Diary

Peter used to say, “Everything is nothing by itself.”

Just for the record, today in the dining room, Grace Wilmot was standing with Tabbi in front of the glass cabinet that covers most of one wall. Inside it, china plates sit on stands under soft lights. Cups sit on saucers. Grace Wilmot points to them one at a time. And Tabbi points with her index finger and says, “Fitz and Floyd ... Wedgwood ... Noritake ... Lenox ...”

And shaking her head, Tabbi folds her arms and says, “No, that’s not right.” She says, “The Oracle Grove pattern has a border of fourteen-carat gold. Venus Grove has twenty- four carat.”

Your baby daughter, an expert in extinct china patterns.

Your baby daughter, a teenager now.

Grace Wilmot reaches over and loops a few stray hairs behind Tabbi’s ear, and she says, “I swear, this child is a natural.”

With a tray of lunches on her shoulder, Misty stops long enough to ask Grace, “How did Harrow die?”

And Grace looks away from the china. Her orbicularis oculi muscle making her eyes wide, she says, “Why do you ask?”

Misty mentions her doctor’s appointment. Dr. Touchet. And how Angel Delaporte thinks Peter’s handwriting says something about his relationship with his dad. All the details that look like nothing standing alone.

And Grace says, “Did the doctor give you any pills to take?”

The tray is heavy and the food’s getting cold, but Misty says, “The doc says Harrow had liver cancer.”

Tabbi points and says, “Gorham ... Dansk ...”

And Grace smiles. “Of course. Liver cancer,” she says. “Why are you asking me?” She says, “I thought Peter told you.”

Just for the record, the weather today is foggy with widely conflicting stories about your father’s cause of death. No detail is anything by itself.

And Misty says, she can’t talk. Too busy. It’s the lunch rush. Maybe later.

In art school, Peter used to talk about the painter James McNeill Whistler, and how Whistler worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sketching the coastline settings for proposed lighthouses. The problem was, Whistler wouldn’t stop doodling little figure studies in the margins. He drew old women, babies, beggars, anything he saw on the street. He did his job, documenting land for the government, but he couldn’t ignore everything else. He couldn’t let anything slip away. Men smoking pipes. Children rolling hoops. He collected all of it in doodles around the margin of his official work. Of course, the government ca

“Those doodles,” Peter used to say, “they’re worth millions today.”

You used to say.

In the Wood and Gold Room, they serve butter in little crocks, only now each pad has a little picture carved in it. A little figure study.

Maybe it’s a picture of a tree or the particular way a hillside in Misty’s imagination slopes, right to left. There’s a cliff, and a waterfall from a hanging canyon, and a small ravine full of shade and mossy boulders and vines around the thick trunks of trees, and by the time she’s imagined it all and sketched it on a paper napkin, people are coming to the bus station to refill their own cups of coffee. People tap their glasses with forks to get her attention. They snap their fingers. These summer people.

They don’t tip.

A hillside. A mountain stream. A cave in a riverbank. A tendril of ivy. All these details come to her, and Misty just can’t let them go. By the end of her di

In her attic room, in the heap of paper scraps, she’s collected the patterns of leaves and flowers she’s never seen. In another heap, she has abstract shapes that look like rocks and mountaintops on the horizon. There are the branching shapes of trees, the cluster of bushes. What could be briers. Birds.

What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.

When you sit on the toilet for hours, sketching nonsense on a sheet of toilet paper until your ass is ready to fall out—take a pill.

When you just stop going down to work altogether, you just stay in your room and phone for room service. You tell everyone you’re sick so you can stay up all night and day sketching landscapes you’ve never seen, then it’s time to take a pill.

When your daughter knocks and begs you for a good-night kiss, and you keep telling her to go to bed, that you’ll be there in a minute, and finally her grandmother takes her away from the door, and you can hear her crying as they go down the hallway—take two pills.

When you find the rhinestone bracelet she’s pushed under the door, take another.

When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how’s the painting coming along?” it’s pill time.

When the headaches won’t let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don’t recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you’re holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you’re half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.

When you just ca

Because Peter’s right.

You’re right.

Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don’t know why yet.

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.

Everything you do shows your hand.

Peter used to say, an artist’s job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.

July 21— The Third-Quarter Moon

ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They’re different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of su

“Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work ... my God.”

Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they’re in Oysterville. This is somebody’s missing family room. They’ve crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.

Your graffiti.

The way Misty looks, how she can’t get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It’s some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she’s wearing sunglasses.

Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It’s her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.

Angel’s snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand’s shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It’s for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”

Across the sofa, Peter’s spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He’s pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.

You have.

Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”

The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.

Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for the record, she drank his booze. What you learn in art school is there’s an etiquette to drugs. You have to share.

Misty says, “Help yourself. Take one.”

And Angel pops the bottle open and shakes out two. He slips one in his pocket, saying, “For later.” He swallows the other with gin and makes a terrible gagging face, leaning forward with his red and white tongue stuck out. His eyes squeezed shut.

Immanuel Kant and his gout. Karen Blixen and her syphilis. Peter would tell Angel Delaporte that suffering is his key to inspiration.

Getting the sketches and watercolors spread out across the sofa, Misty says, “What do you think?”

Angel sets each picture down and lifts the next. Shaking his head no. Just a hair side to side, a kind of palsy. He says, “Simply unbelievable.” He lifts another picture and says, “What kind of software are you using?”

Her brush? “Sable,” Misty says. “Sometimes squirrel or oxtail.”

“No, silly,” he says, “on your computer, for the drafting. You can’t be doing this with hand tools.” He taps his finger on the castle in one painting, then taps on the cottage in another.

Hand tools?

“You don’t use just a straightedge and a compass, do you?” Angel says. “And a protractor? Your angles are identical, perfect. You’re using a stencil or a template, right?”

Misty says, “What’s a compass?”

“You know, like in geometry, in high school,” Angel says, spreading his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “It has a point on one leg, and you put a pencil in the other leg and use it to draw perfect curves and circles.”

He holds up a picture of a house on a hillside above the beach, the ocean and trees just different shades of blue and green. The only warm color is a dot of yellow, a light in one window. “I could look at this one forever,” he says.

Stendhal syndrome.

He says, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

And Misty says, “I can’t.”

He takes another from the portfolio and says, “Then how about this one?”

She can’t sell any of them.

“How about a thousand?” he says. “I’ll give you a thousand just for this one.”