Ashes to ashes. Her baby in an urn.

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.

The tape tight over each eye, keeping her face relaxed, a mask, Misty says, “Has anyone gone to tell Peter?”

Someone sighs, one long breath in, then out. And Grace says, “What would that accomplish?”

He’s her father.

You’re her father.

The gray cloud of Tabbi will drift off on the wind. Drifting back down the coastline toward the town, the hotel, the houses and church. The neon signs and billboards and corporate logos and trademarked names.

Dear sweet Peter, consider yourself told.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, one problem with art school is it makes you so much less of a romantic. All that garbage about painters and garrets, it disappears under the load you have to learn about chemistry, about geometry and anatomy. What they teach you explains the world. Your education leaves everything so neat and tidy.

So resolved and sensible.

Her whole time dating Peter Wilmot, Misty knew it wasn’t him she loved. Women just look for the best physical specimen to father their children. A healthy woman is wired to seek out the triangle of smooth muscle inside Peter’s open collar because humans evolved hairless in order to sweat and stay cool while outrunning some hot and exhausted form of furry animal protein.

Men with less body hair are also less likely to harbor lice, fleas, and mites.

Before their dates, Peter would take a painting of hers. It would be framed and matted. And Peter would press two long strips of extrastrong double-sided mounting tape onto the back of the frame. Careful of the sticky tape, he’d tuck the painting up inside the hem of his baggy sweater.

Any woman would love how Peter ran his hands through her hair. It’s simple science. Physical touch mimics early parent-child grooming practices. It stimulates your release of growth hormone and ornithine decarboxylase enzymes. Inversely, Peter’s fingers rubbing the back of her neck would naturally lower her levels of stress hormones. This has been proved in a laboratory, rubbing baby rats with a paintbrush.

After you know about biology, you don’t have to be used by it.

On their dates, Peter and Misty, they’d go to art museums and galleries. Just the two of them, walking and talking, Peter looking a little square in front, a little pregnant with her painting.

There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.

Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

Walking the galleries looking for a blank wall space, Peter was a living example of the golden section, the formula used by ancient Greek sculptors for perfect proportion. His legs were 1.6 times longer than his torso. His torso is 1.6 times longer than his head.

Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second, then the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is called Phi, after the sculptor Phidias.

The architecture of you.

Walking, Misty told Peter about the chemistry of painting. How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It’s a paradox, “creating” a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

When people look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they need to know that carbon black paint is the soot from natural gas. The color rose madder is the ground root of the madder plant. Emerald green is copper acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and used as an insecticide. A poison. Tyrian purple is made from clams.

And Peter, he slid the painting out from under his sweater. Alone in the gallery with no one around to see, the painting of a stone house behind a picket fence, he pressed it to the wall. And there it was, the signature of Misty Marie Kleinman. And Peter said, “I told you someday your work would hang in a museum.”

His eyes are deep Egyptian brown, the paint made from ground-up mummies, bone ash and asphalt, and used until the nineteenth century, when artists discovered that icky reality. After twisting years of brushes between their lips.

Peter kissing the back of her neck, Misty said how when you look at the Mona Lisa, you need to remember that burnt sienna is just clay colored with iron and manganese and cooked in an oven. Sepia brown is the ink sacs from cuttlefish. Dutch pink is crushed buckhorn berries.

Peter’s perfect tongue licked the back of her ear. Something, but not a painting, felt stiff inside his clothes.

And Misty whispered, “Indian yellow is the urine of cattle fed mango leaves.”

Peter wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his other arm, he pressed the back of her knee so it buckled. He lowered her to the gallery’s marble floor, and Peter said, “ Te amo,Misty.”

Just for the record, this came as a little surprise.

His weight on top of her, Peter said, “You think you know so much,” and he kissed her.

Art, inspiration, love, they’re all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

The paint colors iris green and sap green are the juice of flowers. The color of Cappagh brown is Irish dirt, Misty whispered. Cinnabar is vermilion ore shot from high Spanish cliffs with arrows. Bistre is the yellowy brown soot of burnt beech wood. Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Even while they kissed, you closed your eyes.

And Misty kept hers open, not watching you, but the earring in your ear. Silver tarnished almost brown, holding a knot of square-cut glass diamonds, twinkling and buried in the black hair falling over your shoulders—that’s what Misty loved.

That first time, Misty kept telling you, “The paint color Davy’s gray is powdered slate. Bremen blue is copper hydroxide and copper carbonate—a deadly poison.” Misty said, “Brilliant scarlet is iodine and mercury. The color bone black is charred bones . . .”

THE COLOR BONE BLACK is charred bones.

Shellac is the shit aphids leave on leaves and twigs. Drop black is burnt grapevines. Oil paints use the oil of crushed walnuts or poppy seeds. The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft. Everything crushed and mixed and baked, the more it could be cooking.

Misty was still talking, talking, talking, but this was days later, in gallery after gallery. This was in a museum, with her painting of a tall stone church pasted to the wall between a Monet and a Renoir. With Misty sitting on the cold floor straddling Peter between her legs. It was late afternoon, and the museum was deserted. Peter’s perfect head of black hair pressed hard on the floor, he was reaching up, both his hands inside her sweater, thumbing her nipples.

Both your hands.

Behavioral psychologists say that humans copulate face-to-face because of breasts. Females with larger breasts attracted more partners, who insisted on breast play during intercourse. More sex bred more females, who inherited the larger breasts. That begat more face-to-face sex.

Now, here on the floor, Peter’s hands, his breast play, his erection sliding around inside his pants, Misty’s thighs spread above him, she said how when William Turner painted his masterpiece of Hannibal crossing the Alps to slaughter the Salassian army, Turner based it on a hike he took in the Yorkshire countryside.