her dress. He cinched its panels together, tucked the zipper tab down neatly in its groove, finessed the hook through its little loop of thread, and vaguely noticed the way the top of the silk bodice bit softly into the flesh of Claire Steiger's back. He used to find her back very beautiful, that much Kip Cunningham remembered. Her back wasn't freckled, exactly, but there were light mottlings below the surface; the effect was of looking not at her skin but into it, it was like peering through sun-shot water in a trout stream and seeing pebbles at the bottom. Was her back still beautiful? Her husband could not really have said. He was losing her, though the loss that was happening now had mainly to do with money and social ease. The deeper loss he was oddly numb to because he'd inflicted it on himself, subtly, gradually murdering his chance for happiness with the slow poison of inattention.
'What if someone tries to buy-' he began.
The zip job completed, his wife slid away from his touch and cut him off. 'At an opening, Kip? None of my clients would be so tacky.'
Cunningham flipped his collar up and began the painstaking process of tying his tie. 'There might be discreet inquiries, hints as to price.'
Claire leaned forward and examined her eyes. What on earth, she wondered, had been on her mind eight years ago when she and the decorator designed this grand double bathroom with its his-and-hers mirrors, its twin dressing alcoves, its side-by-side scallop-shell sinks? She knew damn well what had been on her mind, and the recalling of it mocked her. What had been on her mind was a Hepburn-Tracy romance. Scintillating chitchat and intimate, brainy repartee while quaffing bubbly and grooming each other for some gala evening where they would take great pleasure and pride from being mates. Parts of the fantasy had come true, Claire Steiger reflected. If anything, there'd been too damn many black-tie evenings, an exhausting excess of verbal sparring, and perhaps too much fine wine. The only thing missing had been the marriage.
'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.
