The walls of his house were made of horizontal slats of white-painted pine, and here and there were brighter rectangles where Augie Silver's paintings had formerly been hung. There was something naked, naughty about those paler patches, they grabbed the eye like an unexpected flash of a woman's panties. Robert Natchez looked up from his glass of ruby wine and peeked rather lewdly at the empty places.
"Show's been over a week or more," he said. "When're the pictures coming back?"
This was a taunt, and no mistake. Phipps took it in stride. Taunting was what he expected and in some perverse way what he needed from Robert Natchez. "They're not," he said.
The poet smirked in his Bordeaux. A glad cynicism opened up his sinuses and he suddenly smelled cedar and mint in the wine. "Don't tell me you've decided to sell them? I thought everything
was strictly NFS."
"They're being offered at auction," said the allegedly dead artist's alleged best friend. In an effort to appear casual, he swung a leg over the opposite knee. The dampness on his thigh made the nubbly linen itch. "Sotheby's. Next month."
"Ah," said Natchez. He leered from under his black eyebrows at the nude rectangles, and managed to work into his expression both disapproval and nasty enjoyment. The look maneuvered his host into an abject stance of self-defense.
"You think it matters to Augie?" Phipps heard himself saying.
"I have no opinion on what matters to the dead," said the poet. This was just the sort of pronouncement, portentous yet inane, that delighted Natchez, and he was tickled with himself for mouthing it. He paused, sipped some wine, then added, "But they were gifts."
At this, Clay Phipps could not hold back a nervous snorting laugh, a laugh that rasped his throat. "A sentimentalist! You of all people a sentimentalist!"
The swarthy Natchez almost blushed at the charge, which was nearly the most debasing accusation he could imagine. "It has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with what's dignified and fitting. Those paintings were given in friendship."
"Friendship is complicated," said Clay Phipps.
"So is envy," said Robert Natchez. "So is old stale jealousy. So is hate." He swirled his wine the way he'd seen Phipps do it, drained his glass, and licked his lips. "Any more of this?" he asked.
Phipps somewhat grudgingly got up to fetch the bottle.
*
Augie Silver nestled the thin smock between his skinny thighs and slowly, cautiously settled back onto the examination table. "I feel like Mahatma Gandhi in this thing," he said.
"You look like an anorectic Father Time," said Manny Rucker, his doctor for the past ten years. "Now lie still and let me goose you."
Rucker put his soft hands on Augie's belly, pressed under his ribs to palpate the liver, felt for enlarged spleen, for hernia, for strangled loops of intestine. Augie blinked at the ceiling and was almost lulled asleep by the visceral massage. He'd spent the morning with electrodes taped onto his head and glued across his chest. He'd given blood, produced urine samples, labored mightily but without success to deliver a stool. He was exhausted.
"You are one hell of a case study," said his doctor, and the voice pulled Augie back to the waking present: the hum of the air conditioning, hot light being sliced by narrow blinds, the waxy paper of the exam table crinkling under him, the smell of alcohol masking but not effacing the intimate aromas of sundry sorts of human goo. "Rest awhile if you like. I'll come back for you later."
Nina Silver was waiting in the consultation room. She sat on the edge of a green leather chair and stifled an urge to straighten the frames of the gold-sealed diplomas and purple-bordered certificates: paraphernalia of reassurance, fetishes of hope, pompous promises that things would probably turn out O.K., and if they didn't, well, at least everything humanly possible had been done. A silver pen stood next to a tortoiseshell box that held prescription slips. Behind the doctor's imposing chair was a pen-and-ink caricature of a fat woman bending over to receive a shot in the behind: No Norman Rockwell prints for Manny Rucker.
He bustled in, hands buried wrist-deep in his labcoat pockets, and started talking before he'd even reached his desk. "Nina," he said, "your husband is an extremely stubborn man. He really should be dead about five different ways."
She swallowed and slid backward in her seat. Her spine went soft and it took tremendous concentration, a gymnast's concentration, to hold herself erect. The doctor bounded around his desk, tossed a manila folder onto his green blotter, then dropped so heavily into his swiveling, rolling chair that the entire office seemed to quake around him. "I'm not saying this to frighten you," he resumed. "I'm saying it because I'm impressed as hell. I'm amazed.
"Listen. We don't yet know everything that went on with him-we won't know that till the lab work is done, and even then a lot of it will be surmising, reconstructing. But here's the minimum we're up against."
Rucker bore down on the arms of his throne until the springs creaked and the casters chattered against their Plexiglas platform. He exhaled noisily, then leaned forward, opened the folder, and spread his thick and hairy elbows on either side of it.
"Last time Augie was in here, he weighed a hundred seventy-four pounds, and he wasn't fat. He now weighs one sixteen. That kind of weight loss, the dehydration, the metabolic craziness, is very debilitating. His kidneys shut down for a while-the function seems to be returning, but we can't tell how badly they've been compromised. His stomach has shrunk up smaller than a fist, which means it's going to be a long, slow process getting the weight back on him. His spleen is enlarged, who knows why. That's another obstacle to recovery."
The doctor paused for breath, and Nina felt herself starting to cry. She struggled not to, because doctors' offices make everyone feel like children being spoken to sternly but well-meaningly by a grownup, and, absurdly, pathetically, it seems important to be brave and well behaved. Still, she thought she could feel her own stomach shrinking up like a puddle in the sun, her own spleen swelling like a sodden sponge, her kidneys growing parched and brittle, tubes and passageways caving in like long-abandoned tunnels.
Manny Rucker noticed that her face was collapsing and decided not to acknowledge it. She was not the patient and there was nothing to be gained by coddling.
"He's had a concussion," the doctor resumed. "That's rather a vague concept, concussion is. It basically means he's been clunked on the head and something went kerblooey. We don't yet know if he's fully recovered his memory or where the gaps might be. We don't know if the loss might recur. Probably he's now at somewhat higher risk of Parkinson's and of stroke."
Manny Rucker flipped shut the manila folder, and Nina Silver allowed herself to exhale. She thought she'd heard all she had to listen to. She was wrong.
"There's one other thing," the doctor told her. "He's had a heart attack."
Nina's eyes went out of focus and settled vaguely on the buttocks of the fat woman awaiting her injection. "Heart attack?"
"There's a pronounced irregularity in the EKG that wasn't there before," said Rucker. "It's clear evidence. Too much time has passed to gauge the severity from the blood enzymes. But there's no doubt that something happened."
The room was falling away from Nina Silver, the angles between walls and floor and ceiling becoming jarring, oblique, and insane. Her other reunions with Augie, the ones in dreams, had never been so complicated, so fraught. "He told me his chest ached, his arms, when he crawled into the dinghy."