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"Smile, Kip. Be your blithe preppy self. Don't talk about money and for Christ's sake don't talk about art. Talk horses, talk sports. Invite some critics to the club. They like that."

Cunningham smoothed his collar and lifted his glass. With more champagne in him it was easier to imagine that his wife's contempt was only a form of affectionate banter. "Anybody in particular?"

"You know who's who. Find someone susceptible to your boyish charm."

The husband secured his cummerbund around his still-flat tummy. "So we get the ink. Then what?"

Claire blotted her lipstick before she answered. "If the reviews are good, we've got six weeks' buildup before the auction. Enough time for the momentum to build, not enough time for the bubble to burst."

The bankrupt examined himself in profile. "And if the reviews are bad?"

"If they're bad?" said his wife. "If they're bad, I'm stuck with a bunch of damaged goods. Augie Silver goes down in history as one more second-rater. We'll lose the beach house and whatever else you've pawned."

She moved to the small bathroom window that overlooked Fifth Avenue and stared down at Central Park. The spring foliage already looked sooty, the cherry blossoms were going brown and rank, they had the sodden look of yesterday's salad. "But there's a bright side, I suppose."

Kip Cunningham did not ask what the bright side was. He knew it wouldn't really be bright, and he knew his wife would tell him anyway. He drained his glass.

"The more we lose up front," she said, "the less to give up when I get free of you."

In the dim living room of the house on Olivia Street, Nina Silver nestled into her soft-pillowed sofa and talked to her dead husband. She hadn't begun by speaking to him; she'd begun by looking at his paintings and thinking. But as the light had faded, as the windows stopped framing colors and patterns and just passed along a uniform gray, there seemed less and less reason to deprive herself of the company of speech. "Augie," she said. "Up in New York, they're making you a star right now. D'you know that, Augie? A big fancy opening. Caviar. Canapes. Limos all up and down the street… Just the sort of thing you always hated. Men looking ridiculous in patent-leather shoes. Young jealous colleagues wearing capes, dying to know what the critics are scrawling in their notebooks. The inevitable two women in the same expensive dress… "What's it got to do with the work? you'd say. "What's it got to do with anything? "

She paused, and it seemed that Fred the parrot felt compelled to fill the silence. The big green bird riffled through its limited vocabulary and picked some sounds at random. "Incha Pinch. Alla joke."

"What's it got to do with anything?' the widow said again.

"What's it got to do with anything?' asked Kip Cunningham, leaning against the marble counter at the entrance of Ars Longa. His voice was thick with wine, his tie was crooked, his shave no longer fresh, and in all he was about as trashed as the gallery itself. Champagne corks swollen up like tumors littered the tables and the countertops. Lipstick-stained glasses lay on their sides like toy soldiers killed by kisses. Here and there the marble floor had been scorched by cigarettes. The ladies' toilet needed plunging, and someone, it seemed, had walked off with the crystal paperweight that held down the stack of catalogues.

"I just can't believe that someone would steal a paperweight," said Claire Steiger. "That's all."

It was 11 p.m. The hostess looked fresh as an anchorwoman, but she was in the grip of the sort of brain fatigue that makes little things like stolen paperweights into large distractions that call forth a draining and useless indignation. She'd been up since six that morning. She'd overseen the hanging of the show, the catering, dealt with the last-minute RSVPs. She'd strutted through the evening in high-heel shoes and greeted perhaps two hundred people by name. Used to be, she cruised through days like this on waves of glad ambition; the grasping joy of reaching her next goal would keep her primed with adrenaline. Now the ambition was mainly habit; it kept its form just as her hair and makeup kept their form, but the joy had dried up inside it the way a stranded clam bakes away to a gooey nothing. "I mean," she went on, "who would be so small-"

"Claire, fuck the paperweight," slurred her husband. "How'd we do?"

The gallery owner paused, then fluttered her soft brown eyes as if waking from a nap. She was ready to go one more mile. "The right people showed up," she said. "Some big-money no-nerve collectors-the kind who wait for the Grade A stamp. Couple of agents for Japanese investors. The heavy critics."

"I talked to a few," said Cunningham. He was pleased with himself, gave a drunk smile. "Joe Rudman from the Times. Talked ponies. What's-his-name, the Newsweek guy. Likes croquet. And Peter Brandenburg — I'm playing squash with him tomorrow."

It had been a long time since Claire Steiger approved of anything her husband had done, but she could not now prevent an impressed look from stealing across her tired face. "He counts, Kip. He counts a lot."

Cunningham nodded. Then he grabbed an end of his tie and pulled out the knot. When he'd been younger, less embittered, when his shallowness could pass for finesse and his essential dullness for aristocratic restraint, he'd looked especially debonair with his tie undone and hanging on his chest. Now he just looked dissolute, hollowed out, ready for three aspirin and an icepack. Absently, with no great interest, he jerked a thumb toward the softly spotlighted paintings on the gallery walls. "For what it's worth," he said, "you think this stuff is any good?"

"Everything I show is good," Claire Steiger said. Outside, on 57th Street, someone honked a horn. A cross-town bus whined loudly as it pulled away from a stop, and the gallery owner somewhat guiltily indulged herself in an unchecked yawn. "You've got to believe in the product, Kip. That's rule number one."

Ray Yates had always wanted to be a local character.

He'd tried on towns like some people try on hats, telling himself he needed one that fit his image, but in fact looking for the image in the hat. What he was searching for was a place that would embrace him as a perfect type, adopt him as a kind of mascot.

He'd had false starts in several careers, and these had been custom-fitted to various cities. In Boston, all in tweeds and baggy corduroys, he'd edited a small and unprofitable magazine of poetry and opinion. In Los Angeles, he'd managed to make seven payments on a leased Porsche before realizing that no one was going to hire him to doctor scripts. In Chicago, the last newspaper town, he'd worn real suits and the ugly ties reporters wear, but quit when he realized it might be twenty frigid winters before he was recognized on Michigan Avenue.

When he arrived in Key West six years ago, he'd immediately begun trying to out-local the locals. His wardrobe turned abruptly turquoise, he bought a stack of palm tree and flamingo shirts, which he laundered repeatedly to fade. He bought sandals and denied himself the use of Band-Aids, hoping to speed the process by which blisters turned to calluses. He rented a houseboat, and felt extremely Floridian having a teensy toilet with a hand pump and a gangplank for a driveway.

As for a job, Yates hadn't known exactly what he'd do. He didn't want to work very hard. He didn't want to start early in the morning. And he wanted the kind of position that would help him insinuate himself, that would give him the kind of access, insider-ness, small renown even, that had eluded him in bigger, more important places.

So it had seemed providential when, at a cocktail party, he'd met Rich Florio, manager of radio station WKEY. KEY was nothing if not local. It broadcast from an ancient cottage in a downtown alley and had a transmitter slightly more powerful than an under-counter microwave; in perfect atmospheric conditions, its signal could be detected as far away as mile marker twenty. The format was eclectic: pop in the morning, jazz at night, some classical on Sundays, and lots of local news and notices. School-board meetings. Church outings. Benefits to save the reef, the manatee, the embossed tin roofs of Old Town.