stayed overtime because he thought it might be a comfort to the widow to have someone there when she arrived. She might need something moved. She might need an errand run. There might be any number of things that needed doing, and Reuben wanted to be the person to do them if he could.
Nina moved slowly into the house, still waiting for her pulse to slow.
Fred the parrot greeted her. 'Awk. Jack Daniel's. Where's Augie?'
The widow sat on the edge of the sofa. Her legs were warm from biking, and the upholstery felt good. 'Someday,' she said, 'I'm going to strangle that bird.'
Reuben the Cuban reached up and put a glass on a high shelf. Then he moved gracefully to Fred's cage and offered the parrot a knuckle to peck. 'Thees bird, he love you and Meester Silber too. He not try to make you feel bad.'
Nina kicked off her shoes and reflected that there are people who think the worst and people who think the best. Even about parrots. 'You're a very kind person, Reuben.'
The young man absorbed the compliment with great solemnity. He'd glided back to the kitchen and was now buffing flatware and putting it away. He took care not to mar the moment by jangling forks and knives.
The widow leaned back on the sofa and let her head fall against the top of the cushion. The light in the living room was so soft it had turned grainy; the brighter glow from the kitchen made the house seem cozy and safe, inviolable. Nina was ready to think about the day just ending. 'Reuben,' she said softly, 'what's a friend? What do you think a friend is, Reuben?'
The young Cuban dropped his cloth, pondered a moment, then absently began polishing the countertop with slow round movements. He hadn't known a lot of friendship in his life. He had a father who was so ashamed of him that Reuben couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the old man's eyes, and a mother who claimed to love him but was always praying on her swollen knees for a miracle that would make him other than he was. He had a brother who'd promised to kill him if he showed his faggot face in certain places, and he'd had lovers who had promised him romance and devotion, then easily cast him aside. He was too bashful and unfinished to be at ease among the smart, theatric Old Town gays, too tender and too dignified to seek solace in the shadowy places where lonely young men collided. In Key West, a town that prides itself on having room for everyone, there didn't seem to be a spot for him.
But there is as much wisdom in pure yearning as in flawed experience, and on the subject of friendship Reuben had strongly held beliefs. 'A friend,' he said, 'is when you cry, the tears fall in his heart. When he laughs, it is bread and wine, it is like food, enough for happiness. A friend, you would do anything, you would look for more that you could do, you would watch the world like a fisherman watches the sky to see if there is danger, to keep your friend safe by watching closely-'
The housekeeper suddenly broke off. He was unaccustomed to talking so much; he was still making slow circles with the dishcloth. In the dark living room, Nina Silver had become a silhouette, a still dim outline against the furniture. 'You ask a lot,' she said. 'Of yourself.'
'Yes,' said Reuben.
'You should,' said the widow. Then she thought of certain people with whom her life had been very much involved and whose goodwill she was each day less sure that she could trust. 'Only… only, if you ask so much of a friend, I'm not sure anyone really has one. I don't feel that I do.'
Reuben the Cuban fretted with his dish towel, closed the drawer that held the flatware. He pressed his teeth together to keep his face composed but his heart was wild with a secret, modest pride, the knightly ecstasy of one who stands ready to do all and asks nothing in return. 'You do,' he said, leaning just slightly across the kitchen counter. 'You do, Meesus Silber.'
8
'So this Steiger woman,' said Ray Yates. 'She call you?'
Clayton Phipps took a small sip of extremely nasty white wine and silently cursed himself for being talked into slumming at the Clove Hitch bar. It was well and good for Yates to play out this man-of-the-people routine; he had to, being a radio host, a local personality. But why should Phipps have to subject himself to this resinous, oxidized fluid out of a green gallon screw-top jug with an ear? 'Yes,' the connoisseur said reluctantly. 'She called.'
'She want your paintings?' Yates pressed.
'She wants to show my paintings,' Phipps corrected. 'There's an understanding that it's strictly NFS.'
'NFS,' muttered Robert Natchez, who was sitting on Phipps's other side. Like most pretentious people, the poet was uncannily sensitive to pretension in others, it irritated him like sand in the mesh cup of a bathing suit. 'Goddamnit, Clay, can't you just say 'not for sale' like a normal human being?'
Phipps shrugged. The whole subject of the paintings made him highly uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him feel as nasty as the wine. 'O.K., Natch,' he said. 'Not for sale. Like your journals.'
There was a pause. The three friends blinked across the glare of Garrison Bight and watched the charter boats straggle in, their practiced captains working shifters and throttles to back them into their slips with swagger. Red and seasick tourists gathered at the sterns, jockeying for position to be the first ones back on land. Pelicans sat in the water, still as bathtub toys, cormorants stood on pilings and spread their prehistoric wings to dry.
'How many paintings ya got?' asked Ray Yates.
The question fell just as Clay Phipps had let himself imagine that the topic of Augie's canvases was closed, and for all Yates's efforts to sound offhanded, there was something inherently rude, salacious even, about the inquiry, like casually asking someone the length of his dick or the amount of money in his Keogh plan.
There had always been a certain competitiveness among Augie Silver's friends. It stemmed from the fact that they all admired Augie more than they did each other, and more than they did themselves. There was something about the man that made it seem crucial to be liked by him. He was a natural arbiter, he conferred esteem the way a king grants titles of nobility, and his favor suggested not just personal preference but fundamental worth. In the matter of gift paintings, his favor could also confer large amounts of cold cash, but that was something no one wanted to be crude enough to be the first to mention.
'Six,' said Clayton Phipps. He said it softly, shyly even, looking down at his cheap scratched wineglass, yet could not quite squelch a nervous smile, a hint of bragging.
'Six!' said Ray Yates. His voice was also soft, but an octave above its usual smooth range.
'Three large, three small,' Phipps went on. It seemed he'd decided to make a full disclosure of his holdings and have it over with. 'Three oils, one acrylic, two watercolors. Done over a span of twenty years.'
'You sound like a fucking exhibition catalogue,' groused Robert Natchez.
Phipps did not immediately answer. He glanced across the pier, saw fishermen hanging grouper on scales and nailing angry-eyed barracuda onto posts. Jealousy. He knew he was dealing with Natchez's scattershot corrosive jealousy and that the higher course would be to let it slide. But lately Phipps's higher impulses had been consistently losing out. Augie's death, his rebuff at the gentle but definite hands of Augie's widow-things like that made him weary of the vigilance it took to be dignified. 'How many d'you have?' he taunted Natchez.
'Just the one. You know that.'
'Ah. It's one of the nicer of the small ones.'
'I have two,' Ray Yates volunteered. 'A good-size oil on the boat and a little watercolor I hung at the studio.'
'Take it home, Ray,' said Natchez bitterly. 'It's gonna be worth money.'
Money. So there it was. The unholy word was dropped like a plateful of soup and was as hard to ignore as a food stain on a tie, but the other two men strove gamely to ignore it. They sipped their drinks, glanced around them at the bar beginning to fill up now with boat crews and returning sailors. The sun was low enough that there were hems of pink on the bottoms of the puffy clouds.
'So Clay,' said Yates, 'you gonna send your paintings?'
'I haven't decided,' said Phipps, though in fact he had. 'I just wish I was surer what Augie would want.'
'What Augie would want,' Yates said, 'is not to be dead.'
To this, the two men clinked their smudged and murky glasses. It was the sort of comradely gesture they
