King, Stephen - Duma Key by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416552963
Amazon: 1416552960
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2008-10-21T05:00:00+00:00

12—Another Florida

i

“All right, Edgar, I think we’re almost finished.”

Maybe she saw something on my face, because Mary laughed. “Has it been that awful?”

“No,” I said, and it hadn’t been, really, although her questions about my technique had made me feel uncomfortable. What it came down to was I looked at things, then slopped on the paint. That was my technique. And influences? What could I say? The light. It always came down to the light, both in the pictures I liked to look at and the ones I liked to paint. What it did to the surface of things, and what it seemed to suggest about what was inside, hunting a way out. But that didn’t sound scholarly; to my ears it sounded goofy.

“Okay,” she said, “last subject: how many more paintings are there?”

We were sitting in Mary Ire’s penthouse apartment on Davis Islands, a tony Tampa enclave which looked to me like the art deco capital of the world. The living room was a vast, nearly empty space with a couch at one end and two slingback chairs at the other. There were no books, but then, there was no TV, either. On the east wall, where it would catch the early light, was a large David Hockney. Mary and I were at opposite ends of the couch. She had her shorthand pad in her lap. There was an ashtray perched beside her on the arm of the sofa. Between us was a big silver Wollensak tape-recorder. It had to be fifty years old, but the reels turned soundlessly. German engineering, baby.

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.

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