Scavenger Reef Page 2

  Clayton Phipps sipped his warmish Sancerre and noted how the flinty taste turned cactusy as the wine approached body temperature. He hooked a thumb through one of his suspenders and slid it to a fresh place on his shoulder. "Ray," he said, "this might be tough for you to grasp, but it had to do with standards.

  I remember a dinner I had with Augie, about five years ago. We were drinking a Lynch Bages 'seventy-eight, rather young but very concen—"

  "Who gives a shit what you were drinking?" interjected Robert Natchez.

  Phipps glared at him from under his heavy brows. "It speaks of the quality of the moment, Natch. Isn't that what you poets supposedly care about? Anyway, we were talking about standards. About the difference between talent and genius. Between skilled painting and great painting. Augie had no fake modesty—we all know that. He knew he had talent. He knew he had skill. He doubted he had genius. And he was coming to feel that if he didn't have genius, then what was the point—"

  "The point," said Ray Yates, "was that there were all these people who would buy his stuff."

  Phipps shook his head, glanced upward through the feathery leaves of the poinciana tree. "No offense, Ray. You're a slut."

  "Just because I think if a guy's making a good living—"

  "Where's your judgment?" Phipps interrupted. "Where's your imagination? You believe something's good just because there's some schmuck out there who'll pay for it?"

  "Usually it's just the opposite," put in Robert Natchez. "If something's commercial—"

  Phipps wheeled toward him with a vehemence that surprised all three of them. "And that's bullshit too. Ray's a slut, you're an undergraduate. You're both children, for chrissake. Augie was a realist. He used his skill to buy himself the life he wanted. Period. No high-flown crap about art, no sucking up to the marketplace. He had a skill, he used it."

  Phipps paused, and noticed rather suddenly that he was smashed. Grief, heat, alcohol, and candor: The blend was making him dizzy, and the shade of the poinciana offered no coolness but seemed rather to hold congealed sunshine that pressed directly on his bald and throbbing head. He glanced with a queasy blend of affection and despising at Natchez and Yates; he dimly wondered if they realized that when he compared people unfavorably to Augie, he was talking first and foremost of himself. It was probably for the best that he was prevented from rambling on by the sudden appearance of Nina Silver.

  She'd come through the French doors, silently skirted the pool, and stood before them; in her drained look there was something very touching but uncomfortably intimate, an exposure like the sudden scrubbing off of makeup, like a privileged glimpse of a sleeping face on a pillow. Her gray eyes were weary, the slight smile she managed held no joy but only a tired tenderness. The widow had decided against wearing black, and her sea-green linen suit was slightly wilted. Only her hair remained perfect. Short, thick, raven, it framed her face and tucked under her jawline the way an acorn top hugs the smooth curve of the acorn. She put one hand on Ray Yates's shoulder, the other on Bob Natchez's.

  "Gents," she said, "I have to go lie down. You'll help yourselves to whatever you want?"

  It was an innocent offer but perhaps an injudicious one from a woman newly alone. Nina managed something like a smile, then turned, and had any of the men been watching the others' eyes instead of her retreating form, he might perhaps have noticed a glimmer of something beyond mere disinterested concern for the widow of their fallen friend.

  3

  'That isn't how it's done," Claire Steiger said.

  "How many paintings do we still have?" pressed her husband.

  "We?" She spit out the word as if it were a rotten piece of fruit and went back to her magazine. The northbound plane was somewhere off Cape Hatteras, and in the first-class cabin coffee was being offered with petit fours, little pink squares whose icing stuck to the ribbed paper of their nests.

  "Look, there's a psychological moment to these things," said Kip Cunningham. "How long does a dead artist stay fashionable? A few months maybe? While he's still news, while he's still being talked about at dinner parties. After that he's just one more dead painter. Last year's tragedy. Who cares?"

  Exasperated, Claire Steiger grabbed a petit four and ate half of it before she realized what she was doing. More annoyed than before, she put the other half back into its paper cup and squashed it past all temptation. Raspberry jam oozed out on her thumb. "Kip," she said, "now you're explaining to me the mental quirks of art buyers?"

  "I'm only saying—"

  "You're only saying things you would have heard a hundred times if you listened when I talked."

  'This again, Claire?"

  "Yeah, Kip, this again. Because now you can't afford to ignore me. Now you can't act like your business is the be-all end-all, and mine's a little hobby, good for some social cachet, nice for getting us invited . . ."

  The husband rolled his head against the back of the leather seat and entertained the unholy wish that the wings would fall off the airplane, that the naked fuselage, aerodynamic as a cucumber, would plummet into the sea, settling everything with a gruesome splash no one would hear. At that moment, no price seemed too high to pay to get another human being to shut up, and without actually deciding to, Kip played a card he'd been saving for some time, one of the few cards he had left.

  "Claire, we're going to lose the Sagaponack house. Are you aware of that?"

  There are two best ways to hurt someone. One is through what is most feared, the other through what is most loved. Claire Steiger's mouth stayed open but sound stopped coming out. Something had slammed shut at the back of her throat, and her eyes had started instantly to burn. She loved that house, took delight from every colorless weather-beaten board of it. It was half a block from the beach, always swollen and ripe with moisture and salt. The first porch step gave a welcoming squeak when she arrived on summer Fridays. The shutters were the most wonderful shade of grayed-out blue, and the wet light that filtered through the bedroom curtains reminded her of the radiance that came through angels' wings in seventeenth-century murals.

  "There's a huge payment due the first of July," Kip went on. "The house is collateral against it." His tone had become weirdly threatening, as if he had willed himself back to the good old days when he was the one foreclosing and not the one foreclosed. "We've gotta turn some cash, Claire. A lot of cash."

  She turned away and looked out the window. It was an unrewarding view: flat tops of featureless clouds gapping here and there to reveal a blank gray ocean. "Kip," she said, "you don't understand. I've spent a lot of years building a clientele, making a reputation for doing business a certain way. A dignified, discreet way, Kip. I don't do fire sales. I don't cash in on drowned artists. I don't slap paintings on the walls with price tags dangling from them. The Ars Longa Gallery has a certain image—"

  "Fuck the image," said Kip Cunningham without parting his small and perfect teeth. "We're broke."

  Claire Steiger reached for another petit four, then regarded her outstretched hand as if it belonged to someone else, some piggish guest, and yanked it back before it had snatched the pastry. Claire was not fat, just round, put together out of circles. Her coarse curly hair haloed her head in a spherical do. Her face was round, her hips were round, her breasts were round. When she lost weight, certain dimensions flattened out and became disk-like but never angular.

  "It wouldn't work," she told her husband. "Even if I said the hell with being classy, let's go for the quick score—it wouldn't work. Serious collectors don't buy that way, Kip. They're not impulsive. They wait for assurance from the critics. They're going to spend six, maybe seven figures for a canvas, they want the big auction houses' stamp of approval—"

  "So why don't we sell through an auction house?"

  "Then why do we have a gallery?"

  "Sotheby's," Kip Cunningham said. It sounded like a prayer. "Don't they do a big painting sale in June?"

  "The Solstice Show. Biggest of the year. But Kip, what'll it
accomplish? Say we're the only ones unloading Augie Silvers. If anything, it'll drive the prices down. It'll look like we're dumping. Like we're desperate."

  "We are desperate."

  The flight attendant came by to refresh their coffee, and had the tact not to ask if everything was all right. The speaker system switched on and a voice from the flight deck informed them that those seated on the left side of the airplane could look down and see Washington, DC.

  "Who gives a good goddamn?" grumbled Kip. He pushed his coffee aside and asked for a brandy. He was sipping it sullenly when his wife spoke again.

  "How much we need for the July payment?" she asked.

  "Two million four," said Kip.

  "And the total indebtedness?"

  "Personal or corporate?"

  "Corporate's not my problem." Claire fixed her husband with her tender brown eyes. "I'm asking how much you're in hock on things that are half mine."

  Kip blinked down at his tray table. It befuddled him that he couldn't figure exactly when or how this toy called debt was transfigured into money he actually had to pay. "Eight million," he mumbled. "A little less."

  His wife considered. "I've got an idea. I think I can raise enough for July at least, maybe the whole nut. But it comes with a price tag, Kip. I bail you out, the Sagaponack house goes into my name and my name alone."

  Kip Cunningham had the kind of fragile handsomeness that one moment seemed polished, cocksure, and composed, and with the smallest shift could collapse into the sniveling pout of a spoiled child, a defeated brat snuffling outside a squash-court door. He glanced sideways at his wife, his mouth flat as snake lips, his eyes hard with the furtive meanness of the weak. He gave a brief laugh that was meant to be sardonic. "So what are you saying, Claire? Are you saying you're going to divorce me?"

  She flashed her tender eyes at him. "I might."

  She reached again for a petit four and didn't stop herself this time. She bit into it, luxuriating in the rasp of grainy sugar against her teeth, the squish of yellow cake and apricot preserve against her tongue. "It seems more possible every day."

  4

  "Clay, don't," said Nina Silver.

  She gently but firmly grasped the family friends thick wrist before his hand could slide down onto her breast, and pushed his large warm face away from her neck.

  Phipps, a gentleman more or less, didn't wait for the attempted embrace to become a grovel, a grope, some unseemly echo of adolescence. He sat up straight on the settee alongside Augie Silver's blue-lit swimming pool, partly disappointed, part contrite, maybe even part relieved. "Nina," he said, "I'm sorry." In a move to recapture his dignity, he smoothed the placket of his linen shirt the way a riled bird resettles its feathers. "Loss does strange things to people. I'm a mess."

  Augie's widow gave him a soft smile and patted him on the knee. It was a gesture of caring and acceptance, but it somehow made Phipps feel worse. Was he so ridiculous a suitor that the woman he'd just been trying to seduce would feel not the slightest threat in touching his leg? He took stock. He was fifty-eight years old. O.K., not young, but only one year older than Augie. He was bald, yes, but had always been told he had a well-shaped head. He wasn't rich, but managed to live as though he was. He wasn't famous, but enjoyed many of the perks thereof. His little newsletter was highly respected by those who knew and cherished the finer things; his endorsement was coveted around the world. Clayton Phipps was acknowledged as a formidable judge of wine, a gourmet of nice discernment and enviable experience, a canny traveler who had filled ten passports with visa stamps.

  All those hotel rooms, he reflected wryly, sitting next to Augie Silver's lovely widow. Overlooking the Bay of Naples, Sydney Harbor, the Tyrolean Alps. All those beautiful, romantic, complimentary suites—brass beds, marble bathtubs—he'd occupied alone. All those marvelous dinners taken at small tables in the sycophantic company of proprietors. All those tastings of legendary Bordeaux, sipped elbow to elbow with a bunch of crotchety old men in caves. Nearing the age of sixty, Clayton Phipps admitted to himself what a damnably clever job he'd done of living life for free, keeping himself unfettered, independent, sought after, and alone.

  "Nina, Nina, you know what it is?" Emerging from his thoughts, Phipps didn't notice the abruptness of his voice in the night air that was perfumed with frangipani and chlorine. "What it is I really want? I want what you and Augie had."

  "Of course you do," the widow said softly. Loss, for her, had made everything seem simple, obvious, reduced to its essentials. People wanted love, intimacy, the sense of being mated. They wanted to feel the profound familiarity that made another person's nearness as basic as the taste of water. "Everyone wants what Augie and I had. I want it. I want it back."

  Clayton Phipps was not an unfeeling man, not usually, but in the grip of his newly acknowledged loneliness he failed to see that the widow's pain was infinitely sharper than his own because she knew exactly what she was missing while he had only the vague awareness that something precious had eluded him all his life. "With someone else . . ." he began. It wasn't quite a question, not quite a statement. It was off the beat and had the awkwardness of doomed pleading.

  'There is no one else, Clay," said the widow, and there was defiance in her voice. The defiance was not aimed at Clayton Phipps, but still it stung him, made him feel a flash of shaming envy and even bitterness, even spite, toward his dead friend. Why should Augie Silver be so loved?

  "Come now, Nina," he said. Phipps felt as if he'd slipped into a chasm of longing that had little to do with Nina Silver, a slippery pit in which his isolation was the only fact, and he tried to climb out of it with handholds of cynicism couched as worldliness. "Aren't we a little old to believe in this one right person nonsense?"

  "I don't believe in that," said Nina. "I think there are any number of right people for each other—"

  "Well then," Phipps cut in. His tone had turned professorial. If charm couldn't rescue the moment, maybe logic would save him. "If there are any number—"

  The widow interrupted in turn, soft but unstoppable as a train. "Until you really fall in love with one. Then the others dim out, fade away, come to seem—I don't mean this personally, Clay—a little bit absurd."

  They sat. A scrap of breeze sent tiny ripples across the pool and lifted a wet green smell from the hedge. Inside the house, soft yellow lights gleamed against the dark wood walls. Augie's paintings loomed, unmoved in the week since the memorial. The parrot cage stood near the door; Fred was covered for the night, dreaming what visions of jungle, berries, feathers, and flight might come to a bird in sleep.

  And Nina Alonzo saw Augie Silver for the first time.

  It was twelve years ago. She was twenty-nine. She was sitting at her desk at the gallery on 57th Street. She heard a strange scuffing sound on the marble floor and looked up to see her future husband strolling in his meandering way, looking over first one shoulder, then the other, halfway twirling, wearing boat shoes. Boat shoes in midtown Manhattan in March. He approached her. He had on a black cashmere turtleneck, the collar askew but tucked high under the chin, and over the sweater was a light jacket of fawn-colored pigskin suede. It vaguely occurred to her that these were tiger colors, black and tan, and it registered only very dimly that everything the painter wore would feel good. His hair was thick, wavy, and almost perfect white, tinged here and there with an oddly pinkish bronze, but his skin was youthful, smooth and ruddy as an Indian's. His eyes were an electric blue, and they rested far back in sockets so deep that they suggested lighthouse beams, piercing, narrow-focused lenses that swept across his range of vision and shone with unsettling concentration on one thing at a time. And now they were fixed on Nina Alonzo. "Hello," he said. "I'm Augie Silver." Then he did something that quietly amazed her when she thought about it afterward, amazed her because it could only have been carried off with perfect confidence, perfect ease, with a manner as comfortable as his clothes. He half-sat on her desk, stretched a leg alongside the phone, the files
, the exhibition catalogues. His trousers were of beefy corduroy, and some of the wales were rubbed almost smooth. ...

  "Nina, are you all right?"

  She flinched just slightly at the sound of Phipps's voice, and felt not gratitude but resentment for the intrusive concern that had pulled her back to the here and now. "No," she said after a moment, "I'm not all right. My husband has been gone—what is it, Clay, three months now?—and he's more alive to me than anybody living. I'm not all right."

  Phipps took her hand, and neither of them could help glancing down at the suspect twining of their fingers. Twenty minutes ago, before his bizarre and meager attempt at lust, the contact would have been clean. "Nina, is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?"

  Even in his own ears, the question sounded a shade unwholesome, and Clay Phipps understood that he had forever forfeited the privilege of being totally trusted, of being mistaken for unselfish.

  The widow took her hand away. "Don't try to be Augie, Clay. That's what you can do for me. Don't try to be the man I love."

  Later, asleep, Nina again saw Augie Silver.

  She saw him often in dreams, and savored these meetings as if they were deliciously forbidden trysts. They were always different and always the same, these dreams, full of the sore joy of reunion which then melted into a growing but never serene acceptance that the reunion was unreal.

  This time Nina saw Augie while she was sitting in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. The front door opened and there he was. He hadn't shaved, his face gleamed with a steely stubble, and his throat was very tan beneath the collar of his shirt. "Augie," she said. She held her mug in front of her, smelling the fragrant steam and embracing the miracle of her husband coming back.