pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.
'Then one day it clicked. By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big sport-fishing tournament-marlin, sailfish-international. Big beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate-part of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes by. Lip Smacker, Key West. I'm standing on the beach, taking turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see it on the transom.
'Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the stupor, and I remembered.
'The tournament headquarters was about thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado. The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a passport.'
The painter paused and settled in farther against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.
'I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings.'
It was full dark beyond the windows now, and the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips to smile.
'You don't think that's a good idea?' he asked.
15
Clayton Phipps expertly sliced the lead foil from the top of a bottle of Gruaud-Larose 1975 and centered his corkscrew in the spongy wood of the stopper. He wasn't quite sure why he was squandering such a venerable wine on the unschooled palate of Robert Natchez; part of him, moreover, disapproved of the whole notion of quaffing a serious red on such a thick and sticky evening, a night that called for talcum powder, fume blanc, and a cool washcloth on the brow. But goddamnit, there were times in a man's life when he wanted Bordeaux and nothing but Bordeaux, and Clay Phipps saw less and less the virtue of denying himself what he wanted at the moment that he wanted it. He pulled the cork. The festive pop carried with it instant scents of black currants, pepper, forest floor, and violets. Thank God there were some things, some few things, that a man could count on and that did not lose their savor.
He poured two glasses and carried them into the living room, where Robert Natchez was sitting, dressed all in black. Phipps wore tan linen, and the two of them might have been the only people in the Florida Keys, not counting maitre'd's and cops, in long pants just then. Clay Phipps was self-conscious about his pale and hairless calves; Robert Natchez keenly felt that shorts did not befit his dignity. So they sweated behind the knees and felt well dressed.
'Cheers,' said Phipps, handing the poet a glass. 'It's too good for you, but what the hell.'
'Ever the gracious host,' said Natchez, and he nosed into the wine.
They settled into their chairs. Clay Phipps had bought his Old Town house around a dozen years before, in the wake of the infamous Mariel boat lift. Fidel Castro, in a gesture of great magnanimity, slyness, and spite, had thrown open the gates of his country's loony bins and prisons and allowed anyone who wished to escape to America. Most of the fruitcakes, murderers, catatonics, child molesters, mental defectives, and petty thieves had made landfall in Key West, which did the local real estate market no good at all. Those who, like Clay Phipps, believed that the island outpost was a tough town to kill, scarfed up historic houses at a small fraction of their worth, and found themselves gentry when the Marielitos, not surprisingly, were absorbed into the population with barely an uptick in the crime rate and no discernible effect on the community's overall level of weirdness and delusion. So Phipps now owned a sweet dwelling on a prime block. It was one more instance of his traveling first class without paying for it, living well but without the resonance of believing that living well was an earned reward.
The walls of his house were made of horizontal slats of white-painted pine, and here and there were brighter rectangles where Augie Silver's paintings had formerly been hung. There was something naked, naughty about those paler patches, they grabbed the eye like an unexpected flash of a woman's panties. Robert Natchez looked up from his glass of ruby wine and peeked rather lewdly at the empty places.
'Show's been over a week or more,' he said. 'When're the pictures coming back?'
This was a taunt, and no mistake. Phipps took it in stride. Taunting was what he expected and in some perverse way what he needed from Robert Natchez. 'They're not,' he said.
The poet smirked in his Bordeaux. A glad cynicism opened up his sinuses and he suddenly smelled cedar and mint in the wine. 'Don't tell me you've decided to sell them? I thought everything
was strictly NFS.'
'They're being offered at auction,' said the allegedly dead artist's alleged best friend. In an effort to appear casual, he swung a leg over the opposite knee. The dampness on his thigh made the nubbly linen itch. 'Sotheby's. Next month.'
'Ah,' said Natchez. He leered from under his black eyebrows at the nude rectangles, and managed to work into his expression both disapproval and nasty enjoyment. The look maneuvered his host into an abject stance of self-defense.
'You think it matters to Augie?' Phipps heard himself saying.
'I have no opinion on what matters to the dead,' said the poet. This was just the sort of pronouncement, portentous yet inane, that delighted Natchez, and he was tickled with himself for mouthing it. He paused, sipped some wine, then added, 'But they were gifts.'
At this, Clay Phipps could not hold back a nervous snorting laugh, a laugh that rasped his throat. 'A sentimentalist! You of all people a sentimentalist!'
The swarthy Natchez almost blushed at the charge, which was nearly the most debasing accusation he could imagine. 'It has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with what's dignified and fitting. Those paintings were given in friendship.'
'Friendship is complicated,' said Clay Phipps.
'So is envy,' said Robert Natchez. 'So is old stale jealousy. So is hate.' He swirled his wine the way he'd seen Phipps do it, drained his glass, and licked his lips. 'Any more of this?' he asked.
Phipps somewhat grudgingly got up to fetch the bottle.
*
Augie Silver nestled the thin smock between his skinny thighs and slowly, cautiously settled back onto the examination table. 'I feel like Mahatma Gandhi in this thing,' he said.
'You look like an anorectic Father Time,' said Manny Rucker, his doctor for the past ten years. 'Now lie still and let me goose you.'
Rucker put his soft hands on Augie's belly, pressed under his ribs to palpate the liver, felt for enlarged spleen, for hernia, for strangled loops of intestine. Augie blinked at the ceiling and was almost lulled asleep by the visceral massage. He'd spent the morning with electrodes taped onto his head and glued across his chest. He'd given blood,
