"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 poured from a Bauhaus pot represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.