"Coffee?" he said, and walked through the living room toward the counter. She glanced at the coffee maker and noticed that the red brew light was flickering, blinking like a buoy at sea. She watched Augie walk, and though his walk was casual, shuffling as always, he became more insubstantial with each step, his form flattening, his feet in less secure contact with the floor, and the sleeping Nina felt him slipping away yet again. With the dreamer's comforting illusion that she could choose, she wrestled with the choice of waking up to dream-capture him before he had vanished, or staying asleep and willing him not to fade, willing him to explain but most of all to keep existing. "Just a cup of coffee," she said in the dream, and in her empty bedroom the words came out only as a soft mumble that woke her up. She opened her eyes, lifted onto her elbows for just a moment, and tried to memorize this most recent visit with her husband. He'd looked so handsome coming through the door.
5
Jimmy Gibbs pushed the point of his knife into the anus of a six-pound mutton snapper and slit its belly to the arc of bone beneath its jaw. Absently, he felt the fish deflate, then reached into the body cavity and plucked out the guts. Tubes and membranes, red nodes and green sacs came away in his hand, and he flung them into the shallow water shimmering with fish oil. It was a measure of Jimmy Gibbs's mood, where he flung the guts. When he was happy, feeling benign, he tossed them in the air so the wheeling gulls could snag the unspeakable morsels from the sky. When he was feeling foul, he threw the slimy viscera into Garrison Bight and made the squawking, miserable scavengers dunk for them.
Today Jimmy Gibbs was feeling especially foul. His back hurt. His hands were stiff, his fingers crosshatched with tiny cuts from spiny fish fins, edges of scales, other people's hooks. He had complaining knees, a swollen liver, a weakening bladder, and he was too damn old to be a mate on someone else's boat. Fifty-two, and a beat-up fifty-two at that. Living in a trailer; driving an ancient pickup that sifted rust every time he closed the door; and having something under nine hundred dollars of cash money in the bank. He yanked the innards out of another fish and swept them disgustedly off his cleaning table. They left behind a bloody and slightly iridescent smear.
"Whole or fillet?" Gibbs said to the tourist who, with a great deal of help and plenty of coaching, had managed to catch some fish. The tourist just stood there blankly. Was it too fucking difficult a question? Was it unthinkable that the tourist, God forbid, might sometime have to eat something with a bone in it? It was five o'clock, the sun was still hot, and Jimmy Gibbs had two more buckets of dead fish to clean.
"Fillet," the tourist said at last; and with more force than was required, Gibbs slashed the glistening flesh away from the pliant backbones. The tourist reached a clean hand into a clean pocket and came up with a dollar. He took his fish fillets in a plastic bag and dropped the bill onto the cleaning table, where it soaked up some slime. It was breezy on the dock but the dollar didn't blow away because fish stuff was gluing it to the plywood.
Gibbs looked down at the bill. What the fuck was a dollar? Two-thirds of a beer. Three quarts of gas. One three-hundredth of his rent. Nothing that would last the evening. Gibbs's hairline itched. He raked his forearm across it, then took a moment to look up and down the dock at the Key West charter fleet. There were maybe thirty boats that cost an average, say, of eighty thousand bucks apiece. Fuck had all that money come from? Some of it, Gibbs knew, was drug money. Well, O.K., people would do what they had to do, and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot. Some of it had come from land that the old families, the real Conchs, sold off to developers for what seemed at first vast sums then always turned out to be a lousy deal, a deal that ate the soul. Then of course there were the guys who acted like big shots but were really hired help, the paid captains with the silent partners in Dallas, Atlanta, or New York. They'd use the boat a week or two, these money guys, and take most of the profits the rest of the time. They liked the idea of being able to say they had a fishing boat in Key West. My boat. My captain. My crew. It gave them a hard-on, they could run around all thinking they were little Hemingways.
Gibbs reached into a bucket, grabbed a grouper by the tail, slapped it onto the cleaning table, and stabbed and slashed it open. He'd almost bought a boat once, Jimmy had. It was during the recession that most people hardly remembered, '81-'82, when business stank, no one was making money, and the market was flooded with bargains. There was an old Bertram, thirty-one feet, twin gas inboards, worth a good forty grand and going begging at twenty-seven. Back then, Jimmy Gibbs had five thousand dollars put away, the proceeds of some discreet transporting of bales of marijuana He'd put on a fresh blue shirt and jeans with a crease and gone to the bank to borrow the rest.
The banker was a realist. "Lotta guys, Jimmy, they think a charter boat's a money machine, think once ya got the boat, everything is easy. Not true. Things go wrong. There's a lousy season. Ya get sick. Someone breaks a leg and sues. A lotta guys can't cut it. And we take the boats back, Jimmy. Don't think for a second we don't. It's embarrassing, it makes you crazy mad, and you can't ever borrow money again. You sure ya wanna try?"
Gibbs yanked the guts out of the grouper, flicked off a loop of purplish intestine that was clinging to his finger. He had been sure he wanted the loan, until he came to the part of the application that asked if he'd ever been convicted of a felony. "I gotta answer this?" he'd asked.
The banker had folded his hands, dropped his voice, and put on an expression that was a mixture of concern and grisly curiosity. "Jimmy, we're a local bank. You're a local guy from a local family. Up to a point, we're very understanding. . . . What you did, how bad was it?"
Gibbs slid the hollowed grouper to the edge of the cleaning table and plunged into the bucket for a yellowtail. It had already begun to curl and grow rigid, he had to flatten it with one hand while puncturing its belly. Jimmy Gibbs didn't go around telling people what he'd done as a younger man with a vicious temper and a stock of grievances close-packed as a seaman's trunk. He'd told the banker he'd finish the application at home. Then he'd left, crumpled up the paper in the parking lot, dropped it in the trash, gone out and gotten shit-face drunk, and that was as close as he'd come to owning a boat. Now he reached into the yellowtail and felt its gelatinous organs turn to a warm paste between his fingers.
"Whole or fillet?" he said to the tourist who owned the gutted fish.
The tourist was short and sunburned and had white cream on his lips. "Lemme ask the wife," he said, and he turned away to find her.
Jimmy Gibbs stood there, the hot sun on the back of his neck, his nicked fingers smarting from the salt and the drying fish blood, and the hand that held the filleting knife was twitching as he waited.
"How 'bout you, cap'n?" he asked the next know-nothing fisherman down the line. It seemed that Jimmy Gibbs couldn't wait to plunge his blade back into something. "How you want them snappers?"
6
"It's as good a system as any other," said Ray Yates, stepping gingerly through the kennel area at the Stock Island dog track between the evening's sixth and seventh races.
"It's asinine," said Robert Natchez. Natchez, a fastidious man, picked his footfalls even more carefully than his friend. He was wearing black sneakers, black jeans, black T-shirt, and black blazer.
Around the two men, nervous greyhounds, their limbs taut as frogs' legs, their gleaming fur given a hellish orange cast by the strange stadium lights, were being led out of their pens. Handlers stroked their lean flanks and petted their bony heads while fitting on their numbers. The dogs pranced, high-stepping as carousel horses frozen in the glory of full gait. Now and then one of the animals would pause, sniff the ground, lower its elegantly rippling haunches, fix the nearest human with a gaze of sympathetic candor, and take a dump.
When that happened, Ray Yates would reach for his program and check the dog's name against its number. "There's your winner," he'd confidently say to Natchez. "A lighter dog is a faster dog."
'That hasn't proven
true so far," Natchez pointed out. The information wafted gently over the radio host without putting the slightest dent in his certainty.
Back in the grandstand, the audience of hard-core bettors, bored locals, and ragtag tourists waited for the next grim pursuit of Swifty the mechanical rabbit. Beauty parlor blondes, their lobes stretched tribal-style by weighty jangling earrings, sucked powdery whiskey sours through straws. Fat men in the inevitable plaids smoked Cuban cigars that had been bought with a wink in Miami. The night sky was reduced to a hazy black bowl above the pink glare of the floods.
"Gimme two dollars on number seven," said Robert Natchez. He didn't quite know why he'd agreed to accompany Ray Yates to the track, this place of shit and greed. He'd told himself the artist should see everything, however tawdry. But Key West offered abundant seaminess, squalor, pathos, and depravity without the need of going to the dogs.
Yates glanced at his annotated program. "Number seven didn't go," he advised.
"Maybe he runs better constipated," Natchez said. "I'll take my chances."
The more systematic bettor shrugged. "My two simoleons are going on the lighter number four."
Yates took Natchez's money and went to place the bets. Low to the ground and purposeful, he bulled through the milling crowd, his palm-tree shirt just slightly damp with sweat. A queasy and familiar excitement overtook him as he neared the barred, illicit cashier's window. The excitement started as a tickle at the backs of his knees, then became a not unpleasant burning in his stomach. The burning transformed itself to a twinge in his loins followed by a pulsing in the veins of his neck. Now he stood directly in front of the dead-faced woman who punched the pari-mutuel machine and his mouth was dry. He took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure that Robert Natchez, his closest friend, had not for some reason followed him. Then, with fingers that were not quite steady, he reached across and placed a two-dollar bet on number seven and bought another hundred dollars' worth of losing tickets for himself.
Later, after nine dull races and a nightcap under the bougainvillea at Raul's, Robert Natchez returned to his small apartment to do some work. He had a grant application to complete. And maybe, he admitted to himself, that was the real reason he'd agreed to waste the evening at the track: to avoid yet another confrontation with the inane, insulting, subtly humiliating questions on yet another grant form. He'd applied for them all at one time or another. National Endowment. Florida Arts Council. Southeastern Poetry Foundation. They all asked, in their polite and neutered institutional prose, why he wanted the grant. Morons! How about to eat? They all wanted to know what he would bring to the program. On this question, Natchez's colossal arrogance contended with his fragile sense of decorum. When decorum lost out, he'd submit answers like "a bracingly fresh approach to language coupled with a masterful grasp of poetic form and an emotional intensity reminiscent of Pound." To go on record with a self-evaluation like that and still not get the grant was a distressing experience.
Even on those rare occasions when the funding came through, the result was generally depressing. Three thousand dollars to drag himself around the flat and endless state of Florida giving poetry workshops to baffled, nose-picking, germ-carrying first-graders in the public schools. Two thousand to read soothing verses to frothing schizophrenics in county nuthouses, to dozing oldsters in their rubber-sheeted beds. So worthy, these foundation projects, and so futile and bad-paying. Though Robert Natchez could never have brought himself to acknowledge it, they made him feel like a runt kitten still burrowing blindly toward some grudging public tit while his more robust and savvy peers had opened their eyes, stretched their legs, and set out to stalk their destinies in the wider world.
The poet picked up his pen, angled the application in the pool of yellow lamplight in front of him, and stared at the wall.
The wall was of dark wood, old Dade County pine. Dade County pine was purportedly termite-proof, but Natchez's walls were riddled with tiny holes, out of which, on windy days or when a plane went over especially low, flew termite droppings slightly smaller than poppy seeds. It had become second nature to Natchez to begin work by shaking the pellets off his papers and into the trash.
He'd had the apartment eighteen years, an astonishing tenure in transient Key West. At first it had seemed the perfect writer's garret. Not the classical northern garret of Dostoyevsky or La Boheme: no snow climbing up the windowpanes, no burning of timeless manuscripts for a few moments' warmth. This was a tropical garret. It had a moist, rank, generative smell from the rotting leaves in the vacant lot next door; from that lot, as well, came feral sounds of rutting cats and the brainless clucking of runaway chickens that led unimaginable lives and sometimes laid eggs in the undergrowth. As the setting was funky, so was the furniture—rickety wicker, cracked and squeaky rattan, end tables found by chance, thrift-shop lamps of cheap archaic charm.
Women loved the place—or used to. Lank-haired and blithe, they came to him easily in the early years, drawn by the aura of the pure and struggling artist. They were won over by the chipped coffee cups, content to get politely plastered on syrupy Liebfraumilch or vinegary Bardolino swigged from glasses that had formerly held grated supermarket parmesan. And when Natchez had a poem accepted at one of the little magazines and a check for fifteen or twenty-five dollars arrived, there was cause for pride and celebration.
Then the eighties descended and the honor went out of being poor. Women no longer seemed titillated at the thought of sleeping in Robert Natchez's platform bed that one had to crawl across to reach the john. Inconveniently, the poet passed the age of forty, and season by season his image slipped from that of someone very intriguing to that of someone not quite suitable. His apartment underwent a similarly discouraging change. It was no longer cozy; it was cramped. It was no longer quaint; it was dark, musty, and held a perennial and unromantic whiff of mildew.
"My God, man," Augie Silver had said to him the very first time he visited, "you need a window."
So Augie went home and painted him one. It was a canvas full of fight and air, with suggestions of brilliant sky, hints of spring-green lawn, a calm movement running through it as of wind-tossed fronds. It was the cheeriest object by far in Natchez's apartment and had recently become by a vast margin the most valuable.
The poet looked over at it now, dropped his pen, and turned his thoughts to the dead painter. There is an awe spiked with envy and verging on hatred that those for whom life is difficult feel for those to whom life comes easily. And life, or so it seemed, had come easily to Augie Silver. He didn't agonize about painting; he painted. He didn't agonize about quitting; he quit. He had with his wife the sort of apparently effortless contentment that is the steadiest form of affection and regard, and that remains an utter mystery to those outside of it. He made enough money and, perversely, seemed to make more the less he worked.
And he wasn't, even by his own assessment, a major artist. That was the part that nettled Natchez, or that justified his pique. To the great artist, much was allowed, maybe everything; that was basic. But why should Augie Silver—a gifted dauber, a freakishly facile lightweight—have been admired, fawned on, taken seriously, while Natchez, who knew beyond a doubt that he was an important poet, a major voice, was still filling out applications like a goddamn high school senior? Where was the justice in it? He burned to know.
Disgusted, feeling wronged and righteous, Natchez pushed aside the grant forms, switched off his desk light, and walked the one step to the kitchenette to pour a glass of rum. Justice. It mattered deeply to Robert Natchez, 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 a
sked. 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.
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