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
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,
“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 cliche, 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:
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 cliche.” 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
