Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  Barnett blinked. This was the first he'd heard about Jimmy Gibbs buying the boat and he set it down to his former first mate's desperate swagger. "We'll talk about that some other time," he said, as softly as before. "For right now you better hit the road."

  The skipper nodded and the two guys holding Jimmy Gibbs moved him out, squeezing tight against his sides like prison guards as they walked him to his rusty truck.

  20

  "You know what they're starting to say," said Peter Brandenburg, the art critic for Manhattan magazine. "They're starting to say the whole thing—his disappearance, the retrospective, this supposed miracle return—was one big cheap publicity stunt."

  "That's ridiculous," said Claire Steiger.

  "Absurd," put in Kip Cunningham.

  "Is it?" Brandenburg prodded, and he lifted his martini. For his money, which it rarely was, Coco's Bar at the Hotel France still made the best cocktail in town. The classic glass alone made it worth the seven dollars. And there were no peanuts in the mix served up in heaping cut-glass bowls. Only the more aristocratic nuts: pecans with perfect cleavage, brazils like small canoes, cashews curled like salted shrimp.

  "Think about it," the critic resumed. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, then plucked at the neckline of his woven silk vest. "You've got a painter who hasn't painted in three years. Who knows if he can paint anymore? He dies and he's suddenly a star. A speculative frenzy kicks in. Then, just when the momentum is perhaps beginning to slow, there's a dramatic new twist: a rumor that he's back! Really, doesn't it seem—"

  "Seem what?" Claire Steiger cut him off. Her fingers reached toward the nut bowl and grabbed a couple of depth charges of sodium and fat. She chomped a walnut, then seemed to realize what she was doing and dropped a filbert onto her coaster.

  "Convenient," said Brandenburg, and he managed to make the word sound dirty.

  "It's hardly convenient," said Augie Silver's agent. "Peter, you remember what happened to prices when Warhol died, when Rothko killed himself. They take a huge leap, we all know that. If it turns out he's alive—" "Alive, not alive," said Brandenburg impatiently. "I'm telling you that people are suspicious, confused, and ready to be very pissed off. It's the kind of thing that ruins people."

  "Ruins who?" asked Kip Cunningham. Peter Brandenburg flashed him a quick glance from underneath his eyebrows and pretended not to understand the question. He was known at Coco's and it did not do for a critic to look upset, to appear to be taking things personally. But Brandenburg did look upset, if only for an instant, and only to someone who knew him fairly well. Claire Steiger saw the twitch at the corner of his eye and went at it the way a boxer attacks a cut.

  "Yes, Peter," she said. "Who would it ruin?" She caught her husband's eye and for a second, only a second, they were allies, almost lovers, again.

  Brandenburg sipped his martini. He was forty-four years old and had all the advantages that youngish/oldish age could offer. People who didn't know him assumed he must be sixty because he had that kind of power and had been in print forever. Yet there were boyish things about his looks that allowed him still to pass, in any but the harshest light, for not much more than thirty. His reddish hair had neither thinned nor faded. He was lean as he'd been in prep school, his astute hazel eyes were every bit as clear. His posture was firm and rather stiff, inviolate; 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&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 glance
d 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 emerged at all, just grown stale within the ever staler game. He had been left behind; no, he had left himself behind, and that was worse.

  He walked up Olivia Street and was assaulted by an ugly thought: Certain things would be easier if Augie Silver stayed dead and gone. There'd be a great deal less explaining to do. There'd be no more mute reproaches. Phipps's life had in some sense shriveled to accommodate the fact of his friend's death; he was, if not happy, at ease now in the smaller space, the tighter orbit. Maybe Robert Natchez in some crazy way was right: The world closed up around a dead person, there was no room for his return.

  Clay Phipps climbed the three porch steps, paused a moment to smooth his linen shirt, and rang the bell.

  After a moment Nina Silver opened the door, not very wide. She was backlit by the yellowish glow of the living room, her jet black hair was square across the bottom and perfectly framed her oval face. She smiled at Clay Phipps, but her posture was the posture of a sentry.

  "Clay," she said. It was neither unfriendly nor welcoming.

  "Nina," he said. He waited a polite interval to be invited in and was only slightly surprised when the invitation didn't come. "I was wondering how you are. These rumors ... It must be very trying."

  "I'm all right, Clay," the former widow said. "Thank you for your concern."

  There was a silence, and Clay Phipps's falseness filled it up the way a bad smell fills an elevator. Then the evening's first locusts began to rattle. Blocks away, some idiot revved a motorcycle. The family friend cleared his throat. "Nina," he fumbled, "the rumors, the newspaper ... Is it true? Is he back?"

  There is a horror of lying about important things that is more ancient than morality, a kind of religious terror of tempting fate, offending the universe by denying some crucial facet of it. Nina Silver wanted nothing more than to be left alone, and there was no way she could lie about her husband being alive. "He's back."

  "My God."

  "He's been through hell, Clay. He's very ill, he's very weak. He's not ready to see people."

  "I understand," Phipps mumbled, feeling that he understood nothing, neither life nor death, friendship nor love, loyalty nor envy.

  "Please keep this quiet, Clay. Please? We'll call you when he's a little stronger. I promise."

  "All right," said Phipps, "all right."

  He backed down the porch steps, he didn't know how his feet found the stairs, the sidewalk. On the way home he didn't notice dogs or cats, trees or lizards. He didn't see the misted moon or the swarms of moths around the streetlights. He was looking for something else, scanning his heart for some bright patch of gladness at learning Augie Silver was alive. The gladness should gleam, he thought, the way a pool of cool water gleams in the desert; he could steer his steps to it and be refreshed, be saved. But first he had to find it, and though he looked at nothing else as he strolled down Olivia Street, he couldn't find the glad gleam either.

  *

  When he got home he was rattled and thirsty. He grabbed an extravagant Pauillac, an '82 Duhart-Milon, and noticed that his fingers were unsteady as he sliced the lead foil. The wine poured purple and thick, it glubbed as it squeezed through the neck of the bottle. No light came through the bowl of the glass, and the first smells were black smells, licorice and tar.

  Phipps took the wine to the living room and sat down on the sofa. The pale, denuded rectangles where Augie's paintings had hung put a crazy pattern on the wall. Phipps told himself he'd have the place painted soon.

  Augie Silver was alive.

  Phipps drank. The wine was closed up still, it tasted less than it smelled and had a steely edge. He sucked air through it. Some of the alcohol was siphoned off and different flavors seemed to move like different-colored pebbles to different places in his mouth. Amazing stuff, Pauillac.

  Augie Silver was back, and Clay Phipps was one of the very few people who knew it for sure.

  He poured more wine. The wall of tannins opened just a bit, glints of fruit came through like sun through the chinks of a blind. Dusty currant with an undertaste of plum, held together by a teasing astringency that did rude things to the tongue.

  Augie was alive, a lot of things were changed, a lot of plans suddenly in chaos, and as Clay Phipps drank he saw less and less the wisdom or necessity of keeping it to himself.

  Claire Steiger, at least, should have the information.

  He lumbered to his desk, looked up the phone number of the Ars Longa Gallery in New York, and
left a message with the answering service. Then he refilled his glass. The wine was getting soft and comfy as a well-used baseball mitt.

  Why shouldn't Robert Natchez be told? Why not Ray Yates? They were friends, after all, they had a right to know.

  Phipps made two more calls. But Natchez was at a reading and Yates was hiding from his loan shark, and he just talked to their machines. He poured out the last of the wine. He didn't think he'd broken his word to Nina Silver. Had he even given his word? He couldn't quite remember. That part of the evening seemed a different day. His conscience was not clear exactly, but shut down, benumbed. If he'd failed to find the cool, clear water of loyalty, he'd at least availed himself of a damn nice puddle of wine. His balance just a little tentative, he slipped out of his linen clothes and went to bed alone.

  22

  "Did you ever see that experiment they do with the Ping-Pong balls and mousetraps?" Arty Magnus asked his eager but ungifted protege, Freddy McClintock. "They set about a zillion traps, load 'em with Ping Pong balls instead of cheese. Then they drop in one tiny, almost weightless Ping-Pong ball. It lands on a trap and sets it off. Now you've got two balls clattering around. Then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, infinity. It takes about one deep breath to happen, and with all the snapping springs and flying balls and mayhem it very soon becomes impossible to figure out how the whole goddamn thing got started."

  The young reporter used the eraser end of his pencil to coax his red hair back from his sweaty forehead. "And you're saying that's how news spreads?"

  "Very good, Freddy," said Arty Magnus. He swiveled in his editor's chair, put his feet on the air conditioner that dribbled water more than it pushed air, and wished that he was somewhere else. "You're catching on."

  McClintock beamed. He was proud of himself for finding confirmation of the Augie Silver story, though all he'd done was put himself, quite by chance, on a collision course with the bouncing bit of news.