Diary

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 at the time he wrote. You have to study the pressure and speed of the writing, pressing as hard as the writer pressed. Writing as fast as it seems the writer did. Angel says this is all similar to Method acting. What he calls Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of physical actions.

Handwriting analysis and Method acting, Angel says they both got popular at the same time. Stanislavski studied the work of Pavlov and his drooling dog and the work of neurophysiologist I. M. Sechenov. Before that, Edgar Allan Poe studied graphology. Everybody was trying to link the physical and the emotional. The body and the mind. The world and the imagination. This world and the next.

Moving Misty’s finger along the wall, he has her trace the words: “... the flood of you, with your bottomless hunger and noisy demands ...”

Whispering, Angel says, “If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”

Stanislavski, Sechenov, Poe, everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand, he says. An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.

The mystical meets the Industrial Revolution.

The way the rag smells after you polish your boots, that’s how the whole room smells. The way the inside of a heavy belt smells. A catcher’s mitt. A dog’s collar. The faint vinegar smell of your sweaty watchband.