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All Misty’s friends, they were weaving their stupid grasses. To make some appliance that looked real enough to be witty. And not unravel. Unless it had the genuine look of a real prehistoric high-technology entertainment system, the irony just wouldn’t work.

Peter gave her the blank canvas and said, “Paint something.”

And Misty said, “Nobody paint paints. Not anymore.”

If anybody she knew still painted at all, they used their own blood or semen. And they painted on live dogs from the animal shelter, or on molded gelatin desserts, but never on canvas.

And Peter said, “I bet you still paint on canvas.”

“Why?” Misty said. “Because I’m retarded? Because I don’t know any better?”

And Peter said, “Just fucking paint.”

They were supposed to be above representational art. Making pretty pictures. They were supposed to learn visual sarcasm. Misty said they were paying too much tuition not to practice the techniques of effective irony. She said a pretty picture didn’t teach the world anything.

And Peter said, “We’re not old enough to buy beer, what are we supposed to teach the world?” There on his back in their nest of weeds, one arm behind his head, Peter said, “All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”

In case you didn’t fucking notice, you big boob, Misty really wanted you to like her. Just for the record, her dress, her sandals and floppy straw hat, she was all dressed up for you. If you’d just touch her hair you’d hear it crackle with hair spray.

She wore so much Wind Song perfume she was attracting bees.

And Peter set the blank canvas on her easel. He said, “Maura Kincaid never went to fucking art school.” He spit a wad of green slobber, picked another weed stem and stuck it in his mouth. His tongue stained green, he said, “I bet if you painted what’s in your heart, it could hang in a museum.”

What was in her heart, Misty said, was pretty much just silly crap.

And Peter just looked at her. He said, “So what’s the point of painting anything you don’t love?”

What she loved, Misty told him, would never sell. People wouldn’t buy it.

And Peter said, “Maybe you’d be surprised.”

This was Peter’s theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.

Some idiot who’s not afraid to say what they really love.

“Plato,” Peter says, and he turns his head to spit green slobber into the weeds. “Plato said: ‘He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.’ ”

He stuck another weed in his mouth and chewed, saying, “So what makes Misty Kleinman a maniac?”

Her fantasy houses and cobblestone streets. Her seagulls circling the oyster boats as they came back from the shoals she’d never seen. The window boxes overflowing with snapdragons and zinnias. No way in fucking hell was she going to paint that crap.

“Maura Kincaid,” Peter says, “didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was forty-one years old.” He started taking paintbrushes out of the pale wood box, twisting the ends sharp. He said, “Maura got hitched to a good old Waytansea Island carpenter, and they had a couple kids.” He took out her tubes of paint, setting them next to the brushes there on the blanket.

“It wasn’t until her husband died,” Peter said. “Then Maura got sick, really sick, with consumption or something. Back then, being forty-one made you an old lady.”

It wasn’t until one of her kids died, he said, that Maura Kincaid ever painted a picture. He said, “Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”

You told Misty all this.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist.

You were digging in your pocket while you said this. You were fishing something out.