He saw them before they saw him, and he was
comforted, reassured somehow, that his companions had stayed within
the small snug orbit afforded by island life, that certain things
about the universe had stayed in place, were still familiar. Clay
Phipps still wore long linen trousers that crinkled up behind his
knees. Robert Natchez still dressed all in black, in token of some
showy grief or theoretical outlaw-hood. Ray Yates, more local than
the locals, still wore faded palm tree shirts and drank
tequila.
Augie, unseen, crept up to their table and
said, "Hi guys, what's new?"
Conversation stopped, faces froze, there was
a slow distended moment of some nameless guilt, as though the three
seated men were kids caught doing something dirty. The awkwardness
went on just long enough for Augie Silver to have the first faint
inkling that something had gone wrong among his friends. Like rusty
musicians, they were off the beat somehow; gestures were stiff,
smiles tentative, nothing flowed.
But then Clay Phipps, gracious if not
tranquil, was on his feet. For a moment the two old friends stood
back and appraised each other in the brave and galling way that old
friends do, each seeing in the other the deflating but
tenderness-inspiring evidence of his own aging, his own mortality.
To Augie, Phipps looked paunchy and somewhat dissolute: a bald,
distracted man whose earlobes were stretching and whose shoulders
were folding inward. To Phipps, Augie looked decrepit, dried up,
stringy as a sparerib; there was something wrenching and
undignified about the empty skin around his knees.
They were a couple of fellows on the cusp of
being old; they moved together and embraced.
Reuben discreetly but unflinchingly watched
them from the bar. He saw, as Augie could not see, the uneasy,
ashen look on Phipps's face, a look not of joy but shame.
Yates and Natchez had stood up as well, they
reached handshakes across the table that was bejeweled with rings
of condensation from their glasses.
"Ray," said Augie warmly. "Bob."
The poet could not help wincing at the bland
and Anglo syllable. He looked at Augie hard and said,
"Roberto."
Augie thought he was kidding, though he
didn't see the joke. "I go away a few months, and you have an
ethnic reawakening?"
Natchez didn't laugh, didn't answer. He just
resumed his seat, and Augie was more baffled than before. He
decided to try his luck with Yates. "And Ray," he said. "Or
Raymond. How're things with you?"
The fact was, things were worse than they
had ever been, but the talk-show host didn't feel like going into
it. He gave a beefy shrug accompanied by a head tilt that brought
into the light the lingering remains of the black eye Bruno had
given him the week before. A greenish bruise was ringed by purple
clotting; it was hard to overlook.
"Walk into a door?" Augie asked him.
By way of answer, Ray Yates said, "Siddown,
have a drink."
The painter was settling into a chair when
the waitress bustled over. Her name was Suzy, she knew Augie only
as a customer, a friendly face, yet she put a hand on his shoulder
and smiled broadly when she saw him, and he could not help thinking
that this stranger seemed more unambiguously glad to see him than
did his closest friends. He ordered a Scotch and water, weak.
"Weak!" exclaimed Clay Phipps as Suzy walked
away. "My God, man, you must really have been through something.
Tell us."
So Augie nursed his watery cocktail and told
the story. He knew he'd be asked to tell it many times, it was
already taking on a life of its own. It was a story with three
characters, even though they were all called Augie. The burly,
vigorous Augie who had gone off sailing on that unmenacing day in
January was not the same as the mindless half-dead Augie floating
away from Scavenger Reef, nor was he the same as the chastened
re-emerging Augie who was spinning out the yam. The name was like a
briefcase, monogrammed but hollow, the only thing that stayed the
same as the contents were shuffled in and shuffled out. "So here I
am," the latest Augie concluded, "back where I started, beat to
hell, and in some weird way happier than I've ever been."
He broke off. Bar noise flooded the silence,
the sun-seared bougainvillea rustled with a papery sound. Then
Roberto Natchez said, "A charmed life."
The comment was not generous. It was sour,
grouchy, warped by the annoyance people tend to feel at the
excessive good fortune of another. Augie looked at the poet not in
accusation but with mute inquiry: Was he jealous even of another
man's near death? Natchez's face told him nothing; he glanced at
Yates and Phipps and came away with the unsettling feeling that the
poet had somehow spoken for all of them, that all were envious of
his adventure, his resilience, that his return in some dim way
affronted them. Suddenly Augie was depressed, confused. He wanted
to believe that he was only tired, maybe the noise and the smoke
and the unaccustomed sociability were draining him too much,
overloading him and skewing his perceptions. But sitting there
among his buddies he felt more exiled, more cast adrift, than when
he had been lost at sea.
"I think I'd better go," he said, and no one
tried to talk him out of it. "Doesn't take much to exhaust me."
He rose amid uneasy smiles, paused for
handshakes that fell short of being hearty, and slipped out past
the bar. Reuben the Cuban, vigilant and silent, slid gracefully off
his barstool and was ready to take him home.
The next day, in answer to a call from
Augie, Clay Phipps came to visit.
He arrived at the door with beads of sweat
strung along his bald pink head and a bakery box neatly tied with
string in his hands. Reuben took the box and held it like it might
contain a bomb. He remembered the Key lime tart; he remembered the
guilty look, the Judas look, on the heavy man's face when he and
Augie had embraced.
Augie, fresh out of the shower, came into
the living room and said hello.
"I brought some cake," the visitor said.
"Want some cake?"
"Later," said Augie, "later. I want to
talk."
He led the way through the painting-strewn
house, out toward the backyard. Reuben wondered why a fleeting look
of disappointment had crossed Clay Phipps's face when Augie
declined the pastry. Maybe it was just that the husky man wanted a
slice himself. Or maybe there was some other reason.
Augie motioned Clay Phipps toward the love
seat where the family friend had felt up Nina, but he slid away
from the illicit spot and took a single chair instead. He settled
in, then nodded toward the west end of the pool. "That's where I
delivered your eulogy. Set up a lectern so I wouldn't fall in if I
swooned."
"Nina tells me you praised me out of all
proportion."
"It's easy to be generous to the dead."
"And extremely difficult to be fair to the
living."
This was a throwaway, a random bit of
repartee, but Phipps felt sure it was somehow aimed at him. How
much did Augie really know?
"Clay," his host went on, "about last night
..."
"What about it?"
Augie pushed some breath through his teeth,
it made a hissing sound. "Is it just me, or was there some unease,
some tension ..."
Phipps frowned. He didn't especially want to
answer, nor was he content to let Augie go on probing. "Well, you
know, the shock, the suddenness . . ."
Augie stroked his chin. "I'd like to think
it was only that. But I felt ... I felt . . . unwelcome."
It hurt to say the word, and Augie looked
down when he said it. His looking down made it easier for Phipps to
tell a lie.
"Nonsense," he said. "Ray and Natch, they
seem to have a lot on their minds these days, they've been distant
with me too."
The painter considered, decided not without
conflict to be satisfied. "Okay," he said, "okay. Death, you know,
I guess it's made me touchy."
Phipps saw an opportunity to change the
subject. "Touchy but happy. Last night you said you were happier
than ever. How come?"
Augie looked around his
yard, smiled at the oleanders and the pendant bundles of poinciana
flowers. "I used to take myself too seriously," he said. "I didn't
think I did, but I did. This whole thing about not painting. Maybe
it could pass for modesty, but it was arrogance, pretension. I
mean, what gave me the chutzpah to think I
had
to be that good? So I'm not
Vermeer— who cares? The paintings you have, Clay—am I wrong to
think they give a certain pleasure?"
Phipps squirmed, gestured vaguely, made a
soft harrumphing sound. Augie went right on.
"So I'll paint as well as I can paint, and
the hell with it. The people who are happy are the people who get
up in the morning and do their best, don'tcha think?"
The question hung a moment in the hot thick
air. It was precisely what Clay Phipps thought; and precisely what
Clay Phipps had never done. Augie knew that.
Was he goading him? Was he mocking him now
not only by example but by precept? Or was Phipps, in his guilt and
his festering disappointment, simply that determined to take
offense, to find or imagine scraps of justification for turning
against his friend?
Reuben, moving soundlessly and with his
low-slung self-effacing geisha's grace, appeared near the two men
and offered them something cold to drink. "A beer?" he said. "A
glass of wine?"
"And there's the cake," said Clayton Phipps.
"It's apricot."
"Ah," said Augie. He seemed to be
considering. "Will you have some?"
"Me?" said Phipps, as if he was being
singled out in a crowded room. "No, I've just had lunch. I brought
it for you."
Augie pursed his lips, pulled his eyebrows
together. A lot went into a man's decision about whether to have a
piece of cake. Was he hungry? Would the sweetness be too cloying in
the heat? Did he want the coffee the cake cried out for? Reuben
leaned far forward on the balls of his feet, so far forward that he
had to flex his toes as hard as he could to keep from falling over.
For one mad instant it seemed to him that he should throw himself
on Clayton Phipps's neck, wrestle him to the ground, and unmask him
at once as the would-be killer. But he waited. He didn't want to
make a scene in front of Augie; besides, if Augie said no to cake
there would be no emergency.
The painter frowned through to the end of
his deliberations. Then he said, "Yes, I think I'll have a piece. A
small one." He paused a half-beat, then added, "Sure you won't join
me, Clay?"
Phipps shook his head and Reuben didn't like
the shadowy smile that slithered quickly across his face.
The young man glided back to the house and
paced around the kitchen. He took a knife and cut through the
string around the bakery box. He opened the package and looked
inside. He saw a neat arrangement of apricot halves, round and
orange as just-risen moons, overlaid with a glaze like tinted glass
and bordered with a butter-rich marzipan crust. Reuben liked
sweets. His mouth, one of the body parts that didn't know what was
good for it, watered perversely even as his mind recoiled. He shook
his head and swallowed, then brought down the top of the box like
the lid of a coffin. He got the stepstool and put the cake on the
highest shelf of the least-used cabinet, hid it like a gun from a
curious child. He put a bottle of mineral water and two glasses on
a tray and went outside again.
"The cake," he announced, "I'm sorry, you
can't have any." He poured water for Augie and Phipps, handed them
their glasses.
"Whaddya mean, I can't have any?" Augie
asked. His body had readied itself for cake, the taste buds were
prepared, the passageways open, and now, goddamn it, he wanted
something sweet.
"The cake, it will make you sick," said
Reuben. He spoke to Augie but looked at Phipps, and Phipps seemed
unable to stay still in his chair.
"Reuben," Augie said, "I'd like a piece of
cake."
The young man balanced his tray, bit his
lower lip. "The cake, I didn't want to say this, is full of
bugs."
"That's impossible," blurted Clay Phipps,
who suddenly seemed far more exasperated than was called for by a
spoiled cake. "I just bought it. It's from Jean Claude's.
It's—"
"It's the tropics," Augie interrupted with a
shrug. O.K., he'd live without the cake. "There are bugs here."
"Well, damnit," said Clay Phipps, "there
shouldn't be! Not in a fancy cake from a fancy baker. I'll bring it
back."
This, Reuben had not counted on. But for
Phipps to take the cake away was out of the question. The cake was
very important. The cake was evidence. It would end the danger to
Augie and would prove that Nina was not crazy.
"I'm sorry," Reuben said. "The cake, I put
it in the garbage. The compactor. The cake it is squished."
Phipps tisked, threw a damp leg over the
opposite knee. Reuben turned back toward the kitchen, wondering if
he had seen, along with Phipps's exasperation, a hint of something
like relief that the cake had been destroyed. But Augie saw only
his visitor's annoyance. He watched him writhe and sweat, and
gently mused on how easily rattled people were before they got on
terms with death.
"It's nothing, Clay," he softly said, and he
put a hand across the other man's forearm.
"But it was a gift," the visitor said
miserably, and immediately wished he hadn't used the word. It was a
gift like Augie's paintings had been gifts, and he, Clay Phipps,
was always doing just the wrong thing where gifts were concerned,
gifts always seemed to be the litmus test that pointed up his
smallness, the unintentional and unchangeable lack of generosity
that was poisoning his life. Gift. The word and Augie's
all-forgiving touch made him feel as loathsome as a serpent, and as
spiteful. He sipped his mineral water, mopped his forehead, and
wished that he was home, alone.