Scavenger Reef (7 page)

"Kip," said the gallery owner, "you used to
be a businessman. You can't talk about price until there's some
basis for a price."

"But—"

"Ink, Kip. The show is about ink. Publicity.
Reviews. You wanna help, do what you do best. Play squash."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Smile, Kip. Be your blithe preppy self.
Don't talk about money and for Christ's sake don't talk about art.
Talk horses, talk sports. Invite some critics to the club. They
like that."

Cunningham smoothed his collar and lifted
his glass. With more champagne in him it was easier to imagine that
his wife's contempt was only a form of affectionate banter.
"Anybody in particular?"

"You know who's who. Find someone
susceptible to your boyish charm."

The husband secured his cummerbund around
his still-flat tummy. "So we get the ink. Then what?"

Claire blotted her lipstick before she
answered. "If the reviews are good, we've got six weeks' buildup
before the auction. Enough time for the momentum to build, not
enough time for the bubble to burst."

The bankrupt examined himself in profile.
"And if the reviews are bad?"

"If they're bad?" said his wife. "If they're
bad, I'm stuck with a bunch of damaged goods. Augie Silver goes
down in history as one more second-rater. We'll lose the beach
house and whatever else you've pawned."

She moved to the small bathroom window that
overlooked Fifth Avenue and stared down at Central Park. The spring
foliage already looked sooty, the cherry blossoms were going brown
and rank, they had the sodden look of yesterday's salad. "But
there's a bright side, I suppose."

Kip Cunningham did not ask what the bright
side was. He knew it wouldn't really be bright, and he knew his
wife would tell him anyway. He drained his glass.

"The more we lose up front," she said, "the
less to give up when I get free of you."

In the dim living room of the house on
Olivia Street, Nina Silver nestled into her soft-pillowed sofa and
talked to her dead husband. She hadn't begun by speaking to him;
she'd begun by looking at his paintings and thinking. But as the
light had faded, as the windows stopped framing colors and patterns
and just passed along a uniform gray, there seemed less and less
reason to deprive herself of the company of speech. "Augie," she
said. "Up in New York, they're making you a star right now. D'you
know that, Augie? A big fancy opening. Caviar. Canapes. Limos all
up and down the street. . . . Just the sort of thing you always
hated. Men looking ridiculous in patent-leather shoes. Young
jealous colleagues wearing capes, dying to know what the critics
are scrawling in their notebooks. The inevitable two women in the
same expensive dress. . . . "What's it got to do with the work?
you'd say. "What's it got to do with anything? "

She paused, and it seemed that Fred the
parrot felt compelled to fill the silence. The big green bird
riffled through its limited vocabulary and picked some sounds at
random. "Incha Pinch. Alla joke."

"What's it got to do with anything?' the
widow said again.

"What's it got to do with anything?' asked
Kip Cunningham, leaning against the marble counter at the entrance
of Ars Longa. His voice was thick with wine, his tie was crooked,
his shave no longer fresh, and in all he was about as trashed as
the gallery itself. Champagne corks swollen up like tumors littered
the tables and the countertops. Lipstick-stained glasses lay on
their sides like toy soldiers killed by kisses. Here and there the
marble floor had been scorched by cigarettes. The ladies' toilet
needed plunging, and someone, it seemed, had walked off with the
crystal paperweight that held down the stack of catalogues.

"I just can't believe that someone would
steal a paperweight," said Claire Steiger. "That's all."

It was 11
p.m
. The hostess looked
fresh as an anchorwoman, but she was in the grip of the sort of
brain fatigue that makes little things like stolen paperweights
into large distractions that call forth a draining and useless
indignation. She'd been up since six that morning. She'd overseen
the hanging of the show, the catering, dealt with the last-minute
RSVPs. She'd strutted through the evening in high-heel shoes and
greeted perhaps two hundred people by name. Used to be, she cruised
through days like this on waves of glad ambition; the grasping joy
of reaching her next goal would keep her primed with adrenaline.
Now the ambition was mainly habit; it kept its form just as her
hair and makeup kept their form, but the joy had dried up inside it
the way a stranded clam bakes away to a gooey nothing. "I mean,"
she went on, "who would be so small—"

"Claire, fuck the paperweight," slurred her
husband. "How'd we do?"

The gallery owner paused, then fluttered her
soft brown eyes as if waking from a nap. She was ready to go one
more mile. "The right people showed up," she said. "Some big-money
no-nerve collectors—the kind who wait for the Grade A stamp. Couple
of agents for Japanese investors. The heavy critics."

"I talked to a few," said
Cunningham. He was pleased with himself, gave a drunk smile. "Joe
Rudman from the Times. Talked ponies. What's-his-name, the
Newsweek
guy. Likes
croquet. And Peter Brandenburg —I'm playing squash with him
tomorrow."

It had been a long time since Claire Steiger
approved of anything her husband had done, but she could not now
prevent an impressed look from stealing across her tired face. "He
counts, Kip. He counts a lot."

Cunningham nodded. Then he grabbed an end of
his tie and pulled out the knot. When he'd been younger, less
embittered, when his shallowness could pass for finesse and his
essential dullness for aristocratic restraint, he'd looked
especially debonair with his tie undone and hanging on his chest.
Now he just looked dissolute, hollowed out, ready for three aspirin
and an icepack. Absently, with no great interest, he jerked a thumb
toward the softly spotlighted paintings on the gallery walls. "For
what it's worth," he said, "you think this stuff is any good?"

"Everything I show is good," Claire Steiger
said. Outside, on 57th Street, someone honked a horn. A cross-town
bus whined loudly as it pulled away from a stop, and the gallery
owner somewhat guiltily indulged herself in an unchecked yawn.
"You've got to believe in the product, Kip. That's rule number
one."

*

Ray Yates had always wanted to be a local
character.

He'd tried on towns like some people try on
hats, telling himself he needed one that fit his image, but in fact
looking for the image in the hat. What he was searching for was a
place that would embrace him as a perfect type, adopt him as a kind
of mascot.

He'd had false starts in several careers,
and these had been custom-fitted to various cities. In Boston, all
in tweeds and baggy corduroys, he'd edited a small and unprofitable
magazine of poetry and opinion. In Los Angeles, he'd managed to
make seven payments on a leased Porsche before realizing that no
one was going to hire him to doctor scripts. In Chicago, the last
newspaper town, he'd worn real suits and the ugly ties reporters
wear, but quit when he realized it might be twenty frigid winters
before he was recognized on Michigan Avenue.

When he arrived in Key West six years ago,
he'd immediately begun trying to out-local the locals. His wardrobe
turned abruptly turquoise, he bought a stack of palm tree and
flamingo shirts, which he laundered repeatedly to fade. He bought
sandals and denied himself the use of Band-Aids, hoping to speed
the process by which blisters turned to calluses. He rented a
houseboat, and felt extremely Floridian having a teensy toilet with
a hand pump and a gangplank for a driveway.

As for a job, Yates hadn't known exactly
what he'd do. He didn't want to work very hard. He didn't want to
start early in the morning. And he wanted the kind of position that
would help him insinuate himself, that would give him the kind of
access, insider-ness, small renown even, that had eluded him in
bigger, more important places.

So it had seemed providential when, at a
cocktail party, he'd met Rich Florio, manager of radio station
WKEY. KEY was nothing if not local. It broadcast from an ancient
cottage in a downtown alley and had a transmitter slightly more
powerful than an under-counter microwave; in perfect atmospheric
conditions, its signal could be detected as far away as mile marker
twenty. The format was eclectic: pop in the morning, jazz at night,
some classical on Sundays, and lots of local news and notices.
School-board meetings. Church outings. Benefits to save the reef,
the manatee, the embossed tin roofs of Old Town.

But the station lacked a talk show, and Ray
Yates, drinking tequila on the strength of a third-hand invitation,
found himself pitching one to the station manager. "In a town with
so much going on," he'd said. "So many writers, artists, so many
famous people ... An interview show. Early evenings. Call it . . .
call it Culture Cocktail."

They'd agreed to talk further, and when
Florio hired Yates, the new Key Wester thought he'd done a
masterful sell job, though the truth was that the station manager
had been having the damnedest time recruiting anyone remotely
qualified who would work for what KEY could pay. But Yates was in
it for the entree, not the money. His rent was cheap, he had some
savings from Chicago, and if he kept his gambling under control, he
could get by.

The problem, as he discovered early on, was
that Key West was not nearly as sophisticated or culturally vibrant
as its reputation—the reputation that Yates had wholeheartedly
bought into, and which he now had both to exploit and to
perpetuate. Writers' haven. Ha! Maybe two dozen writers, most of
them bad sober and worse drunk, perhaps four of whom were actually
working at a given time. Artists? Well, if you granted the premise
that painting on T-shirts was a major art form, then, yes, Key West
abounded in artists. Theater, you could take your pick between drag
shows downtown and road companies doing recycled musicals out at
the college. True, there were the street performers from Mallory
Dock—but juggling was not ideally suited to radio and nothing was
surer to make dials turn than a guy playing bagpipes. Faced with
the unremitting task of filling air time, Ray Yates had grown every
year more grateful for the existence of the Gay Men's Chorus, the
Lesbian Political Verse Initiative, the annual Tattoo Show.

Still, every now and then Yates had the
pleasure of reporting a real piece of culture news, an item that
did not need to be qualified by the diminutive term local,
something of interest north of mile marker twenty. On an evening
toward the middle of May, he had such a story, and he devoted the
last segment of his show to it. He swept off his headset and spread
a yellow-highlighted magazine in front of him. He glanced at the
big clock above the engineer's booth window. Then he laid his
forearms against the cheap veneers of the studio table and leaned
in toward his microphone.

"Back live on Culture
Cocktail," he said as the producer gave the signal that the
hair-salon and dive-shop ads were over. "Friends, it's always been
my belief that all of us who love Key West should root for each
other, should take pride whenever the accomplishments of one of our
own are recognized by the outside world. So I'd like to share with
you an art review from this week's
Manhattan
magazine. The review is by
Peter Brandenburg. Some of you might know of him. He's got a
reputation as the hardest marker around, someone with such
exquisite taste that he doesn't like anything. Except he loves our
former Key West neighbor Augie Silver.

"Probably a lot of you knew Augie—knew him
as a wonderful companion who loved his food and drink, a man
interested and generous toward local causes, a man who celebrated
the beauty and uniqueness of the Keys. But I wonder how many of us
realized we had a truly major painter in our midst? Honestly, I'm
not sure I did—and Augie Silver was one of my dearest friends.

" 'Some painters are badly served by
retrospectives.' I'm quoting Brandenburg now. 'Comprehensive shows
reveal less of their talent than their limitations. We see the
place they stopped growing, ran dry of ideas, almost as clearly as
if a black line were painted on the wall, separating the
discoveries from the walkthroughs. Such was not the case with Augie
Silver. He never reached a plateau and never coasted. He reinvented
his vision with every canvas, and in this regard the inevitable
comparisons are with Picasso and Matisse—tireless talents who kept
exploring and refining till the day they died.'

"Picasso and Matisse!" editorialized Ray
Yates. He could not help glancing at the small painting Augie had
given him and which hung now, crooked on a rusty nail, on the
smudged wall of the studio.

"Farther on, here's what Brandenburg says:
'He belonged to no school, subscribed to no trends. At a time when
many painters appeared to care less about craft than about theory,
Silver cared only for the quality of what was on the canvas. In an
era when artists seemed to feel that, to be taken seriously, their
work had to be ugly, jarring, or pointlessly original, Silver clung
to a riper, braver, more classic kind of wisdom: His work depicts a
world almost unbearably lush, tender, beautiful, and temporary. In
his love of color, his unabashed sensuality, he is a pure romantic;
yet even in his most gorgeous pictures there is an awareness of
death, of decay—the calm, sad resignation of the tropics. And what
more poignant and honest reflection of that resignation than that
Augie Silver, as if in humble acceptance of the paltriness of human
effort, should have stopped working altogether in his final years?
This passionate inactivity seems the final proof of his sincerity,
his miraculous freedom from ambition. And while his premature death
was certainly a tragedy, the current show at Ars Longa will assure
him a place in the top rank of contemporary painters. Long after
the dreary canvases by this season's art-journal darlings have come
to seem dated and dull, Augie Silver's work— eccentric, indifferent
to fashion, happily outside the mainstream—will speak to us of the
power of untrammeled temperament wedded to talent, possibly to
genius.' "