McClintock, an eager young reporter for the Key West Sentinel. With a newsman's fine and fitting lack of decency, he decided to call the Silver home.
When the phone rang, Nina was sitting on the edge of the bed urging Augie to drink some broth. He'd managed two sips. Fred the parrot was on his perch, nuzzling his wing pit with his beak and adding a new sound to his idiot vocabulary. 'Eat,' squawked the bird. 'Jack Daniel's. Eat, eat.'
Nina went to the living room and picked up the receiver. 'Hello?'
'Mrs. Silvers?'
'Silver.'
'Yes. This is Freddy McClintock, Key West Sentinel — '
'Thank you, we don't want a subscription.'
'We? Did you say we?'
Nina pulled the phone a few inches from her ear. Caution was not a habit with her, not since she'd left New York, nor was the feeling that she had anything to hide. 'What is it you want?' she asked.
The reporter cleared his throat. 'I've heard from a couple of sources that your husband has been seen. Alive.'
Nina said nothing.
'And I thought it'd make a terrific story,' McClintock went on. ' 'Key West's Own Lazarus.' Or Jonah. Maybe Jonah would be better. He was lost at sea, wasn't he?'
'What if your rumor's wrong, Mr. McClintock? What if you're talking to a widow?'
'Am I?' the reporter countered. 'Is your husband alive, Mrs. Silver?'
'I never for a moment believed that he was dead.'
'So you're saying he's alive?'
'What I'm saying is goodbye.'
For a second she stared at the telephone as if she'd never seen one before. Then she went back to the bedroom and checked on her husband's heroic progress through half a cupful of soup.
'Who was it?' he asked.
'Hm?' she said. 'Wrong number.' A quick wave of nausea rippled through her stomach. It was an innocent fib, a protective fib, but she could not remember ever being untruthful with her husband before, and the words left a sick taste in her mouth. Stress. She had vowed to shield him from stress, to spread a calm place around him the way a tree throws a pool of shade. And it was just beginning to dawn on her that a tree casts shade only by suffering the heat itself.
*
As it stood, it was not much of a story. But then, the Sentinel was not much of a paper.
'No interview. No real confirmation. Do we go with it?' McClintock asked Arty Magnus, his editor, idol, and reluctant mentor.
'Ya got anything better?' Magnus, a wildly impractical man in all other aspects of his life, took an extremely pragmatic approach to the newspaper business. This was mainly because he didn't care about it very much. Facts bored him. Actual quotes from actual sources were always deathly dull. The best parts of a story were always the parts that somebody made up, but Magnus couldn't bring himself to tell that to the sincere, impressionable, and slightly stupid Freddy McClintock.
The young reporter riffled through his notebook. It seemed the professional thing to do, though he knew damn well he had nothing better or even anything else. 'No,' he said at last.
'Well then,' Magnus said with a shrug. He shrugged a lot, it was a symptom of his stifled zest. He was forty and he didn't want to be sitting at a newspaper desk in front of an ancient air conditioner that managed to dribble condensation without cooling any air; he wanted to be writing novels in front of a huge window with an ocean view. Oceans of narrative truth, that's what he wanted, not flat and stagnant little pools of information. One of these days he'd find something to say, and he would say it wisely and well.
McClintock pressed the eraser end of his pencil against his lower lip. 'Boss,' he meekly said, 'what if I say he's alive and he isn't? Is that libel?'
Magnus locked his hands behind his head and pushed back in his squeaky chair. 'Freddy, do you bear malice in your heart toward Augie Silver?'
'I don't even know the man.'
'No malice, no libel.'
'I know, I know,' McClintock said. 'But what about for dead people?'
His editor considered. Facts bored him, yes, but occasionally they pretzeled up into paradoxes he found amusing. 'The only other criterion is demonstrable economic damage to someone's reputation…. But if someone's dead, how can you damage his reputation just by claiming he's alive?'
Arty Magnus was a savvy fellow, but he didn't understand the market for fine art.
17
'Sonofabitch,' said Kip Cunningham. 'Sonofabitch. That bastard is going to spoil everything.'
He wriggled in the stately leather chair in the locker room of the University Club, then adjusted the thick towel that had gotten tangled between his thighs as he twisted. Not far away, his squash racquet lay on top of a pile of dirty sweaty clothes that a flunky would pick up, launder, and neatly fold. He sipped his club soda and lime and cradled the phone against an ear that was still damp from the shower.
'It's only a rumor, darling,' said his wife. She'd taken to calling him darling again, and Cunningham was too oblivious to notice that she called him that the way some people call a Lhasa apso Killer or a knocked-out fighter Champ.
'Rumor? You just said it was in the paper.'
'Not a real paper,' she said. 'Only the Sentinel. And the Sentinel always gets things wrong.'
Cunningham sipped his soda and looked for the comfort in this. A couple of club colleagues strolled by, splotched with sweat and red as beef, and the bankrupt tried to look like he was doing business, real business, rather than helplessly hoping his wife would finesse him out of hock. Importantly, with great acumen, he moved the phone to his other ear.
'What if it isn't wrong?' he said at last.
Claire Steiger looked out her office window onto 57th Street. It was just after six. People were darting home from work, out for drinks, to early movies, to the park for a stroll. She tried to remember, and vaguely could, the romance, the dim still perfection of warm late-May dusks in Manhattan. Going to the theater while at the western verge of 45th Street the sky was red above the river. The cafe off Madison where darkness would slip in soft as Margaux while her handsome husband told laconic but exciting tales of business and she tried to think past his immaculate shirts to his skin. Was that this same city in this same season?
'Awkward,' she said. 'It would be very awkward.'
'Muck up the auction,' said Kip Cunningham. It wasn't a question, wasn't a statement, just a mumble. Absently he glanced toward his dressing cubicle where a white-haired black man was stooping slowly to gather his dirty clothes. 'Maybe people won't find out,' he added. The sneak's last hope.
'Kip, don't be an ass. True, not true, anybody who might conceivably be interested is going to hear about this by tomorrow.'
There was a silence. The squash player looked across the locker room at a calendar near the pro shop window. It was a pin-up calendar of sorts, but instead of women as the objects of desire, each month had a different yacht. May had an elegant Concordia with tanbark sails, but Kip Cunningham wasn't looking at the boat. He was counting days until the Solstice Show, gauging how much time it would take for things to fall apart. 'So how'll it play?'
His wife had turned her back on the window, on its mocking promise. 'Depends,' she said. 'Best-case scenario, the rumor is false. Nothing has really changed, and this buzz about the artist's return just adds interest.'
Oddly, disconnectedly, Kip Cunningham began to chuckle.
