sweater stopped, Peter’s face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.
“Look,” Peter’s voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”
Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.
Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”
It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.
“I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It’s so every day I feel new pain.”
Looking now, the sweater around the brooch was crusted stiff and darker with bloodstain. Still, this was art school. She’d seen worse. Maybe she hadn’t.
“You,” Misty said, “you’re crazy.” For no reason, maybe shock, she laughed and said, “I mean it. You are vile.” Her feet in sandals, sticky and splashed with beer.
Who knows why we like what we like?
And Peter said, “You ever hear of the painter Maura Kincaid?” He twisted the brooch, pinned through his chest, to make it glitter in the white gallery light. To make it bleed. “Or the Waytansea school of painters?” he said.
Why do we do what we do?
Misty looked back at her friends, and they looked at her, their eyebrows raised, ready to come to the rescue.
And she looked at Peter and said, “My name’s Misty,” and she held out her hand.
And slow, Peter’s eyes still on hers, he reached up and opened the clasp behind the brooch. His face winced, every muscle pulled tight for a second. His eyes sewed shut with wrinkles, he pulled the long pin out of his sweater. Out of his chest.
Out of your chest. Smeared with your blood.
He snapped the pin closed and put the brooch in her palm.
He said, “So, you want to marry me?”
He said this like a challenge, like he was picking a fight, like a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. Like a dare. A duel. His eyes handled her all over, her hair, her breasts, her legs, her arms and hands, like Misty Kleinman was the rest of his life.
Dear sweet Peter, can you feel this?
And the little trailer park idiot, she took the brooch.
July 3
ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you’re about to pick your nose.”
He takes Misty’s hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”
Just for the record, they’re a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They’ve crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner’s waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel’s wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it’s in your back pocket while you’re driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that’s how Angel’s leather pants smell pressed up against her.