"But they must've found a pulse or something," the painter continued. "Maybe they just didn't feel like digging right then. Anyway, they told me afterward I was unconscious for around ten days."
"Who told you, Augie?" asked his wife.
He slowly shifted on the sofa and managed a skeletal smile. "This old man who spoke pretty decent English. Used to work at a casino in the Batista days. Told me I almost cashed in all my cheeps."
Nina tried to smile in return but found that she could not. The person to whom something terrible has happened is usually the first to be able to laugh about it; those who love him are always the last. "But Augie," she said, "why did it take you so long to get home?"
"Amnesia, paranoia, and politics," he said. "I didn't know who I was. It wasn't till much later that I remembered the waterspouts, the wreck. I had no I.D. As soon as I could speak, the fishermen realized I was American, and they didn't know what to do with me. Where I landed was very remote-an isolated little peninsula called Boca de Cangrejo. What these people knew of the outside world was what the government radio told them. They were savvy enough to see I was no Yanqui imperialist devil, but they were afraid of what might happen if they turned me in."
"Afraid for themselves?"
"For themselves. For me. Afraid. Who knows of what exactly? So they kept me under wraps. Tried to feed me fish broth. As I got a little stronger, they helped me to the beach to watch the boats. They were very kind."
He paused, and Nina rubbed his shoulders. It was almost dark outside, the windows were soft gray pauses in the painting-covered walls. A block away a dog was barking, palm fronds scratched softly against the tin shingles of the roof.
"Only problem was, these little strands of memory started tugging at me, more and more each day. It didn't bother me especially that I didn't have a name. So what? But I was getting to ache about other things. Yearn. Yearning. I'd used those words, everybody does, but now I knew what they meant. I knew I had a home somewhere and I yearned to get back to it. I believed I had a mate, someone it was my proper destiny to be with. And I had this nagging and, if this doesn't sound too crazy, religious sense that I had work, some kind of work, to do."
"It doesn't sound crazy," said Nina Silver, but her husband continued as though he hadn't heard. Even through his weakness, it seemed a kind of frenzy was upon him now, and he hurtled through the rest of his story as if the meaning of it existed not in the details but in the sheer momentum.
"Day to day," he said, "I felt that I was getting stronger, but the strength wasn't going to my body, it was being siphoned off into this groping quest for memory, this blank struggle to recall or invent who I was and what I was put on earth to do. Everything had to be relearned; it was exhausting as childhood. Little bits of things triggered recollections that, maddeningly, went nowhere. A color. A smell. I knew them. But how? From where? I asked for a paper and pencil and I started to draw. I didn't know I knew how, I just drew. I looked for hints in the pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.
"Then one day it clicked. By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big sport-fishing tournament-marlin, sailfish-international. Big beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate-part of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes by. Lip Smacker, Key West. I'm standing on the beach, taking turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see it on the transom.
"Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the stupor, and I remembered.
"The tournament headquarters was about thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado. The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a passport."
The painter paused and settled in farther against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.
"I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings."
It was full dark beyond the windows now, and the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips to smile.
"You don't think that's a good idea?" he asked.
15
Clayton Phipps expertly sliced the lead foil from the top of a bottle of Gruaud-Larose 1975 and centered his corkscrew in the spongy wood of the stopper. He wasn't quite sure why he was squandering such a venerable wine on the unschooled palate of Robert Natchez; part of him, moreover, disapproved of the whole notion of quaffing a serious red on such a thick and sticky evening, a night that called for talcum powder, fume blanc, and a cool washcloth on the brow. But goddamnit, there were times in a man's life when he wanted Bordeaux and nothing but Bordeaux, and Clay Phipps saw less and less the virtue of denying himself what he wanted at the moment that he wanted it. He pulled the cork. The festive pop carried with it instant scents of black currants, pepper, forest floor, and violets. Thank God there were some things, some few things, that a man could count on and that did not lose their savor.
He poured two glasses and carried them into the living room, where Robert Natchez was sitting, dressed all in black. Phipps wore tan linen, and the two of them might have been the only people in the Florida Keys, not counting maitre'd's and cops, in long pants just then. Clay Phipps was self-conscious about his pale and hairless calves; Robert Natchez keenly felt that shorts did not befit his dignity. So they sweated behind the knees and felt well dressed.
"Cheers," said Phipps, handing the poet a glass. "It's too good for you, but what the hell."
"Ever the gracious host," said Natchez, and he nosed into the wine.
They settled into their chairs. Clay Phipps had bought his Old Town house around a dozen years before, in the wake of the infamous Mariel boat lift. Fidel Castro, in a gesture of great magnanimity, slyness, and spite, had thrown open the gates of his country's loony bins and prisons and allowed anyone who wished to escape to America. Most of the fruitcakes, murderers, catatonics, child molesters, mental defectives, and petty thieves had made landfall in Key West, which did the local real estate market no good at all. Those who, like Clay Phipps, believed that the island outpost was a tough town to kill, scarfed up historic houses at a small fraction of their worth, and found themselves gentry when the Marielitos, not surprisingly, were absorbed into the population with barely an uptick in the crime rate and no discernible effect on the community's overall level of weirdness and delusion. So Phipps now owned a sweet dwelling on a prime block. It was one more instance of his traveling first class without paying for it, living well but without the resonance of believing that living well was an earned reward.