Duma Key - Stephen King

"No, you've got it all wrong," I said, but these words came out in a listless drone that did not sound especially convincing. "It's just that all the organizational stuff drives me crazy, and I kept... you know, putting it off."

Wireman was relentless. If I'd been on the witness stand, I think I'd have been a little puddle of grease and tears by then; the judge would have called a recess to allow the bailiff time to either mop me up or buff me to a shine. "Pam says if you subtracted The Freemantle Company buildings from the St. Paul skyline, it would look like Des Moines in nineteen seventy-two."

"Pam exaggerates."

He took no notice. "Am I supposed to believe that a guy who organized that much work couldn't organize some plane tickets and two dozen hotel rooms? Especially when he could reach out to an office staff that would absolutely love to hear from him?"

"They don't... I don't... they can't just..."

"Are you getting pissed?"

"No." But I was. The old anger was back, wanting to raise its voice until it was shouting as loud as Axl Rose on The Bone. I raised my fingers to a spot just over my right eye, where a headache was starting up. There would be no painting for me today, and it was Wireman's fault. Wireman was to blame. For one moment I wished him blind. Not just half-blind but blind blind, and realized I could paint him that way. At that the anger collapsed.

Wireman saw my hand go to my head and let up a little. "Look, most of the people she's contacted unofficially have already said hell yes, of course, they'd love to. Your old line foreman Angel Slobotnik told Pam he'd bring you a jar of pickles. She said he sounded thrilled."

"Not pickles, pickled eggs," I said, and Big Ainge's broad, flat, smiling face was for a moment almost close enough to touch. Angel, who had been right there beside me for twenty years, until a major heart attack sidelined him. Angel, whose most common response to any request, no matter how seemingly outrageous, was Can do, boss.

"Pam and I made the flight arrangements," Wireman said. "Not just for the people from Minneapolis-St. Paul, but from other places, as well." He tapped the brochure. "The Air France and Delta flights in here are real, and your daughter Melinda is really booked on em. She knows what's going on. So does Ilse. They're only waiting to be officially invited. Ilse wanted to call you, and Pam told her to wait. She says you have to pull the trigger on this, and whatever she may have been wrong about in the course of your marriage, muchacho, she's right about that."

"All right," I said. "I'm hearing you."

"Good. Now I want to talk to you about the lecture."

I groaned.

"If you do a bunk on the lecture, you'll find it twice as hard to go to the opening-night party-"

I looked at him incredulously.

"What?" he asked. "You disagree?"

"Do a bunk?" I asked. "Do a bunk? What the fuck is that?"

"To cut and run," he said, sounding slightly defensive. "British slang. See for instance Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen, 1952."

"See my ass and your face," I said. "Edgar Freemantle, present day."

He flipped me the bird, and just like that we were mostly okay again.

"You sent Pam the pictures, didn't you? You sent her the JPEG file."

"I did."

"How did she react?"

"She was blown away, muchacho."

I sat silently, trying to imagine Pam blown away. I could do it, but the face I saw lighting up in surprise and wonder was a younger face. It had been quite a few years since I'd been able to generate that sort of wind.

Elizabeth was dozing off, but her hair was flying against her cheeks and she pawed at them like a woman troubled by insects. I got up, took an elastic from the pouch on the arm of her wheelchair - there was always a good supply of them, in many bright colors - and pulled her hair back into a horsetail. The memories of doing this for Melinda and Ilse were sweet and terrible.

"Thank you, Edgar. Thank you, mi amigo."

"So how do I do it?" I asked. I was holding my palm on the side of Elizabeth's head, feeling the smoothness of her hair as I had often felt the smoothness of my daughters' after it had been shampooed; when memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts, haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves. "How do I talk about a process that's at least partially supernatural?"

There. It was out. The root of the matter.

Yet Wireman looked calm. "Edgar!" he exclaimed.

"Edgar what?"

The sonofabitch actually laughed. "If you tell them that... they will believe you. "

I opened my mouth to refute this. Thought of Dal 's work. Thought of that wonderful Van Gogh picture, Starry Night. Thought of certain Andrew Wyeth paintings - not Christina's World but his interiors: spare rooms where the light is both sane and strange, as if coming from two directions at the same time. I closed my mouth again.

"I can't tell you just what to say," Wireman said, "but I can give you something like this." He held up the brochure/invitation. "I can give you a template."

"That would help."

"Yeah? Then listen."

I listened.

iv

"Hello?"

I was sitting on the couch in the Florida room. My heart was beating heavily. This was one of those calls - everyone's made a few - where you simultaneously hope it will go through the first time, so you can get it over with, and hope it won't, so you can put off some hard and probably painful conversation a little while longer.

I got Option One; Pam answered on the first ring. All I could hope was this conversation would go better than the last one. Than the last couple, in fact.

"Pam, it's Edgar."

"Hello, Edgar," she said cautiously. "How are you?"

"I'm... all right. Good. I've been talking with my friend Wireman. He showed me the invitation the two of you worked up." The two of you worked up. That sounded unfriendly. Conspiratorial, even. But what other way was there to put it?

"Yes?" Her voice was impossible to read.

I drew in a breath and jumped. God hates a coward, Wireman says. Among other things. "I called to say thanks. I was being a horse's ass. Your jumping in like that was what I needed."

The silence was long enough for me to wonder if maybe she'd quietly hung up at some point. Then she said, "I'm still here, Eddie - I'm just picking myself up off the floor. I can't remember the last time you apologized to me."

Had I apologized? Well... never mind. Close enough, maybe. "Then I'm sorry about that, too," I said.

"I owe you an apology myself," she said, "so I guess this one's a wash."

"You? What do you have to apologize for?"

"Tom Riley called. Just two days ago. He's back on his meds. He's going to, I quote, 'see someone' again - by which I assume he means a shrink - and he called to thank me for saving his life. Have you ever had someone call and thank you for that?"

"No." Although I'd recently had someone call and thank me for saving his sight, so I kind of knew what she was talking about.

"It's quite an experience. 'If not for you I'd be dead now.' Those were his exact words. And I couldn't tell him he had you to thank, because it would have sounded crazy."

It was as if a tight belt cinching my middle had suddenly been cut away. Sometimes things work out for the best. Sometimes they actually do. "That's good, Pam."

"I've been on to Ilse about this show of yours."

"Yes, I- "

"Well, Illy and Lin both, but when I talked to Ilse, I turned the conversation toward Tom and I could tell right away that she doesn't know anything about what went on between the two of us. I was wrong about that, too. And showed a very unpleasant side of myself while I was at it."

I realized, with alarm, that she was crying. "Pam, listen."

"I've shown several unlovely sides of myself, to several people, since you left me."

I didn't leave you! I almost shouted. And it was close. Close enough to make sweat pop out on my forehead. I didn't leave you, you asked for a divorce, you witting quench!

What I said was "Pam, that's enough."

"But it was so hard to believe, even after you called and told me those other things. You know, about my new TV. And Puffball."

I started to ask who Puffball was, then remembered the cat.

"I'm doing better, though. I've started going to church again. Can you believe that? And a therapist. I see her once a week." She paused, then rushed on. "She's good. She says a person can't close the door on the past, she can only make amends and go on. I understood that, but I didn't know how to start making amends to you, Eddie."

"Pam, you don't owe me any-"

"My therapist says it isn't about what you think, it's about what I think."

"I see." That sounded a lot like the old Pam, so maybe she'd found the right therapist.

"And then your friend Wireman called and told me you needed help... and he sent me those pictures. I can't wait to see the actual things. I mean, I knew you had some talent, because you used to draw those little books for Lin when she was so sick that year-"

"I did?" I remembered Melinda's sick year; she'd had one infection after another, culminating in a massive bout of diarrhea, probably brought on by too many antibiotics, that had landed her in the hospital for a week. She lost ten pounds that spring. If not for summer vacation - and her own grade-A intelligence - she would have needed to repeat the second grade. But I couldn't remember drawing any little books.

"Freddy the Fish? Carla the Crab? Donald the Timid Deer?"

Donald the Timid Deer rang a very faint bell, way down deep, but... "No," I said.

"Angel thought you should try to get them published, don't you remember? But these... my God. Did you know you could do it?"

"No. I started thinking something might be there when I was at the place on Lake Phalen, but it's gone farther than I thought it would." I thought of Wireman Looks West and the mouthless, noseless Candy Brown and thought I'd just uttered the understatement of the century.

"Eddie, will you let me do the rest of the invitations the way I did the sample? I can customize them, make them nice."

"Pa- " Almost Panda again. "Pam, I can't ask you to do that."

"I want to."

"Yeah? Then okay."

"I'll write them and e-mail them to Mr. Wireman. You can check them over before he prints them. He's quite a jewel, your Mr. Wireman."

"Yes," I said. "He is. The two of you really ganged up on me."

"We did, didn't we?" She sounded delighted. "You needed it. Only you have to do something for me."

"What?"

"You have to call the girls, because they're going crazy, Ilse in particular. Okay?"

"Okay. And Pam?"

"What, hon?" I'm sure she said it without thinking, without knowing how it could cut. Ah, well - she probably felt the same when she heard my pet name for her coming up from Florida, growing colder with every mile it sped north.

"Thanks," I said.

"Totally welcome."

It was only quarter to eleven when we said goodbye and hung up. Time never went faster that winter than it did during my evenings in Little Pink - standing at my easel, I'd wonder how the colors in the west could possibly fade so fast - and it never went slower than it did that morning, when I made the phone calls I'd been putting off. I swallowed them one after the other, like medicine.

I looked at the cordless sitting in my lap. "Fuck you, phone," I said, and started dialing again.

v

"Scoto Gallery, this is Alice."

A cheery voice I'd come to know well over the last ten days.

"Hi, Alice, it's Edgar Freemantle."

"Yes, Edgar?" Cheery became cautious. Had that cautious note been there before? Had I just ignored it?

I said, "If you have a couple of minutes, I wonder if we could talk about ordering the slides at the lecture."

" Yes, Edgar, we certainly could." The relief was palpable. It made me feel like a hero. Of course it also made me feel like a rat.

"Have you got a pad handy?"

"You bet your tailfeathers!"

"Okay. Basically, we're going to want them in chronological order-"

"But I don't know the chronology, I've been trying to tell you th-"

"I know, and I'm going to give it to you now, but listen, Alice: the first slide won't be chronological. The first should be of Roses Grow from Shells. Have you got that?"

" Roses Grow from Shells. I've got it." For only the second time since meeting me, Alice sounded genuinely happy that we were talking.

"Now, the pencil sketches," I said.

We talked for the next half an hour.

vi

" Oui, all ? "

For a moment I said nothing. The French threw me a little. The fact that it was a young man's voice threw me more.

" All , all ? " Impatient now. "Qui est l'appareil?"

"Mmm, maybe I have the wrong number," I said, feeling not just like an asshole but a monolingual American asshole. "I was trying to reach Melinda Freemantle."

" D'accord, you have the right number." Then, off a little: "Melinda! C'est ton papa, je crois, ch rie. "

The phone went down with a clunk. I had a momentary image - very clear, very politically incorrect, and very likely brought on by Pam's mention of the cartoon books I'd once drawn for a little sick girl - of a large talking skunk in a beret, Monsieur Pep Le Pew, strutting around my daughter's pension (if that was the word for a bedsitter-type apartment in Paris) with wavy aroma lines rising from his white-striped back.

Then Melinda was there, sounding uncharacteristically flustered. "Dad? Daddy? Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine," I said. "Is that your roommate?" It was a joke, but I realized from her uncharacteristic silence that I had unwittingly hit the nail on the head. "It's not a big deal, Linnie. I was just-"

" - goofin wit me, right." It was impossible to tell if she was amused or exasperated. The connection was good but not that good. "He is, actually." The subtext of that one to come through loud and clear: Want to make something of it?

I most assuredly did not want to make something of it. "Well, I'm glad you made a friend. Does he wear a beret?"

To my immense relief, she laughed. With Lin, it was impossible to tell which way a joke was going to go, because her sense of humor was as unreliable as an April afternoon. She called: "Ric! Mon papa... " Something I didn't catch, then: "... si tu portes un b ret!"

There was faint male laughter. Ah, Edgar, I thought. Even overseas you lay them in the aisles, you p re fou.

"Daddy, are you all right?"

"Fine. How's your strep?"

"All better, thanks."

"I just got off the phone with your mother. You're going to get an official invitation to this show I'm having, but she says you'll come and I'm thrilled."

" You're thrilled? Mom sent me some of the pictures and I can't wait. When did you learn to do that?"

This seemed to be the question of the hour. "Down here."

"They're amazing. Are the others as good?"

"You'll have to come and see for yourself."

"Could Ric come?"

"Does he have a passport?"

"Yes..."

"Will he promise not to poke ze fun at your old man?"

"He's very respectful of his elders."

"Then assuming the flights aren't sold out and you don't mind sleeping two to a room - I assume that's not a problem - then of course he can come."

She squealed so loudly it hurt my ear, but I didn't take the telephone away. It had been a long time since I'd said or done anything to make Linnie Freemantle squeal like that. "Thank you, Daddy - that's great!"