the sort of detached amusement that comes to grownups when they watch a baby try to walk.
'Can you tell me?' asked his wife. 'Can you tell me what happened?'
Augie settled in flat on his back and stared up past the still fan at the ceiling. 'I can try,' he said, as if he was being asked to relate a story of something that happened long ago, to someone else. 'But there's a lot I don't remember even now.'
He shifted just slightly, and his crinkly white hair spread around him on the pillow, his tinsel beard folded down onto his chest. 'It was a beautiful January afternoon. Bright sun. Not too much humidity-'
'I remember the day,' she gently interrupted.
'Yes, of course,' he said. 'Well, I was out past Scavenger Reef. I'd just come through it, I could see the line of the Gulf Stream maybe two miles up ahead. It was gorgeous. Pointy little whitecaps in the shallow water-nervous whitecaps, high-pitched, like kids' voices. Then the slow, thick purple swells in the deep. Off to the west there were huge tall clouds-not anvil tops exactly, but mountain clouds, whole ranges of them. I watched them. I wasn't the least bit worried, not even about getting rained on-the weather was from the east. The boat was heeled but steady, I just watched the clouds, sketched the shapes in my mind.
'Then it was like the clouds were melting, like there was a table across the sky and the clouds were pouring down across it, perfectly flat, much heavier, denser than before. They started rolling toward me; it was like a domed stadium slamming shut. The sky got very confused, low clouds going one way, high clouds going another, this odd sensation that the earth had started spinning faster. Half the sky was black, the other half an acid green. There was a wash of white over the shallow water and a dull gleam like wet lead over the Gulf Stream. The wind picked up-but not too much. I was enjoying it.'
His wife looked at him strangely, but Augie didn't notice. He took a deep and labored breath that moved the white bristles of his mustache. Outside, the morning's first breeze set the palm fronds scratching at the tin roofs of Olivia Street.
'Then I saw the spouts starting to drop,' the painter resumed. 'I'd never actually seen that before, and it's not the way I would have imagined. I would have pictured great dark funnels thrusting fully formed down from the clouds. But in fact they slip out almost shyly, like a man sticking a toe in cold water. Wisps and scraps, little rags of cloud. They hesitate, sometimes they crawl back up. Then they venture down a little farther, and then they start to spin. Once they start turning, they digest the whole huge cloud they came from, suck it all down through their writhing hollow bodies.
'I saw three spouts touch down, and they all were moving toward me. I had to make a choice: drop sail and take my chances or try to outrun the storm. You know me, I made a race of it. I sailed away. The funnels followed. I headed farther out to sea-away from the reef, away from the shallows. The wind started really ripping, and then in an instant it totally changed direction. I wasn't ready for that. I got slammed around, I couldn't even hold the wheel, there was no way I could keep my course.
'I looked up and a spout was dancing straight toward me, shimmying, swaying like a genie, homing in like it had radar. I tried to dodge it. But it was too close now, the swirling wind kept pulling the ocean out from under me like a rug. I thought it was starting to hail, then I realized what was hitting me was little fish, snappers and ballyhoo, that had gotten sucked into the spout and now were raining down, bouncing off the deck, slapping into the cockpit. The shrouds were twanging and groaning. I think the mainsail tore but I can't be sure; the jib came loose and was whipping around like a flag in a battle.
'And I really don't know what happened next,' the painter said. He was still staring at the ceiling and speaking in a quiet monotone. His parrot shifted on its perch and scratched its chest with its beak. 'I might've been carried back to the coral, I really can't be sure. Either I was pulled out of the boat or the boat broke up around me. I think something hit me in the head- maybe the boom, maybe just something flying. I suppose I was knocked out. Then suddenly I was in the water, awake enough to thrash through the foam like a madman. I looked around for the boat. It was gone. I thought I saw the top of the mast disappearing, but I may have imagined it. My arms were getting exhausted, I was sucking too much water. Then the dinghy-half the dinghy-came bobbing by. I managed to grab it and nestle in; it was like a leaky clamshell. I must've passed out again.'
Nina Silver put her hand on her husband's. His skin was so thin it felt powdery and she thought she could distinguish the small bones in his fingers. 'Augie,' she said, 'if this is too painful…'
The painter seemed surprised at the word. He smiled, and his wife noticed how deep were the fissures in his burned lips. They seemed to divide his mouth almost into tiles of flesh. 'Painful? I wasn't aware of it being painful. Beautiful and terrifying. Painful, no.'
He looked at his wife and realized he had been misunderstood, and that the misunderstanding had hurt her. 'Missing you,' he said. 'That was painful. The thought of leaving you by dying-that was painful. But those things I didn't feel till later-till I remembered. For a long time I knew nothing except what I imagine an animal knows: I knew I was alive. I knew I was in danger. And that was all.'
He paused and closed his eyes. His wife nestled closer and waited for him to continue. But he didn't continue. His breathing fell back into the rhythm of sleep, his foot kicked weakly under the sheet and half awakened him. 'I love you, Nina,' he mumbled, and then his breath began to whistle softly through his nose. His wife stayed in bed a few minutes more, then went, as on any ordinary morning, to put up coffee.
13
'No,' said Claire Steiger, 'there won't be any sales before the auction.'
She hugged the phone against her shoulder and looked down at her fingernails. It was a muggy morning in springtime New York, a May day on the lam from August. Viscous, dirty light spilled in through the windows of the gallery office. Below, on 57th Street, people looked stylishly limp in the season's first wilting linens.
'Yes, Avi,' the dealer was saying, 'I know you've been a terrific client. I appreciate it. But this time I can't make any special deals. The situation's too volatile, you know that as well as I do.'
The would-be buyer paused, then there was a soft popping sound as of heavy lips reluctantly letting go of a damp cigar. Avi Klein resumed his wheedling, and Claire Steiger reflected with gamy zest on the perverse and malleable machinery of human wants. What was so especially delicious about the phantom cookie at the bottom of the empty bag? What was so particularly beautiful about the painting that could not be had? Why was Avi Klein, a generally shrewd and cool-headed collector, suddenly prostrating himself for the privilege of paying more by far than had ever been paid for an Augie Silver canvas?
'Half a million is a lot of money,' Claire Steiger purred. She gave an impressed curl to her lips, as though the client were in the room, looking to be stroked. 'Are you sure it's worth that much?'
Klein was the fourth big customer to call that morning, and Claire Steiger was having a better time than she could easily remember having. She was dusting off some of her favorite moves, the feints and tactics she had refined in the years when the building of her business had seemed each day an adventure. There was flattery, of course; nothing so crude as compliments, but the passive flattery of sitting tight and letting someone show off the size of his wallet. There was the preempting of doubt, the sly reversal that forced the buyer to defend his judgment and so sell the painting to himself.
Though in the present instance the idea was not to sell the painting-and this offered an impish satisfaction all its own. Withholding. There was a power in it that was like the power of sex. The power to entice and frustrate, to beckon and dismiss. When its exercise was temporary, playful, that power could be delicious, could stoke appetites and make the nerve synapses incandescent. But when withholding became one's normal stance, a habit of the heart…
Claire Steiger did not ask to be visited by this thought. It simply descended in the midst of her negotiations and spoiled her mood the way a swarm of gnats spoils a walk in the garden. She fell out of her professional trance and remembered her life. She was married to a man she no longer loved. She was no longer on the glad ascent of making her reputation and her fortune, but was locked now in the squalid scramble of trying to hold on to those very few things she still cared about. A wave of bitterness squeezed up from her belly and brought an evil taste to her throat. Avi Klein was still talking moistly in her ear, still trying to persuade her, and his voice had become maddening, appalling, a devil voice that spoke glozingly of wanting and paying, selling and haggling, a wet salacious voice that made all transactions seem inherently shameful, fundamentally corrupt, and somehow humiliating. For an
