Dr. Touchet feels underneath each arm. Rooting around for nodes. For cancer. He knows just where to press your spine to make your head tilt back. The fake pearls folded deep in the back of her neck. His eyes, the irises are too far apart for him to be looking at you. He hums a tune. Focusing somewhere else. You can tell he’s used to working with dead people.
Sitting on the examination table, watching them both in the mirror, Misty says, “What used to be out on the point?”
And Dr. Touchet jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.
As if some dead body just spoke.
“Out on Waytansea Point,” Misty says. “There’s statues, like it used to be a park. What was it?”
His finger probes deep between the tendons on the back of her neck, and he says, “Before we had a crematorium in this area, that was our cemetery.” This would feel good except his fingers are so cold.
But Misty didn’t see any tombstones.
His fingers probing for lymph nodes under her jaw, he says, “There’s a mausoleum dug into the hill out there.” His eyes staring at the wall, he frowns and says, “At least a couple centuries ago. Grace could tell you more than I could.”
The grotto. The little stone bank building. The state capitol with its fancy columns and carved archway, all of it crumbling and held together with tree roots. The locked iron gate, the darkness inside.
Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail in deeper.
The diplomas on the examining room’s green tiled wall are yellowed, cloudy under glass. Water-stained. Flyspecked. Daniel Touchet, M.D. Holding her wrist between two fingers, Dr. Touchet checks her pulse against his wristwatch.
His triangularis pulling both corners of his mouth down in a frown, he puts his cold stethoscope between her shoulder blades. He says, “Misty, I need you to take a deep breath and hold it.”
The cold stab of the stethoscope moves around her back.
“Now let it out,” he says. “And take another breath.”
Misty says, “Did you know, did Peter ever have a vasectomy?” She breathes again, deep, and says, “Peter told me that Tabbi was a miracle from God so I wouldn’t abort.”
And Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, how much are you drinking these days?”
This is such a small fucking town. And poor Misty Marie, she’s the town drunk.
“A police detective came into the hotel,” Misty says. “He was asking if we had the Ku Klux Klan out here on the island.”
And Dr. Touchet says, “Killing yourself is not going to save your daughter.”
He sounds like her husband.
Like you, dear sweet Peter.
And Misty says, “Save my daughter from
And looking at her, Dr. Touchet smiles and says, “Of course not.” He goes to his desk and picks up a folder with a few sheets of paper in it. Inside the folder, he writes something. He looks at a calendar on the wall above the desk. He looks at his watch and writes inside the folder. His handwriting, the tail of every letter hanging low, below the line, subconscious, impulsive. Greedy, hungry, evil, Angel Delaporte would say.
Dr. Touchet says, “So, are you doing anything different lately?”
And Misty tells him yes. She’s drawing. For the first time since college, Misty’s drawing, painting a little, mostly watercolors. In her attic room. In her spare time. She’s put up her easel so she can see out the window, down the coastline to Waytansea Point. She works on a picture every day. Working from her imagination. The wish list of a white trash girl: big houses, church weddings, picnics on the beach.
Yesterday Misty worked until she saw it was dark outside. Five or six hours had just disappeared. Vanished like a missing laundry room in Seaview. Bermuda triangulated.
Misty tells Dr. Touchet, “My head always hurts, but I don’t feel as much pain when I’m painting.”
His desk is painted metal, the kind of steel desk you’d see in the office of an engineer or accountant. The kind with drawers that slide open on smooth rollers and close with thunder and a loud boom. The blotter is green felt. Above it on the wall are the calendar, the old diplomas.
Dr. Touchet with his spotted, balding head and a few long brittle hairs combed from one ear to the other, he could be an engineer. With his thick round glasses in their steel frames, his thick wristwatch on a stretch-metal band, he could be an accountant. He says, “You went to college, didn’t you?”
Art school, Misty tells him. She didn’t graduate. She quit. They moved here when Harrow died, to look after Peter’s mother. Then Tabbi came along. Then Misty fell asleep and woke up fat and tired and middle-aged.
The doctor doesn’t laugh. You can’t blame him.
“When you studied history,” he says, “did you cover the Jains? The Jain Buddhists?”
Not in art history, Misty tells him.
He pulls open one of the desk drawers and takes out a yellow bottle of pills. “I can’t warn you enough,” he says. “Don’t let Tabbi within ten feet of these.” He pops open the bottle and shakes a couple into his hand. They’re clear gelatin capsules, the kind that pull apart into two halves. Inside each one is some loose, shifting dark green powder.
The peeling message on Tabbi’s windowsill:
Dr. Touchet holds the bottle in her face and says, “Only take these when you have pain.” There isn’t a label. “It’s an herbal compound. It should help you focus.”
Misty says, “Has anybody ever died from Stendhal syndrome?”
And the doctor says, “These are green algae mostly, some white willow bark, a little bee pollen.” He puts the capsules back in the bottle and snaps it shut. He sets the bottle on the table, next to her thigh. “You can still drink,” he says, “but only in moderation.”
Misty says, “I only drink in moderation.”
And turning back to his desk, he says, “If you say so.”
Fucking small towns.
Misty says, “How did Peter’s dad die?”
And Dr. Touchet says, “What did Grace Wilmot tell you?”
She didn’t. She’s never mentioned it. When they scattered the ashes, Peter told Misty it was a heart attack. Misty says, “Grace said it was a brain tumor.”
And Dr. Touchet says, “Yes, yes it was.” He closes his metal desk drawer with a boom. He says, “Grace tells me you demonstrate a very promising talent.”
Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
Misty askes about those Buddhists he mentioned.
“Jain Buddhists,” he says. He takes the blouse off the back of the door and hands it to her. Under each sleeve, the fabric is ringed with dark sweat stains. Dr. Touchet moves around beside Misty, holding the blouse for her to slip each arm inside.
He says, “What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”
WHEN THEY WERE in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like
Peter used to say, “The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face.”
You’re doomed to being you.
This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we’re only drawing ourselves.
Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.
Everything is a self-portrait.
