Duma Key

I went upstairs at the boom-and-flash height of the festivities, and - feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower - drew Wireman, using a plain old Venus Black pencil. Until the very end, that was. Then I used red and orange for the fruit in the bowl. In the background I sketched a doorway, and in the doorway I put Reba, standing there and watching. I supposed Kamen would have said Reba was my representative in the world of the picture. Maybe s , maybe no. The last thing I did was pick up the Venus Sky to color in her stupid eyes. Then it was done. Another Freemantle masterpiece is born.

I sat looking at it while the diminishing thunder rolled away and the lightning flashed a few goodbye stutters over the Gulf. There was Wireman, sitting at a table. Sitting there, I had no doubt, at the end of his other life. On the table was a bowl of fruit and the pistol he kept either for target practice (back then his eyes had been fine) or for home protection or both. I had sketched the pistol and then scribbled it in, giving it a sinister, slightly blobby look. That other house was empty. Somewhere in that other house a clock was ticking. Somewhere in that other house a refrigerator was whining. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. The scent was terrible. The sounds were worse. The march of the clock. The relentless whine of the refrigerator as it went on making ice in a wifeless, childless world. Soon the man at the table would close his eyes, stretch out his hand, and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl. If it was an orange, he'd go to bed. If it was an apple, he would apply the muzzle of the gun to his right temple, pull the trigger, and air out his aching brains.

It had been an apple.

v

Jack showed up the next day with a borrowed van and plenty of soft cloth in which to wrap my canvases. I told him I'd made a friend from the big house down the beach, and that he'd be going with us. "No problem," Jack said cheerfully, climbing the stairs to Little Pink and trundling a hand-dolly along behind him. "There's plenty of room in the - whoa!" He had stopped at the head of the stairs.

"What?" I asked.

"Are these ones new? They must be."

"Yeah." Nannuzzi from the Scoto had asked to see half a dozen pictures, no more than ten, so I'd split the difference and set out eight. Four were the ones that had impressed Wireman the night before. "What do you think?"

"Dude, these are awesome!"

It was hard to doubt his sincerity; he'd never called me dude before. I mounted a couple more steps and then poked his bluejeaned butt with the tip of my crutch. "Make room."

He stepped aside, pulling the dolly with him, so I could climb the rest of the way up to Little Pink. He was still staring at the pictures.

"Jack, is this guy at the Scoto really okay? Do you know?"

"My Mom says he is, and that's good enough for me." Meaning, I think, that it should be good enough for me, too. I guessed it would have to be. "She didn't tell me anything about the other partners - I think there are two more - but she says Mr. Nannuzzi's okay."

Jack had called in a favor for me. I was touched.

"And if he doesn't like these," Jack finished, "he's wack."

"You think so, huh?"

He nodded.

From downstairs, Wireman called cheerfully: "Knock-knock! I'm here for the field trip. Are we still going? Who's got my name-tag? Was I supposed to pack a lunch?"

vi

I had pictured a bald, skinny, professorial man with blazing brown eyes - an Italian Ben Kingsley - but Dario Nannuzzi turned out to be fortyish, plump, courtly, and possessed of a full head of hair. I was close on the eyes, though. They didn't miss a trick. I saw them widen once - slightly but perceptibly - when Wireman carefully unwrapped the last painting I'd brought, Roses Grow from Shells. The pictures were lined up against the back wall of the gallery, which was currently devoted mostly to photographs by Stephanie Shachat and oils by William Berra. Better stuff, I thought, than I could do in a century.

Although there had been that slight widening of the eyes.

Nannuzzi went down the line from first to last, then went again. I had no idea if that was good or bad. The dirty truth was that I had never been in an art gallery in my life before that day. I turned to ask Wireman what he thought, but Wireman had withdrawn and was talking quietly with Jack, both of them watching Nannuzzi look at my paintings.

Nor were they the only ones, I realized. The end of January is a busy season in the pricey shops along Florida's west coast. There were a dozen or so lookie-loos in the good-sized Scoto Gallery (Nannuzzi later used the far more dignified term "potential patrons"), eyeing the Shachat dahlias, William Berra's gorgeous but touristy oils of Europe, and a few eyepopping, cheerfully feverish sculptures I'd missed in the anxiety of getting my own stuff unwrapped - these were by a guy named David Gerstein.