Duma Key

On the other hand, maybe it was just the wind.

v

The second striped beach chair had become a fixture at the heavyset guy's table, and as I drew closer to it, we sometimes shouted a little conversation back and forth. It was a strange way to strike up an acquaintance, but pleasant. The day after Pam's e-mail, with its surface concerns and buried subtext ( You could be as sick as my father, Eddie, maybe even sicker ), the fellow down the beach yelled: "How long before you get here, do you think?"

"Four days!" I yelled back. "Maybe three!"

"You that set on making a round trip?"

"I am!" I said. "What's your name?"

His deeply tanned face, although growing fleshy, was still handsome. Now white teeth flashed there, and his incipient jowls disappeared when he grinned. "Tell you when you get here! What's yours?"

"It's on the mailbox!" I called.

"The day I stoop to reading mailboxes is the day I start getting my news from talk radio!"

I gave him a wave, he gave me one in turn, called "Hasta ma ana!" and turned to look at the water and the cruising birds once more.

When I got back to Big Pink, the flag of my computer mailbox was sticking up, and I found this:

KamenDoc to EFree19

2:49 PM

January 25

Edgar: Pam sent me copies of your latest e-mail and your pictures. Let me say first and foremost that I am STUNNED by the rapidity of your growth as an artist. I can see you shying away from the word with that patented sidelong frown of yours, but there is no other word. YOU MUST NOT STOP. Concerning her worries: there's probably nothing to them. Still, an MRI would be a good idea. Do you have a doctor down there? You're due for a physical - soup to nuts, my friend.

Kamen

EFree19 to KamenDoc

3:58 PM

January 25

Kamen: Good to hear from you. If you want to call me an artist (or even an "artiste"), who am I to argue? I currently have no Florida sawbones. Can you refer me to one or would you rather I went through Todd Jamieson, the doc with his fingers most recently in my brain?

Edgar

I thought he'd refer, and I might even keep the appointment, but right then a few dropped words and linguistic oddities weren't a priority. Walking was a priority, and reaching the striped beach chair that had been set out for me was also sort of a priority, but my main ones as January waned were Internet searches and painting pictures. I had reached Sunset with Shell No. 16 only the night before.

On January twenty-seventh, after turning back only two hundred yards or so shy of the waiting beach chair, I arrived at Big Pink to find UPS had left a package. Inside were two gardening gloves, one with HANDS printed in faded red on the back and the other similarly printed with OFF. They were beat-up from many seasons in the garden but clean - she'd laundered them, as I had expected. As I had, in fact, hoped. It wasn't the Pam who had worn them during the years of our marriage that I was interested in, not even the Pam who might have worn them in the Mendota Heights garden the past fall, while I was out at Lake Phalen. That Pam was a known quantity. But... I'll tell you something else that's happening, my If-So-Girl had said, unaware of how eerily like her mother she had looked when she was saying it. She's seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street.

That was the Pam I was interested in - the one who had seen an awful lot of the guy down the street. The guy named Max. That Pam's hands had laundered these gloves, then picked them up and put them in the white box inside the UPS package.

That Pam was the experiment... or so I told myself, but we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living. That's what Wireman says, and he's often right. Probably too often. Even now.

vi

I didn't wait for sunset, because at least I didn't fool myself that I was interested in painting a picture; I was interested in painting information. I took my wife's unnaturally clean gardening gloves (she must have really rammed the bleach to them) up to Little Pink and sat down in front of my easel. There was a fresh canvas there, waiting. To the left were two tables. One was for photos from my digital camera and various found objects. The other stood on a small green tarpaulin. It held about two dozen paint-pots, several jars partly filled with turpentine, and several bottles of the Zephyr Hills water I used as rinse. It was quite the messy, busy little work-station.

I held the gloves in my lap, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching them with my right hand. There was nothing. No pain, no itching, no sense of phantom fingers caressing the rough, worn fabric. I sat there willing it to come - whatever it was - and got more nothing. I might as well have been commanding my body to shit when it didn't need to. After five long minutes, I opened my eyes again and looked down at the gloves on my lap: HANDS... OFF.

Useless things. Useless fucking things.

Don't get mad, get even, I thought. And then I thought, Too late. I am mad. At these gloves and the woman who wore them. As for getting even?