Augie was nonplussed, embarrassed to be
caught watching. "Reuben," he said. "I . . . I'm sorry. I didn't
mean to disturb you."
"You do not disturb me," Reuben said. His
hands were still crossed in front of him; he still smiled.
"I didn't know you prayed," Augie fumbled.
"You told me once you'd stopped believing."
Reuben nodded solemnly. "Yes," he said. "I
stopped. I start again."
"Ah," said Augie.
"I start again," said Reuben, "because I am
here. In this house. I have never known a house like this. There is
much life here, much kindness. I must believe God smiles on this
house."
Reuben didn't stand but he lifted his back,
twisted his slender shoulders, and turned his head straight on
toward Augie. His torso was traced by the lamp's yellow glow, one
side of his face shone as if in firelight, the other side was
shadowed. It was an image Augie would remember.
"I hope He does," said Augie. "Good night,
Reuben."
"Good night, Augie. Sleep well."
Roberto Natchez dropped
Friday morning's paper on his dim disheveled desk and coaxed the
top off his Styrofoam cup of
cafe con
leche
. With the usual snarls and sneers he
read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse
by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments,
riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of
what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in
gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as
in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered
while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it
would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to
show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root
the vileness out.
Approvingly, he examined
his scowl in the alcove mirror, sipped some coffee, then turned to
the second section and saw the big lead article, its headline
sprawled across the whole front page:
Augie
Silver— Key West's Greatest (Twice-) Living Artist.
This sent Natchez briefly back to his
looking glass. He did a double take, snapped the paper in what he
intended as a gesture of mocking disbelief. Then, with a throbbing
pulse in his temple and a quickly tightening knot in his stomach,
he began to read.
"Our town," went Arty Magnus's opening, "is
a cultural mecca with many pilgrims and very few prophets."
Already Natchez was so
affronted that he laughed out loud, erupted in a demonic cackle
that hurt his throat. Was it conceivable that this cipher of a
local reporter was going to call Augie Silver—a dauber, a
decorator—a
prophet
? No, it was too ridiculous, too grotesque.
"Artists come here," the article went on,
"expecting —what? To be magically, effortlessly infused with the
island's atmosphere? To absorb talent by some sort of painless
tropical osmosis? Well, it doesn't work that way, as longtime Key
West resident Augie Silver can testify. To understand the allure,
the resonance, and the dangerous beauty of our corner of the world
is a difficult, harrowing—and potentially fatal—experience."
There followed what Roberto Natchez
considered a strained transition to an unctuous, overblown account
of Augie's misadventure at sea—and this evoked another derisive
chortle from the poet: The man has a trivial mishap in a sailboat,
a rich child's toy, and this is evidence of his profundity, this
marks him as a seer?
Absurdity followed absurdity in the article.
Augie Silver's bland commercial work was described as "haunting and
uncompromising." His prissy bourgeois house was characterized as
"cozy and devoid of ostentation." Augie himself—sloppy, haphazard,
careless Augie—was passed off as "a man of unpretentious dignity,
who wears his great gift with modesty and humor."
Great gift? thought Natchez. Ha! A gift for
public relations maybe, a gift for facile showmanship. . . .
But then the profile took a darker turn.
Fame also had its perils, and there had recently been threats, the
piece revealed, against the artist's life. The details were
withheld, though Arty Magnus allowed himself to observe that Key
West had no shortage of crackpots to whom any outrage, from the
sickest prank all the way to murder, might conceivably seem
justified. "Indeed" —and here the journalist ended with a
flourish—"such twisted and deluded souls are symptomatic of the
untamed hothouse life of the tropics—the life that Augie Silver so
powerfully and unsparingly portrays."
Natchez let the paper fall
flat against his desk. He glanced at the mirror and attempted a
supercilious smile, but his face was too tense for that, his upper
lip did a mad-dog twitch against his eyeteeth. "
Crackpots
." He said the word aloud,
then he gave a bitter laugh that curdled in his windpipe and closed
his throat like the taste of sour milk. Crackpots. Wasn't that just
too typical? Anyone who took a stand against a fraud like Augie
Silver must by definition be a crackpot. What simpler, more
insidious way for the mendacious, mediocre status quo to maintain
its death grip on the imagination than by pinning the label
crackpot
on anyone who saw
beyond its narrow, constipated limits?
The poet did not remember rising from his
chair, but he found himself pacing the confines of his small
apartment. He paced, he wheeled—and then he saw the Augie Silver
canvas still hanging on his wall. Why in God's name did he keep
that wretched thing? He wouldn't stoop to sell it—never!—but why
did he allow it to sully his workplace? Maybe, long before, he'd
kept it as a kind of private joke, a goad, but that was in a less
ripe phase of his development. Such frivolity, such an invasion of
marketplace crassness, could no longer be abided.
Roberto Natchez had a silver-plated letter
opener. He'd bought it many years before; it had struck him as a
necessary accoutrement for a budding literary man, though the
implement, weighty and portentous, seemed designed for the
unsealing of more important mail than the poet ever got. He grabbed
it now and stood before the painting Augie Silver had given him in
friendship. His face contorted, he raised the blade and let the
point of it rest lightly near the center of the canvas, poking at a
swath of sunshot sky. He breathed deeply, gripped his weapon as
tightly as though he were about to plunge it into flesh, and he
slashed. He slashed again and again, the canvas made a rasping,
screaming sound as it was rent, flecks of brightly colored paint
floated off the sundered cloth like tinsel glitter. He slashed
until the picture was in shreds too narrow to hold the knife, and
then he stepped back, breathless and sweating, to see what he had
done.
The frame had been knocked askew, ribbons of
canvas hung down at random angles over the bottom of it. Natchez
smiled. He examined the ghastly smile in the mirror, then turned to
the painting again. He moved toward it, intending to take it off
the wall, smash it, and put it in the garbage. Then he had a
different idea. He'd leave it where it was and as it was. Let it
hang there in tatters. Let it hang there dead. It struck him as
somehow more authentic that way, more in the spirit of the crackpot
tropics.
*
Clayton Phipps had not left his house in
four days and was turning a sickly shade of yellowish gray. He
hadn't shaved, he'd slept only for brief intervals at odd hours.
His scalp seemed to have stretched from the weight of fatigue; a
roll of loose skin gathered at the base of his skull, another
formed a curving ledge above his eyebrows. When he finally ventured
out late on Friday afternoon, the damp white light stung his eyes,
and the concrete sidewalks felt bruisingly hard against his
feet.
He walked to Augie Silver's house and
knocked softly, tentatively, on the door.
Reuben opened it. "Meester Pheeps," he said.
There was surprise in his voice, though it was unclear whether it
had to do with the visit itself or the neat man's slovenly
condition.
"Is Augie home?"
Reuben recognized suffering; he recognized
repentance. He answered gently. "He is home. I do not know if he
likes to see you."
Phipps gave a resigned and tired nod. "Would
you ask him, please?"
Reuben left the visitor standing at the
door; in deference to his unhappiness, he did not close it in his
face. Augie was in the backyard sketching Nina as she swam. He put
his pencil down at Reuben's news, and hesitated only for an
instant. "Yes," he said, "of course I'll see him."
There is a kind of fondness that can
co-exist with disappointment and that persists even in the absence
of forgiveness—a fondness that itself becomes an unexalted but
tolerable species of forgiveness—and this is what Augie Silver felt
as his old friend came through the French doors and approached him.
He looked at the white stubble on Phipps's jowls, the black bags
under his sagging eyes, and he found it unexpectedly easy to muster
a wry affection. "Clay," he said, "you look like hell."
The other man managed something like a
smile. "Thank you."
"Whisky?"
Phipps's shirt was damp, he was itchy behind
the knees. "Awfully hot for whisky," he said.
"That's obvious," said Augie. "Let's have
whisky anyway."
Reuben went for drinks. Nina, dimly aware of
muffled voices, peeked above the water just long enough to identify
their guest; she decided she would keep on swimming. For a few
moments no one spoke; Phipps seemed to be recharging, taking
nourishment from the fact that he had been invited in, that he had
not been turned away forever. Not until the Scotch and ice arrived
and the two men had clinked glasses did he say another word.
"Augie, those paintings. I was thinking. Maybe it's not too late to
withdraw—"
"I don't ever want to see those pictures
again, Clay." The artist's voice was soft but it was definite. "I
don't imagine you do either. It's history. Cheers."
The chilled whisky was both cold and hot; it
tickled first and then it burned.
Phipps looked into his glass. The ice was
melting so fast he could see water streaming off the cubes,
shimmering pale currents snaking through the brown liquor. "What
happened to us, Augie? To our hale little group of buddies?"
"I know what happened to me," Augie said.
"Damned if I know what's going on with you guys." He watched his
wife swim. He loved the way she turned, reaching for the wall then
becoming a liquid J as she reversed direction underwater. After a
moment he said, "You going to the auction?"
Phipps listened hard for a note of rancor,
but he heard no blame. "I was going to," he said. "Now I just don't
know."
"You might want to decide," Augie said.
"It's three days from now."
Phipps shrugged absently. "There's a fellow
does charters in a Learjet. Dies in the off-season. Said he'd take
me anywhere, anytime for a mention in the newsletter."
Augie could not help smiling.
Incorrigibility might not be the loftiest of human traits, but
there is always comfort in consistency. "Same old Clay," he said,
"the freeloader's freeloader."
By way of answer, Phipps raised his glass.
But the twinkle in his eye lasted only for an instant. Then his
face caved in, his gray cheeks went slack, his voice turned shrill
and maudlin. "Isn't there anything I can do? I feel like such a
shit."
"Don't feel like a shit," said Augie. "And
no, there's nothing you can do."
With effort, Phipps leaned forward, put his
elbows on his knees. There was a creaking sound, it was unclear
whether it was the furniture or his disused joints. "Augie, these
threats, are you really in danger?"
"D'you think I was grandstanding the other
night?"
"Maybe I can help," said Phipps. "There has
to be some way I can help."
The painter regarded him. He was fat, he was
old, he was bald, he was slow, he was searching desperately for
some shred of grandeur within himself. Augie patted his knee and
with his other hand poured him half a glass of Scotch. "Maybe there
will be, Clay," he said. "In the meantime, drink up, go home, and
get some sleep."
That weekend was the hottest of the
year.
People woke up sweating, tangled sheets
kicked down near their ankles; pillows took on a sour smell, a
smell like something from an overcrowded hospital. The wind went
dead calm and the clouds melted into a shroud of rainless haze.
Asphalt softened; houses swelled; window sashes seized like rusted
pistons. The ocean went improbably flat and soupy green; there
seemed to be a cushion of milky white between the water and the
air, a zone reserved for the vapor that was constantly rising as
from a pot about to boil.
At the Silver house a kind of equatorial
stupor had set in. The stupor did not undo anxiety but gave a
giddy, unreal cast to it. It seemed impossible that someone was
trying to murder Augie; it seemed impossible to prevent it. His
killing was so inconceivable that it seemed at moments almost not
to matter; then the enormity of imagining it did not matter broke
through the haze, and another wave of panic surged over the
household. The panic gradually subsided into temporary exhaustion;
then, after a nap, a swim, the debilitating march of moods replayed
itself.
On Saturday night, in bed, naked, uncovered
and not touching, Nina said to Augie, "I so want to believe that
somehow, after Monday, this will all be over."
Augie, depressed and sulky from the heat and
the fear, perversely made a joke he realized would not be funny.
"No way," he said, "the summer is just starting."