Duma Key

Mary wore no make-up, but her lips were coated with clear goo that made them shine. Her hair was tied up in a careless, coming-apart twist that looked simultaneously elegant and slatternly. She smoked English Ovals and sipped what looked like straight Scotch from a Waterford tumbler (she offered me a drink and seemed disappointed when I opted for bottled water). She wore tailored cotton slacks. Her face looked old, used, and sexy. Its best days might have been around the time Bonnie and Clyde was playing in theaters, but her eyes were still breathtaking, even with lines at the corners, cracks in the eyelids, and no make-up to enhance them. They were Sophia Loren eyes.

"You showed twenty-two slides at the Selby. Nine were of pencil-sketches. Very interesting, but small. And eleven paintings, because there were actually three slides of Wireman Looks West, two close-ups and the wide-angle. So how many other paintings are there? How many will you be showing at the Scoto next month?"

"Well," I said, "I can't say for sure, because I'm painting all the time, but I think right now there are about... twenty more."

"Twenty," she said, softly and tonelessly. "Twenty more."

Something about the way she was looking at me made me uncomfortable and I shifted around. The sofa creaked. "I think the actual number might be twenty-one." Of course there were a few pictures I wasn't counting. Friends with Benefits, for instance. The one I sometimes thought of as Candy Brown Loses His Breath. And the red-robe sketch.

"So. Over thirty in all."

I did the addition in my head and shifted around some more. "I guess so."

"And you have no idea how amazing that is. I can see by your face that you don't." She got up, dumped her ashtray in a wastebasket behind the couch, then stood looking at the Hockney with her hands in the pockets of her expensive slacks. The painting showed a cube of a house and a blue swimming pool. Beside the pool was a ripe teenager in a black tank suit. She was all breasts and long tanned legs and dark hair. She wore dark glasses, and a tiny sun blazed in each lens.

"Is that an original?" I asked.

"Yes indeed," she said, without turning. "The girl in the swimsuit is an original, too. Mary Ire, circa 1962. Gidget in Tampa." She turned to me, her face fierce. "Turn that tape recorder off. The interview is over."

I turned it off.

"I want you to listen to me. Will you?"

"Of course."

"There are artists who labor for months over a single painting of half the quality your work shows. Of course many spend their mornings getting over the excesses of the night before. But you... you're producing these things like a man working on an assembly line. Like a magazine illustrator or a... I don't know... a comic-book artist!"

"I grew up believing folks were supposed to work hard at what they do - I think that's all it is. When I had my own company, I worked much longer hours, because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself."

She nodded. "Not true for everyone, but when it is true, it's really true. I know."

"I just carried that... you know, that ethic... over to what I do now. And it's all right. Hell, it's better than all right. I turn on the radio... it's like I go into a daze... and I paint..." I was blushing. "I'm not trying to set the world's land-speed record, or anything-"

"I know that," she said. "Tell me, do you block?"

"Block?" I knew what the word meant in a football context; otherwise, I was drawing a blank. "What's that?"

"Never mind. In Wireman Looks West - which is staggering, by the way, that brain - how did you set the features?"

"I took some pictures," I said.

"I'm sure you did, darling, but when you got ready to paint the portrait, how did you set the features?"

"I... well, I-"

"Did you use the third-eye rule?"

"Third- eye rule? I never heard of any third-eye rule."

She smiled at me kindly. "In order to get the right spacing between a subject's eyes, painters will often imagine or even block a third eye between the two actual ones. What about the mouth? Did you center it using the ears?"

"No... that is, I didn't know you were supposed to do that." Now it felt as if I were blushing all over my body.

"Relax," she said. "I'm not suggesting y'all start following a bunch of bullshit art school rules after breaking them so spectacularly. It's just..." She shook her head. "Thirty paintings since last November? No, it's even less time than that, because you didn't start painting right away."

"Of course not, I had to get some art supplies first," I said, and Mary laughed herself into a coughing fit that she washed away with a sip of Scotch.

"If thirty paintings in three months is what almost getting crushed to death does," she said when she could talk again, "maybe I ought to find me a crane."

"You wouldn't want to," I said. "Believe me." I got up, went to the window, and looked down on Adalia Street. "This is some place you've got here."