as it matters to all profoundly frustrated people. As long as they themselves are the ones defining what is just and, in fantasy at least, the ones with the awful power to see that every person ends up as he deserves.
7
'Darling, how are you?' asked Claire Steiger.
Nina Silver briefly hesitated at her end of the phone line. How was she? Only lately had the widow noticed how often and offhandedly this bedeviling little question was asked. Take it seriously, and it was intimate as a bath. 'I'm as well as I can be, Claire. How are you?'
'Me?' She sounded faintly surprised at the inquiry, but that, Nina reflected, was Claire. It was axiomatic that she was fine. The self-made woman who'd opened a dinky exhibition space in a side-street storefront, given it the grand name Ars Longa, and in less than a decade turned it into one of New York's most formidable taste-making galleries. Who'd snagged herself a square-jawed husband from among the East Side's thin crop of croquet-playing, equestrian bluebloods. Who'd done all this, moreover, without independent wealth or the cheap currency of great beauty or any particular genius except a genius for reaching the end point of her wishes. 'Very busy. Hectic… It was a lovely memorial the other week.'
What did one say to this? Thank you for approving of my taste in mourning? Nina had years ago stopped competing with her former boss on issues of style and refinement, had stopped competing with anyone about anything. She kept silent and looked around her own modest premises, the Vita Brevis Gallery. Augie had suggested the name over a bottle of champagne, and it had proven irresistible. It was a sweet space, the Vita Brevis, pine- floored and washed in north light, and its overhead was low enough that Nina Silver could turn a profit while showing exactly what she pleased. With modesty of aims came freedom. That was something Nina's former colleagues in New York found it difficult to understand.
'Nina,' Claire Steiger resumed, 'let me tell you why I'm calling. I'm mounting a show of Augie's work. A retrospective.'
The news should hardly have shocked the widow. This was how it happened: A painter died, and after a brief interval came a show, a look back, a reconsideration of the work, now that the work was finished. But usually when a painter died it was clearer he was dead. There was a body. There was a chance to look down at the dead face and confirm that it was lifeless, an opportunity to lay one's cheek against the still chest and convince oneself that it was void of breath. There was the final sound of tossed dirt crunching down on a lowered coffin. Nina Silver felt a moment of bewilderment and mistrust. It seemed to her that people were conspiring in some sadistic hoax to persuade her that her husband wasn't coming back-when in her heart, against all evidence and all rules of the natural world, she yet believed he was. She saw him, after all, nearly every night, his ruddy face flush with life, his meandering step as full of curiosity as ever… The widow groped for something to say, something that would reconnect her with the ordinary waking world in which plans were made, things decided.
'But Claire,' she managed. 'Nothing's settled. The estate-'
'Nothing will be for sale,' said Augie Silver's agent. 'Nina, the show is meant as an homage, a tribute.'
Again the widow was stopped short. Claire Steiger was a merchant, not a curator; she showed paintings to sell paintings, and it had not occurred to Nina that the precious square footage of Ars Longa might be given over simply to the admiration of canvases. The widow felt remorse. Was she already slipping into bitterness, beginning to assume that everything was a sham, a cheat, just because her own life had been cheated? 'Claire,' she said, 'I suppose I should be grateful. It's just that-'
'Just what, darling?'
'I don't know. It seems so soon.' Even as Nina was saying the words, she knew they were beside the point. Twenty years from now it would still seem soon.
'Nina, listen, I understand that everything feels very new right now, very raw. But this show will be a celebration-the kind of big overview that Augie would have wanted.'
'I don't think Augie wanted that,' said Nina, and a flash of suspicion again arced through her brain. Living artists had a lot to say about when, where, and how they were shown; dead artists were not consulted. Someone had to step in and tell the world what the painter would have wanted. That someone was usually a dealer, and mysteriously, what the painter would have wanted fit in very neatly with a marketing plan. 'Claire,' the widow said, 'I don't think I like this.'
The proprietor of the Ars Longa Gallery looked out her office window at the springtime bustle of 57th Street, the veering taxis and recession-proof limos. Over the years, she'd developed a very versatile and effective stratagem for avoiding arguments. When a disagreement loomed, she simply ignored it and went on to announce her intentions. 'The gallery has seventeen major works on hand,' she told Nina Silver. 'Collectors have so far agreed to lend another dozen. If you'd consent to lend the canvases you have, we'd of course pay shipping and insur-'
'Claire, this is all just business, isn't it? This is no homage, no tribute.'
'Nina, your husband's reputation-'
'My husband doesn't-didn't-particularly give a damn about his reputation. I think we agree that was part of his charm.'
'We can't all afford to be quite so cavalier about it, Nina. Let's be professional here, shall we? As Augie's agent, I'm asking you to lend the paintings. Will you?'
'No.'
'I'll ask another time, when you're less upset.'
'Don't bother, Claire.'
'And one more thing, Nina. Did Augie in fact make no pictures at all the last three years? Was he perhaps working quietly-'
Nina Silver hung up the phone. She didn't slam it down, didn't even drop it with particular suddenness. She placed it gently in its cradle, crossed her arms against her midriff, and blew out a long slow breath.
On 57th Street, Claire Steiger stared blankly at the dead receiver in her hand and wondered for just a moment if her unaccustomed desperation had led her to a rare strategic blunder. But she allowed herself little time to linger on the question. She had other calls to make.
Nina Silver, like most Key Westers, went most places by bicycle.
Her bike was an old fat-tire one-speed, powder blue, with a corroded wire basket and a rusted bell whose clapper stuck after three weak and un-resounding taps against its casing. She'd had the bike eight years and found it a perennial source of mind-easing delight. It wasn't that the bike reminded her of childhood; rather, it leavened her notion of what it was to be a grownup. It was impossible to take oneself too seriously while astride an old fat- tire bike. The world, and the sense of one's place in it, came back to scale and flooded in as one pedaled by at eight miles an hour, with a vantage point some four feet off the ground.
As the widow cruised slowly up Olivia Street, the sun's last low rays were slanting in from the Gulf side of the island, and the light was so soft yet compelling that the pink and red oleanders seemed not shined upon but fired from within. Confident dogs sprawled in the street, serenely nestled against the tires of parked cars. Stray cats missing patches of fur and pieces of ears mixed democratically with brushed pets in the shady places under porch stairs. Amorous doves puffed up on wires and hopefully sang out: ta-fee-ya, ta-keeya. And with a sometimes audible creaking and squeaking, the old wooden houses of Key West began to recover from the daytime baking that had swelled their window frames and bowed their doorjambs, made their beams and joists as painfully taut as a fat man's ankles.
Nina chained her bike and climbed the three front stairs, took a last look across her porch rail at the splendid light, and slipped her key into the lock. She was a half-step into her living room, looking down as she replaced her key ring in her bag, when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a male form in the kitchen. Her feet froze, her throat clamped shut as if squeezed by a cold hand, her heart stalled and then began to hammer.
It was Reuben the Cuban.
He was standing at the counter, a dish towel in his hand, drying glasses. 'Hello, Meesus Silber,' he said. 'I run berry late today.'
This was a lie. Reuben never ran late. But on Tuesdays, the day he cleaned the Silvers' house, he often
