Duma Key (16 page)

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?

“Too late for that, too,” I said, and looked at my stump. “I'll never be heaven again.”

The wrong word. Always the wrong word, and it would go on like that for-fucking-ever. I felt like knocking everything off my stupid goddam play-tables and onto the floor.

“Even,” I said, deliberately low and deliberately slow. “I'll never be
eeee-
ven again. I'm odd-arm-out.” That wasn't very funny (or even very sensible), but the anger started seeping away just the same. Hearing myself say the right word helped. It usually did.

I turned my thoughts from my stump to my wife's gloves. HANDS OFF, indeed.

With a sigh—there might have been some relief in it, I don't remember for sure, but it's likely—I set them on the table where I put my model objects, took a brush out of a turp jar, cleaned it with a rag, rinsed it, and looked at the blank canvas. Did I mean to paint the gloves anyway? Why, for fuck's sake?
Why?

All at once the idea that I had been painting at all seemed ridiculous. The idea that I didn't know how seemed a hell of a lot more plausible. If I dipped this brush in black and then put it on that forbidding white-space, surely the best I'd be able to do would be a series of marching stick figures:
Ten little Indians went out to dine, One drowned her baby self, Then there were nine. Nine little Indians, Stayed up very late
—

That was spooky. I got up from my chair, and fast. Suddenly I didn't want to be here, not in Little Pink, not in Big Pink, not on Duma Key, not in my stupid pointless limping retired retarded life. How many lies was I telling? That I was an artist? Ridiculous. Kamen could cry STUNNED and YOU MUST NOT STOP in his patented e-mail capitals, but Kamen specialized in tricking the victims of terrible accidents into believing the pallid imitations of life they were living were as good as the real thing. When it came to positive reinforcement, Kamen and Kathi Green the Rehab Queen were a tag-steam. They were FUCKING BRILLIANT, and most of their grateful patients cried YOU MUST NOT STOP. Was I telling myself I was psychic? Possessed of a phantom arm capable of seeing into the unknown? That wasn't ridiculous, it was pitiful and insane.

There was a 7-Eleven in Nokomis. I decided I would try my driving skills, pick up a couple of sixpacks,
and get drunk. Things might look better tomorrow, through the haze of a hangover. I did not see how they could look much worse. I reached for my crutch and my foot—my left one, my good foot, for Christ's sake—caught under my chair. I stumbled. My right leg wasn't strong enough to hold me up and I fell full-length, reaching out with my right arm to break my fall.

Just instinct, of course . . . except it did break my fall. It did. I didn't see it—my eyes were squeezed shut, the way you squeeze them when you know you're going to take one for the team—but if I hadn't broken my fall, I would almost certainly have done myself significant damage, carpet or no carpet. I could have sprained my neck, or even broken it.

I lay there a moment, confirming to myself that I was still alive, then got to my knees, my hip aching fiercely, holding my throbbing right arm up in front of my eyes. There was no arm there. I set my chair up on its legs, leaned on it with my left forearm . . . then darted my head forward and bit my right arm.

I felt the crescents of my teeth sink in just below the elbow. The pain.

I felt more. I felt the flesh of my forearm against my lips. Then I drew back, panting. “Jesus! Jesus! What's happening? What
is
this?”

I almost expected to see the arm swirl into existence. It didn't, but it was there, all right. I reached across the seat of my chair for one of my brushes. I could feel my fingers grasp it, but the brush didn't move. I thought:
So this is what it's like to be a ghost
.

I scrambled into the chair. My hip was snarling, but that pain seemed to be happening far downriver. With my left hand I snatched up the brush I'd cleaned
and put it behind my left ear. Cleaned another and put it in the gutter of the easel. Cleaned a third and put that in the gutter, as well. Thought about cleaning a fourth and decided I didn't want to take the time. That fever was on me again, that hunger. It was as sudden and violent as my fits of rage. If the smoke detectors had gone off downstairs, announcing the house was on fire, I would have paid no attention. I stripped the cellophane from a brand-new brush, dipped black, and began to paint.

As with the picture I'd called
The End of the Game,
I don't remember much about the actual creation of
Friends with Benefits
. All I know is it happened in a violent explosion, and sunsets had nothing to do with it. It was mostly black and blue, the color of bruises, and when it was done, my left arm ached from the exercise. My hand was splattered with paint all the way to the wrist.

The finished canvas reminded me a little of those
noir
paperback covers I used to see back when I was a kid, the ones that always featured some roundheels dame headed for hell. Only on the paperback covers, the dame was usually blond and twenty-twoish. In my picture, she had dark hair and looked on the plus side of forty. This dame was my ex-wife.

She was sitting on a rumpled bed, wearing nothing but a pair of blue panties. The strap of a matching bra trailed across one leg. Her head was slightly bent, but there was no mistaking her features; I had caught her BRILLIANTLY in just a few harsh strokes of black that were almost like Chinese ideograms. On the slope of one breast was the picture's only real spot of brightness: a rose tattoo. I wondered when she'd gotten it, and why. Pam wearing ink seemed as unlikely
to me as Pam racing a dirtbike at Mission Hill, but I had no doubt whatever that it was true; it was just a fact, like Carson Jones's Torii Hunter tee-shirt.

There were also two men in the picture, both naked. One stood at the window, half-turned. He had a perfectly typical body for a white middle-class man of fifty or so, one I imagined you could see in any Gold's Gym changing room: poochy stomach, flat little no-cheeks ass, moderate man-tits. His face was intelligent and well-bred. On that face now was a melancholy she's-almost-gone look. A nothing-will-change-it look. This was Max from Palm Desert. He might as well have been wearing a sign around his neck. Max who had lost
his
father last year, Max who had started by offering Pam coffee and had ended up offering her more. She'd taken him up on the coffee and the more, but not all the more he would have given. His face said that. You couldn't see all of it, but what you could see was a lot more naked than his ass.

The other man leaned in the doorway with his ankles crossed, a position that pressed his thighs together and pushed his considerable package forward. He was maybe ten years older than the man at the window, in better shape. No belly. No lovehandles. Long muscles in the thighs. His arms were folded below his chest and he was looking at Pam with a little smile on his face. I knew that smile well, because Tom Riley had been my accountant—and my friend—for thirty-five years. If it had not been custom in our family to ask your father to be your best man, I would have asked Tom.

I looked at him standing naked in the doorway, looking at my wife on the bed, and remembered
him helping me move my stuff out to Lake Phalen. Remembered him saying
You
don't give up the house, that's like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game
.

Then catching him with tears in his eyes.
Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way.

Had he been fucking her then? I thought not. But—

I'm going to give you an offer to take back to her,
I'd said. And he had. Only maybe he'd done more than make my offer.

I limped to the big window, not using my crutch. Sunset was still hours off, but the light was westering strongly, beating a reflection off the water. I made myself look directly into that glaring track, wiping my eyes repeatedly.

I tried to tell myself the picture might be no more than a figment of a mind that was still trying to heal itself. It wouldn't wash. All my voices were speaking clearly and coherently to one another, and I knew what I knew. Pam had fucked Max out there in Palm Desert, and when he had suggested a longer, deeper commitment, she had refused. Pam had also fucked my oldest friend and business associate, and might still be fucking him. The only unanswered question was which guy had talked her into the rose on her tit.

“I need to let this go,” I said, and leaned my throbbing forehead against the glass. Beyond me, the sun burned on the Gulf of Mexico. “I really need to let this go.”

Then snap your fingers,
I thought.

I snapped the fingers of my right hand and heard the sound—a brisk little click. “All right, over-done
with-gone!” I said brightly. But then I closed my eyes and saw Pam sitting on the bed—some bed—in her panties, with a bra-strap lying across her leg like a dead snake.

Friends with benefits.

Fucking friends, with fucking benefits.

vii

That evening I didn't watch the sunset from Little Pink. I left my crutch leaning against the corner of the house, limped down the beach, and walked into the water until I was up to my knees. The water was cold, the way it gets a couple of months after hurricane season has blown itself out, but I hardly noticed. Now the track beating across the water was bitter orange, and that was what I was looking at.

“Experiment, my ass,” I said, and the water surged around me. I rocked unsteadily on my feet, holding my arm out for balance. “My fucking ass.”

Overhead a heron glided across the darkening sky, a silent long-neck projectile.

“Snooping is what it was, snooping is
all
it was, and I paid the price.”

True. If I sort of felt like strangling her all over again, it was nobody's fault but my own.
Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed,
my dear old mother used to say. I peeked, I was vexed, end of story. It was her life now, and what she did in it was her business. My business was to drop it. My
question
was whether or not I could. It was harder than snapping your fingers; even than snapping the fingers of a hand that wasn't there.

A wave surged in, one big enough to knock me down. For a moment I was under, and breathing water. I came up spluttering. The backrun tried to pull me out with the sand and shells. I pushed shoreward with my good foot, even kicking feebly with my bad one, and managed to get some purchase. I might be confused about some things, but I didn't want to drown in the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn't confused about that. I crawled out of the water with my hair hanging in my eyes, spitting and coughing, dragging my right leg behind me like so much soaked luggage.

When I finally got to dry sand, I rolled over and stared up into the sky. A fat crescent moon sailed the deepening velvet above Big Pink's roofpeak. It looked very serene up there. Down here was a man who felt the opposite of serene: shaking and sad and angry. I turned my head to look at the stump of my arm, then up at the moon again.

“No more peeking,” I said. “The new deal starts tonight. No more peeking and no more experiments.”

I meant it, too. But as I've said (and Wireman was there before me), we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

i

The first time Wireman and I actually met he laughed so hard he broke the chair he was sitting in, and I laughed so hard I almost fainted—did in fact go into that half-swooning state that's called “a gray-out.” That was the last thing I would have expected a day after finding out that Tom Riley was having an affair with my ex-wife (not that my evidence would have stood up in any court of law), but it was an augury of things to come. It wasn't the only time we laughed together. Wireman was many things to me—not least of all my fate—but most of all, he was my friend.

ii

“So,” he said, when I finally reached his table with the striped umbrella shading it and the empty chair across from his own. “The limping stranger arriveth, bearing a bread-bag filled with shells. Sit down, limping stranger. Wet thy whistle. That glass has been waiting for some days now.”