cheek?
The widow sat and smelled the evening. Salt and iodine flavored the air, a slippery odor as of earthworms in wet dirt wafted up from the cooling ground. The poinciana was just coming into flower, and Nina noticed for the thousandth time what tiny, feathery leaves it had for such a big and spreading tree; it always made her think of a great fat man with the palest, daintiest fingers.
Time passed. She knew this because the mosquitoes had come and gone, the western sky had phased from pink to lavender to jewel-box blue, and higher up Castor and Pollux, the tall spring twins, were nearly at the zenith. Nina Silver was wondering if she too was trying to lay claim to a ghost. Her claim, she told herself, at least was lawful-lawful in that vague portentous sense of lawful wedded wife. But what did that really mean? Did it set her up beyond dispute as the keeper of the true memory, the vestal standing guard against the vandals? She had built, was still building, a shrine of remembrance; other people-friends, colleagues, self-appointed judges-were building other shrines. Nina told herself her own temple was the grandest because it was built with the greatest love. But what it had in common with all the others was that it was meant to house, contain, hold captive the ghost of Augie Silver- and maybe Augie's ghost did not wish to be held.
This was a terrible thought, a thought to turn grief guilty. Perhaps, of all the rudenesses and well-meaning indignities that the living heaped upon the longed-for and admired dead, the worst was simply that they wouldn't let them go. Perhaps the dead were like tired guests who truly wanted nothing more than to leave the party and have some peace. Why did the noisy, selfish, stubborn living try to bully them into staying?
'Augie,' Nina Silver said aloud, 'do you really want to go?'
11
That night, as usual, she dreamed of her dead husband.
In the first dream he was walking with her down a New York street. It was winter, night, big halos of icy blue surrounded all the streetlights. The parked cars were so black they gleamed like schist, and the brownstones all had stately stoops that exactly paralleled each other, like something out of Egypt. It was cold, with a gritty wind, but Nina didn't mind because she had her warmest jacket on and she was holding Augie's arm. He wore a camel topcoat, carelessly buttoned, and though she couldn't see his hands she knew they were balled lightly into fists at the bottom of his pockets. She was looking at the sidewalk; it had small shiny stones embedded in it. Then something went wrong. Nina had the sudden certainty that she was holding not her husband's arm but an empty sleeve. When she looked up they were standing at a broad intersection. Many traffic lights were flashing and the wind was blowing from everywhere at once. Augie was now standing outside his coat. He was naked, pale as egg, and skin was blowing off of him, his face was distorted and flesh was being stretched and torn away like leaves from a tree in the first November storm.
Nina sat up groaning, then leaned back on her elbows. She brought a hand to her throat and felt her racing pulse. She poured some water from her nightstand carafe. A late moon had risen and a dim ivory light was spilling through the thin curtains. It put a soft gleam on the pine-cone bedposts, and the gleam reminded Nina of the delicious and secure fatigue of childhood. After a while she went back to sleep.
When she dreamed again, the dream was gentler. She was on a beach, sitting at the water's edge, letting wet sand sift through her fingers. The sun was hot on her shoulders, the water so flat she could see the place where the earth curved underneath it. Augie was behind her, lying in a hammock. At least she trusted that he was: She could only see his leg, pegged in the sand like a bird's leg, his toes faintly wiggling just below the surface. She was happy. She looked down the beach and saw a black man selling coconuts. He was wearing a big hat of woven palm. She wanted to buy a coconut for her husband. She wanted to surprise him, to see him drink the rich milk through a straw. But there was a dilemma. She was happy as she was, knowing Augie's toes were wiggling. She would be happier sitting next to him and giving him a coconut, but she feared that if she reached for greater happiness she might lose the happiness she had. She glanced up the beach, then back at the hammock. She gestured toward the man with the coconuts. Then her nerve failed and she woke up just enough to break the dream, to finish it without an ending.
She rolled over and smoothed an imagined crease in her pillowcase. Her leg twitched once, she cleared her throat, and some time later her husband appeared to her once more.
He stood before her looking very old and thin, as if he'd been dead for many years. His hair was pure white and hung down past his shoulders. He had a beard dry as tinsel on his sunken cheeks, and his cheeks were not ashen but burned the color of rosewood. He wore a threadbare shirt, a pauper's shirt, and on his shoulder perched a parrot.
'Nina,' said her husband. 'I've come home.'
The widow smiled sadly on her pillow. Augie had never before appeared in such a ghostlike way, never seemed so old, so low, so fragile. Yet his deep eyes in the moonlight seemed at peace. 'Augie,' she murmured. She froze his image for a moment, nestled it into her shrine of recollection, then blinked herself awake.
Or thought she did. The apparition did not vanish. The widow tried to shake herself out of a sleep that was stubborn as memory, stubborn as love, struggled upward as from a dive where one has gone too deep, but still her husband's image loomed before her. She was dreaming now that she was sitting up, looking past the dead man's tinsel hair at the familiar curtains moving with the breeze, though she knew this could not be.
'Whiskey sour,' squawked Fred the parrot. 'Pretty Nina.'
'Augie?' said his wife.
He sat down on the bed. He'd grown so light he barely made a dent. His wife reached out a trembling hand to touch him. The parrot fluttered in protest and moved to its master's other shoulder. 'I'm very tired,' said the painter. 'Very tired.'
He swiveled slowly on his shrunken hips, let himself fall backward, and was sleeping in an instant. The bird jumped onto its bedside perch and sat there preening in the moonlight.
12
Nina Silver lay awake the rest of the night, afraid that if she blinked, her husband would again be gone. She held back from touching him, terrified her hand would slip right through his outline, that his shirt would be vacant, would prove to be nothing more than a twisted piece of bedsheet, errant cloth throwing the shadow of a man. She lay on her side and breathed deeply. She thought she smelled the ocean, and now and then a sweet chalky smell that made her remember the taste of her husband's mouth.
Dawn came, and with it came growing belief: The private madnesses allowed in the dark cannot, for the sane, cross the border into day. The bedroom windows began just barely to lighten, and still Augie Silver was there in his bed. His wife dared to put her face against his arm. It was shrunken but it was warm. She cried silently and she dozed.
When she awoke, the room was bright. Augie was gone, and in some awful way Nina Silver was not surprised, only confused to see Fred the parrot on his bedside perch.
Then she heard the sound of tinkling, and a moment later her husband was standing in the bathroom doorway. Seeing his wife awake, he flashed her a tired smile that was full of the reverent screwball miracle of finding himself alive. The smile banished doubt forever. Nothing but a living person could have an expression so wry, beat up, and full of zest.
'Augie.'
'Nina.'
'Cutty Sark. Awk, awk.'
The painter, still in his clothes, came back to bed and took his wife in his wizened arms. The movement and the embrace seemed to drain him. 'I'm so weak,' he said. It was not a complaint, just an observation, made with
