Diary (4 page)

July 2

OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.

Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty's fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.

Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:

Don't.

No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”

The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.

You'd flunked out.

Every art school in eleven states, Peter went there and didn't go to class. He never spent any time in his studio. The Wilmots had to be rich because he'd been in school almost five years and his portfolio was still empty. Peter just flirted with young women full-time. Peter Wilmot, he had long black hair, and he wore these stretched-out cable-knit sweaters the color of blue dirt. The seam was always coming open in one shoulder, and the hem hung down below his crotch.

Fat, thin, young, or old women, Peter wore his ratty blue sweater and slouched around campus all day, flirting with every girl student. Creepy Peter Wilmot. Misty's girlfriends, they pointed him out one day, his sweater unraveling at the elbows and along the bottom.

Your sweater.

Stitches had broken and holes were hanging open in the back, showing Peter's black T-shirt underneath.

Your black T-shirt.

The only difference between Peter and a homeless mental outpatient with limited access to soap was his jewelry. Or maybe not. It was just weird cruddy old brooches and necklaces made from rhinestones. Crusted with fake pearls and rhinestones, these are big scratchy old wads of colored glass that hang off the front of Peter's sweater. Big grandma brooches. A different brooch every day. Some days, it was a big pinwheel of fake emeralds. Then it would be a snowflake made of chipped glass diamonds and rubies, the wire parts turned green from his sweat.

From your sweat.

Junk jewelry.

For the record, the first time Misty met Peter was at a freshman art exhibit where some friends and her were looking at a painting of a craggy stone house. On one side, the house opened into a big glass room, a conservatory full of palm trees. In through the windows, you could see a piano. You could see a man reading a book. A private little paradise. Her friends were saying how nice it looked, the colors and everything, and then somebody said, “Don't turn around, but the walking peter is headed over here.”

Misty said, “The what?”

And somebody said, “Peter Wilmot.”

Someone else said, “Do not make eye contact.”

All her girlfriends said, Misty, do not even encourage him. Anytime Peter came into the room, every woman remembered a reason to leave. He didn't really stink, but you still tried to hide behind your hands. He didn't stare at your breasts, but most women still folded their arms. Watching any woman talk to Peter Wilmot, you could see how her frontalis muscle lifted her forehead into wrinkles, proof she was scared. Peter's top eyelids would be half shut, more like someone angry than looking to fall in love.

Then Misty's friends, in the gallery that night, they scattered.

Then she was standing alone with Peter in his greasy hair and the sweater and the old junk jewelry, who rocked back on his heels, his hands on his hips, and looking at the painting, he said, “So?”

Not looking at her, he said, “You going to be a chicken and run away with your little friends?”

He said this with his chest stuck out. His upper eyelids were half closed, and his jaw worked back and forth. His teeth ground together. He turned and fell back against the wall so hard the painting beside him went crooked. He leaned back, his shoulders squared against the wall, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. Peter shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out, slow, opened his eyes to stare at her, and said, “So? What do you think?”

“About the painting?” Misty said. The craggy stone house. She reached out and turned it straight again.

And Peter looked sideways without turning his head. His eyes rolled to see the painting just past his shoulder, and he said, “I grew up next door to that house. The guy with the book, that's Brett Petersen.” Then loud, he said, too loud, “I want to know if you'll marry me.”

That's how Peter proposed.

How you proposed. The first time.

He was from the island, everybody said. The whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, all those fine old island families going back to the Mayflower Compact. Those fine old family trees where everybody was everybody's cousin once removed. Where nobody's had to buy any silverware since two hundred years ago. They ate something meat with every meal, and all the sons seemed to wear the same shabby old jewelry. Their kind-of regional fashion statement. Their old shingle and stone family houses towered along Elm Street, Juniper Street, Hornbeam Street, weathered just so by the salt air.

Even all their golden retrievers were inbred cousins to each other.

People said everything on Waytansea Island was just-so museum quality. The funky old ferryboat that held six cars. The three blocks of red brick buildings along Merchant Street, the grocer, the old library clock tower, the shops. The white clapboards and wraparound porches of the closed old Waytansea Hotel. The Waytansea church, all granite and stained glass.

There in the art school gallery, Peter was wearing a brooch made from a circle of dirty blue rhinestones. Inside that was a circle of fake pearls. Some blue stones were gone, and the empty fittings looked sharp with ragged little teeth. The metal was silver, but bent and turning black. The point of the long pin, it stuck out from under one edge and looked pimpled with rust.

Peter held a big plastic mug of beer with some sports team stenciled on the side, and he took a drink. He said, “If you'd never consider marrying me, there's no point in me taking you to dinner, is there?” He looked at the ceiling and then at her and said, “I find this approach saves everybody a shitload of time.”

“Just for the record,” Misty told him, “that house doesn't exist. I made it up.”

Misty told you.

And you said, “You remember that house because it's still in your heart.”

And Misty said, “How the fuck do you know what's in my goddamn heart?”

The big stone houses. Moss on the trees. Ocean waves that hiss and burst below cliffs of brown rock. All that was in her little white trash heart.

Maybe because Misty was still standing here, maybe because you thought she was fat and lonely and she hadn't run away, you looked down at the brooch on your chest and smiled. You looked at her and said, “You like it?”

And Misty said, “How old is it?”

And you said, “Old.”

“What kind of stones are those?” she said.

And you said, “Blue.”

Just for the record, it wasn't easy to fall in love with Peter Wilmot. With you.

Misty said, “Where did it come from?”

And Peter shook his head a little bit, grinning at the floor. He chewed his bottom lip. He looked around at the few people left in the gallery, his eyes narrow, and he looked at Misty and said, “You promise you won't be grossed out if I show you something?”

She looked back over her shoulder at her friends; they were off by a picture across the room, but they were watching.

And Peter whispered, his butt still against the wall, he leaned forward toward her and whispered, “You'll need to suffer to make any real art.”

Just for the record, Peter once asked Misty if she knew why she liked the art she liked. Why is it a terrible battle scene like Picasso's
Guernica
can be beautiful, while a painting of two unicorns kissing in a flower garden can look like crap.

Does anybody really know why they like anything?

Why people do anything?

There in the gallery, with her friends spying, one of the paintings had to be Peter's, so Misty said, “Yeah. Show me some real art.”

And Peter chugged some of his beer and handed her the plastic mug. He said, “Remember. You promised.” With both hands, he grabbed the ragged hem of his sweater and pulled it up. A theater curtain lifting. An unveiling. The sweater showed his skinny belly with a little hair going up the middle. Then his navel. The hair spread out sideways around two pink nipples starting to show.

The sweater stopped, Peter's face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.

“Look,” Peter's voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”

Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.

Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”

It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.

“I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It's so every day I feel new pain.”

Looking now, the sweater around the brooch was crusted stiff and darker with bloodstain. Still, this was art school. She'd seen worse. Maybe she hadn't.

“You,” Misty said, “you're crazy.” For no reason, maybe shock, she laughed and said, “I mean it. You are vile.” Her feet in sandals, sticky and splashed with beer.

Who knows why we like what we like?

And Peter said, “You ever hear of the painter Maura Kincaid?” He twisted the brooch, pinned through his chest, to make it glitter in the white gallery light. To make it bleed. “Or the Waytansea school of painters?” he said.

Why do we do what we do?

Misty looked back at her friends, and they looked at her, their eyebrows raised, ready to come to the rescue.

And she looked at Peter and said, “My name's Misty,” and she held out her hand.

And slow, Peter's eyes still on hers, he reached up and opened the clasp behind the brooch. His face winced, every muscle pulled tight for a second. His eyes sewed shut with wrinkles, he pulled the long pin out of his sweater. Out of his chest.

Out of your chest. Smeared with your blood.

He snapped the pin closed and put the brooch in her palm.

He said, “So, you want to marry me?”

He said this like a challenge, like he was picking a fight, like a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. Like a dare. A duel. His eyes handled her all over, her hair, her breasts, her legs, her arms and hands, like Misty Kleinman was the rest of his life.

Dear sweet Peter, can you feel this?

And the little trailer park idiot, she took the brooch.

July 3

ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE
a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you're about to pick your nose.”

He takes Misty's hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”

Just for the record, they're a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They've crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner's waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel's wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it's in your back pocket while you're driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that's how Angel's leather pants smell pressed up against her.

Every so often the homeowner standing outside, she kicks the wall and shouts, “You want to tell me what you two are up to in there?”

Today's weather is warm and sunny with a few scattered clouds and some homeowner called from Pleasant Beach to say she'd found her missing breakfast nook, and somebody had better come see right away. Misty called Angel Delaporte, and he met her when the ferry docked so they could drive together. He brings his camera and a bag full of lenses and film.

Angel, you might remember, he lives in Ocean Park. Here's a hint: You sealed off his kitchen. He says the way you write your
m
's, with the first hump larger than the second, that proves you value your own opinion above public opinion. How you do your lowercase
h
's, with the last stroke cutting back underneath the hump, shows you're never willing to compromise. It's graphology, and it's a bona fide science, Angel says. After seeing these words in his missing kitchen, he asked to see some other houses.

Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase
g
's and
y
's, with the bottom loop pulling to the left, that shows you're very attached to your mother.

And Misty told him, he got that part right.

Angel and her, they drove to Pleasant Beach, and a woman opened the front door. She looked at them, her head tilted back so her eyes looked down her nose, her chin pushed forward and her lips pressed together thin, with the muscle at each corner of her jaw, each masseter muscle clenched into a little fist, and she said, “Is Peter Wilmot too lazy to show his face here?”

That little muscle from her lower lip to her chin, the mentalis, it was so tense her chin looked pitted with a million tiny dimples, and she said, “My husband hasn't stopped gargling since this morning.”

The mentalis, the corrugator, all those little muscles of the face, those are the first things you learn in art school anatomy. After that, you can tell a fake smile because the risorius and platysma muscles pull the lower lip down and out, squaring it and exposing the lower teeth.

Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

In her kitchen, the yellow wallpaper peels back from a hole near the floor. The floor's yellow tile is covered in newspapers and white plaster dust. Next to the hole's a shopping bag bulging with scraps of busted plasterboard. Ribbons of torn yellow wallpaper curl out of the bag. Yellow dotted with little orange sunflowers.

The woman stood next to the hole, her arms folded across her chest. She nodded at the hole and said, “It's right in there.”

Steelworkers, Misty told her, they'll tie a branch to the highest peak of a new skyscraper or bridge to celebrate the fact that no one has died during construction. Or to bring prosperity to the new building. It's called “tree topping.” A quaint tradition.

They're full of irrational superstitions, building contractors.

Misty told the homeowner not to worry.

Her corrugator muscle pulls her eyebrows together above her nose. Her levator labii superioris pulls her upper lip up into a sneer and flares her nostrils. Her depressor labii inferioris pulls her bottom lip down to show her lower teeth, and she says, “It's you who should be worried.”

Inside the hole, the dark little room's lined on three sides with yellow built-in bench seats, sort of a restaurant booth with no table. It's what the homeowner calls a breakfast nook. The yellow is yellow vinyl and the walls above the benches are yellow wallpaper. Scrawled across all this is the black spray paint, and Angel moves her hand along the wall where it says:

“. . . save our world by killing this army of invaders . . .”

It's Peter's black spray paint, broken sentences and squiggles. Doodles. The paint loops across the framed art, the lace pillows, the yellow vinyl bench seats. On the floor are empty cans with Peter's black handprints, his spiraling fingerprints in paint, they're still clutching each can.

The spray-painted words loop across the little framed pictures of flowers and birds. The black words trail over the little lace throw pillows. The words run around the room in every direction, across the tiled floor, over the ceiling.

Angel says, “Give me your hand.” And he balls Misty's fingers together into a fist with just her index finger sticking out straight. He puts her fingertip against the black writing on the wall and makes her trace each word.

His hand tight around hers, guiding her finger. The dark creep of sweat around the collar and under the arms of his white T-shirt. The wine on his breath, collecting against the side of Misty's neck. The way Angel's eyes stay on her while she keeps her eyes on the black painted words. This is how the whole room feels.

Angel holds her finger against the wall, moving her touch along the painted words there, and he says, “Can you feel how your husband felt?”

According to graphology, if you take your index finger and trace someone's handwriting, maybe you take a wooden spoon or chopstick and you just write on top of the written words, you can feel exactly how the writer felt at the time he wrote. You have to study the pressure and speed of the writing, pressing as hard as the writer pressed. Writing as fast as it seems the writer did. Angel says this is all similar to Method acting. What he calls Konstantin Stanislavski's method of physical actions.

Handwriting analysis and Method acting, Angel says they both got popular at the same time. Stanislavski studied the work of Pavlov and his drooling dog and the work of neurophysiologist I. M. Sechenov. Before that, Edgar Allan Poe studied graphology. Everybody was trying to link the physical and the emotional. The body and the mind. The world and the imagination. This world and the next.

Moving Misty's finger along the wall, he has her trace the words: “. . . the flood of you, with your bottomless hunger and noisy demands . . .”

Whispering, Angel says, “If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”

Stanislavski, Sechenov, Poe, everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand, he says. An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.

The mystical meets the Industrial Revolution.

The way the rag smells after you polish your boots, that's how the whole room smells. The way the inside of a heavy belt smells. A catcher's mitt. A dog's collar. The faint vinegar smell of your sweaty watchband.

The sound of Angel's breath, the side of her face damp from his whispering. His hand stiff and hard as a trap around her, squeezing her hand. His fingernails dig into Misty's skin. And Angel says, “Feel. Feel and tell me what your husband felt.” The words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

The way reading something can be a slap in your face.

Outside the hole, the homeowner says something. She knocks on the wall and says, louder, “Whatever it is you have to do, you'd better be doing it.”

Angel whispers, “Say it.”

The words say: “. . . you, a plague, trailing your failures and garbage . . .”

Forcing your wife's fingers along each letter, Angel whispers, “Say it.”

And Misty says, “No.” She says, “It's just crazy talk.”

Steering her fingers wrapped tight inside his, Angel shoulders her along, saying, “It's just words. You can say it.”

And Misty says, “They're evil. They don't make sense.”

The words: “. . . to slaughter all of you as an offering, every fourth generation . . .”

Angel's skin warm and tight around her fingers, he whispers, “Then why did you come see them?”

The words: “. . . my wife's fat legs are crawling with varicose veins . . .”

Your wife's fat legs.

Angel whispers, “Why bother coming?”

Because her dear sweet stupid husband, he didn't leave a suicide note.

Because this is part of him she never knew.

Because she wants to understand who he was. She wants to find out what happened.

Misty tells Angel, “I don't know.”

Old-school building contractors, she tells him, they'd never start a new house on a Monday. Only on a Saturday. After the foundation is laid, they'll toss in a handful of rye seed. After three days, if the seed doesn't sprout, they'll build the house. They'll bury an old Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They'll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won't know the house is done until it's already being lived in.

Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It's square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal's smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.

On the tall thin side of the flask, it's engraved:
To Angel—Te Amo
.

Misty says, “So? Why are
you
here?”

As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.

Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.

And Angel says, “It's gin.”

The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What's inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner's feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.

Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.

Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase
g
or
y
for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you're stuck in the past and looking at yourself.

You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It's all art. What you do with your hands, you're always blabbing your life story.

It's gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.

Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase
e
or
x,
those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your
l
or
h
or dot your
i,
that shows what you aspire to become.

Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they're crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.

Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.

And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”

Peter's words say, “. . . it's with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations . . .”

Your words. Your art.

Angel's fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there's the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.

Misty's fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “. . . I've done my part. I found her . . .”

It says: “. . . it's not my job to kill anybody. She's the executioner . . .”

To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Géricault painted
The Raft of the Medusa,
he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.

The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he's going to jail for this shit.”

Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.

Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”

From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn't Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”

And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”

And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”