"Cheers," said Phipps, handing the poet a
glass. "It's too good for you, but what the hell."
"Ever the gracious host," said Natchez, and
he nosed into the wine.
They settled into their chairs. Clay Phipps
had bought his Old Town house around a dozen years before, in the
wake of the infamous Mariel boat lift. Fidel Castro, in a gesture
of great magnanimity, slyness, and spite, had thrown open the gates
of his country's loony bins and prisons and allowed anyone who
wished to escape to America. Most of the fruitcakes, murderers,
catatonics, child molesters, mental defectives, and petty thieves
had made landfall in Key West, which did the local real estate
market no good at all. Those who, like Clay Phipps, believed that
the island outpost was a tough town to kill, scarfed up historic
houses at a small fraction of their worth, and found themselves
gentry when the Marielitos, not surprisingly, were absorbed into
the population with barely an uptick in the crime rate and no
discernible effect on the community's overall level of weirdness
and delusion. So Phipps now owned a sweet dwelling on a prime
block. It was one more instance of his traveling first class
without paying for it, living well but without the resonance of
believing that living well was an earned reward.
The walls of his house were made of
horizontal slats of white-painted pine, and here and there were
brighter rectangles where Augie Silver's paintings had formerly
been hung. There was something naked, naughty about those paler
patches, they grabbed the eye like an unexpected flash of a woman's
panties. Robert Natchez looked up from his glass of ruby wine and
peeked rather lewdly at the empty places.
"Show's been over a week or more," he said.
"When're the pictures coming back?"
This was a taunt, and no mistake. Phipps
took it in stride. Taunting was what he expected and in some
perverse way what he needed from Robert Natchez. "They're not," he
said.
The poet smirked in his Bordeaux. A glad
cynicism opened up his sinuses and he suddenly smelled cedar and
mint in the wine. "Don't tell me you've decided to sell them? I
thought everything was strictly NFS."
"They're being offered at auction," said the
allegedly dead artist's alleged best friend. In an effort to appear
casual, he swung a leg over the opposite knee. The dampness on his
thigh made the nubbly linen itch. "Sotheby's. Next month."
"Ah," said Natchez. He leered from under his
black eyebrows at the nude rectangles, and managed to work into his
expression both disapproval and nasty enjoyment. The look
maneuvered his host into an abject stance of self-defense.
"You think it matters to Augie?" Phipps
heard himself saying.
"I have no opinion on what matters to the
dead," said the poet. This was just the sort of pronouncement,
portentous yet inane, that delighted Natchez, and he was tickled
with himself for mouthing it. He paused, sipped some wine, then
added, "But they were gifts."
At this, Clay Phipps could not hold back a
nervous snorting laugh, a laugh that rasped his throat. "A
sentimentalist! You of all people a sentimentalist!"
The swarthy Natchez almost blushed at the
charge, which was nearly the most debasing accusation he could
imagine. "It has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with
what's dignified and fitting. Those paintings were given in
friendship."
"Friendship is complicated," said Clay
Phipps.
"So is envy," said Robert Natchez. "So is
old stale jealousy. So is hate." He swirled his wine the way he'd
seen Phipps do it, drained his glass, and licked his lips. "Any
more of this?" he asked.
Phipps somewhat grudgingly got up to fetch
the bottle.
*
Augie Silver nestled the thin smock between
his skinny thighs and slowly, cautiously settled back onto the
examination table. "I feel like Mahatma Gandhi in this thing," he
said.
"You look like an anorectic Father Time,"
said Manny Rucker, his doctor for the past ten years. "Now lie
still and let me goose you."
Rucker put his soft hands on Augie's belly,
pressed under his ribs to palpate the liver, felt for enlarged
spleen, for hernia, for strangled loops of intestine. Augie blinked
at the ceiling and was almost lulled asleep by the visceral
massage. He'd spent the morning with electrodes taped onto his head
and glued across his chest. He'd given blood, produced urine
samples, labored mightily but without success to deliver a stool.
He was exhausted.
"You are one hell of a case study," said his
doctor, and the voice pulled Augie back to the waking present: the
hum of the air conditioning, hot light being sliced by narrow
blinds, the waxy paper of the exam table crinkling under him, the
smell of alcohol masking but not effacing the intimate aromas of
sundry sorts of human goo. "Rest awhile if you like. I'll come back
for you later."
Nina Silver was waiting in the consultation
room. She sat on the edge of a green leather chair and stifled an
urge to straighten the frames of the gold-sealed diplomas and
purple-bordered certificates: paraphernalia of reassurance,
fetishes of hope, pompous promises that things would probably turn
out O.K., and if they didn't, well, at least everything humanly
possible had been done. A silver pen stood next to a tortoiseshell
box that held prescription slips. Behind the doctor's imposing
chair was a pen-and-ink caricature of a fat woman bending over to
receive a shot in the behind: No Norman Rockwell prints for Manny
Rucker.
He bustled in, hands buried wrist-deep in
his labcoat pockets, and started talking before he'd even reached
his desk. "Nina," he said, "your husband is an extremely stubborn
man. He really should be dead about five different ways."
She swallowed and slid backward in her seat.
Her spine went soft and it took tremendous concentration, a
gymnast's concentration, to hold herself erect. The doctor bounded
around his desk, tossed a manila folder onto his green blotter,
then dropped so heavily into his swiveling, rolling chair that the
entire office seemed to quake around him. "I'm not saying this to
frighten you," he resumed. "I'm saying it because I'm impressed as
hell. I'm amazed.
"Listen. We don't yet know everything that
went on with him—we won't know that till the lab work is done, and
even then a lot of it will be surmising, reconstructing. But here's
the minimum we're up against."
Rucker bore down on the arms of his throne
until the springs creaked and the casters chattered against their
Plexiglas platform. He exhaled noisily, then leaned forward, opened
the folder, and spread his thick and hairy elbows on either side of
it.
"Last time Augie was in here, he weighed a
hundred seventy-four pounds, and he wasn't fat. He now weighs one
sixteen. That kind of weight loss, the dehydration, the metabolic
craziness, is very debilitating. His kidneys shut down for a
while—the function seems to be returning, but we can't tell how
badly they've been compromised. His stomach has shrunk up smaller
than a fist, which means it's going to be a long, slow process
getting the weight back on him. His spleen is enlarged, who knows
why. That's another obstacle to recovery."
The doctor paused for breath, and Nina felt
herself starting to cry. She struggled not to, because doctors'
offices make everyone feel like children being spoken to sternly
but well-meaningly by a grownup, and, absurdly, pathetically, it
seems important to be brave and well behaved. Still, she thought
she could feel her own stomach shrinking up like a puddle in the
sun, her own spleen swelling like a sodden sponge, her kidneys
growing parched and brittle, tubes and passageways caving in like
long-abandoned tunnels.
Manny Rucker noticed that her face was
collapsing and decided not to acknowledge it. She was not the
patient and there was nothing to be gained by coddling.
"He's had a concussion," the doctor resumed.
"That's rather a vague concept, concussion is. It basically means
he's been clunked on the head and something went kerblooey. We
don't yet know if he's fully recovered his memory or where the gaps
might be. We don't know if the loss might recur. Probably he's now
at somewhat higher risk of Parkinson's and of stroke."
Manny Rucker flipped shut the manila folder,
and Nina Silver allowed herself to exhale. She thought she'd heard
all she had to listen to. She was wrong.
"There's one other thing," the doctor told
her. "He's had a heart attack."
Nina's eyes went out of focus and settled
vaguely on the buttocks of the fat woman awaiting her injection.
"Heart attack?"
"There's a pronounced irregularity in the
EKG that wasn't there before," said Rucker. "It's clear evidence.
Too much time has passed to gauge the severity from the blood
enzymes. But there's no doubt that something happened."
The room was falling away from Nina Silver,
the angles between walls and floor and ceiling becoming jarring,
oblique, and insane. Her other reunions with Augie, the ones in
dreams, had never been so complicated, so fraught. "He told me his
chest ached, his arms, when he crawled into the dinghy."
Rucker nodded. "Very possibly he was having
the attack while he was in the water. Truly amazing he didn't
drown."
There was a long silence. In the examination
room, Augie Silver, all alone, was rousing himself from a catnap;
his bony fingers clutched the edges of the table and he gamely
strained to sit himself up without assistance. His wife was trying
equally hard to ask a simple question. She opened her mouth three
times before the words squeezed past her clenched throat.
"Will he die?"
Rucker folded his hands and skidded his huge
chair a little closer to the desk. "Eventually," he said. "But he
hasn't died yet, and I'm not going to bet against him now. I think
he'll recover, I think he's got a good shot at a normal life span.
But he needs a very long and very total rest. He's got to get the
weight back. If he can't do it at home, he's got to go to the
hospital—"
"He doesn't want to do that."
"He's made that clear," said Rucker. "That's
why I'm making it a threat. He has to eat. He has to drink. And he
has to be totally shielded from stress."
Nina Silver straightened up, willed her mind
to clear, and looked at Manny Rucker with a kind of defiance. She
loved her husband. She would protect him, care for him, heal him.
For this she didn't need diplomas, certificates, prescription pads.
"He'll be best off at home," she said. Then her expression softened
and she almost smiled. "Besides, this is Key West. What kind of
stress could there possibly be?"
What kind of stress?
For starters, the subtle subliminal stress
of finding oneself the subject of rumors, whispers, the sort of
breathless gossip that attends such odd occurrences as a slightly
famous neighbor's return from the dead.
Nothing could be clearer than that Augie
Silver was not yet ready for company, much less a full-scale
reemergence into society. When Nina bundled her husband into their
seldom-used old Saab and drove him to Manny Rucker's Fleming Street
office, it was with the intention of getting him there and back
again unseen.
But Key West is a small place, a sparse
place, and little that belongs to it goes unnoticed. Politics,
economics, world events go largely unnoticed, being the province of
the chill, drear world north of mile marker five. Tourists go
unnoticed, because they are not of the town and no one cares what
happens to them or what they do; they pass through as
undifferentiated parcels of sunburn and noise.
It is a very different thing among the few
thousand people who are truly of the place, who are the place.
Unconsciously and unfailingly, they recognize each other against
the backdrop of faceless transients, they pick each other out as
though by some invisible genetic marking. And the Silvers, husband
and wife, were very much of the place, distinctive and familiar by
dozens of small details: her square-cut jet-black hair; his archaic
penchant for corduroy. His meandering Socratic walk; the French net
shopping bag she used for groceries. Her gallery; his death. They
were known.
So it was inevitable they'd be seen as they
passed, even briefly, on such a busy sidewalk as that of Fleming
one block up from Duval.
The first person to see them was Lindy
Barnes, a checker at Fausto's market. She did a quick and bashful
double take, and later told her colleagues across the cashiers'
aisles that it had to be the husband, the painter you know, I mean
he looked like an old dirtbag, stooped and sick, but really who
else could it be?
The second person to see them was Claire
Davidson, the head teller at the downtown branch of Keys Marine.
She was not a chatterbox, but it was part of her job to recognize
faces and remember names, and the real or apparent return of Augie
Silver was not something she could quite keep to herself.
By the end of the business
day, perhaps a hundred people had heard the rumor, and one of them
was Freddy McClintock, an eager young reporter for the Key
West
Sentinel
. With
a newsman's fine and fitting lack of decency, he decided to call
the Silver home.
When the phone rang, Nina was sitting on the
edge of the bed urging Augie to drink some broth. He'd managed two
sips. Fred the parrot was on his perch, nuzzling his wing pit with
his beak and adding a new sound to his idiot vocabulary. "Eat,"
squawked the bird. "Jack Daniel's. Eat, eat."
Nina went to the living room and picked up
the receiver. "Hello?"
"Mrs. Silvers?"
"Silver."
"Yes. This is Freddy
McClintock, Key West
Sentinel
—"