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.
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
Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase
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
