hurry?'
During those forty-eight hours, Augie Silver seemed quietly to break through some mysterious barrier that had been retarding his recovery. His ravaged body grew cleverer at relearning things, battered organs remembered their functions, and he felt a mute animal joy at the wonder of recuperation. That a broken thing could fix itself-this was as marvelous a fact as anything under heaven.
He began to sit outside in the mornings, before the days had grown too beastly hot. Reuben brought him coffee and fruit in the shade of the poinciana tree. Augie watched the shadows move across the yard, looked at cloud reflections in the swimming pool when the wind was very still. Sometimes he sketched-pencil drawings of flowers and shrubs, quick life studies of Reuben which he would sign with a flourish then give the young man to take home. When the sun got high, Augie would go inside to nap, and the naps now seemed like earned rest from some activity rather than a mere slipping backward into helpless exhaustion.
On the fourth of June, the convalescent had his best day yet. He ate. He drew. He strolled around his yard on legs that did not tremble. Midday, he took siesta and was ecstatically awakened by the tropical music of a fierce brief downpour clattering on the roof.
That evening, when Nina came home, there were high spirits in the house. Augie's health was a shared crusade, a common mission; everyone partook of his invigoration, as though he were a racehorse. Reuben allowed himself a flush of knightly pride in his care and vigilance. Nina's face softened, the tension in her jaw diminished as she stroked her husband's forehead and found it neither cold nor feverish.
For a little while they sat out by the pool, the three of them. Nina had a glass of wine. Reuben accepted a bit of rum. Augie asked for Scotch and was allowed a few drops in a lot of water. 'Cutty Sark,' said Fred the parrot as he perched on the back of a lawn chair.
'Bullshit,' said Augie. 'H-two-O.'
The sky dimmed and deepened to a jewel-box blue, and Reuben the Cuban got up to leave.
Augie Silver, the green parrot perched upon his shoulder, began the long slow stroll to bed.
Outside the front door, just on his right as he exited, Reuben found a small bakery box with a card taped on top. He picked it up and brought it in to Nina. 'Look what someone left,' he said.
Nina opened the card. Small neat handwriting she didn't recognize said, 'A Speedy Recovery.' Inside the little box was a single Key lime tart, the authentic kind that's yellow, not the tourist kind that's green.
'How nice,' said Nina. 'I wonder who brought it.'
Reuben shrugged and smiled. He didn't know, but it made him happy that there were others who agreed that Augie Silver was a great man and who wished him well. He said good night again and slipped away.
Nina took the tart out of the box and put it on a plate. Augie loved Key lime, anything Key lime. She was happy to get more food into him, coax another few ounces back onto his frame. She carried the treat toward the bedroom, and before she'd even reached the doorway, she sang out, 'Dessert, Augie. Someone brought dessert.'
Augie was already in bed, he had the sheet pulled hallway up his sunken white-haired chest. He'd lit the hurricane lamp on the bedside table; it cast a weird light on the parrot's belly as the bird sidestepped on its perch.
'I want to make love with you, Nina,' the painter said. 'I want to try.'
His wife swallowed, couldn't breathe, couldn't move. The last light made soft blue boxes of the windows. A barely visible wisp of smoke came through the chimney of the lamp. Nina tried to say something but Augie put a finger across his own lips and she didn't get as far as making words. They held each other's eyes a long moment, then Nina absently put the plate down on the bedside table and began to undress. She'd almost forgotten this part of nakedness: being seen, becoming ready. Lamplight played on her flanks, gleamed on her breasts and cast shadows in her hollows, and for the first time in a long time she felt beautiful.
She got into bed next to her husband. His skin was hot and taut, as if pinched and tucked against his bones, but it was still his skin, she recognized it, she nestled close against his chest. They kissed, and through his lean lips, parched and cracked, she remembered the way of his kissing, the taste of his mouth was as it had always been. He touched her and their bodies remembered things together, struggled back from loss, pain, grief, disease, redeemed each other from deadness and laughed at incapacity from the high vantage of long love.
Afterwards they cried a little in each other's arms, and after that they slept, slept so soundly that they didn't hear a scuffling as Fred the parrot came down off his perch and ate the Key lime tart, and didn't hear the feathered thump as the bird dropped stone dead on the floor.
23
Fred the dead parrot lay on Augie's side of the bed, but it was Nina who saw him first.
As she sidled sleepily to the bathroom in the half-light of 6 a.m., she glimpsed but did not recognize the stiffening bundle on the floor. It was not till the return trip back to bed that she understood what she was looking at. She squatted over the expired pet and examined it. Fred's eye was open, staring at the ceiling, the lens glassy and thick. The green feathers had pulled in neat as fish scales, and the claws were rounded down as though grasping desperately for some perch in eternity. Nina lifted the bird before figuring out exactly what she would do with it. She held it a moment, noting its fluffy, hollow-boned lightness, then put it softly on her dresser.
For herself she felt no great grief. The bird was noisy, as devoid of tact as a Parisian; the occasionally funny things it said were witless accidents and did not amuse her. But she felt a pang for Augie. She was afraid the bird's demise would depress him, would slow his recovery. As though to fortify him against the loss, she climbed back into bed and softly pressed herself against his taut dry skin.
In the dim light she had not noticed the pecked-at Key lime tart; in fact the arrival of the Get Well offering in its string-tied bakery box had been greatly overshadowed by the momentous event of making love, and she had nearly forgotten about it. She saw no great mystery in the bird's having died. Parrots were longlived creatures, but mortal, after all. Things went wrong with them, they caught viruses, succumbed to cancers, just like people. The bird had died and that was that.
Augie woke up shortly after seven. He blinked in the direction of the vacant perch but did not immediately realize anything was wrong. Nina brought him juice and coffee. To make room on his bedside table, she carried away the mutilated pastry and last night's glass of water; she was thinking about how best to break the sad news to her husband and didn't pay particular attention to the mundane chores her hands were doing.
'Coffee in bed,' Augie was saying. He was smiling, he woke up cheerful. He sipped the hot brew a little awkwardly, brown drops clung to his unruly white mustache. 'Makes it all worthwhile just to get coffee in bed-
Nina sat softly next to him and stroked his hair. 'Darling,' she said, 'something happened to Fred last night. I found him dead this morning.'
Augie frowned and sighed. He sipped coffee and looked out the bedroom window. It was a flat still morning, the breeze had yet to rouse itself, and neither plants, people, nor even lizards seemed quite awake yet either. 'Smart bird,' he said at last.
'He's here,' Nina resumed. 'Do you want to see him?'
Augie nodded, and Nina brought him the dead bird the way a mother brings a sick child a favorite doll. The painter took the rigid parrot and laid it against his shoulder. He stroked the sleek green feathers, kissed the top of the beak where the flat hard nostrils were, then stoically handed the stiff bundle back to his wife.
'Should we bury him?' Nina asked.
Augie pressed his lips together and shook his head. 'That wouldn't be doing him a favor.' In Key West, not even people got buried; their caskets were stacked three-high in concrete hurricane-resistant mausoleums. The ground was so rocky and the water table so near the surface that even shallow holes filled almost instantly with a gray seepage that oozed through the limestone like milk through a sponge, 'just wrap 'im up and toss 'im.'
Nina took the corpse to the kitchen, swaddled it in newspaper, and dropped it in the trash, where it lay oblivious among the mango peels, the coffee grounds, the squashed tart in its foil shell.
It was not until hours later, when she was at her gallery and losing herself in the savingly precise task of
