Scavenger Reef (3 page)

"Then why do we have a gallery?"

"Sotheby's," Kip Cunningham said. It sounded
like a prayer. "Don't they do a big painting sale in June?"

"The Solstice Show. Biggest of the year. But
Kip, what'll it accomplish? Say we're the only ones unloading Augie
Silvers. If anything, it'll drive the prices down. It'll look like
we're dumping. Like we're desperate."

"We are desperate."

The flight attendant came by to refresh
their coffee, and had the tact not to ask if everything was all
right. The speaker system switched on and a voice from the flight
deck informed them that those seated on the left side of the
airplane could look down and see Washington, DC.

"Who gives a good goddamn?" grumbled Kip. He
pushed his coffee aside and asked for a brandy. He was sipping it
sullenly when his wife spoke again.

"How much we need for the July payment?" she
asked.

"Two million four," said Kip.

"And the total indebtedness?"

"Personal or corporate?"

"Corporate's not my problem." Claire fixed
her husband with her tender brown eyes. "I'm asking how much you're
in hock on things that are half mine."

Kip blinked down at his tray table. It
befuddled him that he couldn't figure exactly when or how this toy
called debt was transfigured into money he actually had to pay.
"Eight million," he mumbled. "A little less."

His wife considered. "I've got an idea. I
think I can raise enough for July at least, maybe the whole nut.
But it comes with a price tag, Kip. I bail you out, the Sagaponack
house goes into my name and my name alone."

Kip Cunningham had the kind of fragile
handsomeness that one moment seemed polished, cocksure, and
composed, and with the smallest shift could collapse into the
sniveling pout of a spoiled child, a defeated brat snuffling
outside a squash-court door. He glanced sideways at his wife, his
mouth flat as snake lips, his eyes hard with the furtive meanness
of the weak. He gave a brief laugh that was meant to be sardonic.
"So what are you saying, Claire? Are you saying you're going to
divorce me?"

She flashed her tender eyes at him. "I
might."

She reached again for a petit four and
didn't stop herself this time. She bit into it, luxuriating in the
rasp of grainy sugar against her teeth, the squish of yellow cake
and apricot preserve against her tongue. "It seems more possible
every day."

"Clay, don't," said Nina Silver.

She gently but firmly grasped the family
friends thick wrist before his hand could slide down onto her
breast, and pushed his large warm face away from her neck.

Phipps, a gentleman more or less, didn't
wait for the attempted embrace to become a grovel, a grope, some
unseemly echo of adolescence. He sat up straight on the settee
alongside Augie Silver's blue-lit swimming pool, partly
disappointed, part contrite, maybe even part relieved. "Nina," he
said, "I'm sorry." In a move to recapture his dignity, he smoothed
the placket of his linen shirt the way a riled bird resettles its
feathers. "Loss does strange things to people. I'm a mess."

Augie's widow gave him a soft smile and
patted him on the knee. It was a gesture of caring and acceptance,
but it somehow made Phipps feel worse. Was he so ridiculous a
suitor that the woman he'd just been trying to seduce would feel
not the slightest threat in touching his leg? He took stock. He was
fifty-eight years old. O.K., not young, but only one year older
than Augie. He was bald, yes, but had always been told he had a
well-shaped head. He wasn't rich, but managed to live as though he
was. He wasn't famous, but enjoyed many of the perks thereof. His
little newsletter was highly respected by those who knew and
cherished the finer things; his endorsement was coveted around the
world. Clayton Phipps was acknowledged as a formidable judge of
wine, a gourmet of nice discernment and enviable experience, a
canny traveler who had filled ten passports with visa stamps.

All those hotel
rooms
, he reflected wryly, sitting next to
Augie Silver's lovely widow. Overlooking the Bay of Naples, Sydney
Harbor, the Tyrolean Alps. All those beautiful, romantic,
complimentary suites—brass beds, marble bathtubs—he'd occupied
alone. All those marvelous dinners taken at small tables in the
sycophantic company of proprietors. All those tastings of legendary
Bordeaux, sipped elbow to elbow with a bunch of crotchety old men
in caves. Nearing the age of sixty, Clayton Phipps admitted to
himself what a damnably clever job he'd done of living life for
free, keeping himself unfettered, independent, sought after, and
alone.

"Nina, Nina, you know what it is?" Emerging
from his thoughts, Phipps didn't notice the abruptness of his voice
in the night air that was perfumed with frangipani and chlorine.
"What it is I really want? I want what you and Augie had."

"Of course you do," the widow said softly.
Loss, for her, had made everything seem simple, obvious, reduced to
its essentials. People wanted love, intimacy, the sense of being
mated. They wanted to feel the profound familiarity that made
another person's nearness as basic as the taste of water. "Everyone
wants what Augie and I had. I want it. I want it back."

Clayton Phipps was not an unfeeling man, not
usually, but in the grip of his newly acknowledged loneliness he
failed to see that the widow's pain was infinitely sharper than his
own because she knew exactly what she was missing while he had only
the vague awareness that something precious had eluded him all his
life. "With someone else . . ." he began. It wasn't quite a
question, not quite a statement. It was off the beat and had the
awkwardness of doomed pleading.

'There is no one else, Clay," said the
widow, and there was defiance in her voice. The defiance was not
aimed at Clayton Phipps, but still it stung him, made him feel a
flash of shaming envy and even bitterness, even spite, toward his
dead friend. Why should Augie Silver be so loved?

"Come now, Nina," he said.
Phipps felt as if he'd slipped into a chasm of longing that had
little to do with Nina Silver, a slippery pit in which his
isolation was the only fact, and he tried to climb out of it with
handholds of cynicism couched as worldliness. "Aren't we a little
old to believe in this
one right
person
nonsense?"

"I don't believe in that," said Nina. "I
think there are any number of right people for each other—"

"Well then," Phipps cut in. His tone had
turned professorial. If charm couldn't rescue the moment, maybe
logic would save him. "If there are any number—"

The widow interrupted in turn, soft but
unstoppable as a train. "Until you really fall in love with one.
Then the others dim out, fade away, come to seem—I don't mean this
personally, Clay—a little bit absurd."

They sat. A scrap of breeze sent tiny
ripples across the pool and lifted a wet green smell from the
hedge. Inside the house, soft yellow lights gleamed against the
dark wood walls. Augie's paintings loomed, unmoved in the week
since the memorial. The parrot cage stood near the door; Fred was
covered for the night, dreaming what visions of jungle, berries,
feathers, and flight might come to a bird in sleep.

And Nina Alonzo saw Augie Silver for the
first time.

It was twelve years ago. She was
twenty-nine. She was sitting at her desk at the gallery on 57th
Street. She heard a strange scuffing sound on the marble floor and
looked up to see her future husband strolling in his meandering
way, looking over first one shoulder, then the other, halfway
twirling, wearing boat shoes. Boat shoes in midtown Manhattan in
March. He approached her. He had on a black cashmere turtleneck,
the collar askew but tucked high under the chin, and over the
sweater was a light jacket of fawn-colored pigskin suede. It
vaguely occurred to her that these were tiger colors, black and
tan, and it registered only very dimly that everything the painter
wore would feel good. His hair was thick, wavy, and almost perfect
white, tinged here and there with an oddly pinkish bronze, but his
skin was youthful, smooth and ruddy as an Indian's. His eyes were
an electric blue, and they rested far back in sockets so deep that
they suggested lighthouse beams, piercing, narrow-focused lenses
that swept across his range of vision and shone with unsettling
concentration on one thing at a time. And now they were fixed on
Nina Alonzo. "Hello," he said. "I'm Augie Silver." Then he did
something that quietly amazed her when she thought about it
afterward, amazed her because it could only have been carried off
with perfect confidence, perfect ease, with a manner as comfortable
as his clothes. He half-sat on her desk, stretched a leg alongside
the phone, the files, the exhibition catalogues. His trousers were
of beefy corduroy, and some of the wales were rubbed almost smooth.
...

"Nina, are you all right?"

She flinched just slightly at the sound of
Phipps's voice, and felt not gratitude but resentment for the
intrusive concern that had pulled her back to the here and now.
"No," she said after a moment, "I'm not all right. My husband has
been gone—what is it, Clay, three months now?—and he's more alive
to me than anybody living. I'm not all right."

Phipps took her hand, and neither of them
could help glancing down at the suspect twining of their fingers.
Twenty minutes ago, before his bizarre and meager attempt at lust,
the contact would have been clean. "Nina, is there anything I can
do for you? Anything at all?"

Even in his own ears, the question sounded a
shade unwholesome, and Clay Phipps understood that he had forever
forfeited the privilege of being totally trusted, of being mistaken
for unselfish.

The widow took her hand away. "Don't try to
be Augie, Clay. That's what you can do for me. Don't try to be the
man I love."

Later, asleep, Nina again saw Augie
Silver.

She saw him often in dreams, and savored
these meetings as if they were deliciously forbidden trysts. They
were always different and always the same, these dreams, full of
the sore joy of reunion which then melted into a growing but never
serene acceptance that the reunion was unreal.

This time Nina saw Augie while she was
sitting in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. The front door
opened and there he was. He hadn't shaved, his face gleamed with a
steely stubble, and his throat was very tan beneath the collar of
his shirt. "Augie," she said. She held her mug in front of her,
smelling the fragrant steam and embracing the miracle of her
husband coming back.

"Coffee?" he said, and walked through the
living room toward the counter. She glanced at the coffee maker and
noticed that the red brew light was flickering, blinking like a
buoy at sea. She watched Augie walk, and though his walk was
casual, shuffling as always, he became more insubstantial with each
step, his form flattening, his feet in less secure contact with the
floor, and the sleeping Nina felt him slipping away yet again. With
the dreamer's comforting illusion that she could choose, she
wrestled with the choice of waking up to dream-capture him before
he had vanished, or staying asleep and willing him not to fade,
willing him to explain but most of all to keep existing. "Just a
cup of coffee," she said in the dream, and in her empty bedroom the
words came out only as a soft mumble that woke her up. She opened
her eyes, lifted onto her elbows for just a moment, and tried to
memorize this most recent visit with her husband. He'd looked so
handsome coming through the door.

Jimmy Gibbs pushed the point of his knife
into the anus of a six-pound mutton snapper and slit its belly to
the arc of bone beneath its jaw. Absently, he felt the fish
deflate, then reached into the body cavity and plucked out the
guts. Tubes and membranes, red nodes and green sacs came away in
his hand, and he flung them into the shallow water shimmering with
fish oil. It was a measure of Jimmy Gibbs's mood, where he flung
the guts. When he was happy, feeling benign, he tossed them in the
air so the wheeling gulls could snag the unspeakable morsels from
the sky. When he was feeling foul, he threw the slimy viscera into
Garrison Bight and made the squawking, miserable scavengers dunk
for them.

Today Jimmy Gibbs was feeling especially
foul. His back hurt. His hands were stiff, his fingers crosshatched
with tiny cuts from spiny fish fins, edges of scales, other
people's hooks. He had complaining knees, a swollen liver, a
weakening bladder, and he was too damn old to be a mate on someone
else's boat. Fifty-two, and a beat-up fifty-two at that. Living in
a trailer; driving an ancient pickup that sifted rust every time he
closed the door; and having something under nine hundred dollars of
cash money in the bank. He yanked the innards out of another fish
and swept them disgustedly off his cleaning table. They left behind
a bloody and slightly iridescent smear.

"Whole or fillet?" Gibbs said to the tourist
who, with a great deal of help and plenty of coaching, had managed
to catch some fish. The tourist just stood there blankly. Was it
too fucking difficult a question? Was it unthinkable that the
tourist, God forbid, might sometime have to eat something with a
bone in it? It was five o'clock, the sun was still hot, and Jimmy
Gibbs had two more buckets of dead fish to clean.

"Fillet," the tourist said at last; and with
more force than was required, Gibbs slashed the glistening flesh
away from the pliant backbones. The tourist reached a clean hand
into a clean pocket and came up with a dollar. He took his fish
fillets in a plastic bag and dropped the bill onto the cleaning
table, where it soaked up some slime. It was breezy on the dock but
the dollar didn't blow away because fish stuff was gluing it to the
plywood.