'You like'a heah?' said Reuben the Cuban, suspending a huge vase of lilies and orchids above the center of a long split-willow table.
Nina Alonzo-Silver stood hands on hips in the middle of her living room and weighed the arrangement with her eyes. 'Too heavy there,' she said. 'Try it over by the lamp.'
The housekeeper moved the flowers. He was a slight, wiry young man with the surprising yellowish pallor of certain Key West Cubans; he moved in a low-slung whisper like a cat or a Japanese woman, and he nearly disappeared behind the thick stems of the lilies. 'Oba heah?' he said.
The widow nodded. Then she cast an appraising glance at the buffet dishes and glasses already arrayed on the sideboard, and at her dead husband's paintings beautifully hung and immaculately lit on every wall. Through the French doors at the rear of the house, a soft blue gleam wafted up from the lights in the pool. In a big enameled cage near the door, a twitchy green parrot looked on. The widow squared a picture frame that had been perhaps a quarter-inch off-true. Then she tried to smile.
'You see, Reuben,' she said. 'It's just like getting ready for an opening.'
'Art sucks,' said the parrot. 'Johnnie Walker.' The sound was metallic and wildly abrupt, scratchy as the sand in the bird's idiot throat.
' Tranquilo, Fred,' said Reuben the Cuban.
'Cutty Sark. Where's Augie?' the parrot responded, and the widow started to cry. She made no sound. Her shoulders hunched slightly and flat streaks of wet almost instantly appeared under her slate-gray eyes.
'Noon tomorrow,' she said.
Reuben didn't understand exactly what she meant. He stood there silent, hoping to be able to help.
'Service at ten,' she said, her voice soft but without a quaver. 'No rabbi. No minister. No God. No Heaven. The way Augie would have wanted. Just some stories, some laughing, some crying, some wine. A lot of wine. Then noon.'
'Noon what?' asked Reuben.
The widow tried to smile again and the tear streaks took a sudden turn around the changed contours of her face. 'Noon tomorrow. The official unofficial time to give up hope.'
2
'Augie Silver,' intoned his best friend, Clayton Phipps, once a promising playwright, now for many years the publisher, editor, and sole contributor to a quaint little newsletter called Best Revenge. 'Augie Silver.'
Phipps paused, leaning against a makeshift lectern set up at the deep end of the dead man's pool. He let the syllables hang in the bright, clear morning air, hoping to evoke the entire miracle and tragedy of a human being through the thin yet potent fact of his name. Much underrated, the magic of a name. It was the ultimate container, the profoundest and most elegant summing-up of the passions, capacities, follies, likes and dislikes, the fears, quests, and eccentricities that made one person distinguishable from all others.
'Augie Silver.' Phipps chanted it a third time, and under a poinciana tree, very near the table with the liquor, Ray Yates elbowed Robert Natchez in the ribs.
'Only guy I know who's a more pompous asshole than you are.'
Natchez frowned his disapproval and tugged at the cuffs of another black shirt. Reuben the Cuban slunk silently among the guests, content in the belief that in pouring coffee and delivering mimosas he was paying homage to the dead husband and bringing comfort to the widow.
Perhaps a hundred fifty people had come together to honor Augie Silver's memory, and they reflected the breadth and oddness of the painter's personal democracy. The art establishment, of course, was represented. There was an editor from Picture Plane, a publication that had once dubbed the deceased 'a minor yet searing talent, achingly pure and infuriatingly unambitious.' There was the famously snide yet annoyingly accurate critic Peter Brandenburg, who years before had described Silver as 'a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll paint.' There were reviewers from the newsmagazines and from papers in New York, Chicago, and Washington. There was even a gallery owner from Paris who happened to be vacationing in South Beach.
But when, ten years before, Augie Silver had moved to Key West from Manhattan, it was with the clear intention of escaping the hothouse atmosphere of the art capitals, broadening his circle beyond the clutch of those who could do favors and those who wanted favors done. To be sure, the Key West artsy set had gravitated to him: the writers who didn't write, the sculptors who didn't sculpt, the trust-funders kept just shy of suicidal self-loathing by the mercifully untested belief that they were in some sense creative. They could be quite amusing, these constipated, deluded bohemians and hangers-on: Their vision had nowhere to go except into what they said and how they lived, and their frustrations often gave rise to piquant comments on human nature and the state of the world.
Still, it was not the Ray Yateses and Bob Natchezes who had given the greatest zest to Augie Silver's last years. It was the people who were strangers to poetry, innocent of art. It was the wharf rats like Jimmy Gibbs, half of whom had done jail time. It was the fishing captains who at first took Augie out as one more pain-in-the-ass know-nothing client, then later invited him as a soothing companion. It was the old Cubans who poled out in the back country and showed him how to dig a sponge. They too were represented at Augie's corpseless send-off. They milled shyly along the periphery, these outsiders, bashful of the canapes, made nervous by the thinness of the glassware. They wanted to pay their respects and get the hell out of this elegant backyard, but Clayton Phipps was not about to race through his moment of high praise for his friend and spotlight for himself.
'Augie Silver was the most generous man I ever knew,' said the eulogist. 'Ya know, some people decide to be generous. It occurs to them to give you something. Augie wasn't like that. He didn't decide. It just happened. It was his nature. Gifts flowed from him. He was a source, a well. Life burned in him, and he could not help but give back warmth.'
Phipps looked toward the shady place where Nina Silver was sitting, all alone. A hundred people had greeted her, many had embraced her, and yet there had remained a dread and stubborn space around her, a cuticle of passionate blankness that she would not allow to be moved aside or filled.
'Who among us,' he went on, 'does not have something of Augie's? Some remembered story, some flash of insight or shred of his wise-ass wisdom. Some taste or preference we learned from him. A sweater he gave you because you said you liked the color. A jacket he put around your shoulders because you were cold and he was not. A tool he lent and promptly forgot about, a book he thought you might like…'
Around the dead man's yard and through the open doors of his house, the mourners shifted from foot to foot, remembered, smiled privately, and glanced at each other, secretly wondering who'd gotten the sweaters, the jackets…
'And the paintings,' Clayton Phipps resumed. 'My God, the paintings! The man gave them away like they were so much scratch paper. His life's work, his livelihood, his legacy. Where did he find the strength and the humor that enabled him to take it all so lightly? 'Here,' he'd say, about a canvas that had taken him a month. 'You like it? Put it in your house.' 'Here,' he'd say with this amazing casualness. 'This little one? Sell it if you can-get your boat fixed.' 'Here, put this over your desk for luck.' 'Here, put this in your kid's room.' How many beautiful and precious paintings did Augie Silver give away? Does anybody even know?'
The question rose up over the swimming pool and hovered there. Claire Steiger, the dead man's agent, read her bankrupt husband's face and despised him for the bloodless calculations she knew were going on behind it. And she wondered if it showed in her own expression that she could not help but do some calculating too.
By 1 p.m. the speeches were over, the ice cubes were melted, the crowd had thinned, and Nina Silver had barely noticed that her promised deadline of hope had come and gone and nothing whatever had changed in her heart. She bid farewell to the dispersing guests, accepted their sincere and irrelevant sympathies, nodded to all the well-meant pledges to stay close, to see more of one another. She yearned for everyone to be gone and dreaded the moment when the house would once again be empty. Emptier than before, with no event to plan, no exquisitely small details-irises or lilies? champagne or chardonnay? — to rivet her attention. She straightened a picture frame that a departing friend had shouldered awry, then stared at the level edge to steady herself, the way a seasick man
