Scavenger Reef (2 page)

But when, ten years before, Augie Silver had
moved to Key West from Manhattan, it was with the clear intention
of escaping the hothouse atmosphere of the art capitals, broadening
his circle beyond the clutch of those who could do favors and those
who wanted favors done. To be sure, the Key West artsy set had
gravitated to him: the writers who didn't write, the sculptors who
didn't sculpt, the trust-funders kept just shy of suicidal
self-loathing by the mercifully untested belief that they were in
some sense creative. They could be quite amusing, these
constipated, deluded bohemians and hangers-on: Their vision had
nowhere to go except into what they said and how they lived, and
their frustrations often gave rise to piquant comments on human
nature and the state of the world.

Still, it was not the Ray Yateses and Bob
Natchezes who had given the greatest zest to Augie Silver's last
years. It was the people who were strangers to poetry, innocent of
art. It was the wharf rats like Jimmy Gibbs, half of whom had done
jail time. It was the fishing captains who at first took Augie out
as one more pain-in-the-ass know-nothing client, then later invited
him as a soothing companion. It was the old Cubans who poled out in
the back country and showed him how to dig a sponge. They too were
represented at Augie's corpseless send-off. They milled shyly along
the periphery, these outsiders, bashful of the canapes, made
nervous by the thinness of the glassware. They wanted to pay their
respects and get the hell out of this elegant backyard, but Clayton
Phipps was not about to race through his moment of high praise for
his friend and spotlight for himself.

"Augie Silver was the most
generous man I ever knew," said the eulogist. "Ya know, some
people
decide
to be
generous. It
occurs
to them to give you something. Augie wasn't like that. He
didn't decide. It just happened. It was his nature. Gifts flowed
from him. He was a source, a well. Life burned in him, and he could
not help but give back warmth."

Phipps looked toward the shady place where
Nina Silver was sitting, all alone. A hundred people had greeted
her, many had embraced her, and yet there had remained a dread and
stubborn space around her, a cuticle of passionate blankness that
she would not allow to be moved aside or filled.

"Who among us," he went on, "does not have
something of Augie's? Some remembered story, some flash of insight
or shred of his wise-ass wisdom. Some taste or preference we
learned from him. A sweater he gave you because you said you liked
the color. A jacket he put around your shoulders because you were
cold and he was not. A tool he lent and promptly forgot about, a
book he thought you might like . . ."

Around the dead man's yard and through the
open doors of his house, the mourners shifted from foot to foot,
remembered, smiled privately, and glanced at each other, secretly
wondering who'd gotten the sweaters, the jackets . . .

"And the paintings," Clayton Phipps resumed.
"My God, the paintings! The man gave them away like they were so
much scratch paper. His life's work, his livelihood, his legacy.
Where did he find the strength and the humor that enabled him to
take it all so lightly? 'Here,' he'd say, about a canvas that had
taken him a month. 'You like it? Put it in your house.' 'Here,'
he'd say with this amazing casualness. 'This little one? Sell it if
you can—get your boat fixed.' 'Here, put this over your desk for
luck.' 'Here, put this in your kid's room.' How many beautiful and
precious paintings did Augie Silver give away? Does anybody even
know?"

The question rose up over the swimming pool
and hovered there. Claire Steiger, the dead man's agent, read her
bankrupt husband's face and despised him for the bloodless
calculations she knew were going on behind it. And she wondered if
it showed in her own expression that she could not help but do some
calculating too.

*

By
1 p.m
. the speeches were over, the ice
cubes were melted, the crowd had thinned, and Nina Silver had
barely noticed that her promised deadline of hope had come and gone
and nothing whatever had changed in her heart. She bid farewell to
the dispersing guests, accepted their sincere and irrelevant
sympathies, nodded to all the well-meant pledges to stay close, to
see more of one another. She yearned for everyone to be gone and
dreaded the moment when the house would once again be empty.
Emptier than before, with no event to plan, no exquisitely small
details—irises or lilies? champagne or chardonnay?—to rivet her
attention. She straightened a picture frame that a departing friend
had shouldered awry, then stared at the level edge to steady
herself, the way a seasick man searches for sanity in a clear
horizon.

Out in the garden, a few men whose nature it
was to be the last to leave were honoring Augie the way the men of
Athens honored the martyred Socrates, by talking and drinking,
drinking and arguing.

"Here's the part I still don't get," Ray
Yates said, slipping into the mock-ingenuous interviewer's tone he
used in his radio show. He was sitting on a white wrought-iron
chair and his inappropriately cheery shirt was darkened here and
there with moisture. Yates was thickly built, squat and hairy, the
type that's always sweaty. It didn't help that there was no ice
left for his rum. "Guy's got this great career. A New York gallery
that loves him. He can sell whatever he paints, prices are better
all the time. . . . Then he just stops working. Why?"

Clayton Phipps sipped his warmish Sancerre
and noted how the flinty taste turned cactusy as the wine
approached body temperature. He hooked a thumb through one of his
suspenders and slid it to a fresh place on his shoulder. "Ray," he
said, "this might be tough for you to grasp, but it had to do with
standards.

I remember a dinner I had with Augie, about
five years ago. We were drinking a Lynch Bages 'seventy-eight,
rather young but very concen—"

"Who gives a shit what you were drinking?"
interjected Robert Natchez.

Phipps glared at him from under his heavy
brows. "It speaks of the quality of the moment, Natch. Isn't that
what you poets supposedly care about? Anyway, we were talking about
standards. About the difference between talent and genius. Between
skilled painting and great painting. Augie had no fake modesty—we
all know that. He knew he had talent. He knew he had skill. He
doubted he had genius. And he was coming to feel that if he didn't
have genius, then what was the point—"

"The point," said Ray Yates, "was that there
were all these people who would buy his stuff."

Phipps shook his head, glanced upward
through the feathery leaves of the poinciana tree. "No offense,
Ray. You're a slut."

"Just because I think if a guy's making a
good living—"

"Where's your judgment?" Phipps interrupted.
"Where's your imagination? You believe something's good just
because there's some schmuck out there who'll pay for it?"

"Usually it's just the opposite," put in
Robert Natchez. "If something's commercial—"

Phipps wheeled toward him with a vehemence
that surprised all three of them. "And that's bullshit too. Ray's a
slut, you're an undergraduate. You're both children, for chrissake.
Augie was a realist. He used his skill to buy himself the life he
wanted. Period. No high-flown crap about art, no sucking up to the
marketplace. He had a skill, he used it."

Phipps paused, and noticed rather suddenly
that he was smashed. Grief, heat, alcohol, and candor: The blend
was making him dizzy, and the shade of the poinciana offered no
coolness but seemed rather to hold congealed sunshine that pressed
directly on his bald and throbbing head. He glanced with a queasy
blend of affection and despising at Natchez and Yates; he dimly
wondered if they realized that when he compared people unfavorably
to Augie, he was talking first and foremost of himself. It was
probably for the best that he was prevented from rambling on by the
sudden appearance of Nina Silver.

She'd come through the French doors,
silently skirted the pool, and stood before them; in her drained
look there was something very touching but uncomfortably intimate,
an exposure like the sudden scrubbing off of makeup, like a
privileged glimpse of a sleeping face on a pillow. Her gray eyes
were weary, the slight smile she managed held no joy but only a
tired tenderness. The widow had decided against wearing black, and
her sea-green linen suit was slightly wilted. Only her hair
remained perfect. Short, thick, raven, it framed her face and
tucked under her jawline the way an acorn top hugs the smooth curve
of the acorn. She put one hand on Ray Yates's shoulder, the other
on Bob Natchez's.

"Gents," she said, "I have to go lie down.
You'll help yourselves to whatever you want?"

It was an innocent offer but perhaps an
injudicious one from a woman newly alone. Nina managed something
like a smile, then turned, and had any of the men been watching the
others' eyes instead of her retreating form, he might perhaps have
noticed a glimmer of something beyond mere disinterested concern
for the widow of their fallen friend.

'That isn't how it's done," Claire Steiger
said.

"How many paintings do we still have?"
pressed her husband.

"We?" She spit out the word as if it were a
rotten piece of fruit and went back to her magazine. The northbound
plane was somewhere off Cape Hatteras, and in the first-class cabin
coffee was being offered with petit fours, little pink squares
whose icing stuck to the ribbed paper of their nests.

"Look, there's a psychological moment to
these things," said Kip Cunningham. "How long does a dead artist
stay fashionable? A few months maybe? While he's still news, while
he's still being talked about at dinner parties. After that he's
just one more dead painter. Last year's tragedy. Who cares?"

Exasperated, Claire Steiger grabbed a petit
four and ate half of it before she realized what she was doing.
More annoyed than before, she put the other half back into its
paper cup and squashed it past all temptation. Raspberry jam oozed
out on her thumb. "Kip," she said, "now you're explaining to me the
mental quirks of art buyers?"

"I'm only saying—"

"You're only saying things you would have
heard a hundred times if you listened when I talked."

'This again, Claire?"

"Yeah, Kip, this again. Because now you
can't afford to ignore me. Now you can't act like your business is
the be-all end-all, and mine's a little hobby, good for some social
cachet, nice for getting us invited . . ."

The husband rolled his head against the back
of the leather seat and entertained the unholy wish that the wings
would fall off the airplane, that the naked fuselage, aerodynamic
as a cucumber, would plummet into the sea, settling everything with
a gruesome splash no one would hear. At that moment, no price
seemed too high to pay to get another human being to shut up, and
without actually deciding to, Kip played a card he'd been saving
for some time, one of the few cards he had left.

"Claire, we're going to lose the Sagaponack
house. Are you aware of that?"

There are two best ways to hurt someone. One
is through what is most feared, the other through what is most
loved. Claire Steiger's mouth stayed open but sound stopped coming
out. Something had slammed shut at the back of her throat, and her
eyes had started instantly to burn. She loved that house, took
delight from every colorless weather-beaten board of it. It was
half a block from the beach, always swollen and ripe with moisture
and salt. The first porch step gave a welcoming squeak when she
arrived on summer Fridays. The shutters were the most wonderful
shade of grayed-out blue, and the wet light that filtered through
the bedroom curtains reminded her of the radiance that came through
angels' wings in seventeenth-century murals.

"There's a huge payment due the first of
July," Kip went on. "The house is collateral against it." His tone
had become weirdly threatening, as if he had willed himself back to
the good old days when he was the one foreclosing and not the one
foreclosed. "We've gotta turn some cash, Claire. A lot of
cash."

She turned away and looked out the window.
It was an unrewarding view: flat tops of featureless clouds gapping
here and there to reveal a blank gray ocean. "Kip," she said, "you
don't understand. I've spent a lot of years building a clientele,
making a reputation for doing business a certain way. A dignified,
discreet way, Kip. I don't do fire sales. I don't cash in on
drowned artists. I don't slap paintings on the walls with price
tags dangling from them. The Ars Longa Gallery has a certain
image—"

"Fuck the image," said Kip Cunningham
without parting his small and perfect teeth. "We're broke."

Claire Steiger reached for another petit
four, then regarded her outstretched hand as if it belonged to
someone else, some piggish guest, and yanked it back before it had
snatched the pastry. Claire was not fat, just round, put together
out of circles. Her coarse curly hair haloed her head in a
spherical do. Her face was round, her hips were round, her breasts
were round. When she lost weight, certain dimensions flattened out
and became disk-like but never angular.

"It wouldn't work," she told her husband.
"Even if I said the hell with being classy, let's go for the quick
score—it wouldn't work. Serious collectors don't buy that way, Kip.
They're not impulsive. They wait for assurance from the critics.
They're going to spend six, maybe seven figures for a canvas, they
want the big auction houses' stamp of approval—"

"So why don't we sell through an auction
house?"