Scavenger Reef (15 page)

Brandenburg sipped his martini. He was
forty-four years old and had all the advantages that
youngish/oldish age could offer. People who didn't know him assumed
he must be sixty because he had that kind of power and had been in
print forever. Yet there were boyish things about his looks that
allowed him still to pass, in any but the harshest light, for not
much more than thirty. His reddish hair had neither thinned nor
faded. He was lean as he'd been in prep school, his astute hazel
eyes were every bit as clear. His posture was firm and rather
stiff, inviolate; he was as self-contained as something kept in
Tupperware. He didn't answer the question.

"Of course," Claire Steiger goaded, "it was
really your review that got the whole thing rolling. Is that what's
bothering you, Peter?"

"I stand by my review," the critic said.
"Well, then," said Kip Cunningham. Brandenburg turned petulant. "I
just don't want to feel that I've been duped. And I don't want to
feel that I've been party to a hoax."

Augie's agent ate the filbert on her
coaster. "Peter, Peter, I swear to you I've tried to get to the
bottom of this. I called the house. The houseboy answers, acts like
he doesn't speak English. I tried Nina at the gallery. She's got
the answering machine on, she's screening calls, she hasn't called
me back. She's still angry about the retrospective. I doubt she
even knows about the auction—"

"Sotheby's has a certain aversion to
scandal," said Brandenburg. "I can see reputations destroyed. I can
see the whole thing blowing up."

Claire reached out and took the critic's
hand. It was not a gesture of kindness: She'd noticed many times
that Peter Brandenburg did not like to be touched, it only made him
jumpier. "Peter, I assure you this is not a hoax. The tone set by
your review—"

Kip Cunningham waited a beat, then reached
out and patted Brandenburg's wrist. "We've got to wind you down,
old boy. A squash game and a good long steam. Whaddya say?
Tomorrow, four o'clock?"

*

Augie Silver was feeling slightly stronger,
his progress measured in the small, sweet, private victories of the
convalescent.

He discovered that if he rested his eyes,
just closed them for a few deep breaths now and then, it was much
easier to stay awake for more than several hours at a time. He
could read, could hold a book and sometimes concentrate. He found
that if he stood up slowly, very slowly, he could keep enough blood
in his brain so that his vision didn't go blank around the edges,
so that he hardly felt the ocean dizziness anymore.

He began to wean himself off broth and
return to solid food—soft food, like the peeled, sliced mangoes
Reuben the Cuban was bringing to him on a tray.

"Meester Silber?" he said quietly, having
softly knocked on the frame of the open bedroom door.

"Come in, Reuben," said the painter. "And
Reuben, would you stop it already with the Meester Silber
bullshit?"

The young man did not answer until he'd
smoothed the convalescent's sheets so that the tray fit neatly over
them and didn't pull. "Please, Meester Silber, it is a
respect."

"I know it is, but that kind of respect I
don't need. I want you to call me Augie."

Reuben folded his hands in front of him and
looked down at the floor. Then his eye was caught by the vase of
flowers at Augie Silver's bedside. The morning's hibiscus blooms
were starting to curl; he'd replace them with sprigs of jasmine
before he left.

"Awk," said Fred the parrot. "J&B.
Where's Augie?"

"Ya see, Reuben, even the goddamn bird calls
me Augie."

At this the young man could not help smiling
shyly. The parrot was a crazy bird. And Reuben liked it when Mister
Silver cursed, he wasn't sure why. Maybe because when other men
cursed, cursed in English or in Spanish, there was anger in it, and
mockery, and violence. But Mister Silver cursed like telling a
joke, like whistling a song, it was not about anger, but
freedom.

"So come on, say it: Augie."

Reuben hesitated. To say a name was no small
thing. It carried a weight, an honor. It was a kind of touch. He
took a breath, then looked the painter in the eye. It was a bolder
look than he had ever cast at Mister Silver and he found it not
much less difficult than looking at the sun, but he knew in his
heart that the saying of a name should go together with a look like
that, a look with nothing hidden. "Augie," he softly said.

"Bravo," the painter answered, dimly aware
that this leap into informality, into the first chamber of
intimacy, was as much a victory for Reuben as was conquering solid
food for him. "Now siddown."

He nodded toward the bedside chair, and
Reuben the Cuban didn't budge. A breeze rustled the palm fronds,
they scratched at the tin roofs of Olivia Street. The wet smell of
mango wafted up from the tray and mingled with the baked aromas of
cracked sidewalks and softening streets after a day of blistering
heat.

"Reuben, you're here to keep me company. So
keep me company, goddamnit. You need a written invitation?"

Again the painter gestured toward the chair,
and Reuben glanced at it as though he were standing on a high-dive
platform looking down at a bucket of water.

"What the hell is this about?" Augie asked.
"Is it just because you work for us? Because I'm an old fart with
white hair? You think we're fancy people? What?"

Reuben shuffled his feet. He glanced at Fred
the parrot. For reasons known only to itself, the bird had ruffled
its feathers and the lifted edges cast purple shadows against the
green. Instead of answering the question, Reuben softly said, "You
really want me to sit with you, Augie?"

"Christ, Reuben. Yes."

Lightly, gracefully, the willowy young man
settled on the edge of the chair. He didn't sit, he perched, an
apron across his thighs, most of his weight still carried on the
balls of his feet. "Augie," he said, "the reason it is hard for me
to sit with you, it is none of the things you say. It is because I
think you are a great man."

Either Augie Silver put down a sliver of
mango or the wet fruit slithered through his fingers. "Ah,
bullshit," he said, and Reuben the Cuban could not help smiling
shyly.

On the stroll up Olivia Street, Clay Phipps
counted seventeen cats and eleven dogs. The cats were nearly all in
motion—skulking over hot curbstones and slinking through the
latticework under porches, stalking palmetto bugs or just being
sneaky for the hell of it. The dogs tended to be princely
still—laid out on the pavement with their chins on their crossed
paws, panting softly, contentedly drooling, fixing passersby with
the flatteringly interested glances that canines turn on humans.
The day had been cloudless, with an odd desiccating wind from the
east. The cactuses were gloating, they seemed to stand up
straighter and taller as the palms drooped and the poincianas let
their feathery leaves hang down lank as Asian hair. Finger-sized
lizards clung to tree trunks and climbed the pocked sides of coral
rocks; they were brown, gray, invisible until sex or vanity got the
best of them and they puffed up their scarlet throat sacs, making
themselves impressive and absurd.

Clay Phipps was not ordinarily a rapt
observer of dogs and cats, plants and lizards. But this evening he
was trying, with mixed success, to distract himself from the errand
he was on. It was, on the face of it, a simple mission, potentially
a joyous one, yet Phipps could bring himself to feel no joy.
Everything had gotten too screwed up in his feelings toward Augie
Silver, his feelings toward himself. Everything made him feel
ashamed. He had tried to seduce the woman he took for Augie's widow
but who may have been his wife. He was selling, at the first
opportunity and with hardly a moment's hesitation, the paintings
Augie had given him as tokens of their friendship.

Why was he so willing, secretly eager even,
to part with those canvases? There was, of course, the nasty vulgar
business of the money. It was fatiguing, a high-wire strain to live
wealthily year after year while having, in fact, so little cash, so
little real security. His newsletter could go out of fashion, the
perks and freebies could dry up, and that would be the end of the
amber-edged Bordeaux, the turreted hotel rooms. What would he do
with himself? Minus the trappings, Clay Phipps would look to all
the world like the small-timer, the perennial freeloader, the
facile lightweight he suspected himself to be.

That was why he was secretly relieved to
have Augie Silver's paintings off his walls: The pictures, like
almost everything else to do with Augie, had come to seem a
reproach to him, a reminder of how he'd gypped himself for want of
nerve, shortchanged his life in the name of doing what was easy.
They'd been earnest young artists together, Clay and Augie had.
Augie had stuck to his work and eventually won through to mastery,
while Clay had given up on the slow salvation of writing plays and
used his skill to carve himself a blithe and cushy niche. They'd
been bachelors together back when being a bachelor was
rambunctious, ribald fun.

Augie had emerged from the debauch with the
mysterious readiness for love, for marriage; Clay had not emerged
at all, just grown stale within the ever staler game. He had been
left behind; no, he had left himself behind, and that was
worse.

He walked up Olivia Street and was assaulted
by an ugly thought: Certain things would be easier if Augie Silver
stayed dead and gone. There'd be a great deal less explaining to
do. There'd be no more mute reproaches. Phipps's life had in some
sense shriveled to accommodate the fact of his friend's death; he
was, if not happy, at ease now in the smaller space, the tighter
orbit. Maybe Robert Natchez in some crazy way was right: The world
closed up around a dead person, there was no room for his
return.

Clay Phipps climbed the three porch steps,
paused a moment to smooth his linen shirt, and rang the bell.

After a moment Nina Silver opened the door,
not very wide. She was backlit by the yellowish glow of the living
room, her jet black hair was square across the bottom and perfectly
framed her oval face. She smiled at Clay Phipps, but her posture
was the posture of a sentry.

"Clay," she said. It was neither unfriendly
nor welcoming.

"Nina," he said. He waited a polite interval
to be invited in and was only slightly surprised when the
invitation didn't come. "I was wondering how you are. These rumors
... It must be very trying."

"I'm all right, Clay," the former widow
said. "Thank you for your concern."

There was a silence, and Clay Phipps's
falseness filled it up the way a bad smell fills an elevator. Then
the evening's first locusts began to rattle. Blocks away, some
idiot revved a motorcycle. The family friend cleared his throat.
"Nina," he fumbled, "the rumors, the newspaper ... Is it true? Is
he back?"

There is a horror of lying about important
things that is more ancient than morality, a kind of religious
terror of tempting fate, offending the universe by denying some
crucial facet of it. Nina Silver wanted nothing more than to be
left alone, and there was no way she could lie about her husband
being alive. "He's back."

"My God."

"He's been through hell, Clay. He's very
ill, he's very weak. He's not ready to see people."

"I understand," Phipps mumbled, feeling that
he understood nothing, neither life nor death, friendship nor love,
loyalty nor envy.

"Please keep this quiet, Clay. Please? We'll
call you when he's a little stronger. I promise."

"All right," said Phipps, "all right."

He backed down the porch steps, he didn't
know how his feet found the stairs, the sidewalk. On the way home
he didn't notice dogs or cats, trees or lizards. He didn't see the
misted moon or the swarms of moths around the streetlights. He was
looking for something else, scanning his heart for some bright
patch of gladness at learning Augie Silver was alive. The gladness
should gleam, he thought, the way a pool of cool water gleams in
the desert; he could steer his steps to it and be refreshed, be
saved. But first he had to find it, and though he looked at nothing
else as he strolled down Olivia Street, he couldn't find the glad
gleam either.

*

When he got home he was rattled and thirsty.
He grabbed an extravagant Pauillac, an '82 Duhart-Milon, and
noticed that his fingers were unsteady as he sliced the lead foil.
The wine poured purple and thick, it glubbed as it squeezed through
the neck of the bottle. No light came through the bowl of the
glass, and the first smells were black smells, licorice and
tar.

Phipps took the wine to the living room and
sat down on the sofa. The pale, denuded rectangles where Augie's
paintings had hung put a crazy pattern on the wall. Phipps told
himself he'd have the place painted soon.

Augie Silver was alive.

Phipps drank. The wine was closed up still,
it tasted less than it smelled and had a steely edge. He sucked air
through it. Some of the alcohol was siphoned off and different
flavors seemed to move like different-colored pebbles to different
places in his mouth. Amazing stuff, Pauillac.

Augie Silver was back, and Clay Phipps was
one of the very few people who knew it for sure.

He poured more wine. The wall of tannins
opened just a bit, glints of fruit came through like sun through
the chinks of a blind. Dusty currant with an undertaste of plum,
held together by a teasing astringency that did rude things to the
tongue.

Augie was alive, a lot of things were
changed, a lot of plans suddenly in chaos, and as Clay Phipps drank
he saw less and less the wisdom or necessity of keeping it to
himself.

Claire Steiger, at least, should have the
information.