Duma Key

"It's where the elite meet." He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

"Then that's settled," I said, "because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son."

I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.

xviii

Back at Big Pink, he helped me into the house with my loot - five bags, two boxes, and a stack of nine stretched canvases. Almost a thousand dollars' worth of stuff. I told him we'd worry about getting it upstairs the next day. Painting was the last thing on earth I wanted to do that night.

I limped across the living room toward the kitchen, meaning to put together a sandwich, when I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking. I thought it must be Ilse, saying her flight had been cancelled due to weather or equipment problems.

It wasn't. The voice was pleasant but cracked with age, and I knew who it was at once. I could almost see those enormous blue sneakers propped on the bright footplates of her wheelchair.

"Hello, Mr. Freemantle, welcome to Duma Key. It was a pleasure to see you the other day, if only briefly. One assumes the young lady with you was your daughter, given the resemblance. Have you taken her back to the airport? One rather hopes so."

There was a pause. I could hear her breathing, the loud, not-quiteemphysemic respiration of a person who has probably spent a great deal of her life with a cigarette in one hand. Then she spoke again.

"All things considered, Duma Key has never been a lucky place for daughters."

I found myself thinking of Reba in a very unlikely tennis dress, surrounded by small fuzzy balls as more came in on the next wave.

"One hopes we will meet, in the course of time. Goodbye, Mr. Freemantle."

There was a click. Then it was just me and the restless grinding sound of the shells under the house.

The tide was in.

How to Draw a Picture (III)

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that may play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. There's nothing as human as hunger. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art. That little girl I was telling you about? She found hers and used it.

She thinks No more bed all day now. I go Daddy room, Daddy's study. Sometimes I say study, sometimes I say groody. It has a nice big window. They sit me in the char. I can see down up. Birds and nice. Too nice for me, so it makes me sat. Some clouds have wings. Some have blue eyes. Every sunset I cry from sat. Hurts to see. Hurts the down up in me. I could never say what I see and that makes me sat.

She thinks SAD, that word is SAD. Sat is for how you feel in the char.

She thinks If I could stop the hurt. If I could get it out like weewee. I cry and beg beg beg to say what I mean. Nan can't hep. When I say "Color!" she touch her face and smile and say "Always was, always will be." Big girls don't help either. I'm so mad at them, why don't you listen, YOU BIG MEANIES! Then one day the twins come, Tessie and Lo-Lo. They talk special to each other, listen special to me. They don't understand me at first, but then. Tessie bring me paper. Lo-Lo bring me pencil and I "Ben-cil!" out my mouth and it makes them claff and lap their hands.

She thinks I CAN ALMOST SAY THE NAME OF PENCIL!

She thinks I can make the world on paper. I can draw what the words mean. I see tree, I make tree. I see bird, I make bird. It's good, like water from a glass.

This is a little girl with a bandage wound around her head, wearing a little pink housecoat and sitting beside the window in her father's study. Her doll, Noveen, lies on the floor beside her. She has a board and on the board is a piece of paper. She has just succeeded in drawing a claw that actually does bear a resemblance to the dead loblolly pine outside the window.

She thinks I will have more paper, please.

She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

It must have been like being given back your tongue after you thought it had been stilled forever. And more. Better. It was a gift of herself, of ELIZABETH. Even from those incredibly brave first drawings, she must have understood what was happening. And wanted more.

Her gift was hungry. The best gifts - and the worst - always are.

4 - Friends with Benefits

i

On New Year's afternoon, I woke from a brief but refreshing nap thinking of a certain kind of shell - the orangey kind with white speckles. I don't know if I dreamed about it or not, but I wanted one. I was ready to start experimenting with paints, and I thought one of those orange shells would be just the thing to plop down in the middle of a Gulf of Mexico sunset.