Scavenger Reef Read online

  "Farther on, here's what Brandenburg says: 'He belonged to no school, subscribed to no trends. At a time when many painters appeared to care less about craft than about theory, Silver cared only for the quality of what was on the canvas. In an era when artists seemed to feel that, to be taken seriously, their work had to be ugly, jarring, or pointlessly original, Silver clung to a riper, braver, more classic kind of wisdom: His work depicts a world almost unbearably lush, tender, beautiful, and temporary. In his love of color, his unabashed sensuality, he is a pure romantic; yet even in his most gorgeous pictures there is an awareness of death, of decay—the calm, sad resignation of the tropics. And what more poignant and honest reflection of that resignation than that Augie Silver, as if in humble acceptance of the paltriness of human effort, should have stopped working altogether in his final years? This passionate inactivity seems the final proof of his sincerity, his miraculous freedom from ambition. And while his premature death was certainly a tragedy, the current show at Ars Longa will assure him a place in the top rank of contemporary painters. Long after the dreary canvases by this season's art-journal darlings have come to seem dated and dull, Augie Silver's work— eccentric, indifferent to fashion, happily outside the mainstream—will speak to us of the power of untrammeled temperament wedded to talent, possibly to genius.' "

  Yates stopped reading and looked up at the clock. It was twenty seconds before 7 p.m., and behind the engineer's booth window his producer was flashing him the O.K. sign. The host searched for some final comment, a capper, and when none came he decided that the most effective way to end the show was to let the Brandenburg review hang in the air through a rare moment of radio silence. He paused a double beat, then said, "This is Ray Yates, and this is WKEY, the voice of the lower Keys. See you tomorrow on Culture Cocktail."

  He gave a nod and a point, and the producer played his theme music. It was a tune that always made Yates thirsty. Most evenings he bolted immediately from the padded womb of the studio and went directly to Raul's for several drinks. Tonight he broke the pattern. He looked at the painting on the wall. It was an impression of wind-lashed trees against a green sky full of reverence and menace. More important, it was a signed original Augie Silver. Picasso, thought Ray Yates. Matisse. You didn't leave such things around a public place where anyone could grab them. He decided to bring the picture to the houseboat, and reminded himself to install the dead bolt he'd meant to put on months ago. He owned two works by someone in the top rank of contemporary painters, and he felt a twinge as at a betting window when he let himself imagine how much they might be worth.

  10

  Nina Silver switched off the radio, walked softly through the French doors at the back of the living room, and sat down near the pool. Strange, she thought, what happens to a person when he's dead. He becomes the property of others, part of some ghastly common pot from which anyone may feed, a shared blurred memory that can be put to many uses. He can be talked about, written about, set up as a yardstick to measure or to shame the living. A person, dead, becomes a topic, a silent, neutral thing about which others have opinions. Chatter that would be called mere gossip in regard to the living passes for serious appraisal, something right and fitting, when applied to someone dead.

  But it was still gossip, reflected Nina Silver. Gossip and presumption by people trying to lay claim to a ghost. What did any of the chatter have to do with the flesh and blood man who had been her husband? What did it say about the smell of coffee on his morning breath, the glad gleam in his open eyes when their faces were close and they were making love? What did it say about the particular warp of his wit, the gruff charm that was indescribably different from the charm of other charming men, as ticklish, comforting, and sometimes prickly as an unshaved cheek?

  The widow sat and smelled the evening. Salt and iodine flavored the air, a slippery odor as of earthworms in wet dirt wafted up from the cooling ground. The poinciana was just coming into flower, and Nina noticed for the thousandth time what tiny, feathery leaves it had for such a big and spreading tree; it always made her think of a great fat man with the palest, daintiest fingers.

  Time passed. She knew this because the mosquitoes had come and gone, the western sky had phased from pink to lavender to jewel-box blue, and higher up Castor and Pollux, the tall spring twins, were nearly at the zenith. Nina Silver was wondering if she too was trying to lay claim to a ghost. Her claim, she told herself, at least was lawful—lawful in that vague portentous sense of lawful wedded wife. But what did that really mean? Did it set her up beyond dispute as the keeper of the true memory, the vestal standing guard against the vandals? She had built, was still building, a shrine of remembrance; other people—friends, colleagues, self-appointed judges—were building other shrines. Nina told herself her own temple was the grandest because it was built with the greatest love. But what it had in common with all the others was that it was meant to house, contain, hold captive the ghost of Augie Silver—and maybe Augie's ghost did not wish to be held.

  This was a terrible thought, a thought to turn grief guilty. Perhaps, of all the rudenesses and well-meaning indignities that the living heaped upon the longed-for and admired dead, the worst was simply that they wouldn't let them go. Perhaps the dead were like tired guests who truly wanted nothing more than to leave the party and have some peace. Why did the noisy, selfish, stubborn living try to bully them into staying?

  "Augie," Nina Silver said aloud, "do you really want to go?"

  11

  That night, as usual, she dreamed of her dead husband.

  In the first dream he was walking with her down a New York street. It was winter, night, big halos of icy blue surrounded all the streetlights. The parked cars were so black they gleamed like schist, and the brownstones all had stately stoops that exactly paralleled each other, like something out of Egypt. It was cold, with a gritty wind, but Nina didn't mind because she had her warmest jacket on and she was holding Augie's arm. He wore a camel topcoat, carelessly buttoned, and though she couldn't see his hands she knew they were balled lightly into fists at the bottom of his pockets. She was looking at the sidewalk; it had small shiny stones embedded in it. Then something went wrong. Nina had the sudden certainty that she was holding not her husband's arm but an empty sleeve. When she looked up they were standing at a broad intersection. Many traffic lights were flashing and the wind was blowing from everywhere at once. Augie was now standing outside his coat. He was naked, pale as egg, and skin was blowing off of him, his face was distorted and flesh was being stretched and torn away like leaves from a tree in the first November storm.

  Nina sat up groaning, then leaned back on her elbows. She brought a hand to her throat and felt her racing pulse. She poured some water from her nightstand carafe. A late moon had risen and a dim ivory light was spilling through the thin curtains. It put a soft gleam on the pine-cone bedposts, and the gleam reminded Nina of the delicious and secure fatigue of childhood. After a while she went back to sleep.

  When she dreamed again, the dream was gentler. She was on a beach, sitting at the water's edge, letting wet sand sift through her fingers. The sun was hot on her shoulders, the water so flat she could see the place where the earth curved underneath it. Augie was behind her, lying in a hammock. At least she trusted that he was: She could only see his leg, pegged in the sand like a bird's leg, his toes faintly wiggling just below the surface. She was happy. She looked down the beach and saw a black man selling coconuts. He was wearing a big hat of woven palm. She wanted to buy a coconut for her husband. She wanted to surprise him, to see him drink the rich milk through a straw. But there was a dilemma. She was happy as she was, knowing Augie's toes were wiggling. She would be happier sitting next to him and giving him a coconut, but she feared that if she reached for greater happiness she might lose the happiness she had. She glanced up the beach, then back at the hammock. She gestured toward the man with the coconuts. Then her nerve failed and she woke up just enough to break the dream, to finish it withou
t an ending.

  She rolled over and smoothed an imagined crease in her pillowcase. Her leg twitched once, she cleared her throat, and some time later her husband appeared to her once more.

  He stood before her looking very old and thin, as if he'd been dead for many years. His hair was pure white and hung down past his shoulders. He had a beard dry as tinsel on his sunken cheeks, and his cheeks were not ashen but burned the color of rosewood. He wore a threadbare shirt, a pauper's shirt, and on his shoulder perched a parrot.

  "Nina," said her husband. "I've come home."

  The widow smiled sadly on her pillow. Augie had never before appeared in such a ghostlike way, never seemed so old, so low, so fragile. Yet his deep eyes in the moonlight seemed at peace. "Augie," she murmured. She froze his image for a moment, nestled it into her shrine of recollection, then blinked herself awake.

  Or thought she did. The apparition did not vanish. The widow tried to shake herself out of a sleep that was stubborn as memory, stubborn as love, struggled upward as from a dive where one has gone too deep, but still her husband's image loomed before her. She was dreaming now that she was sitting up, looking past the dead man's tinsel hair at the familiar curtains moving with the breeze, though she knew this could not be.

  "Whiskey sour," squawked Fred the parrot. "Pretty Nina."

  "Augie?" said his wife.

  He sat down on the bed. He'd grown so light he barely made a dent. His wife reached out a trembling hand to touch him. The parrot fluttered in protest and moved to its master's other shoulder. "I'm very tired," said the painter. "Very tired."

  He swiveled slowly on his shrunken hips, let himself fall backward, and was sleeping in an instant. The bird jumped onto its bedside perch and sat there preening in the moonlight.

  part two

  12

  Nina Silver lay awake the rest of the night, afraid that if she blinked, her husband would again be gone. She held back from touching him, terrified her hand would slip right through his outline, that his shirt would be vacant, would prove to be nothing more than a twisted piece of bedsheet, errant cloth throwing the shadow of a man. She lay on her side and breathed deeply. She thought she smelled the ocean, and now and then a sweet chalky smell that made her remember the taste of her husband's mouth.

  Dawn came, and with it came growing belief: The private madnesses allowed in the dark cannot, for the sane, cross the border into day. The bedroom windows began just barely to lighten, and still Augie Silver was there in his bed. His wife dared to put her face against his arm. It was shrunken but it was warm. She cried silently and she dozed.

  When she awoke, the room was bright. Augie was gone, and in some awful way Nina Silver was not surprised, only confused to see Fred the parrot on his bedside perch.

  Then she heard the sound of tinkling, and a moment later her husband was standing in the bathroom doorway. Seeing his wife awake, he flashed her a tired smile that was full of the reverent screwball miracle of finding himself alive. The smile banished doubt forever. Nothing but a living person could have an expression so wry, beat up, and full of zest.

  "Augie."

  "Nina."

  "Cutty Sark. Awk, awk."

  The painter, still in his clothes, came back to bed and took his wife in his wizened arms. The movement and the embrace seemed to drain him. "I'm so weak," he said. It was not a complaint, just an observation, made with the sort of detached amusement that comes to grownups when they watch a baby try to walk.

  "Can you tell me?" asked his wife. "Can you tell me what happened?"

  Augie settled in flat on his back and stared up past the still fan at the ceiling. "I can try," he said, as if he was being asked to relate a story of something that happened long ago, to someone else. "But there's a lot I don't remember even now."

  He shifted just slightly, and his crinkly white hair spread around him on the pillow, his tinsel beard folded down onto his chest. "It was a beautiful January afternoon. Bright sun. Not too much humidity—"

  "I remember the day," she gently interrupted.

  "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I was out past Scavenger Reef. I'd just come through it, I could see the line of the Gulf Stream maybe two miles up ahead. It was gorgeous. Pointy little whitecaps in the shallow water—nervous whitecaps, high-pitched, like kids' voices. Then the slow, thick purple swells in the deep. Off to the west there were huge tall clouds—not anvil tops exactly, but mountain clouds, whole ranges of them. I watched them. I wasn't the least bit worried, not even about getting rained on—the weather was from the east. The boat was heeled but steady, I just watched the clouds, sketched the shapes in my mind.

  "Then it was like the clouds were melting, like there was a table across the sky and the clouds were pouring down across it, perfectly flat, much heavier, denser than before. They started rolling toward me; it was like a domed stadium slamming shut. The sky got very confused, low clouds going one way, high clouds going another, this odd sensation that the earth had started spinning faster. Half the sky was black, the other half an acid green. There was a wash of white over the shallow water and a dull gleam like wet lead over the Gulf Stream. The wind picked up—but not too much. I was enjoying it."

  His wife looked at him strangely, but Augie didn't notice. He took a deep and labored breath that moved the white bristles of his mustache. Outside, the morning's first breeze set the palm fronds scratching at the tin roofs of Olivia Street.

  "Then I saw the spouts starting to drop," the painter resumed. "I'd never actually seen that before, and it's not the way I would have imagined. I would have pictured great dark funnels thrusting fully formed down from the clouds. But in fact they slip out almost shyly, like a man sticking a toe in cold water. Wisps and scraps, little rags of cloud. They hesitate, sometimes they crawl back up. Then they venture down a little farther, and then they start to spin. Once they start turning, they digest the whole huge cloud they came from, suck it all down through their writhing hollow bodies.

  "I saw three spouts touch down, and they all were moving toward me. I had to make a choice: drop sail and take my chances or try to outrun the storm. You know me, I made a race of it. I sailed away. The funnels followed. I headed farther out to sea—away from the reef, away from the shallows. The wind started really ripping, and then in an instant it totally changed direction. I wasn't ready for that. I got slammed around, I couldn't even hold the wheel, there was no way I could keep my course.

  "I looked up and a spout was dancing straight toward me, shimmying, swaying like a genie, homing in like it had radar. I tried to dodge it. But it was too close now, the swirling wind kept pulling the ocean out from under me like a rug. I thought it was starting to hail, then I realized what was hitting me was little fish, snappers and ballyhoo, that had gotten sucked into the spout and now were raining down, bouncing off the deck, slapping into the cockpit. The shrouds were twanging and groaning. I think the mainsail tore but I can't be sure; the jib came loose and was whipping around like a flag in a battle.

  "And I really don't know what happened next," the painter said. He was still staring at the ceiling and speaking in a quiet monotone. His parrot shifted on its perch and scratched its chest with its beak. "I might've been carried back to the coral, I really can't be sure. Either I was pulled out of the boat or the boat broke up around me. I think something hit me in the head— maybe the boom, maybe just something flying. I suppose I was knocked out. Then suddenly I was in the water, awake enough to thrash through the foam like a madman. I looked around for the boat. It was gone. I thought I saw the top of the mast disappearing, but I may have imagined it. My arms were getting exhausted, I was sucking too much water. Then the dinghy—half the dinghy—came bobbing by. I managed to grab it and nestle in; it was like a leaky clamshell. I must've passed out again."

  Nina Silver put her hand on her husband's. His skin was so thin it felt powdery and she thought she could distinguish the small bones in his fingers. "Augie," she said, "if this is too painful . . ."
r />   The painter seemed surprised at the word. He smiled, and his wife noticed how deep were the fissures in his burned lips. They seemed to divide his mouth almost into tiles of flesh. "Painful? I wasn't aware of it being painful. Beautiful and terrifying. Painful, no."

  He looked at his wife and realized he had been misunderstood, and that the misunderstanding had hurt her. "Missing you," he said. 'That was painful. The thought of leaving you by dying—that was painful. But those things I didn't feel till later—till I remembered. For a long time I knew nothing except what I imagine an animal knows: I knew I was alive. I knew I was in danger. And that was all."

  He paused and closed his eyes. His wife nestled closer and waited for him to continue. But he didn't continue. His breathing fell back into the rhythm of sleep, his foot kicked weakly under the sheet and half awakened him. "I love you, Nina," he mumbled, and then his breath began to whistle softly through his nose. His wife stayed in bed a few minutes more, then went, as on any ordinary morning, to put up coffee.

  13

  "No," said Claire Steiger, "there won't be any sales before the auction."

  She hugged the phone against her shoulder and looked down at her fingernails. It was a muggy morning in springtime New York, a May day on the lam from August. Viscous, dirty light spilled in through the windows of the gallery office. Below, on 57th Street, people looked stylishly limp in the season's first wilting linens.

  "Yes, Avi," the dealer was saying, "I know you've been a terrific client. I appreciate it. But this time I can't make any special deals. The situation's too volatile, you know that as well as I do."

  The would-be buyer paused, then there was a soft popping sound as of heavy lips reluctantly letting go of a damp cigar. Avi Klein resumed his wheedling, and Claire Steiger reflected with gamy zest on the perverse and malleable machinery of human wants. What was so especially delicious about the phantom cookie at the bottom of the empty bag? What was so particularly beautiful about the painting that could not be had? Why was Avi Klein, a generally shrewd and cool-headed collector, suddenly prostrating himself for the privilege of paying more by far than had ever been paid for an Augie Silver canvas?