Claire Steiger could find nothing remotely humorous in what she'd said, and she imagined her husband must be party to some clownishness in the locker room. 'Kip, if you can't even pay attention to what I say-'
'Oh,' he interrupted, 'I'm paying very close attention. You just said you hope that Augie Silver's dead.'
The artist's dealer underwent a hellish moment of knowing she'd been caught, a moment as unsettling and humiliating as being discovered naked in a dream. She squirmed in her chair as though dodging thrown rocks, scrambled in her mind for some avenue of excuse, some route of escape. 'I didn't say anything about Augie Silver,' she protested, and her voice was thin and shrill. 'I was only talking about the situation.'
Kip Cunningham had not won much lately, not in business, not in squash, not in his marriage. He savored the event, let it fill his senses like wine, and when he answered, it was in the sweetly condescending tone of the victor. 'But, my dear,' he said, 'Augie Silver is the situation.'
The next day was a Tuesday, and just after ten o'clock in the morning Reuben the Cuban climbed the three porch steps of the widow Silver's house. The key he'd been given many months before was in his hand, but even though he knew that Mrs. Silver would not be home, would be working at her gallery, he knocked. It was the proper thing to do, not only for a housekeeper but for anyone approaching another's place. He knocked, he waited, and was just moving the key toward the lock when the door swung open.
Nina Silver stood before him, and even though she was smiling, Reuben was concerned that she was ill or freighted with that sadness that weighed people down like the muck around the mangroves, that made it so hard for them to move that they stayed in their houses, then in their rooms, and finally in their beds. With his eyes, he asked if she was all right.
By way of answer she grabbed him by his slender wrist and coaxed him across the threshold into the living room. 'Reuben,' she said, 'something wonderful has happened. Mr. Silver has come back.'
He looked at her, then past her shoulder at the blues and greens, the curves and edges of her husband's paintings. She did not seem crazy, but Reuben was afraid for her. Hadn't he served at the dead painter's memorial? Hadn't he heard the bald man with the deep voice give the eulogy?
'Come,' the former widow said, and again she took his wrist. 'I'll show you.'
Reuben's feet did not want to move, it was as if they'd been replaced by wooden skids that scraped hotly across the floor. He dreaded the moment when he would stand in the bedroom doorway and see nothing, and would know that he had lost a second friend, not to the ocean this time but to that other bottomless sea called madness. He struggled for the courage not to close his eyes.
He let himself be dragged down the hallway, and when he saw Augie Silver propped on pillows, his white beard billowing forth like foam, he did the pure and necessary thing. He fell to his knees with his chest across the returned man's bed and wept against the back of his bony hand. His tears left dark streaks on the sun-scorched skin that was white-coated with a powdery dryness. The parrot looked on and did a slow dance on its perch.
'I pray for you,' Reuben said through his weeping. 'I don't like to pray, I don't believe, but I pray for you, then I feel like I believe enough to feel bad I don't believe, so I shouldn't pray. But I pray for you, Meester Silber. I do.'
Augie put his hand on the young man's dark hair. 'You're a pal, Reuben. You're really a pal.'
He received the words like an anointment and answered with a knightly modesty. 'Yes,' he said. 'A pal for you. And for Meesus Silber too. A pal.' He stood up, wiped his eyes.
'The Cubans saved my life, you know.'
'Yes?' said Reuben. There was confusion in his heart. The Cubans were his people, and if they were kind to Mister Silver he was proud. But the Cubans were also the ones who called him maricon and made him feel cast out, who scoffed and threatened and mimicked his walk. Why was he outside the circle of their kindness?
'I'll tell you about it sometime,' Augie said, and then Nina caught Reuben's eye and gestured him out of the convalescent's room.
They went to the kitchen. Morning light was pouring in through the French doors at the back of the house. Hibiscus flowers were stretching fully open, their pistils brassy with pollen and thrust forth like silent trumpets. The dark leaves of the oleanders looked almost blue.
'Reuben,' Nina said, 'Mr. Silver has been very sick.'
The young man breathed deeply, taking the weight of his friend's illness into himself. He nodded solemnly.
'He needs a long rest, a perfect rest. And he needs someone to spend the days with him, to make sure he isn't bothered. Someone whose company he finds soothing. So I was wondering-'
'I will do it,' Reuben said.
She looked at him, began just barely to smile, then understood that a smile was not called for, would cheapen the moment. 'Maybe you should think about-'
'I will do it,' he repeated.
'But Reuben, your other jobs. You should speak to Mrs. Dugan.'
'I will tell Mrs. Dugan.'
Nina lifted her eyebrows and looked down at her cuticles. She knew Sandra Dugan slightly-a quiet woman and nobody's pushover, a recent New York transplant who ran her business as a business: She had imported to Key West the exotic notion that a person might show up to clean two weeks in a row. 'Maybe you should ask Mrs. Dugan.'
Reuben gave a philosophic shrug. 'It is no difference. If I ask and she says no, I quit. If I tell and she doesn't like that I tell, I am fired. It is the same.'
'But Reuben-'
'Meesus Silber, please. It is what I wish to do.'
And so it was agreed.
Reuben put his apron on and started to clean, humming Cuban songs. He dusted, he vacuumed, he cut flowers from the yard and arranged them neatly in porcelain vases. He was happy and proud. He had been singled out, called upon to serve, to care, to have the privilege of watching his friend grow stronger. He would watch him like a fisherman watches the sky, alert and knowing, the first to see a change, a danger. He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.
18
'Maybe it's like an Elvis sighting,' said Ray Yates. 'You know, a delusion people have to link themselves to someone famous, to feel important.'
'Our friend Augie,' said Clay Phipps, 'wasn't quite that much of a celebrity.'
'Local celebrity,' Yates countered, 'local delusion.'
The talk-show host had just finished work. His theme music, as usual, had made him thirsty, and now he was drinking with his buddies at Raul's. Overhead, misted stars showed here and there through the thinning bougainvillea. The relentless heat had baked most of the flowers away, they'd puckered up and fallen, fluttering to the ground like singed moths. What would survive the summer was mostly just a knuckly vine armed with thorns as sharp as fish hooks.
Robert Natchez took a pull on his rum, then clattered his glass onto the varnished table. The mention of Elvis had made him testy, as references to pop culture always did. Why did intelligent people gum up their brains with such garbage? How did such inane and trivial crap insinuate itself into the conversation of the sophisticated? 'Look,' he said, 'it's one more instance of the Sentinel fucking up. Why not just leave it at that?'
'You don't have to get mad,' said Clay Phipps. It was a way of egging the poet on, and it always worked.
'I do have to get mad,' he said. 'We're trying to have a civilized discussion here, and suddenly it's dragged down to the level of some Shirley MacLaine, Oprah fucking Winfrey, Nazi diet horseshit. Tabloid television. It's cheap. It's disgusting.'
Phipps sipped his Meursault, noted how its caramel low notes came forward as the wine warmed, and tried to look contrite. 'All right, Natch,' he said, 'you pick the level of discourse.'
