he was as self-contained as something kept in Tupperware. He didn't answer the question.
'Of course,' Claire Steiger goaded, 'it was really your review that got the whole thing rolling. Is that what's bothering you, Peter?'
'I stand by my review,' the critic said. 'Well, then,' said Kip Cunningham. Brandenburg turned petulant. 'I just don't want to feel that I've been duped. And I don't want to feel that I've been party to a hoax.'
Augie's agent ate the filbert on her coaster. 'Peter, Peter, I swear to you I've tried to get to the bottom of this. I called the house. The houseboy answers, acts like he doesn't speak English. I tried Nina at the gallery. She's got the answering machine on, she's screening calls, she hasn't called me back. She's still angry about the retrospective. I doubt she even knows about the auction-'
'Sotheby's has a certain aversion to scandal,' said Brandenburg. 'I can see reputations destroyed. I can see the whole thing blowing up.'
Claire reached out and took the critic's hand. It was not a gesture of kindness: She'd noticed many times that Peter Brandenburg did not like to be touched, it only made him jumpier. 'Peter, I assure you this is not a hoax. The tone set by your review-'
Kip Cunningham waited a beat, then reached out and patted Brandenburg's wrist. 'We've got to wind you down, old boy. A squash game and a good long steam. Whaddya say? Tomorrow, four o'clock?'
Augie Silver was feeling slightly stronger, his progress measured in the small, sweet, private victories of the convalescent.
He discovered that if he rested his eyes, just closed them for a few deep breaths now and then, it was much easier to stay awake for more than several hours at a time. He could read, could hold a book and sometimes concentrate. He found that if he stood up slowly, very slowly, he could keep enough blood in his brain so that his vision didn't go blank around the edges, so that he hardly felt the ocean dizziness anymore.
He began to wean himself off broth and return to solid food-soft food, like the peeled, sliced mangoes Reuben the Cuban was bringing to him on a tray.
'Meester Silber?' he said quietly, having softly knocked on the frame of the open bedroom door.
'Come in, Reuben,' said the painter. 'And Reuben, would you stop it already with the Meester Silber bullshit?'
The young man did not answer until he'd smoothed the convalescent's sheets so that the tray fit neatly over them and didn't pull. 'Please, Meester Silber, it is a respect.'
'I know it is, but that kind of respect I don't need. I want you to call me Augie.'
Reuben folded his hands in front of him and looked down at the floor. Then his eye was caught by the vase of flowers at Augie Silver's bedside. The morning's hibiscus blooms were starting to curl; he'd replace them with sprigs of jasmine before he left.
'Awk,' said Fred the parrot. 'J amp;B. Where's Augie?'
'Ya see, Reuben, even the goddamn bird calls me Augie.'
At this the young man could not help smiling shyly. The parrot was a crazy bird. And Reuben liked it when Mister Silver cursed, he wasn't sure why. Maybe because when other men cursed, cursed in English or in Spanish, there was anger in it, and mockery, and violence. But Mister Silver cursed like telling a joke, like whistling a song, it was not about anger, but freedom.
'So come on, say it: Augie.'
Reuben hesitated. To say a name was no small thing. It carried a weight, an honor. It was a kind of touch. He took a breath, then looked the painter in the eye. It was a bolder look than he had ever cast at Mister Silver and he found it not much less difficult than looking at the sun, but he knew in his heart that the saying of a name should go together with a look like that, a look with nothing hidden. 'Augie,' he softly said.
'Bravo,' the painter answered, dimly aware that this leap into informality, into the first chamber of intimacy, was as much a victory for Reuben as was conquering solid food for him. 'Now siddown.'
He nodded toward the bedside chair, and Reuben the Cuban didn't budge. A breeze rustled the palm fronds, they scratched at the tin roofs of Olivia Street. The wet smell of mango wafted up from the tray and mingled with the baked aromas of cracked sidewalks and softening streets after a day of blistering heat.
'Reuben, you're here to keep me company. So keep me company, goddamnit. You need a written invitation?'
Again the painter gestured toward the chair, and Reuben glanced at it as though he were standing on a high-dive platform looking down at a bucket of water.
'What the hell is this about?' Augie asked. 'Is it just because you work for us? Because I'm an old fart with white hair? You think we're fancy people? What?'
Reuben shuffled his feet. He glanced at Fred the parrot. For reasons known only to itself, the bird had ruffled its feathers and the lifted edges cast purple shadows against the green. Instead of answering the question, Reuben softly said, 'You really want me to sit with you, Augie?'
'Christ, Reuben. Yes.'
Lightly, gracefully, the willowy young man settled on the edge of the chair. He didn't sit, he perched, an apron across his thighs, most of his weight still carried on the balls of his feet. 'Augie,' he said, 'the reason it is hard for me to sit with you, it is none of the things you say. It is because I think you are a great man.'
Either Augie Silver put down a sliver of mango or the wet fruit slithered through his fingers. 'Ah, bullshit,' he said, and Reuben the Cuban could not help smiling shyly.
21
On the stroll up Olivia Street, Clay Phipps counted seventeen cats and eleven dogs. The cats were nearly all in motion-skulking over hot curbstones and slinking through the latticework under porches, stalking palmetto bugs or just being sneaky for the hell of it. The dogs tended to be princely still-laid out on the pavement with their chins on their crossed paws, panting softly, contentedly drooling, fixing passersby with the flatteringly interested glances that canines turn on humans. The day had been cloudless, with an odd desiccating wind from the east. The cactuses were gloating, they seemed to stand up straighter and taller as the palms drooped and the poincianas let their feathery leaves hang down lank as Asian hair. Finger-sized lizards clung to tree trunks and climbed the pocked sides of coral rocks; they were brown, gray, invisible until sex or vanity got the best of them and they puffed up their scarlet throat sacs, making themselves impressive and absurd.
Clay Phipps was not ordinarily a rapt observer of dogs and cats, plants and lizards. But this evening he was trying, with mixed success, to distract himself from the errand he was on. It was, on the face of it, a simple mission, potentially a joyous one, yet Phipps could bring himself to feel no joy. Everything had gotten too screwed up in his feelings toward Augie Silver, his feelings toward himself. Everything made him feel ashamed. He had tried to seduce the woman he took for Augie's widow but who may have been his wife. He was selling, at the first opportunity and with hardly a moment's hesitation, the paintings Augie had given him as tokens of their friendship.
Why was he so willing, secretly eager even, to part with those canvases? There was, of course, the nasty vulgar business of the money. It was fatiguing, a high-wire strain to live wealthily year after year while having, in fact, so little cash, so little real security. His newsletter could go out of fashion, the perks and freebies could dry up, and that would be the end of the amber-edged Bordeaux, the turreted hotel rooms. What would he do with himself? Minus the trappings, Clay Phipps would look to all the world like the small-timer, the perennial freeloader, the facile lightweight he suspected himself to be.
That was why he was secretly relieved to have Augie Silver's paintings off his walls: The pictures, like almost everything else to do with Augie, had come to seem a reproach to him, a reminder of how he'd gypped himself for want of nerve, shortchanged his life in the name of doing what was easy. They'd been earnest young artists together, Clay and Augie had. Augie had stuck to his work and eventually won through to mastery, while Clay had given up on the slow salvation of writing plays and used his skill to carve himself a blithe and cushy niche. They'd been bachelors together back when being a bachelor was rambunctious, ribald fun.
Augie had emerged from the debauch with the mysterious readiness for love, for marriage; Clay had not
