“What are you working on now, if I may ask?” Bill’s eyes scan the room.
“Well, to be honest, I’ve been resting on my laurels.” Martin chuckles. “Just a few drawings here and there.” He pauses. “I’ve always wanted to try something large-scale, actually, but it’s a question of space. And funding.”
Bill and Coraline are quiet. Philomena stares.
“Let me ask you something,” says Bill, turning to face Martin, his hands thrust into corduroy pockets. “If you had a commission, let’s say, and could do any project you wanted right now, what would you do?”
There is a long pause. In a dresser drawer upstairs, beneath his underpants, Martin keeps the carefully drawn plans from his youth. The papers are yellowed and the pencil lines faded, but the finished image remains bright in his mind. When he proposed the idea to his dealer years ago, he’d received a look of amused incredulity—an unfair response, given the blatant hoaxes other artists were permitted. It was true that the idea might have seemed a departure, but to Martin it was an extension of his vision, its shadow side. He rarely thinks of the project anymore, but every so often it appears to him in a dream, magically realized, and he feels an exhilaration so complete it brings tears to his eyes.
He stands for another moment, looking at Bill and Coraline Gregory. Then he goes out the studio door and hurries upstairs to his underwear drawer.
The Gregorys return the next week to formally commission the work. After their visit, Philomena is strangely quiet. In front of the bathroom mirror, she puts her toothbrush down and finally speaks. “Are you crazy? Do you understand how big their house is?”
Yes, Martin says, he is aware of the size. It’s perfect. Monumental. He’d seen the excitement in Bill Gregory’s eyes when he unfolded the first drawing. Yes, Martin had explained, those were insects, each individually sculpted and affixed to the exterior of a house. Spiders, moths, beetles, grasshoppers. The house in the picture was a generic 1950s ranch, nearly obscured by a mass of clinging bodies, an enchanting tangle of wings, legs, and antennae.
“You’d need millions of them to cover it,” Philomena says. “Who’s going to model each one?”
Martin brushes his teeth calmly.
“And the Gregorys are lunatics, too. Who do they think they are? The de’ Medicis?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Philomena looks at him in the mirror. They lock eyes for a moment, and her face softens. “I just don’t want to see you disappointed.”
“That won’t happen.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“They’re serious about this. You heard what they said. They’ll cover the cost of materials and pay me the rest when it’s finished.” Martin smiles at himself. “This could be really big. Hell, it can’t be anything but big.”
“I’m just saying you should measure the house first. You’re not twenty-five anymore. You’ve never even done an outdoor project before.”
Martin seizes his wife’s soft body. He kisses her forehead and bends her backward, hearing the faint click of her bones. “You worry too much,” he says.
Bill Gregory gives him a copy of the blueprints, but Martin barely looks at them. He understands that the house is large; he doesn’t need to know the exact square footage. First he will need a stockpile of closed-cell foam, dense enough to carve and score. At the lumber yard, he puts in an order for a hundred sheets of pink insulation board. From the hardware store, he buys spools of black electrical wire and tubes of foam adhesive. The owner calls a supplier in California for a roll of fine-gauge stainless mesh. Lastly, he buys paint. Gallons of all-weather coating in a spectrum of colors. He already has a stack of nature books, including a five-pound insect encyclopedia with color illustrations of specimens cataloged by continent.
After the insulation sheets arrive and the men deposit them in the backyard, Martin sits at the kitchen table with a glass of lemonade. Outside, a mountain of pink foam waits beyond the marigolds, topped with cinder block weights. He feels giddy, feverish to begin.
“I hope you’re not planning on leaving that there,” says Philomena, coming through the kitchen in gardening gloves. “It’ll kill the grass.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t be there for long.”