Diary (6 page)

July 7

THE STAINED-GLASS
windows of the island church, little white trash Misty Marie Kleinman, she could draw them before she could read or write. Before she'd ever seen stained glass. She'd never been inside a church, any church. Godless little Misty Kleinman, she could draw the tombstones in the village cemetery out on Waytansea Point, drawing the dates and epitaphs before she knew they were numbers and words.

Now, sitting here in church services, it's hard for her to remember what she first imagined and what she saw for real after she'd arrived. The purple altar cloth. The thick wood beams black with varnish.

It's all what she imagined as a kid. But that's impossible.

Grace beside her in the pew, praying. Tabbi on the far side of Grace, both of them kneeling. Their hands folded.

Grace's voice, her eyes closed and her lips muttering into her hands, she says, “Please let my daughter-in-law return to the artwork she loves. Please don't let her squander the glorious talent God has given her . . .”

Every old island family around them, muttering in prayer.

Behind them, a voice is whispering, “. . . please, Lord, give Peter's wife what she needs to start her work . . .”

Another voice, Old Lady Petersen, is praying, “. . . may Misty save us before the outsiders get any worse . . .”

Even Tabbi, your own daughter, is whispering, “God, make my mom get her act together and get started on her art . . .”

All the Waytansea Island waxworks are kneeling around Misty. The Tuppers and Burtons and Niemans, they're all eyes-closed, knotting their fingers together and asking God to make her paint. All of them thinking she has some secret talent to save them.

And Misty, your poor wife, the only sane person here, she just wants to—well, all she wants is a drink.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. And repeat.

She wants to yell for everybody to just shut up with their goddamn prayers.

If you've reached middle age and you see how you're never going to be the big famous artist you dreamed of becoming and paint something that will touch and inspire people, really touch and move them and change their lives. You just don't have the talent. You don't have the brains or inspiration. You don't have any of what it takes to create a masterpiece. If you see how your whole portfolio of work is just grand stony houses and big pillowy flower gardens—the naked dreams of a little girl in Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—if you see how anything you could paint would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit. If you realize you're forty-one years old and you've reached the end of your God-given potential, well, cheers.

Here's mud in your eye. Bottoms up.

Here's as smart as you're ever going to get.

If you realize there's no way you can give your child a better standard of living—hell, you can't even give your child the quality of life that your trailer park mom gave you—and this means no college for her, no art school, no dreams, nothing except for waiting tables like her mom . . .

Well, it's down the hatch.

This is every day in the life of Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.

Maura Kincaid?

Constance Burton?

The Waytansea school of painters. They were different, born different. Those artists who made it look so easy. The point is some people have talent, but most people don't. Most people, we're going to top out with no glory, no perks. Folks like poor Misty Marie, they're limited, borderline dummies, but nothing enough to get a handicapped parking space. Or get any kind of Special Olympic Games. They just pay the bulk of taxes but get no special menu at the steak house. No oversized bathroom stall. No special seat at the front of the bus. No political lobby.

No, your wife's job will be to applaud other people.

In art school, one girl Misty knew, she ran a kitchen blender full of wet concrete until the motor burned out in a cloud of bitter smoke. This was her statement about life as a housewife. Right now, that girl is probably living in a loft eating organic yogurt. She's rich and can cross her legs at the knee.

Another girl Misty knew in art school, she performed a three-act play with puppets in her own mouth. These were little costumes you could slip over your tongue. You'd hold the extra costumes inside your cheek, the same as the wings to a stage. Between scene changes, you'd just close your lips as a curtain. Your teeth, the footlights and proscenium arch. You'd slip your tongue into the next costume. After doing a three-act play, she'd have stretch marks all around her mouth. Her orbicularis oris stretched all out of shape.

One night in a gallery, doing a tiny version of
The Greatest Story Ever Told,
this girl almost died when a tiny camel slipped down her throat. These days, she was probably rolling in grant money.

Peter with his praise for all of Misty's pretty houses, he was so wrong. Peter who said she should hide away on the island, paint only what she loved, his advice was so fucked.

Your advice, your praise was so very, very fucked.

According to you, Maura Kincaid washed fish in a cannery for twenty years. She potty-trained her kids, weeded her garden, then one day she sits down and paints a masterpiece. The bitch. No graduate degree, no studio time, but now she's famous forever. Loved by millions of people who will never meet her.

Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.

Just so you know, Peter, your mother's still a bitch. She's working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What's the point of being rich here if there's nothing to buy?”

Since Grace heard this, she's been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.

Like she could save the whole island that way.

Tabbi's birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there's no money for a gift. Misty's saving her tips until there's enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can't live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn't want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.

By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn't know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There's always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.

Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.

If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.

Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.

The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.

She flips through the pages, but there's nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.

Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can't.”

It's signed
Constance Burton
.

July 8

ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE,
Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.

You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”

The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop's front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.

Misty and you.

Blocking if anybody might see her painting.

Her signature was at the bottom, below the picket fence,
Misty Marie Kleinman
. The only thing missing was a smiling face. A heart dotting the
i
in Kleinman.

“Maybe a museum of kitsch,” she said. This was just a better version of what she'd been painting since childhood. Her fantasy village. And seeing it felt worse than seeing the worst, most fat naked picture of yourself ever. Here it was, the trite little heart of Misty Marie Kleinman. The sugary dreams of the poor, lonely six-year-old kid she'd be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.

The trite little secret of what made her feel happy.

Misty kept peeking back over one shoulder to make sure no one was looking in. No one was seeing the most cliché, honest part of her, painted here in watercolors.

Peter, God bless him, he just cut the mat and centered the painting inside it.

You cut the mat.

Peter set up the miter saw on the shop's workbench, and he cut the lengths for each side of the frame. The painting, when Peter looked at it, half his face smiled, the zygomatic major pulling up one side of his mouth. He only lifted the eyebrow on that side. He said, “You got the porch railing perfect.”

Outside, a girl from art school walked by on the sidewalk. This girl, her latest “work” was stuffing a teddy bear with dog shit. She worked with her hands inside blue rubber gloves so thick she could almost not bend her fingers. According to her, beauty was a stale concept. Superficial. A cheat. She was working a new vein. A new twist on a classic Dada theme. In her studio, she had the little teddy bear already gutted out, its fake fur spread open autopsy-style, ready to turn into art. Her rubber gloves smeared with brown stink, she could hardly hold the needle and red suture thread. Her title for all this was:
Illusions of Childhood
.

Other kids in art school, kids from rich families, the kids who traveled and saw real art in Europe and New York, all of them did this kind of work.

Another boy in Misty's class, he was masturbating, trying to fill a piggy bank with sperm before the end of the year. He lived off dividends from a trust fund. Another girl drank different colors of egg temperas, then drank syrup of ipecac that made her vomit her masterpiece. She drove to class on a moped from Italy that cost more than the trailer where Misty grew up.

In the frame shop that morning, Peter fitted the corners of the frame together. He dabbed glue with his bare fingers and drilled holes in each corner for the screws.

Still standing between the window and the workbench, her shadow blocking the sunlight, Misty said, “You really think it's good?”

And Peter said, “If you only knew . . .”

You said that.

Peter said, “You're in my light. I can't see.”

“I don't want to move,” Misty told him. “People outside might see.”

All the dog shit and jack-off and barf. Running the glass cutter across the glass, never taking his eyes off the little cutting wheel, a pencil tucked in the hair behind one ear, Peter said, “Just smelling super gross doesn't make their work art.”

Snapping the glass into two pieces, Peter said, “Shit is an esthetic cliché.” He said how the Italian painter Piero Manzoni canned his own shit, labeled “100% Pure Artist's Shit,” and people bought it.

Peter was watching his hands so hard that Misty had to watch. She wasn't watching the window, and behind them they heard a bell ring. Somebody'd walked into the shop. Another shadow fell over the workbench.

Without looking up, Peter went, “Hey.”

And this new guy said, “Hey.”

The friend was maybe Peter's age, blond with a patch of chin hairs, but not what you'd call a beard. Another student from the art school. He was another rich kid from Waytansea Island, and he stood, his blue eyes looking down at the painting on the workbench. He smiled Peter's same half smile, the look of somebody laughing over the fact he had cancer. The look of someone facing a firing squad of clowns with real guns.

Not looking up, Peter buffed the glass and fit it into the new frame. He said, “See what I mean about the picture?”

The friend looked at the house wrapped in porches, the picket fence and blue birds. The name Misty Marie Kleinman. Half smiling, shaking his head, he said, “It's the Tupper house, all right.”

It was a house Misty had just made up. Invented.

In one ear, the friend had a single earring. An old piece of junk jewelry, in the Waytansea Island style of Peter's friends. Buried in his hair, it was fancy gold filigree around a big red enamel heart, flashes of red glass, cut-glass jewels twinkled in the gold. He was chewing gum. Spearmint, from the smell.

Misty said, “Hi.” She said, “I'm Misty.”

And the friend, he looked at her, giving her the same doomed smile. Chewing his gum, he said, “So is this her? Is she the mythical lady?”

And slipping the picture into the frame, behind the glass, looking only at his work, Peter said, “I'm afraid so.”

Still staring at Misty, his eyes jumping around every part of her, her hands and legs, her face and breasts, the friend cocked his head to one side, studying. Still chewing his gum, he said, “Are you sure she's the right one?”

Some magpie part of Misty, some little princess part, couldn't take her eyes off the guy's glittery red earring. The sparkling enamel heart. The flash of red from the cut-glass rubies.

Peter fitted a piece of backing cardboard behind the picture and sealed it around the edge with tape. Running his thumb over the tape, sealing it down, he said, “You saw the painting.” He stopped and sighed, his chest getting big, then collapsing, and he said, “I'm afraid she's the real deal.”

Misty, Misty's eyes were pinned inside the blond tangle of the friend's hair. The red flash of the earring there, it was Christmas lights and birthday candles. In the sunlight from the shopwindow, the earring was Fourth of July fireworks and bouquets of Valentine's Day roses. Looking at the sparkle, she forgot she had hands, a face, a name.

She forgot to breathe.

Peter said, “What'd I tell you, man?” He was looking at Misty now, watching her spellbound by the red earring, and Peter said, “She can't resist the old jewelry.”

The blond guy saw Misty staring back at him, and both his blue eyes swung sideways to see where Misty's eyes were pinned.

In the earring's cut-glass sparkle, in there was the sparkle of champagne Misty had never seen. There were the sparks of beach bonfires, spiraling up to summer stars Misty could only imagine. In there was the flash of crystal chandeliers she had painted in each fantasy parlor.

All the yearning and idiot need of a poor, lonely kid. Some stupid, unenlightened part, not the artist but the idiot in her, loved that earring, the bright rich shine of it. The glitter of sugary hard candy. Candy in a cut-glass dish. A dish in a house she'd never visited. Nothing deep or profound. Just everything we're programmed to adore. Sequins and rainbows. Those bangles she should've been educated enough to ignore.

The blond, Peter's friend, he reached one hand up to touch his hair, then his ear. His mouth dropped open, so fast his gum fell out onto the floor.

Your friend.

And you said, “Careful, dude, it looks like you're stealing her away from me . . .”

And the friend, his fingers fumbled, digging in his hair, and he yanked the earring. The pop made them all wince.

When Misty opened her eyes, the blond guy was holding out his earring, his blue eyes filled with tears. His torn earlobe hung in two ragged pieces, forked, blood dripping from both points. “Here,” he said, “take it.” And he threw the earring toward the workbench. It landed, gold and fake rubies scattering red sparks and blood.

The screw-on back was still on the post. It was so old, the gold back had turned green. He'd yanked it off so fast the earring was tangled in blond hairs. Each hair still had the soft white bulb where it pulled out at the root.

One hand cupped over his ear, blood running from between his fingers, the guy smiled. His corrugator muscle pulling his pale eyebrows together, he said, “Sorry, Petey. It looks like you're the lucky guy.”

And Peter lifted the painting, framed and finished. Misty's signature at the bottom.

Your future wife's signature. Her bourgeois little soul.

Your future wife already reaching for the bloody spot of red sparkle.

“Yeah,” Peter said, “fucking lucky me.”

And still bleeding, one hand clamped over his ear, the blood running down his arm to drip from his pointed elbow, Peter's friend backed up a couple steps. With his other hand, he reached for the door. He nodded at the earring and said, “Keep it. A wedding present.” And he was gone.