Duma Key

At first I thought it was the sculptures - jazz musicians, crazy swimmers, throbbing city scenes - that were drawing the casual afternoon browsers. And some glanced at them, but most didn't even do that. It was my pictures they were looking at.

A man with what Floridians call a Michigan tan - that can mean skin that's either dead white or burned lobster red - tapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. The other was interlaced with his wife's fingers. "Do you know who the artist is?" he asked.

"Me," I muttered, and felt my face grow hot. I felt as if I were confessing to having spent the last week or so downloading pictures of Lindsay Lohan.

"Good for you!" his wife said warmly. "Will you be showing?"

Now they were all looking at me. Sort of the way you might look at a new species of puffer-fish that may or may not be the sushi du jour. That was how it felt, anyway.

"I don't know if I'll be snowing. Showing." I could feel more blood stacking up in my cheeks. Shame-blood, which was bad. Anger-blood, which was worse. If it spilled out, it would be anger at myself, but these people wouldn't know that.

I opened my mouth to pour out words, and closed it. Take it slow, I thought, and wished I had Reba. These people would probably view a doll-toting artist as normal. They had lived through Andy Warhol, after all.

Take it slow. I can do this.

"What I mean to say is I haven't been working long, and I don't know what the procedure is."

Quit fooling yourself, Edgar. You know what they're interested in. Not your pictures but your empty sleeve. You're Artie the One-Armed Artist. Why not just cut to the chase and tell them to fuck off?

That was ridiculous, of course, but -

But now I was goddamned if everyone in the gallery wasn't standing around. Those who'd been up front looking at Ms. Shachat's flowers had been drawn by simple curiosity. It was a familiar grouping; I had seen similar clusters standing around the peepholes in board fences at a hundred construction sites.

"I'll tell you what the procedure is," said another fellow with a Michigan tan. He was swag-bellied, sporting a little garden of gin-blossoms on his nose, and wearing a tropical shirt that hung almost to his knees. His white shoes matched his perfectly combed white hair. "It's simple. Just two steps. Step one is you tell me how much you want for that one." He pointed to Sunset with Seagull. "Step two is I write the check."

The little crowd laughed. Dario Nannuzzi didn't. He beckoned to me.

"Excuse me," I said to the white-haired man.

"Price of poker just went up, my friend," someone said to Gin-Blossoms, and there was laughter. Gin-Blossoms joined in, but didn't look really amused.

I noticed all this as though in a dream.

Nannuzzi smiled at me, then turned to the patrons, who were still looking at my paintings. "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Freemantle didn't come in to sell anything today, only for an opinion on his work. Please respect his privacy and my professional situation." Whatever that is, I thought, bemused. "May I suggest that you browse the works on display while we step into the rear quarters for a little while? Ms. Aucoin, Mr. Brooks, and Mr. Castellano will be pleased to answer all your questions."

" My opinion is that you ought to sign this man up," said a severe-looking woman with her graying hair drawn back into a bun and a kind of wrecked beauty still lingering on her face. There was actually a smattering of applause. My feeling of being in a dream deepened.

An ethereal young man floated toward us from the rear. Nannuzzi might have summoned him, but I was damned if I knew just how. They spoke briefly, and then the young man produced a big roll of stickers. They were ovals with the letters NFS embossed on them in silver. Nannuzzi removed one, bent toward the first painting, then hesitated and gave me a look of reproach. "These haven't been sealed in any way."

"Uh... guess not," I said. I was blushing again. "I don't... exactly know what that is."

"Dario, what you're dealing with here is a true American primitive," said the severe-looking woman. "If he's been painting longer than three years, I'll buy you dinner at Zoria's, along with a bottle of wine." She turned her wrecked but still almost gorgeous face to me.

"When and if there's something for you to write about, Mary," Nannuzzi said, "I'll call you myself."

"You'd better," she said. "And I'm not even going to ask his name - do you see what a good girl I am?" She twiddled her fingers at me and slipped through the little crowd.

"Not much need to ask," Jack said, and of course he was right. I had signed each of the oils in the lower left corner, just as neatly as I had signed all invoices, work orders, and contracts in my other life: Edgar Freemantle.

vii

Nannuzzi settled for dabbing his NFS stickers on the upper righthand corners of the paintings, where they stuck up like the tabs of file-folders. Then he led Wireman and me into his office. Jack was invited but elected to stay with the pictures.