Duma Key - Stephen King

"What's wrong with that? Most men would be delighted to have their daughters watch them turn pro. You going to eat that last piece of lasagna?"

We split it. Being of artistic temperament, I took the bigger half.

"I'd love her to come. But your boss-lady says Duma Key is no place for daughters, and I sort of believe her."

"My boss- lady has Alzheimer's, and it's really starting to bite. The bad news about that is she doesn't know her ass from her elbow anymore. The good news is she meets new people every day. Including me."

"She said the thing about daughters twice, and she wasn't fogged out either time."

"And maybe she's right," he said. "Or possibly it's just a bee in Miss Eastlake's bonnet, based on the fact that a couple of her sisters died here when she was four."

"Ilse vomited down the side of my car. When we got back here she was still so sick she could hardly walk."

"She probably just ate the wrong thing on top of too much sun. Look - you don't want to take a chance and I respect that. So what you're going to do is put both daughters up in a good hotel where there's twenty-four-hour room service and the concierge sucks up harder than an Oreck. I suggest the Ritz-Carlton."

"Both? Melinda won't be able to-"

He took a last bite of his lasagna and put it aside. "You ain't looking at this straight, muchacho, but Wireman, grateful bastard that he is-"

"You've got nothing to be grateful for yet-"

" - will set you straight. Because I can't stand to see a bunch of needless worries steal away your happiness. And Jesus-Krispies, you should be happy. Do you know how many people there are on the west coast of Florida who'd kill for a show on Palm Avenue?"

"Wireman, did you just say Jesus- Krispies?"

"Don't change the subject."

"They haven't exactly offered me a show yet."

"They will. They ain't bringing a sample contract out here to the willi-wags just for shits and giggles. So listen to me, now. Are you listening?"

"Sure."

"Once this show is scheduled - and it will be - you're going to do what any artist new on the scene would be expected to do: publicity. Interviews, starting with Mary Ire and going on from there to the newspapers and Channel 6. If they want to play up your missing arm, so much the better." He did the framing thing with his hands again. "Edgar Freemantle Bursts Upon the Suncoast Art Scene Like a Phoenix from the Smoking Ashes of Tragedy!"

"Smoke this, amigo, " I said, and gripped my crotch. But I couldn't help smiling.

Wireman took no notice of my vulgarity. He was on a roll. "That missing brazo of yours gonna be golden."

"Wireman, you are one cynical mongrel."

He took this for the compliment it sort of was. He nodded and waved it aside magnanimously. "I'll serve as your lawyer. You're going to pick the paintings; Nannuzzi consults. Nannuzzi sets the show arrangement; you consult. Sound about right?"

"I guess so, yeah. If that's how it's done."

"It's how this is going to be done. And, Edgar - last but very far from least - you're going to call everyone you care for and invite them to your show."

"But- "

"Yes," he said, nodding. "Everyone. Your shrink, your ex, both daughters, this guy Tom Riley, the woman who rehabbed you-"

"Kathi Green," I said, bemused. "Wireman, Tom won't come. No way in hell. Neither will Pam. And Lin's in France. With strep, for God's sake."

Wireman took no notice. "You mentioned a lawyer-"

"William Bozeman the Third. Bozie."

"Invite him. Oh, your mom and dad, of course. Your sisters and brothers."

"My parents are dead and I was an only child. Bozie..." I nodded. "Bozie would come. But don't call him that, Wireman. Not to his face."

"Call another lawyer Bozie? Do you think I'm stupid?" He considered. "I shot myself in the head and didn't manage to kill myself, so you better not answer that."

I wasn't paying much attention, because I was thinking. For the first time I understood that I could throw a coming-out party for my other life... and people might show up. The idea was both thrilling and daunting.

"They might all come, you know," he said. "Your ex, your globe-trotting daughter, and your suicidal accountant. Think of it - a mob of Michiganders."

"Minnesotans."

He shrugged and flipped up his hands, indicating they were both the same to him. Pretty snooty for a guy from Nebraska.

"I could charter a plane," I said. "A Gulfstream. Take a whole floor at the Ritz-Carlton. Blow a big wad. Why the fuck not?"

"That's right," he said, and snickered. "Really do the starving artist bit."

"Yeah," I said. "Put out a sign in the window. 'WILL WORK FOR TRUFFLES.'"

Then we were both laughing.

ix

After our plates and glasses were in the dishwasher, I led him back upstairs, but just long enough so I could take half a dozen digital photos of him - big, charmless close-ups. I have taken a few good photographs in my life, but always by accident. I hate cameras, and the cameras seem to know it. When I was done, I told him he could go home and spell Annmarie. It was dark outside, and I offered him my Malibu.

"Gonna walk. The air will be good for me." Then he pointed at the canvas. "Can I take a look?"

"Actually, I'd rather you didn't."

I thought he might protest, but he just nodded and went back downstairs, almost trotting. There was a new spring in his step - that was surely not my imagination. At the door he said, "Call Nannuzzi in the morning. Don't let the grass grow under your heels."

"All right. And you call me if anything changes with your..." I gestured at his face with my paint-stippled hand.

He grinned. "You'll be the first to know. For the time being, I can settle for being headache-free." The grin faded. "Are you sure it won't come back?"

"I'm sure of nothing."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's the human condition, ain't it? But I thank you for trying." And before I knew he was going to do it, he had taken my hand and kissed the back of it. A gentle kiss in spite of the bristles on his upper lip. Then he told me adi s and was gone into the dark and the only sound was the sigh of the Gulf and the whispering conversation of the shells under the house. Then there was another sound. The phone was ringing.

x

It was Ilse, calling to chat. Yes, her classes were going fine, yes, she felt well - great, in fact - yes, she was calling her mother once a week and staying in touch with Lin by e-mail. In Ilse's opinion, Lin's strep was probably so much self-diagnosed bullcrap. I told her I was stunned by her generosity of feeling and she laughed.

I told her there was a possibility that I might be showing my work at a gallery in Sarasota, and she shrieked so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

"Daddy, that's wonderful! When? Can I come?"

"Sure, if you want to," I said. "I'm going to invite everybody." This was a decision I hadn't entirely made until I heard myself telling her. "We're thinking mid-April."

"Shit! That's when I was planning to catch up with The Hummingbirds tour." She paused. Thinking. Then: "I can work them both in. A little tour of my own."

"You think?"

"Yes, of course. You just give me the date and I am there."

Tears pricked the backs of my eyelids. I don't know what it's like to have sons, but I'm sure it can't be as rewarding - as plain nice - as having daughters. "I appreciate that, hon. Do you think... is there any possibility your sister might come?"

"You know what, I think she will," Ilse said, "She'll be crazy to see what you're doing that's got people in the know so excited. Will you get written up?"

"My friend Wireman thinks so. One-armed artist, and all that."

"But you're just good, Daddy!"

I thanked her, then moved on to Carson Jones. Asked what she heard from him.

"He's fine," she said.

"Really?"

"Sure - why?"

"I don't know. I just thought I heard a little cloud in your voice."

She laughed ruefully. "You know me too well. The fact is, they're SRO everyplace they play now - word's getting around. The tour was supposed to end on May fifteenth because four of the singers have other commitments, but the booking agent found three new ones. And Bridget Andreisson, who's become quite the star, got them to push back the start of her understudy pastorate in Arizona. Which was lucky." Her voice flattened as she said this last, and became the voice of some adult woman I didn't know. "So instead of finishing in mid-May, the tour has been extended to the end of June, with dates in the Midwest and a final concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Some bigga-time, huh?" This was my phrase, used when Illy and Lin were little girls putting on what they called "ballet super-shows" in the garage, but I couldn't recall ever saying it in that sad tone of not-quite-sarcasm.

"Are you worried about your guy and this Bridget?"

"No!" she said at once, and laughed. "He says she has a great voice and he's lucky to be singing with her - they have two songs now instead of just one - but she's shallow and stuck-up. Also, he wishes she'd pop some Certs before he has to, you know, share a mike with her."

I waited.

"Okay," Ilse said at last.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I'm worried." A pause. "A little bit, because he's with her on a bus every day and on stage with her every night and I'm here." Another, longer pause. Then: "And he doesn't sound the same when I talk to him on the phone. Almost... but not quite."

"That could be your imagination."

"Yes. It could. And in any case, if something's going on - nothing is, I'm sure nothing is - but if something is, better now rather than after... you know, than after we..."

"Yes," I said, thinking that was so adult it hurt. I remembered finding the picture of them at the roadside stand with their arms around each other, and touching it with my missing right hand. Then rushing up to Little Pink with Reba clamped between my stump and my right side. A long time ago, that seemed. I love you, Punkin! "Smiley" had written, but the picture I'd done that day with my Venus colored pencils (they also seemed a long time ago) had somehow mocked the idea of enduring love: the little girl in her little tennis dress, looking out at the enormous Gulf. Tennis balls all around her feet. More floating in on the incoming waves.

That girl had been Reba, but also Ilse, and... who else? Elizabeth Eastlake?

The idea came out of nowhere, but I thought yes.

The water runs faster now, Elizabeth had said. Soon come the rapids. Do you feel that?

I felt it.

"Daddy, are you there?"

"Yes," I said again. "Honey, be good to yourself, okay? And try not to get too spun up. My friend down here says in the end we wear out our worries. I sort of believe that."

"You always make me feel better," she said. "That's why I call. I love you, Daddy."

"I love you too."

"How many bunches?"

How many years since she'd asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn't matter, I remembered the answer.

"A million and one for under your pillow," I said.

Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I'd kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

xi

Dario Nannuzzi and one of his partners, Jimmy Yoshida, came out the very next day. Yoshida was a Japanese-American Dorian Gray. Getting out of Nannuzzi's Jaguar in my driveway, dressed in faded straight-leg jeans and an even more faded Rihanna Pon De Replay tee-shirt, long black hair blowing in the breeze off the Gulf, he looked eighteen. By the time he got to the end of the walk, he looked twenty-eight. When he shook my hand, up close and personal, I could see the lines tattooed around his eyes and mouth and put him somewhere in his late forties.

"Pleased to meet you," he said. "The gallery is still buzzing over your visit. Mary Ire has been back three times to ask when we're going to sign you up."

"Come on in," I said. "Our friend down the beach - Wireman - has called me twice already to make sure I don't sign anything without him."

Nannuzzi smiled. "We're not in the business of cheating artists, Mr. Freemantle."

"Edgar, remember? Would you like some coffee?"

"Look first," Jimmy Yoshida said. "Coffee later."

I took a breath. "Fine. Come on upstairs."

xii

I'd covered my portrait of Wireman (which was still little more than a vague shape with a brain floating in it three-quarters of the way up), and my picture of Tina Garibaldi and Candy Brown had gone bye-bye in the downstairs closet (along with Friends with Benefits and the red-robe figure), but I had left my other stuff out. There was now enough to lean against two walls and part of a third; forty-one canvases in all, including five versions of Girl and Ship.

When their silence was more than I could bear, I broke it. "Thanks for the tip on that Liquin stuff. It's great. What my daughters would call da bomb."

Nannuzzi seemed not to have heard. He was going in one direction, Yoshida in the other. Neither asked about the big, sheet-draped canvas on the easel; I guessed that doing that might be considered poor etiquette in their world. Beneath us, the shells murmured. Somewhere, far off, a Jet-ski blatted. My right arm itched, but faint and very deep, telling me it wanted to paint but could wait - it knew the time would come. Before the sun went down. I'd paint and at first I would consult the photographs clipped to the sides of the easel and then something else would take over and the shells would grind louder and the chrome of the Gulf would change color, first to peach and then to pink and then to orange and finally to RED, and it would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Nannuzzi and Yoshida met back by the stairs leading down from Little Pink. They conferred briefly, then came toward me. From the hip pocket of his jeans, Yoshida produced a business-size envelope with the words SAMPLE CONTRACT/SCOTO GALLERY neatly typed on the front. "Here," he said. "Tell Mr. Wireman we'll make any reasonable accommodation in order to represent your work."

"Really?" I asked. "Are you sure?"

Yoshida didn't smile. "Yes, Edgar. We're sure."

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you both." I looked past Yoshida to Nannuzzi, who was smiling. "Dario, I really appreciate this."

Dario looked around at the paintings, gave a little laugh, then lifted his hands and dropped them. "I think we should be the ones expressing appreciation, Edgar."

"I'm impressed by their clarity," Yoshida said. "And their... I don't know, but... I think... lucidity. These images carry the viewer along without drowning him. The other thing that amazes me is how fast you've worked. You're unbottling."

"I don't know that word."

"Artists who begin late are sometimes said to unbottle," Nannuzzi said. "It's as if they're trying to make up for lost time. Still... forty paintings in a matter of months... of weeks, really..."

And you didn't even see the one that killed the child-murderer, I thought.

Dario laughed without much humor. "Try not to let the place burn down, all right?"

"Yes - that would be bad. Assuming we make a deal, could I store some of my work at your gallery?"