When your daughter knocks and begs you for a good-night kiss, and you keep telling her to go to bed, that you’ll be there in a minute, and finally her grandmother takes her away from the door, and you can hear her crying as they go down the hallway—take two pills.
When you find the rhinestone bracelet she’s pushed under the door, take another.
When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how’s the painting coming along?” it’s pill time.
When the headaches won’t let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don’t recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you’re holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you’re half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.
When you just cannot stop working. When completing this one project is all you can imagine. Then take a pill.
Because Peter’s right.
You’re right.
Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don’t know why yet.
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.
Everything you do shows your hand.
Peter used to say, an artist’s job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.
July 21— The Third-Quarter Moon
ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They’re different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of sunny fields. Pine forests. The shape of a house or a village in the middle distance. In his face, only Angel’s eyes move, jumping back and forth on every sheet of paper.
“Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work ... my God.”
Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they’re in Oysterville. This is somebody’s missing family room. They’ve crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.
Your graffiti.
The way Misty looks, how she can’t get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It’s some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she’s wearing sunglasses.
Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It’s her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.
Angel’s snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand’s shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It’s for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”
Across the sofa, Peter’s spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He’s pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.
You have.
Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”
The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.
Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for the record, she drank his booze. What you learn in art school is there’s an etiquette to drugs. You have to share.
Misty says, “Help yourself. Take one.”
And Angel pops the bottle open and shakes out two. He slips one in his pocket, saying, “For later.” He swallows the other with gin and makes a terrible gagging face, leaning forward with his red and white tongue stuck out. His eyes squeezed shut.
Immanuel Kant and his gout. Karen Blixen and her syphilis. Peter would tell Angel Delaporte that suffering is his key to inspiration.
Getting the sketches and watercolors spread out across the sofa, Misty says, “What do you think?”
Angel sets each picture down and lifts the next. Shaking his head no. Just a hair side to side, a kind of palsy. He says, “Simply unbelievable.” He lifts another picture and says, “What kind of software are you using?”
Her brush? “Sable,” Misty says. “Sometimes squirrel or oxtail.”
“No, silly,” he says, “on your computer, for the drafting. You can’t be doing this with hand tools.” He taps his finger on the castle in one painting, then taps on the cottage in another.
Hand tools?
“You don’t use just a straightedge and a compass, do you?” Angel says. “And a protractor? Your angles are identical, perfect. You’re using a stencil or a template, right?”
Misty says, “What’s a compass?”
“You know, like in geometry, in high school,” Angel says, spreading his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “It has a point on one leg, and you put a pencil in the other leg and use it to draw perfect curves and circles.”
He holds up a picture of a house on a hillside above the beach, the ocean and trees just different shades of blue and green. The only warm color is a dot of yellow, a light in one window. “I could look at this one forever,” he says.
Stendhal syndrome.
He says, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”
And Misty says, “I can’t.”
He takes another from the portfolio and says, “Then how about this one?”
She can’t sell any of them.
“How about a thousand?” he says. “I’ll give you a thousand just for this one.”
A thousand bucks. But still, Misty says, “No.”
Looking at her, Angel says, “Then I’ll give you ten thousand for the whole batch. Ten thousand dollars. Cash.”
Misty starts to say no, but—
Angel says, “Twenty thousand.”
Misty sighs, and—
Angel says, “Fifty thousand dollars.”
Misty looks at the floor.
“Why,” Angel says, “do I get the feeling that you’d say no to a million dollars?”
Because the pictures aren’t done. They’re not perfect. People can’t see them, not yet. There are more she hasn’t even started. Misty can’t sell them because she needs them as studies for something bigger. They’re all parts of something she can’t see yet. They’re clues.
Who knows why we do what we do.
Misty says, “Why are you offering me so much money? Is this some kind of test?”
And Angel zippers open his camera bag and says, “I want you to see something.” He takes out some shiny tools made of metal. One is two sharp rods that join at one end to make a V. The other is a half circle of metal, shaped like a D and marked with inches along the straight side.
Angel holds the metal D against a sketch of a farmhouse and says, “All your straight lines are absolutely straight.” He sets the D flat against a watercolor of a cottage, and her lines are all perfect. “This is a protractor,” he says. “You use it to measure angles.”
Angel sets the protractor against picture after picture and says, “Your angles are all perfect. Perfect ninty-degree angles. Perfect forty-five-degree angles.” He says, “I noticed this on the chair painting.”
He picks up the V-shaped tool and says, “This is a compass. You use it to draw perfect curves and circles.” He stabs one pointed leg of the compass in the center of a charcoal sketch. He spins the other leg around the first leg and says, “Every circle is perfect. Every sunflower and birdbath. Every curve, perfect.”