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.' '
Yates stopped reading and looked up at the clock. It was twenty seconds before 7 p.m., and behind the engineer's booth window his producer was flashing him the O.K. sign. The host searched for some final comment, a capper, and when none came he decided that the most effective way to end the show was to let the Brandenburg review hang in the air through a rare moment of radio silence. He paused a double beat, then said, 'This is Ray Yates, and this is WKEY, the voice of the lower Keys. See you tomorrow on Culture Cocktail.'
He gave a nod and a point, and the producer played his theme music. It was a tune that always made Yates thirsty. Most evenings he bolted immediately from the padded womb of the studio and went directly to Raul's for several drinks. Tonight he broke the pattern. He looked at the painting on the wall. It was an impression of wind- lashed trees against a green sky full of reverence and menace. More important, it was a signed original Augie Silver. Picasso, thought Ray Yates. Matisse. You didn't leave such things around a public place where anyone could grab them. He decided to bring the picture to the houseboat, and reminded himself to install the dead bolt he'd meant to put on months ago. He owned two works by someone in the top rank of contemporary painters, and he felt a twinge as at a betting window when he let himself imagine how much they might be worth.
10
Nina Silver switched off the radio, walked softly through the French doors at the back of the living room, and sat down near the pool. Strange, she thought, what happens to a person when he's dead. He becomes the property of others, part of some ghastly common pot from which anyone may feed, a shared blurred memory that can be put to many uses. He can be talked about, written about, set up as a yardstick to measure or to shame the living. A person, dead, becomes a topic, a silent, neutral thing about which others have opinions. Chatter that would be called mere gossip in regard to the living passes for serious appraisal, something right and fitting, when applied to someone dead.
But it was still gossip, reflected Nina Silver. Gossip and presumption by people trying to lay claim to a ghost. What did any of the chatter have to do with the flesh and blood man who had been her husband? What did it say about the smell of coffee on his morning breath, the glad gleam in his open eyes when their faces were close and they were making love? What did it say about the particular warp of his wit, the gruff charm that was indescribably different from the charm of other charming men, as ticklish, comforting, and sometimes prickly as an unshaved
