Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  Reuben stood poised with the razor and considered. "I am not macho," he confessed.

  "Me neither anymore," said Augie. "It's a phase."

  The young Cuban went back to his barbering. "You used to punch people in the nose?" he asked.

  "No," said Augie. "But not because I didn't want to. Only because I was afraid they'd hit me back."

  "To be afraid," said Reuben. "This is not macho."

  "No," said Augie. "But everybody is."

  Reuben rinsed the razor. The sun was near its zenith, it made a steely mirror of the swimming pool. The tree the Cubans call Mother-in-law made a rattling complaining noise although there did not seem to be a breeze. Reuben looked at Augie's chin. It was odd to be shaving someone else, to be paying such unflinching pore-by-pore attention to another's face, and there was something deeply naked about Augie's skin, pale under the beard, splotched pink from the tug of the blade as the hair was scraped away.

  "You have fear?" Reuben didn't exactly mean to ask the question, he just heard himself asking it.

  "Damn straight," Augie said. He was going to leave it at that, but there are certain questions that are like siphons, they suction off truth and once the flow starts it continues of itself. After a moment Augie went on. "I used to have a terrible fear of falling short somehow, disappointing myself in some final way, some way that could never be fixed. I'm not afraid of that anymore. No, that's a lie. I still am. But much less. What the hell. But I was terrified of dying down in Cuba, I'll tell you that. Among strangers. Without even saying goodbye to anyone. . . . And you?"

  Reuben hesitated. It was his own fears that had led him to ask about Augie's, yet he was unprepared to have the question turned around. He rinsed the razor, looked away a moment. His eyes burned. "I fear to be alone," he said.

  English words, Spanish syntax. Augie didn't quite know how to take it. Feared to be alone in a room? Or feared to live his life alone? Augie decided to address the longer-lasting terror.

  "You'll find someone," he softly said. "You're a caring, loving man, Reuben. You'll find somebody worthy of you."

  Reuben didn't answer. For himself he didn't mind crying, but he was there to help, not to ask for help, and he didn't want to impose his crying on Augie. He pressed his jaws together, then tried to smile. Gently, he pulled the skin along Augie's jaw and went back to shaving him.

  But his hand was trembling just a little, the razor veered from its proper angle and sliced through the skin of the painter's chin. With a nauseating vividness Reuben felt the blade pop through the flesh. For a second the cut place was paler than the skin around it, then it filled with a line of blood that formed a fat red drop at its lower verge. Reuben pulled the razor back and looked with shame and horror at what he had done. He had let his own pain conquer him so that he had hurt his friend. Frantically he began apologizing while his free hand reached for a cloth to dab the wound.

  Augie turned his head away. "It's only a nick," he said. "I used to cut myself all the time."

  But Reuben was not to be comforted. He was sorry in English, he was sorry in Spanish. The tears that he'd choked back now broke loose, the drops were thick as Augie's blood. He fretted with the cloth over the painter's cut chin, got it splotched with blood in half a dozen places. The red blots made him feel queasy, and without a word he dashed into the house to fetch a fresh clean towel.

  He had just passed through the open French doors when Nina entered from the front. She saw him with the ferocious midday light glaring at his back. She saw that his face was tormented with some terrible guilt. She saw the razor in his hand, the bloodstained cloth. She lurched forward as though she might perhaps attack him, and she screamed. Or thought she screamed. But before the sound had left her throat she had passed out cold and crumpled to the cool bare wooden floor.

  Reuben stood there, tears drying on his cheeks, the razor dangling from his fingers.

  The sight of Nina fainting had baffled him but also brought back his composure the way a dreadful piece of news can make a drunk man sober. Suddenly it seemed he had a lot to do, and he wasn't sure of the order he should do it in. He had Augie outside, half shaved and bleeding. He had Nina here, blanched, unconscious, her legs folded under her in a way it seemed they should not go. He put the razor and the bloody cloth on the kitchen counter. He approached Nina and tried to lift her to the sofa. She was limp and unhelpful as a sack of rice, and he dragged her more than carried her. He slipped her shoes off, then grabbed the razor and a new towel and went back out to Augie.

  Augie didn't seem to have missed him. He was relaxing under his sheet, contentedly baking in the stressless all-over warmth of hot shade. The blood on his chin had thickened to the consistency of jam, solid enough to stem the tide of further bleeding. Reuben resumed his apologizing and Augie told him gently but firmly to shut up.

  "For Christ's sake, Reuben, you make it sound as if you'd slit my throat."

  After that the young man worked in silence. Water glinted in the swimming pool, lizards did push-ups on the pitted coral rocks. Dry white hairs fluttered down from Augie's face, they were almost light enough to float away like motes of dust.

  Inside, Nina was coming back from the small death of a fainting spell.

  Her brain turned on like an old television, the kind that started with a single point of quivering light then popped into a grainy gray in which void images moved like ghosts. One fact filled the screen: Reuben, this peculiar young man she'd trusted and even loved, had killed her husband and it was her fault absolutely for throwing them together. Her own life was finished, that much was clear. She'd forfeited it by this amazing blunder, this astonishing misjudgment. Her eyes opened of themselves, she looked out at the world she'd disowned. She saw the French doors, the flat indifferent light above the pool. The cloth with Augie's blood on it still lay crumpled on the counter. There was nothing left to do but go outside and find the body.

  She sat up. Her veins had lost their will and the blood emptied down through them as if through rain spouts; she again grew lightheaded. After a moment she stood on legs that no longer seemed her own and moved slowly toward the open doors. She did not allow herself an imagined vision of Augie dead, yet she was assaulted by a lunatic memory of drawing class: a tilted oval standing for a human face, balanced on a stem of neck at an angle that could only be true in death.

  She stood in the open doorway now and saw Augie, clean-shaven, shrouded in a sheet but very much alive.

  Reuben had his back to her as he finished Augie's sideburns, and it was her husband who saw her first. "Darling," he said. He reached up and rubbed his own smooth cheeks. "I wanted to surprise you."

  "You did," she said. She struggled to smile and struggled to move forward without letting Augie see that anything was wrong.

  "You're very pale," he said to her. "Do you feel all right?"

  "Hm?" she said. She glanced quickly at Reuben and he understood he should not speak. "Just feeling a little peaked."

  Augie took her hand. "Upset about Fred."

  It was not a question and Nina didn't have to answer. Instead, she took Reuben's hand with her free one. She felt she owed him that, and more, for the secret and grotesque insult of suspecting him.

  The young man put the razor down and solemnly beamed at Nina's touch. Augie smiled softly. It seemed to him that the three of them were sharing a moment of mourning for the fallen parrot, and to complete the circle he took Reuben's other hand. They were silent for a while as the sun beat down. Doves cooed and blue butterflies flew past, and by the linking of their fingers a pact was formed that was no less sacred for the fact that each of them had a different notion of what the moment was about.

  25

  In the conference room at Sotheby's, everything had a name.

  The chairs were not just chairs, they were Barcelona chairs. The lamps were Corbusier, the long blond tapered table was Eero Saarinen. The overhead lights were the same that Mies designed for the Seagram Building, and coffee was pou
red from a Bauhaus pot represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

  None of this was affectation. It was business. In the world of antiques and collectibles, provenance was all. Who designed it? What was the vintage? Had the creator had the grace and the savvy to die and thereby join the Pantheon of bankable reputations? The auction houses had a clear mission to enhance the wealthy public's concern, not to say obsession, with questions such as these. It was all done to enlarge appreciation of the finer things.

  Funny thing about the finer things, though: Their value could change dramatically while they themselves became neither finer nor less fine. And this was precisely the phenomenon being discussed in the Sotheby's conference room on the morning of the sixth of June.

  Campbell Epstein, head of the Painting Department, flicked the white cuffs of his blue-striped shirt. "We're thrilled, of course, that the artist is alive," he said. "Delighted." He said this in the direction of Claire Steiger, as if he was paying her a personal compliment. But Epstein didn't look delighted. Nerves had put a yellowish tinge in his slightly hollow cheeks, crinkles gathered between his eyes from the tension that fanned in a scallop pattern across his forehead. "But it does put a radically different complexion on the auction."

  "I should think," muttered Charles Effingham, the chairman of the board. Effingham hated meetings. He hated coming into the office at all. He was sixty-four years old, unabashedly a figurehead, and absolutely perfect in that role. Upper-crust British, with a shock of white hair generally described as leonine and an American wife typically characterized as incredibly rich, he served his shareholders best at charity balls, golf tournaments, regattas. Absently, he now riffled through the glossy four-color catalogue that had already been printed at vast expense for the Solstice Show. He found the pages devoted to the works of Augie Silver. Next to each illustration was listed the painting's size, approximate date of execution, medium, and Sotheby's most expert guess as to the value. He read the numbers, then stared at Campbell Epstein over the tops of his elegant half-glasses. "Rather Utopian, these estimates," he said.

  The head of Paintings swallowed so that the knot of his yellow tie bobbed upward above the gold collar pin then quickly subsided like a dying erection. "Sir, may I be candid?"

  Effingham gave forth a soft harrumph. Among his favorite peeves were these spasms of veracity that sometimes overwhelmed executives at meetings. What did they accomplish except to clinch the case that they were talking hogwash the rest of the time?

  "The painting market is in a doldrum," Epstein went on. "That's common knowledge. The Silver estimates are optimistic, yes. But our hope was that record-breaking prices for this one artist would buoy the entire show, would spawn a sort of chain reaction—"

  The chairman cut him off. "There'll be a chain reaction, all right. When the actual bids fall egregiously short on the Silvers, a chain-reactive pall will descend. There'll be the sad sound of closing wallets. Paddles will come to rest on well-upholstered laps. The bottom feeders will be most grateful."

  The conference room fell silent save for the subtly maddening hum of the overhead fluorescents. Shoes slid softly over the Bokhara rug, someone rattled a Rosenthal cup back into its saucer. Claire Steiger felt that the moment had come to go on the offensive. "Am I the only one here," she said, "who believes the Augie Silver canvases will hold their value?"

  She panned her soft brown eyes around the table, and for a moment none of the half-dozen men seated there took up the challenge. Finally, Campbell Epstein said, "Claire, your faith in your client is touching. But the estimates were based on the assumption—"

  'That you had a hot dead painter on your hands," Claire Steiger said.

  Epstein's tie did its little dance, he glanced nervously at his boss. Effingham looked interested for the first time all morning.

  "Well," the dealer resumed, "I'm arguing that you now have something better. A miracle man. The publicity will be incredible. And on top of the reviews we already have? The Brandenburg alone—"

  "Rather embarrassing for Peter," came a nasal voice from the far end of the table. It belonged to Theo Stanakos, the director of public relations. Where other people had a brain, Stanakos had a switchboard, a tracking station for gossip in and gossip out, a radar screen on which were etched the trajectories of news, opinions, careers as they took flight, arced, and fizzled.

  "I don't think I follow you," Claire Steiger said. "Are you suggesting his review was not sincere?"

  "I'm saying it was too sincere," Stanakos said. "A great deal too sincere. So unlike Peter to get swept up in the emotion of the moment. Or any emotion. He got choked up at the thought of writing a eulogy, I suppose. But now—it seems so excessive. Gushy. Smarmy. Don't you agree?"

  "No, I don't agree. I think Peter Brandenburg got it right, and it makes no difference whatsoever if it was a eulogy or a midlife appraisal. What he said would have been said ten years ago if Augie Silver was more ambitious, if he pushed—"

  "Claire, Theo," Campbell Epstein interrupted, "I think we're getting off the point."

  "We are not getting off the point," Claire Steiger shot right back. "The point is that Augie's price will hold because his reputation is made, it's assured. The momentum—"

  "A living artist can always muck it up," Charles Effingham put in. He spoke softly but there was something incisive about the Oxford accent, it cut right through the flabbier consonants of the other speakers. "Every collector is aware of that. This year's genius is next year's buffoon. Look at Schnabel. You can't sell him and you can't even have him on your wall without looking like an idiot. It's a nuisance."

  "But an artist only mucks it up by continuing to paint," Claire Steiger argued. "Augie Silver hasn't worked in years—"

  "He could always start again," said Effingham. "He won't," said the agent, with greater certainty than in fact she felt. "I know him. He's—"

  "What does he think about the prices?" put in Theo Stanakos.

  Damn him, Claire thought. Damn his bitchily sharp way of cutting through to what someone doesn't want to talk about. "I don't know," she admitted. "I haven't spoken to him."

  "Odd," said the chairman. "He's ill. He's weak. His wife is hiding him—" "Then presumably," Effingham went on, "he doesn't even know his works are being offered."

  Claire Steiger struggled to control her voice. "If he knows, he doesn't know, what's the difference? The point is that in terms of reputation, in terms of output, he's . . . he's—"

  "As good as dead?" suggested Theo Stanakos. Charles Effingham shook his noble head. "In this business nothing is as good as dead."

  There was a pause. Someone's stomach gurgled, the sound was like the last swirl of water going down a half-clogged bathtub drain.

  Campbell Epstein cleared his throat. "Right. But we still have the question of whether we revise the estimates downward, and if so, how to do it most discreetly and with least damage."

  The chairman of the board looked quickly at his Cartier watch. "I have a luncheon to get to," he announced, and the spry old fellow was on his feet before the short statement was completed.

  Epstein rose with him and tried to smile. The attempt was accompanied by a sharp convulsive pain in the gut. The head of Paintings understood corporate shorthand. He knew the chairman had just washed his hands of the Solstice Show, the event whose success or failure defined Campbell Epstein's performance for the year. His job, which he hated far too much to be able to imagine losing, seemed now to hinge on whether Augie Silver living was worth anywhere near as much as Augie Silver dead.

  26

  Robert Natchez, dressed all in black, sat alone in his tropical garret. From the jungly lot next door came the musky smell of decomposing leaves, the utterly baffled clucks and screams of citified chickens that had blundered into this patch of wild and were unable or unwilling to escape.

  An old lamp threw stale yellow light across the poet's desk, put a brown glow in his glass of rum. At his elbow lay a grant appli
cation that had grown limp in the steamy air. The South Florida Rehabilitation League was offering two thousand dollars for a poet to teach haiku to crack addicts in halfway houses. Natchez didn't like haiku, found its modesty fake, and he wasn't crazy about crack addicts either. Their eyes were a spooky red and they had a lot of tics. Their shoulders twitched and their noses ran. They tended to like crack more than life, and Robert Natchez, given his own passionate morbidity, would have had a tough time mustering the conviction to talk them out of that preference. But he needed the money.

  He needed the money, yet his one Augie Silver canvas still hung on the wall above his desk.

  This was because there were other things that Robert Natchez needed more. He needed to feel exceptional. He needed to maintain the rigid priestly purity that justified him as the final arbiter of right and wrong. He needed to feel superior to Phipps, to Yates, to everyone who had run out to hock his Augie Silver paintings, and as he had lately realized, he needed maybe most of all to triumph in some final way over Augie Silver himself. Augie the sudden darling of the marketplace. Augie the lightweight who had somehow bamboozled the critics with the illusion of substance. Augie whose lucky and so far inconclusive dance with death had cast a falsely dramatic fight on what was in the end a small, conventional, bourgeois talent.

  Natchez sipped his rum, breathed deeply of the molasses fumes that blended with the lewd and fetid smells of the rotting flowers from the lot beyond the alley. Fine, he thought, as he glanced once more at the application angled on the blotter: Let Augie be the sweetheart of the trendoids from New York, the moneyed philistines with their vapid pictures in their vapid houses filled with vapid conversation. He, Natchez, would fill a nobler, more heroic role: Poet Laureate to the addicted and the retarded, troubadour to the incontinent and the insane. Now here was a mission: bringing haiku to the doomed, sonnets to the senile, nonsense verses to those pure and damaged souls beyond the iron grip of sense. This would be no mere dabbling, no whore's diddling in the gross lap of commerce. It would be a liberation.