"Thank you, we don't want a
subscription."
"We? Did you say we?"
Nina pulled the phone a few inches from her
ear. Caution was not a habit with her, not since she'd left New
York, nor was the feeling that she had anything to hide. "What is
it you want?" she asked.
The reporter cleared his throat. "I've heard
from a couple of sources that your husband has been seen.
Alive."
Nina said nothing.
"And I thought it'd make a terrific story,"
McClintock went on. " 'Key West's Own Lazarus.' Or Jonah. Maybe
Jonah would be better. He was lost at sea, wasn't he?"
"What if your rumor's wrong, Mr. McClintock?
What if you're talking to a widow?"
"Am I?" the reporter countered. "Is your
husband alive, Mrs. Silver?"
"I never for a moment believed that he was
dead."
"So you're saying he's alive?"
"What I'm saying is goodbye."
For a second she stared at the telephone as
if she'd never seen one before. Then she went back to the bedroom
and checked on her husband's heroic progress through half a cupful
of soup.
"Who was it?" he asked.
"Hm?" she said. "Wrong number." A quick wave
of nausea rippled through her stomach. It was an innocent fib, a
protective fib, but she could not remember ever being untruthful
with her husband before, and the words left a sick taste in her
mouth. Stress. She had vowed to shield him from stress, to spread a
calm place around him the way a tree throws a pool of shade. And it
was just beginning to dawn on her that a tree casts shade only by
suffering the heat itself.
*
As it stood, it was not
much of a story. But then, the
Sentinel
was not much of a
paper.
"No interview. No real confirmation. Do we
go with it?" McClintock asked Arty Magnus, his editor, idol, and
reluctant mentor.
"Ya got anything better?" Magnus, a wildly
impractical man in all other aspects of his life, took an extremely
pragmatic approach to the newspaper business. This was mainly
because he didn't care about it very much. Facts bored him. Actual
quotes from actual sources were always deathly dull. The best parts
of a story were always the parts that somebody made up, but Magnus
couldn't bring himself to tell that to the sincere, impressionable,
and slightly stupid Freddy McClintock.
The young reporter riffled through his
notebook. It seemed the professional thing to do, though he knew
damn well he had nothing better or even anything else. "No," he
said at last.
"Well then," Magnus said with a shrug. He
shrugged a lot, it was a symptom of his stifled zest. He was forty
and he didn't want to be sitting at a newspaper desk in front of an
ancient air conditioner that managed to dribble condensation
without cooling any air; he wanted to be writing novels in front of
a huge window with an ocean view. Oceans of narrative truth, that's
what he wanted, not flat and stagnant little pools of information.
One of these days he'd find something to say, and he would say it
wisely and well.
McClintock pressed the eraser end of his
pencil against his lower lip. "Boss," he meekly said, "what if I
say he's alive and he isn't? Is that libel?"
Magnus locked his hands behind his head and
pushed back in his squeaky chair. "Freddy, do you bear malice in
your heart toward Augie Silver?"
"I don't even know the man."
"No malice, no libel."
"I know, I know," McClintock said. "But what
about for dead people?"
His editor considered. Facts bored him, yes,
but occasionally they pretzeled up into paradoxes he found amusing.
"The only other criterion is demonstrable economic damage to
someone's reputation. . . . But if someone's dead, how can you
damage his reputation just by claiming he's alive?"
Arty Magnus was a savvy fellow, but he
didn't understand the market for fine art.
"Sonofabitch," said Kip Cunningham.
"Sonofabitch. That bastard is going to spoil everything."
He wriggled in the stately leather chair in
the locker room of the University Club, then adjusted the thick
towel that had gotten tangled between his thighs as he twisted. Not
far away, his squash racquet lay on top of a pile of dirty sweaty
clothes that a flunky would pick up, launder, and neatly fold. He
sipped his club soda and lime and cradled the phone against an ear
that was still damp from the shower.
"It's only a rumor, darling," said his wife.
She'd taken to calling him darling again, and Cunningham was too
oblivious to notice that she called him that the way some people
call a Lhasa apso Killer or a knocked-out fighter Champ.
"Rumor? You just said it was in the
paper."
"Not a real paper," she
said. "Only the
Sentinel
. And the
Sentinel
always gets things wrong."
Cunningham sipped his soda and looked for
the comfort in this. A couple of club colleagues strolled by,
splotched with sweat and red as beef, and the bankrupt tried to
look like he was doing business, real business, rather than
helplessly hoping his wife would finesse him out of hock.
Importantly, with great acumen, he moved the phone to his other
ear.
"What if it isn't wrong?" he said at
last.
Claire Steiger looked out her office window
onto 57th Street. It was just after six. People were darting home
from work, out for drinks, to early movies, to the park for a
stroll. She tried to remember, and vaguely could, the romance, the
dim still perfection of warm late-May dusks in Manhattan. Going to
the theater while at the western verge of 45th Street the sky was
red above the river. The cafe off Madison where darkness would slip
in soft as Margaux while her handsome husband told laconic but
exciting tales of business and she tried to think past his
immaculate shirts to his skin. Was that this same city in this same
season?
"Awkward," she said. "It would be very
awkward."
"Muck up the auction," said Kip Cunningham.
It wasn't a question, wasn't a statement, just a mumble. Absently
he glanced toward his dressing cubicle where a white-haired black
man was stooping slowly to gather his dirty clothes. "Maybe people
won't find out," he added. The sneak's last hope.
"Kip, don't be an ass. True, not true,
anybody who might conceivably be interested is going to hear about
this by tomorrow."
There was a silence. The squash player
looked across the locker room at a calendar near the pro shop
window. It was a pin-up calendar of sorts, but instead of women as
the objects of desire, each month had a different yacht. May had an
elegant Concordia with tanbark sails, but Kip Cunningham wasn't
looking at the boat. He was counting days until the Solstice Show,
gauging how much time it would take for things to fall apart. "So
how'll it play?"
His wife had turned her back on the window,
on its mocking promise. "Depends," she said. "Best-case scenario,
the rumor is false. Nothing has really changed, and this buzz about
the artist's return just adds interest."
Oddly, disconnectedly, Kip Cunningham began
to chuckle.
Claire Steiger could find nothing remotely
humorous in what she'd said, and she imagined her husband must be
party to some clownishness in the locker room. "Kip, if you can't
even pay attention to what I say—"
"Oh," he interrupted, "I'm paying very close
attention. You just said you hope that Augie Silver's dead."
The artist's dealer underwent a hellish
moment of knowing she'd been caught, a moment as unsettling and
humiliating as being discovered naked in a dream. She squirmed in
her chair as though dodging thrown rocks, scrambled in her mind for
some avenue of excuse, some route of escape. "I didn't say anything
about Augie Silver," she protested, and her voice was thin and
shrill. "I was only talking about the situation."
Kip Cunningham had not won much lately, not
in business, not in squash, not in his marriage. He savored the
event, let it fill his senses like wine, and when he answered, it
was in the sweetly condescending tone of the victor. "But, my
dear," he said, "Augie Silver is the situation."
*
The next day was a Tuesday, and just after
ten o'clock in the morning Reuben the Cuban climbed the three porch
steps of the widow Silver's house. The key he'd been given many
months before was in his hand, but even though he knew that Mrs.
Silver would not be home, would be working at her gallery, he
knocked. It was the proper thing to do, not only for a housekeeper
but for anyone approaching another's place. He knocked, he waited,
and was just moving the key toward the lock when the door swung
open.
Nina Silver stood before him, and even
though she was smiling, Reuben was concerned that she was ill or
freighted with that sadness that weighed people down like the muck
around the mangroves, that made it so hard for them to move that
they stayed in their houses, then in their rooms, and finally in
their beds. With his eyes, he asked if she was all right.
By way of answer she grabbed him by his
slender wrist and coaxed him across the threshold into the living
room. "Reuben," she said, "something wonderful has happened. Mr.
Silver has come back."
He looked at her, then past her shoulder at
the blues and greens, the curves and edges of her husband's
paintings. She did not seem crazy, but Reuben was afraid for her.
Hadn't he served at the dead painter's memorial? Hadn't he heard
the bald man with the deep voice give the eulogy?
"Come," the former widow said, and again she
took his wrist. "I'll show you."
Reuben's feet did not want to move, it was
as if they'd been replaced by wooden skids that scraped hotly
across the floor. He dreaded the moment when he would stand in the
bedroom doorway and see nothing, and would know that he had lost a
second friend, not to the ocean this time but to that other
bottomless sea called madness. He struggled for the courage not to
close his eyes.
He let himself be dragged down the hallway,
and when he saw Augie Silver propped on pillows, his white beard
billowing forth like foam, he did the pure and necessary thing. He
fell to his knees with his chest across the returned man's bed and
wept against the back of his bony hand. His tears left dark streaks
on the sun-scorched skin that was white-coated with a powdery
dryness. The parrot looked on and did a slow dance on its
perch.
"I pray for you," Reuben said through his
weeping. "I don't like to pray, I don't believe, but I pray for
you, then I feel like I believe enough to feel bad I don't believe,
so I shouldn't pray. But I pray for you, Meester Silber. I do."
Augie put his hand on the young man's dark
hair. "You're a pal, Reuben. You're really a pal."
He received the words like an anointment and
answered with a knightly modesty. "Yes," he said. "A pal for you.
And for Meesus Silber too. A pal." He stood up, wiped his eyes.
"The Cubans saved my life, you know."
"Yes?" said Reuben. There
was confusion in his heart. The Cubans were his people, and if they
were kind to Mister Silver he was proud. But the Cubans were also
the ones who called him
maricon
and made him feel cast out, who scoffed and
threatened and mimicked his walk. Why was he outside the circle of
their kindness?
"I'll tell you about it sometime," Augie
said, and then Nina caught Reuben's eye and gestured him out of the
convalescent's room.
They went to the kitchen. Morning light was
pouring in through the French doors at the back of the house.
Hibiscus flowers were stretching fully open, their pistils brassy
with pollen and thrust forth like silent trumpets. The dark leaves
of the oleanders looked almost blue.
"Reuben," Nina said, "Mr. Silver has been
very sick."
The young man breathed deeply, taking the
weight of his friend's illness into himself. He nodded
solemnly.
"He needs a long rest, a perfect rest. And
he needs someone to spend the days with him, to make sure he isn't
bothered. Someone whose company he finds soothing. So I was
wondering—"
"I will do it," Reuben said.
She looked at him, began just barely to
smile, then understood that a smile was not called for, would
cheapen the moment. "Maybe you should think about—"
"I will do it," he repeated.
"But Reuben, your other jobs. You should
speak to Mrs. Dugan."
"I will tell Mrs. Dugan."
Nina lifted her eyebrows
and looked down at her cuticles. She knew Sandra Dugan slightly—a
quiet woman and nobody's pushover, a recent New York transplant who
ran her business as a business: She had imported to Key West the
exotic notion that a person might show up to clean two weeks in a
row. "Maybe you should
ask
Mrs. Dugan."
Reuben gave a philosophic shrug. "It is no
difference. If I ask and she says no, I quit. If I tell and she
doesn't like that I tell, I am fired. It is the same."
"But Reuben—"
"Meesus Silber, please. It is what I wish to
do."
And so it was agreed.
Reuben put his apron on and started to
clean, humming Cuban songs. He dusted, he vacuumed, he cut flowers
from the yard and arranged them neatly in porcelain vases. He was
happy and proud. He had been singled out, called upon to serve, to
care, to have the privilege of watching his friend grow stronger.
He would watch him like a fisherman watches the sky, alert and
knowing, the first to see a change, a danger. He would be the kind
of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having
such a friend himself.
"Maybe it's like an Elvis sighting," said
Ray Yates. "You know, a delusion people have to link themselves to
someone famous, to feel important."