The sweater stopped, Peter's face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.
“Look,” Peter's voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”
Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.
Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”
It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.
“I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It's so every 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.
July 3
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 m's, with the first hump larger than the second, that proves you value your own opinion above public opinion. How you do your lowercase h's, with the last stroke cutting back underneath the hump, shows you're never willing to compromise. It's graphology, and it's a bona fide science, Angel says. After seeing these words in his missing kitchen, he asked to see some other houses.
Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase g's and y's, with the bottom loop pulling to the left, that shows you're very attached to your mother.
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
