Scavenger Reef (5 page)

"Darling, how are you?" asked Claire
Steiger.

Nina Silver briefly hesitated at her end of
the phone line. How was she? Only lately had the widow noticed how
often and offhandedly this bedeviling little question was asked.
Take it seriously, and it was intimate as a bath. "I'm as well as I
can be, Claire. How are you?"

"Me?" She sounded faintly surprised at the
inquiry, but that, Nina reflected, was Claire. It was axiomatic
that she was fine. The self-made woman who'd opened a dinky
exhibition space in a side-street storefront, given it the grand
name Ars Longa, and in less than a decade turned it into one of New
York's most formidable taste-making galleries. Who'd snagged
herself a square-jawed husband from among the East Side's thin crop
of croquet-playing, equestrian bluebloods. Who'd done all this,
moreover, without independent wealth or the cheap currency of great
beauty or any particular genius except a genius for reaching the
end point of her wishes. "Very busy. Hectic. ... It was a lovely
memorial the other week."

What did one say to
this?
Thank you for approving of my taste
in mourning?
Nina had years ago stopped
competing with her former boss on issues of style and refinement,
had stopped competing with anyone about anything. She kept silent
and looked around her own modest premises, the Vita Brevis Gallery.
Augie had suggested the name over a bottle of champagne, and it had
proven irresistible. It was a sweet space, the Vita Brevis,
pine-floored and washed in north light, and its overhead was low
enough that Nina Silver could turn a profit while showing exactly
what she pleased. With modesty of aims came freedom. That was
something Nina's former colleagues in New York found it difficult
to understand.

"Nina," Claire Steiger resumed, "let me tell
you why I'm calling. I'm mounting a show of Augie's work. A
retrospective."

The news should hardly have shocked the
widow. This was how it happened: A painter died, and after a brief
interval came a show, a look back, a reconsideration of the work,
now that the work was finished. But usually when a painter died it
was clearer he was dead. There was a body. There was a chance to
look down at the dead face and confirm that it was lifeless, an
opportunity to lay one's cheek against the still chest and convince
oneself that it was void of breath. There was the final sound of
tossed dirt crunching down on a lowered coffin. Nina Silver felt a
moment of bewilderment and mistrust. It seemed to her that people
were conspiring in some sadistic hoax to persuade her that her
husband wasn't coming back—when in her heart, against all evidence
and all rules of the natural world, she yet believed he was. She
saw him, after all, nearly every night, his ruddy face flush with
life, his meandering step as full of curiosity as ever. . . . The
widow groped for something to say, something that would reconnect
her with the ordinary waking world in which plans were made, things
decided.

"But Claire," she managed. "Nothing's
settled. The estate—"

"Nothing will be for sale," said Augie
Silver's agent. "Nina, the show is meant as an homage, a
tribute."

Again the widow was stopped short. Claire
Steiger was a merchant, not a curator; she showed paintings to sell
paintings, and it had not occurred to Nina that the precious square
footage of Ars Longa might be given over simply to the admiration
of canvases. The widow felt remorse. Was she already slipping into
bitterness, beginning to assume that everything was a sham, a
cheat, just because her own life had been cheated? "Claire," she
said, "I suppose I should be grateful. It's just that—"

"Just what, darling?"

"I don't know. It seems so soon." Even as
Nina was saying the words, she knew they were beside the point.
Twenty years from now it would still seem soon.

"Nina, listen, I understand that everything
feels very new right now, very raw. But this show will be a
celebration—the kind of big overview that Augie would have
wanted."

"I don't think Augie wanted
that," said Nina, and a flash of suspicion again arced through her
brain. Living artists had a lot to say about when, where, and how
they were shown; dead artists were not consulted. Someone had to
step in and tell the world what the painter
would have wanted.
That someone was
usually a dealer, and mysteriously, what the painter
would have wanted
fit in
very neatly with a marketing plan. "Claire," the widow said, "I
don't think I like this."

The proprietor of the Ars Longa Gallery
looked out her office window at the springtime bustle of 57th
Street, the veering taxis and recession-proof limos. Over the
years, she'd developed a very versatile and effective stratagem for
avoiding arguments. When a disagreement loomed, she simply ignored
it and went on to announce her intentions. "The gallery has
seventeen major works on hand," she told Nina Silver. "Collectors
have so far agreed to lend another dozen. If you'd consent to lend
the canvases you have, we'd of course pay shipping and insur—"

"Claire, this is all just business, isn't
it? This is no homage, no tribute."

"Nina, your husband's reputation—"

"My husband doesn't—didn't—particularly give
a damn about his reputation. I think we agree that was part of his
charm."

"We can't all afford to be quite so cavalier
about it, Nina. Let's be professional here, shall we? As Augie's
agent, I'm asking you to lend the paintings. Will you?"

"No."

"I'll ask another time, when you're less
upset."

"Don't bother, Claire."

"And one more thing, Nina. Did Augie in fact
make no pictures at all the last three years? Was he perhaps
working quietly—"

Nina Silver hung up the phone. She didn't
slam it down, didn't even drop it with particular suddenness. She
placed it gently in its cradle, crossed her arms against her
midriff, and blew out a long slow breath.

On 57th Street, Claire Steiger stared
blankly at the dead receiver in her hand and wondered for just a
moment if her unaccustomed desperation had led her to a rare
strategic blunder. But she allowed herself little time to linger on
the question. She had other calls to make.

Nina Silver, like most Key Westers, went
most places by bicycle.

Her bike was an old fat-tire one-speed,
powder blue, with a corroded wire basket and a rusted bell whose
clapper stuck after three weak and un-resounding taps against its
casing. She'd had the bike eight years and found it a perennial
source of mind-easing delight. It wasn't that the bike reminded her
of childhood; rather, it leavened her notion of what it was to be a
grownup. It was impossible to take oneself too seriously while
astride an old fat-tire bike. The world, and the sense of one's
place in it, came back to scale and flooded in as one pedaled by at
eight miles an hour, with a vantage point some four feet off the
ground.

As the widow cruised slowly up Olivia
Street, the sun's last low rays were slanting in from the Gulf side
of the island, and the light was so soft yet compelling that the
pink and red oleanders seemed not shined upon but fired from
within. Confident dogs sprawled in the street, serenely nestled
against the tires of parked cars. Stray cats missing patches of fur
and pieces of ears mixed democratically with brushed pets in the
shady places under porch stairs. Amorous doves puffed up on wires
and hopefully sang out: ta-fee-ya, ta-keeya. And with a sometimes
audible creaking and squeaking, the old wooden houses of Key West
began to recover from the daytime baking that had swelled their
window frames and bowed their doorjambs, made their beams and
joists as painfully taut as a fat man's ankles.

Nina chained her bike and climbed the three
front stairs, took a last look across her porch rail at the
splendid light, and slipped her key into the lock. She was a
half-step into her living room, looking down as she replaced her
key ring in her bag, when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed
a male form in the kitchen. Her feet froze, her throat clamped shut
as if squeezed by a cold hand, her heart stalled and then began to
hammer.

It was Reuben the Cuban.

He was standing at the counter, a dish towel
in his hand, drying glasses. "Hello, Meesus Silber," he said. "I
run berry late today."

This was a lie. Reuben never ran late. But
on Tuesdays, the day he cleaned the Silvers' house, he often stayed
overtime because he thought it might be a comfort to the widow to
have someone there when she arrived. She might need something
moved. She might need an errand run. There might be any number of
things that needed doing, and Reuben wanted to be the person to do
them if he could.

Nina moved slowly into the house, still
waiting for her pulse to slow.

Fred the parrot greeted her. "Awk. Jack
Daniel's. Where's Augie?"

The widow sat on the edge of the sofa. Her
legs were warm from biking, and the upholstery felt good.
"Someday," she said, "I'm going to strangle that bird."

Reuben the Cuban reached up and put a glass
on a high shelf. Then he moved gracefully to Fred's cage and
offered the parrot a knuckle to peck. "Thees bird, he love you and
Meester Silber too. He not try to make you feel bad."

Nina kicked off her shoes and reflected that
there are people who think the worst and people who think the best.
Even about parrots. "You're a very kind person, Reuben."

The young man absorbed the compliment with
great solemnity. He'd glided back to the kitchen and was now
buffing flatware and putting it away. He took care not to mar the
moment by jangling forks and knives.

The widow leaned back on the sofa and let
her head fall against the top of the cushion. The light in the
living room was so soft it had turned grainy; the brighter glow
from the kitchen made the house seem cozy and safe, inviolable.
Nina was ready to think about the day just ending. "Reuben," she
said softly, "what's a friend? What do you think a friend is,
Reuben?"

The young Cuban dropped his cloth, pondered
a moment, then absently began polishing the countertop with slow
round movements. He hadn't known a lot of friendship in his life.
He had a father who was so ashamed of him that Reuben couldn't
remember the last time he'd seen the old man's eyes, and a mother
who claimed to love him but was always praying on her swollen knees
for a miracle that would make him other than he was. He had a
brother who'd promised to kill him if he showed his faggot face in
certain places, and he'd had lovers who had promised him romance
and devotion, then easily cast him aside. He was too bashful and
unfinished to be at ease among the smart, theatric Old Town gays,
too tender and too dignified to seek solace in the shadowy places
where lonely young men collided. In Key West, a town that prides
itself on having room for everyone, there didn't seem to be a spot
for him.

But there is as much wisdom in pure yearning
as in flawed experience, and on the subject of friendship Reuben
had strongly held beliefs. "A friend," he said, "is when you cry,
the tears fall in his heart. When he laughs, it is bread and wine,
it is like food, enough for happiness. A friend, you would do
anything, you would look for more that you could do, you would
watch the world like a fisherman watches the sky to see if there is
danger, to keep your friend safe by watching closely—"

The housekeeper suddenly broke off. He was
unaccustomed to talking so much; he was still making slow circles
with the dishcloth. In the dark living room, Nina Silver had become
a silhouette, a still dim outline against the furniture. "You ask a
lot," she said. "Of yourself."

"Yes," said Reuben.

"You should," said the widow. Then she
thought of certain people with whom her life had been very much
involved and whose goodwill she was each day less sure that she
could trust. "Only . . . only, if you ask so much of a friend, I'm
not sure anyone really has one. I don't feel that I do."

Reuben the Cuban fretted with his dish
towel, closed the drawer that held the flatware. He pressed his
teeth together to keep his face composed but his heart was wild
with a secret, modest pride, the knightly ecstasy of one who stands
ready to do all and asks nothing in return. "You do," he said,
leaning just slightly across the kitchen counter. "You do, Meesus
Silber."

"So this Steiger woman," said Ray Yates.
"She call you?"

Clayton Phipps took a small
sip of extremely nasty white wine and silently cursed himself for
being talked into slumming at the Clove Hitch bar. It was well and
good for Yates to play out this man-of-the-people routine;
he
had
to, being a
radio host, a local personality. But why should Phipps have to
subject himself to this resinous, oxidized fluid out of a green
gallon screw-top jug with an ear? "Yes," the connoisseur said
reluctantly. "She called."

"She want your paintings?" Yates
pressed.

"She wants to
show
my paintings," Phipps
corrected. "There's an understanding that it's strictly
NFS."

"NFS," muttered Robert Natchez, who was
sitting on Phipps's other side. Like most pretentious people, the
poet was uncannily sensitive to pretension in others, it irritated
him like sand in the mesh cup of a bathing suit. "Goddamnit, Clay,
can't you just say 'not for sale' like a normal human being?"

Phipps shrugged. The whole subject of the
paintings made him highly uncomfortable, and his discomfort made
him feel as nasty as the wine. "O.K., Natch," he said. "Not for
sale. Like your journals."