It wasn't fair, it stank. Augie Silver somehow buys himself a second life, and Jimmy Gibbs loses his last best shot at the only life he's got. Two lives to none: The accounts didn't balance, that was pretty goddamn clear. Augie owed him. He ate pie and drank beer, and his tightly pulled-back graying hair crawled in outrage. The way things stood, it wasn't right. It wasn't right at all.
27
The death of Fred the parrot changed the cadences of conversation in the Silver house. It used to be that silent beats were rare; the bird would fill them with imbecile pronouncements that added nothing but, like trills in music, eased the way from one line to the next. Now there were empty moments, it was as if Augie and Nina and Reuben were still holding a place for the departed pet, though from day to day the pauses grew briefer, time was squeezing shut around the lost one, as time does.
But if Nina was worried about the bird's demise impeding her husband's recovery, she needn't have been. Augie was getting better every day, his vigor leapfrogged over itself, and the pace of his recuperation was accelerating. His appetite was coming back and had far outstripped the wimpy tastes of convalescence: Now he wanted oysters, strong cheese, steak. He drank Guinness like an Irish baby, and a hint of something almost like roundness began returning to his clean-shaven cheeks. Reuben had cut his hair, and, shorter, it had recaptured some of its waviness and spring, the tinsel dryness that had made him look like Father Time was gone. On the ninth of June, the two-week anniversary of his return, he asked Reuben to set up an easel, and he stood at it to draw. Beneath his baggy khaki shorts, the sinews in his scrawny legs flexed with a remembered strength.
With vitality comes restlessness, however, and on that evening, blissfully unaware that someone had perhaps tried to poison him, Augie told Nina he was tired of being quarantined, he was ready to get out on the street, to resume his life, to see some friends.
They were sitting on the love seat near the pool. Nina looked away on the pretext of following the flight of a dragonfly as it skimmed across the water. But the dragonfly vanished and her dilemma did not. She had vowed to shield her husband from all worries; this was the way to save his life. But serene ignorance could be very dangerous now that Augie, sociable Augie, was antsy to reclaim his place at the hub of his circle.
"You don't think it would be too-"
Augie stroked her short neat hair and interrupted. "Really, darling, you don't have to coddle me quite this much." There was a pause, and when the painter spoke again it was in a playful tone his wife had not heard for many months. "Here's what I'm gonna do," he said. "Tomorrow, seven-thirty, I'm just gonna pop in at Raul's. Perfectly casual. Hi guys, what's new? Won't that be a pisser?"
That night the oblivious painter slept profoundly. His wife stared at the ceiling, at the slowly turning fan whose soft blur riveted her gaze but failed to quell her racing mind. The thin white curtains billowed softly in the moonlight and passed along the damp cardboard smell of closed and shriveling flowers.
In the morning her eyes itched, her skin felt slack, and she had a headache that throbbed with every heartbeat. She got up alone and made coffee. She sat alone at the counter and drank a cup. Her husband was back but now this new aloneness was upon her, aloneness with her suspicions, with what to her was certainty and to others might seem madness. She looked for a bright spot and found none: Either someone had tried to kill her husband and might try again, or she was losing her mind.
Promptly at eight, Reuben knocked at the door. She let him in. He took one look at her and asked if she was ill. By way of answer, she fixed him with a stare that frightened him. There was pleading in it, and also desperation, but more than that, the young man felt, there was a fierce and merciless probing of his worthiness. He struggled to survive that gaze, to muster a limitless and joyful yes to whatever it was that was being asked of him. He held his dark eyes open, tried to put his heart in their black centers. He must have passed the awful test, because after a long moment Nina said, "Reuben, I have to talk to you. There's no one else I can talk to, Reuben."
She led him through the house and out the back. Her steps were measured and oddly cautious, as if she was trying to assure herself she was still in contact with the ground. She skirted the pool, had made it almost to the pillow of shade cast by the poinciana tree when she stopped abruptly, like a person with a heavy suitcase who can't go one more step. Reuben was taken by surprise when she wheeled around, he walked into her words as into a hailstorm. "Someone's trying to murder Augie."
Reuben said nothing. He put the amazing statement into Spanish but it remained incomprehensible. His mouth opened just slightly and stayed that way.
"I know it sounds crazy," Nina said, and Reuben allowed himself silently to agree. Her voice was a throaty whisper, her gray eyes, usually placid, were red-rimmed and wild. Reuben at that moment was more afraid for her than for her husband.
She grabbed the young man's wrist and pulled him toward a chair. She sat leaning close to him, her hands on her knees and her head pitched conspiratorially forward like an asylum patient hissing paranoid lies about the staff. She told Reuben about the pecked-at tart, the connections not seen until later. She told him about going to the police, about Joe Mulvane's refusal of involvement; she explained as best she could about the logic of the art world and why the value of Augie's work was set to plummet. She realized in some bone-deep way that if she was enlisting Reuben's help she could hold back nothing and spare him nothing: She told him that she had suspected him.
"Yes, Reuben. When I saw you with the razor, when I fainted… I thought you'd slit his throat."
Reuben took this in. It hurt badly, the pain of it scoured his insides like a rough cloth full of salt. What had he done to deserve his friend's mistrust? Had his own friendship been imperfect? Or perhaps it was necessary to be mistrusted, to feel the shame and the burn of it, as a passage to a deeper trust.
"I did you a terrible injustice," Nina went on. "For this you have to forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," the young man said. "There is nothing to be sorry when you are protecting your mate."
Nina seemed to take comfort from this, and Reuben was happy. "No," she said, "there isn't. But Reuben, I can't protect him all by myself. I can't. I need other eyes, other ears. I need someone to talk to. Will you help me, Reuben, will you help me protect him?"
Reuben leaned far forward, it almost seemed that, knightlike, he might go down onto one slim knee. He made bold to take Nina's hand. He didn't know if she was any longer sane. He didn't know if Augie was in true danger. But none of that mattered to his pledge. His pledge was between himself and his yearning, a contract with the ideal, untouchable by circumstance. "With my life," he said.
28
"I really don't need a baby-sitter," said Augie.
It was just after seven that evening. The artist was wearing baggy shorts and an ancient denim shirt with fraying buttonholes and paint dabs on the sleeves. His white hair rose and fell in random waves, his deep blue eyes were bright with the prospect of some good talk with his friends; he seemed almost his old self, minus forty pounds and most of his robustness.