Instead of sunblock, you’d rubbed a charcoal pencil under each eye and down the bridge of your nose. A big black cross in the middle of your face.
If you’re reading this now, you’ve been in a coma for God knows how long. The last thing this diary should do is bore you.
When Misty asked why you carried the canvas inside your clothes, tucked up under your sweater like that ...
Peter said, “To make sure it would fit.”
You said that.
If you remember, you’ll know how you chewed a stalk of grass. How it tasted. Your jaw muscles big and squared, first on one side, then on the other as you chewed around and around. With one hand, you dug down between the weeds, picking out bits of gravel or clods of dirt.
All Misty’s friends, they were weaving their stupid grasses. To make some appliance that looked real enough to be witty. And not unravel. Unless it had the genuine look of a real prehistoric high-technology entertainment system, the irony just wouldn’t work.
Peter gave her the blank canvas and said, “Paint something.”
And Misty said, “Nobody paint paints. Not anymore.”
If anybody she knew still painted at all, they used their own blood or semen. And they painted on live dogs from the animal shelter, or on molded gelatin desserts, but never on canvas.
And Peter said, “I bet you still paint on canvas.”
“Why?” Misty said. “Because I’m retarded? Because I don’t know any better?”
And Peter said, “Just fucking paint.”
They were supposed to be above representational art. Making pretty pictures. They were supposed to learn visual sarcasm. Misty said they were paying too much tuition not to practice the techniques of effective irony. She said a pretty picture didn’t teach the world anything.
And Peter said, “We’re not old enough to buy beer, what are we supposed to teach the world?” There on his back in their nest of weeds, one arm behind his head, Peter said, “All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”
In case you didn’t fucking notice, you big boob, Misty really wanted you to like her. Just for the record, her dress, her sandals and floppy straw hat, she was all dressed up for you. If you’d just touch her hair you’d hear it crackle with hair spray.
She wore so much Wind Song perfume she was attracting bees.
And Peter set the blank canvas on her easel. He said, “Maura Kincaid never went to fucking art school.” He spit a wad of green slobber, picked another weed stem and stuck it in his mouth. His tongue stained green, he said, “I bet if you painted what’s in your heart, it could hang in a museum.”
What was in her heart, Misty said, was pretty much just silly crap.
And Peter just looked at her. He said, “So what’s the point of painting anything you don’t love?”
What she loved, Misty told him, would never sell. People wouldn’t buy it.
And Peter said, “Maybe you’d be surprised.”
This was Peter’s theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.
Some idiot who’s not afraid to say what they really love.
“Plato,” Peter says, and he turns his head to spit green slobber into the weeds. “Plato said: ‘He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.’ ”
He stuck another weed in his mouth and chewed, saying, “So what makes Misty Kleinman a maniac?”
Her fantasy houses and cobblestone streets. Her seagulls circling the oyster boats as they came back from the shoals she’d never seen. The window boxes overflowing with snapdragons and zinnias. No way in fucking hell was she going to paint that crap.
“Maura Kincaid,” Peter says, “didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was forty-one years old.” He started taking paintbrushes out of the pale wood box, twisting the ends sharp. He said, “Maura got hitched to a good old Waytansea Island carpenter, and they had a couple kids.” He took out her tubes of paint, setting them next to the brushes there on the blanket.
“It wasn’t until her husband died,” Peter said. “Then Maura got sick, really sick, with consumption or something. Back then, being forty-one made you an old lady.”
It wasn’t until one of her kids died, he said, that Maura Kincaid ever painted a picture. He said, “Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”
You told Misty all this.
You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist.
You were digging in your pocket while you said this. You were fishing something out.
You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.
“According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.’ ”
And there on the blanket, you set something. There, surrounded by tubes of paint and paintbrushes, was a big rhinestone brooch. Big around as a silver dollar, the brooch was clear glass gems, tiny polished mirrors in a pinwheel of yellow and orange, all of them chipped and cloudy. There on the plaid blanket, it seemed to explode the sunlight into sparks. The metal was dull gray, gripping the rhinestones with tiny sharp teeth.
Peter said, “Are you hearing any of this?”
And Misty picked up the brooch. The sparkle reflected straight into her eyes, and she was blinded, dazzled. Disconnected from everything here, the sun and weeds.
“It’s for you,” Peter said, “for inspiration.”
Misty, her reflection showed shattered a dozen times in every rhinestone. A thousand pieces of her face.
To the sparkling colors in her hand, Misty said, “So tell me.” She said, “How did Maura Kincaid’s husband die?”
And Peter, his teeth green, he spit green into the tall weeds around them. The black cross on his face. He licked his green lips with his green tongue, and Peter said, “Murder.” Peter said, “They murdered him.”
And Misty started to paint.
July 6
JUST FOR THE RECORD, the cruddy old library with its wallpaper peeling at every seam and dead flies inside all the milk-glass lights hanging from the ceiling, everything you can remember is still here. If you can remember it. The same shabby world globe, yellowed to the color of soup. The continents carved into places like Prussia and the
Belgian Congo. They still have the framed sign that says “Anyone Caught Defacing Library Books Will Be Prosecuted.”
Old Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian, she wears the same tweed suits, except now she has a lapel button as big as her face that says “Find Yourself in a New Future with Owens Landing Financial Services!”
What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.
People all over the island are wearing this same kind of button or T-shirt, selling some advertising message. They get a little prize or cash award if they’re seen wearing it. Turning their bodies into billboards. Wearing baseball caps with 1-800 telephone numbers.