Augie motioned Clay Phipps toward the love seat where the family friend had felt up Nina, but he slid away from the illicit spot and took a single chair instead. He settled in, then nodded toward the west end of the pool. "That's where I delivered your eulogy. Set up a lectern so I wouldn't fall in if I swooned."
"Nina tells me you praised me out of all proportion."
"It's easy to be generous to the dead."
"And extremely difficult to be fair to the living."
This was a throwaway, a random bit of repartee, but Phipps felt sure it was somehow aimed at him. How much did Augie really know?
"Clay," his host went on, "about last night…"
"What about it?"
Augie pushed some breath through his teeth, it made a hissing sound. "Is it just me, or was there some unease, some tension…"
Phipps frowned. He didn't especially want to answer, nor was he content to let Augie go on probing. "Well, you know, the shock, the suddenness…"
Augie stroked his chin. "I'd like to think it was only that. But I felt… I felt… unwelcome."
It hurt to say the word, and Augie looked down when he said it. His looking down made it easier for Phipps to tell a lie.
"Nonsense," he said. "Ray and Natch, they seem to have a lot on their minds these days, they've been distant with me too."
The painter considered, decided not without conflict to be satisfied. "Okay," he said, "okay. Death, you know, I guess it's made me touchy."
Phipps saw an opportunity to change the subject. "Touchy but happy. Last night you said you were happier than ever. How come?"
Augie looked around his yard, smiled at the oleanders and the pendant bundles of poinciana flowers. "I used to take myself too seriously," he said. "I didn't think I did, but I did. This whole thing about not painting. Maybe it could pass for modesty, but it was arrogance, pretension. I mean, what gave me the chutzpah to think I had to be that good? So I'm not Vermeer- who cares? The paintings you have, Clay-am I wrong to think they give a certain pleasure?"
Phipps squirmed, gestured vaguely, made a soft harrumphing sound. Augie went right on.
"So I'll paint as well as I can paint, and the hell with it. The people who are happy are the people who get up in the morning and do their best, don'tcha think?"
The question hung a moment in the hot thick air. It was precisely what Clay Phipps thought; and precisely what Clay Phipps had never done. Augie knew that.
Was he goading him? Was he mocking him now not only by example but by precept? Or was Phipps, in his guilt and his festering disappointment, simply that determined to take offense, to find or imagine scraps of justification for turning against his friend?
Reuben, moving soundlessly and with his low-slung self-effacing geisha's grace, appeared near the two men and offered them something cold to drink. "A beer?" he said. "A glass of wine?"
"And there's the cake," said Clayton Phipps. "It's apricot."
"Ah," said Augie. He seemed to be considering. "Will you have some?"
"Me?" said Phipps, as if he was being singled out in a crowded room. "No, I've just had lunch. I brought it for you."
Augie pursed his lips, pulled his eyebrows together. A lot went into a man's decision about whether to have a piece of cake. Was he hungry? Would the sweetness be too cloying in the heat? Did he want the coffee the cake cried out for? Reuben leaned far forward on the balls of his feet, so far forward that he had to flex his toes as hard as he could to keep from falling over. For one mad instant it seemed to him that he should throw himself on Clayton Phipps's neck, wrestle him to the ground, and unmask him at once as the would-be killer. But he waited. He didn't want to make a scene in front of Augie; besides, if Augie said no to cake there would be no emergency.
The painter frowned through to the end of his deliberations. Then he said, "Yes, I think I'll have a piece. A small one." He paused a half-beat, then added, "Sure you won't join me, Clay?"
Phipps shook his head and Reuben didn't like the shadowy smile that slithered quickly across his face.
The young man glided back to the house and paced around the kitchen. He took a knife and cut through the string around the bakery box. He opened the package and looked inside. He saw a neat arrangement of apricot halves, round and orange as just-risen moons, overlaid with a glaze like tinted glass and bordered with a butter-rich marzipan crust. Reuben liked sweets. His mouth, one of the body parts that didn't know what was good for it, watered perversely even as his mind recoiled. He shook his head and swallowed, then brought down the top of the box like the lid of a coffin. He got the stepstool and put the cake on the highest shelf of the least-used cabinet, hid it like a gun from a curious child. He put a bottle of mineral water and two glasses on a tray and went outside again.
"The cake," he announced, "I'm sorry, you can't have any." He poured water for Augie and Phipps, handed them their glasses.
"Whaddya mean, I can't have any?" Augie asked. His body had readied itself for cake, the taste buds were prepared, the passageways open, and now, goddamn it, he wanted something sweet.
"The cake, it will make you sick," said Reuben. He spoke to Augie but looked at Phipps, and Phipps seemed unable to stay still in his chair.
"Reuben," Augie said, "I'd like a piece of cake."
The young man balanced his tray, bit his lower lip. "The cake, I didn't want to say this, is full of bugs."
"That's impossible," blurted Clay Phipps, who suddenly seemed far more exasperated than was called for by a spoiled cake. "I just bought it. It's from Jean Claude's. It's-"
"It's the tropics," Augie interrupted with a shrug. O.K., he'd live without the cake. "There are bugs here."
"Well, damnit," said Clay Phipps, "there shouldn't be! Not in a fancy cake from a fancy baker. I'll bring it back."
This, Reuben had not counted on. But for Phipps to take the cake away was out of the question. The cake was very important. The cake was evidence. It would end the danger to Augie and would prove that Nina was not crazy.
"I'm sorry," Reuben said. "The cake, I put it in the garbage. The compactor. The cake it is squished."
Phipps tisked, threw a damp leg over the opposite knee. Reuben turned back toward the kitchen, wondering if he had seen, along with Phipps's exasperation, a hint of something like relief that the cake had been destroyed. But Augie saw only his visitor's annoyance. He watched him writhe and sweat, and gently mused on how easily rattled people were before they got on terms with death.
"It's nothing, Clay," he softly said, and he put a hand across the other man's forearm.
"But it was a gift," the visitor said miserably, and immediately wished he hadn't used the word. It was a gift like Augie's paintings had been gifts, and he, Clay Phipps, was always doing just the wrong thing where gifts were concerned, gifts always seemed to be the litmus test that pointed up his smallness, the unintentional and unchangeable lack of generosity that was poisoning his life. Gift. The word and Augie's all-forgiving touch made him feel as loathsome as a serpent, and as spiteful. He sipped his mineral water, mopped his forehead, and wished that he was home, alone.
29
June was a slow time in Key West, slow for culture as for everything else, and from week to week Ray Yates had a tougher job finding guests and events to fill up time on Culture Cocktail. The seasonal people had gone north, taking with them to the Vineyard or to Provincetown their harpsichords, their loose-leaf binders of lesbian love poems. Road shows didn't come south in June, and no booking agent who wanted to keep a has-been pop act would send them to this off-season purgatory of heat, humidity, and empty seats. So Yates muddled through with the occasional self-published author, a psychic or two, and the local impresarios who spoke with relentless enthusiasm about the upcoming winter season, a million years away.