Scavenger Reef Page 4

  "But Claire," she managed. "Nothing's settled. The estate—"

  "Nothing will be for sale," said Augie Silver's agent. "Nina, the show is meant as an homage, a tribute."

  Again the widow was stopped short. Claire Steiger was a merchant, not a curator; she showed paintings to sell paintings, and it had not occurred to Nina that the precious square footage of Ars Longa might be given over simply to the admiration of canvases. The widow felt remorse. Was she already slipping into bitterness, beginning to assume that everything was a sham, a cheat, just because her own life had been cheated? "Claire," she said, "I suppose I should be grateful. It's just that—"

  "Just what, darling?"

  "I don't know. It seems so soon." Even as Nina was saying the words, she knew they were beside the point. Twenty years from now it would still seem soon.

  "Nina, listen, I understand that everything feels very new right now, very raw. But this show will be a celebration—the kind of big overview that Augie would have wanted."

  "I don't think Augie wanted that," said Nina, and a flash of suspicion again arced through her brain. Living artists had a lot to say about when, where, and how they were shown; dead artists were not consulted. Someone had to step in and tell the world what the painter would have wanted. That someone was usually a dealer, and mysteriously, what the painter would have wanted fit in very neatly with a marketing plan. "Claire," the widow said, "I don't think I like this."

  The proprietor of the Ars Longa Gallery looked out her office window at the springtime bustle of 57th Street, the veering taxis and recession-proof limos. Over the years, she'd developed a very versatile and effective stratagem for avoiding arguments. When a disagreement loomed, she simply ignored it and went on to announce her intentions. "The gallery has seventeen major works on hand," she told Nina Silver. "Collectors have so far agreed to lend another dozen. If you'd consent to lend the canvases you have, we'd of course pay shipping and insur—"

  "Claire, this is all just business, isn't it? This is no homage, no tribute."

  "Nina, your husband's reputation—"

  "My husband doesn't—didn't—particularly give a damn about his reputation. I think we agree that was part of his charm."

  "We can't all afford to be quite so cavalier about it, Nina. Let's be professional here, shall we? As Augie's agent, I'm asking you to lend the paintings. Will you?"

  "No."

  "I'll ask another time, when you're less upset."

  "Don't bother, Claire."

  "And one more thing, Nina. Did Augie in fact make no pictures at all the last three years? Was he perhaps working quietly—"

  Nina Silver hung up the phone. She didn't slam it down, didn't even drop it with particular suddenness. She placed it gently in its cradle, crossed her arms against her midriff, and blew out a long slow breath.

  On 57th Street, Claire Steiger stared blankly at the dead receiver in her hand and wondered for just a moment if her unaccustomed desperation had led her to a rare strategic blunder. But she allowed herself little time to linger on the question. She had other calls to make.

  Nina Silver, like most Key Westers, went most places by bicycle.

  Her bike was an old fat-tire one-speed, powder blue, with a corroded wire basket and a rusted bell whose clapper stuck after three weak and un-resounding taps against its casing. She'd had the bike eight years and found it a perennial source of mind-easing delight. It wasn't that the bike reminded her of childhood; rather, it leavened her notion of what it was to be a grownup. It was impossible to take oneself too seriously while astride an old fat-tire bike. The world, and the sense of one's place in it, came back to scale and flooded in as one pedaled by at eight miles an hour, with a vantage point some four feet off the ground.

  As the widow cruised slowly up Olivia Street, the sun's last low rays were slanting in from the Gulf side of the island, and the light was so soft yet compelling that the pink and red oleanders seemed not shined upon but fired from within. Confident dogs sprawled in the street, serenely nestled against the tires of parked cars. Stray cats missing patches of fur and pieces of ears mixed democratically with brushed pets in the shady places under porch stairs. Amorous doves puffed up on wires and hopefully sang out: ta-fee-ya, ta-keeya. And with a sometimes audible creaking and squeaking, the old wooden houses of Key West began to recover from the daytime baking that had swelled their window frames and bowed their doorjambs, made their beams and joists as painfully taut as a fat man's ankles.

  Nina chained her bike and climbed the three front stairs, took a last look across her porch rail at the splendid light, and slipped her key into the lock. She was a half-step into her living room, looking down as she replaced her key ring in her bag, when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a male form in the kitchen. Her feet froze, her throat clamped shut as if squeezed by a cold hand, her heart stalled and then began to hammer.

  It was Reuben the Cuban.

  He was standing at the counter, a dish towel in his hand, drying glasses. "Hello, Meesus Silber," he said. "I run berry late today."

  This was a lie. Reuben never ran late. But on Tuesdays, the day he cleaned the Silvers' house, he often stayed overtime because he thought it might be a comfort to the widow to have someone there when she arrived. She might need something moved. She might need an errand run. There might be any number of things that needed doing, and Reuben wanted to be the person to do them if he could.

  Nina moved slowly into the house, still waiting for her pulse to slow.

  Fred the parrot greeted her. "Awk. Jack Daniel's. Where's Augie?"

  The widow sat on the edge of the sofa. Her legs were warm from biking, and the upholstery felt good. "Someday," she said, "I'm going to strangle that bird."

  Reuben the Cuban reached up and put a glass on a high shelf. Then he moved gracefully to Fred's cage and offered the parrot a knuckle to peck. "Thees bird, he love you and Meester Silber too. He not try to make you feel bad."

  Nina kicked off her shoes and reflected that there are people who think the worst and people who think the best. Even about parrots. "You're a very kind person, Reuben."

  The young man absorbed the compliment with great solemnity. He'd glided back to the kitchen and was now buffing flatware and putting it away. He took care not to mar the moment by jangling forks and knives.

  The widow leaned back on the sofa and let her head fall against the top of the cushion. The light in the living room was so soft it had turned grainy; the brighter glow from the kitchen made the house seem cozy and safe, inviolable. Nina was ready to think about the day just ending. "Reuben," she said softly, "what's a friend? What do you think a friend is, Reuben?"

  The young Cuban dropped his cloth, pondered a moment, then absently began polishing the countertop with slow round movements. He hadn't known a lot of friendship in his life. He had a father who was so ashamed of him that Reuben couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the old man's eyes, and a mother who claimed to love him but was always praying on her swollen knees for a miracle that would make him other than he was. He had a brother who'd promised to kill him if he showed his faggot face in certain places, and he'd had lovers who had promised him romance and devotion, then easily cast him aside. He was too bashful and unfinished to be at ease among the smart, theatric Old Town gays, too tender and too dignified to seek solace in the shadowy places where lonely young men collided. In Key West, a town that prides itself on having room for everyone, there didn't seem to be a spot for him.

  But there is as much wisdom in pure yearning as in flawed experience, and on the subject of friendship Reuben had strongly held beliefs. "A friend," he said, "is when you cry, the tears fall in his heart. When he laughs, it is bread and wine, it is like food, enough for happiness. A friend, you would do anything, you would look for more that you could do, you would watch the world like a fisherman watches the sky to see if there is danger, to keep your friend safe by watching closely—"

  The housekeeper suddenly broke off.
He was unaccustomed to talking so much; he was still making slow circles with the dishcloth. In the dark living room, Nina Silver had become a silhouette, a still dim outline against the furniture. "You ask a lot," she said. "Of yourself."

  "Yes," said Reuben.

  "You should," said the widow. Then she thought of certain people with whom her life had been very much involved and whose goodwill she was each day less sure that she could trust. "Only . . . only, if you ask so much of a friend, I'm not sure anyone really has one. I don't feel that I do."

  Reuben the Cuban fretted with his dish towel, closed the drawer that held the flatware. He pressed his teeth together to keep his face composed but his heart was wild with a secret, modest pride, the knightly ecstasy of one who stands ready to do all and asks nothing in return. "You do," he said, leaning just slightly across the kitchen counter. "You do, Meesus Silber."

  8

  "So this Steiger woman," said Ray Yates. "She call you?"

  Clayton Phipps took a small sip of extremely nasty white wine and silently cursed himself for being talked into slumming at the Clove Hitch bar. It was well and good for Yates to play out this man-of-the-people routine; he had to, being a radio host, a local personality. But why should Phipps have to subject himself to this resinous, oxidized fluid out of a green gallon screw-top jug with an ear? "Yes," the connoisseur said reluctantly. "She called."

  "She want your paintings?" Yates pressed.

  "She wants to show my paintings," Phipps corrected. "There's an understanding that it's strictly NFS."

  "NFS," muttered Robert Natchez, who was sitting on Phipps's other side. Like most pretentious people, the poet was uncannily sensitive to pretension in others, it irritated him like sand in the mesh cup of a bathing suit. "Goddamnit, Clay, can't you just say 'not for sale' like a normal human being?"

  Phipps shrugged. The whole subject of the paintings made him highly uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him feel as nasty as the wine. "O.K., Natch," he said. "Not for sale. Like your journals."

  There was a pause. The three friends blinked across the glare of Garrison Bight and watched the charter boats straggle in, their practiced captains working shifters and throttles to back them into their slips with swagger. Red and seasick tourists gathered at the sterns, jockeying for position to be the first ones back on land. Pelicans sat in the water, still as bathtub toys, cormorants stood on pilings and spread their prehistoric wings to dry.

  "How many paintings ya got?" asked Ray Yates.

  The question fell just as Clay Phipps had let himself imagine that the topic of Augie's canvases was closed, and for all Yates's efforts to sound offhanded, there was something inherently rude, salacious even, about the inquiry, like casually asking someone the length of his dick or the amount of money in his Keogh plan.

  There had always been a certain competitiveness among Augie Silver's friends. It stemmed from the fact that they all admired Augie more than they did each other, and more than they did themselves. There was something about the man that made it seem crucial to be liked by him. He was a natural arbiter, he conferred esteem the way a king grants titles of nobility, and his favor suggested not just personal preference but fundamental worth. In the matter of gift paintings, his favor could also confer large amounts of cold cash, but that was something no one wanted to be crude enough to be the first to mention.

  "Six," said Clayton Phipps. He said it softly, shyly even, looking down at his cheap scratched wineglass, yet could not quite squelch a nervous smile, a hint of bragging.

  "Six!" said Ray Yates. His voice was also soft, but an octave above its usual smooth range.

  "Three large, three small," Phipps went on. It seemed he'd decided to make a full disclosure of his holdings and have it over with. 'Three oils, one acrylic, two watercolors. Done over a span of twenty years."

  "You sound like a fucking exhibition catalogue," groused Robert Natchez.

  Phipps did not immediately answer. He glanced across the pier, saw fishermen hanging grouper on scales and nailing angry-eyed barracuda onto posts. Jealousy. He knew he was dealing with Natchez's scattershot corrosive jealousy and that the higher course would be to let it slide. But lately Phipps's higher impulses had been consistently losing out. Augie's death, his rebuff at the gentle but definite hands of Augie's widow—things like that made him weary of the vigilance it took to be dignified. "How many d'you have?" he taunted Natchez.

  "Just the one. You know that."

  "Ah. It's one of the nicer of the small ones."

  "I have two," Ray Yates volunteered. "A good-size oil on the boat and a little watercolor I hung at the studio."

  "Take it home, Ray," said Natchez bitterly. "It's gonna be worth money."

  Money. So there it was. The unholy word was dropped like a plateful of soup and was as hard to ignore as a food stain on a tie, but the other two men strove gamely to ignore it. They sipped their drinks, glanced around them at the bar beginning to fill up now with boat crews and returning sailors. The sun was low enough that there were hems of pink on the bottoms of the puffy clouds.

  "So Clay," said Yates, "you gonna send your paintings?"

  "I haven't decided," said Phipps, though in fact he had. "I just wish I was surer what Augie would want."

  "What Augie would want," Yates said, "is not to be dead."

  To this, the two men clinked their smudged and murky glasses. It was the sort of comradely gesture they used to do more of, generally with Augie taking the lead. Now it had less the feel of something done in the present than of something re-enacted, an old routine trotted out without great conviction, and Robert Natchez made no effort to join the toast.

  "Clay," he said, "you know you want those paintings in the show. Make you look like a big collector. And what the hell—it's only NFS."

  *

  Some time later, Jimmy Gibbs parked his sore legs and aching back on a stool at the Clove Hitch bar and ordered up a double Wild Turkey, rocks, chased by a longneck Bud. His captain, Matty Barnett, had offered to buy him a drink, and Gibbs was not one to shortchange himself in matters of the cocktail. He tipped his beer in thanks and sucked the neck of the bottle dry while it was good and cold. Matty Barnett sipped tomato juice livened up with horseradish. He'd been sober fifteen years, ever since he drove his 1970 Bonneville convertible off the bridge and into the Cow Key Channel. It wasn't sinking the car that had scared Barnett onto the wagon; it was that a lot of time went by before he'd noticed he was in the water. Now he watched his first mate sponging up alcohol with the kindly disapproval of a Hindu watching someone wolf a burger.

  "Jimmy," he began, "you got any idea why I wanna talk to you?"

  "Nope," said Gibbs, although several possibilities had crossed his mind. He'd been late, hung over, a couple times in the last week or so—but hey, no one expected a mate on a charter boat to be a model of promptness and propriety. He'd been, well, a little sarcastic to clients now and again—but it had seemed to him the clients were too nauseous, nervous, and ignorant to pick it up. Besides, Jimmy wasn't there to be anybody's best buddy; he was there to rig the lines, keep them clear, land the fish despite the customers' endless talent for losing them—and he defied Matty Barnett or anybody else to question the quality of his skill.

  "I'm thinking of retiring, Jimmy."

  This Gibbs had not expected, and it made him take a hard look at his boss. Barnett was barely older than he was, maybe fifty-five, fifty-seven tops. That did not seem like retirement age to Gibbs. He had a tough time imagining someone being far enough ahead of himself, money-wise. Besides, it didn't look to him that the captain really worked that hard. True, he had a constant weight of responsibility on him, but that wasn't work like hauling lines and scaling fish was work. It didn't make your back hurt, didn't ding up your hands.

  "I useta love getting out on the water," Barnett went on. "Now it's just a job. Fishing's not what it was. Or maybe it's just me. Anyway, I'm over it. I got a little place up the Keys. Own it free and clear. The
wife's got five, six years to go with the Aqueduct. So the way I'm figuring …"

  Gibbs knew by now how Matty Barnett was figuring, and the knowledge put a knot in his gut. Barnett was going to offer him a good deal on the boat that Gibbs ached to have and could not possibly buy. The impossibility of it made him furious with everything and persuaded him that there could be no pure motive, no generous impulse, no fairness in all the world. "The way you're figuring is business is lousy anyway so you may as well sell the Fin Finder to me."

  Barnett backed off. He seemed truly miffed and Gibbs felt ashamed. He punished and soothed himself with a swig of bourbon, then stared off toward the western sky. There was a band of yellow near the horizon, and above that a lot of green.

  "I'm offering it to you first," Barnett said mildly. "It'd please me to have you be the next skipper. If you're not interested, that's fine."

  Gibbs glanced sideways at his captain. Decades of scanning the glaring water for fish had bleached out Matty's eyes and made their sockets pink and crinkly like the eyes of Santa Claus. Gibbs could almost find it in himself to apologize and to tell the other man of course he was interested, but he suddenly had the ridiculous feeling that if he tried to speak he would start to cry.

  "Here's the situation," Barnett resumed. "Boat's worth sixty-five, seventy. I'll let it go for fifty. I still owe eleven on it myself, so I need that much up front. The rest, I'd work with you, you could pay it off as—"