"Fuck the image," said Kip Cunningham without parting his small and perfect teeth. "We're broke."
Claire Steiger reached for another petit four, then regarded her outstretched hand as if it belonged to someone else, some piggish guest, and yanked it back before it had snatched the pastry. Claire was not fat, just round, put together out of circles. Her coarse curly hair haloed her head in a spherical do. Her face was round, her hips were round, her breasts were round. When she lost weight, certain dimensions flattened out and became disk-like but never angular.
"It wouldn't work," she told her husband. "Even if I said the hell with being classy, let's go for the quick score-it wouldn't work. Serious collectors don't buy that way, Kip. They're not impulsive. They wait for assurance from the critics. They're going to spend six, maybe seven figures for a canvas, they want the big auction houses' stamp of approval-"
"So why don't we sell through an auction house?"
"Then why do we have a gallery?"
"Sotheby's," Kip Cunningham said. It sounded like a prayer. "Don't they do a big painting sale in June?"
"The Solstice Show. Biggest of the year. But Kip, what'll it accomplish? Say we're the only ones unloading Augie Silvers. If anything, it'll drive the prices down. It'll look like we're dumping. Like we're desperate."
"We are desperate."
The flight attendant came by to refresh their coffee, and had the tact not to ask if everything was all right. The speaker system switched on and a voice from the flight deck informed them that those seated on the left side of the airplane could look down and see Washington, DC.
"Who gives a good goddamn?" grumbled Kip. He pushed his coffee aside and asked for a brandy. He was sipping it sullenly when his wife spoke again.
"How much we need for the July payment?" she asked.
"Two million four," said Kip.
"And the total indebtedness?"
"Personal or corporate?"
"Corporate's not my problem." Claire fixed her husband with her tender brown eyes. "I'm asking how much you're in hock on things that are half mine."
Kip blinked down at his tray table. It befuddled him that he couldn't figure exactly when or how this toy called debt was transfigured into money he actually had to pay. "Eight million," he mumbled. "A little less."
His wife considered. "I've got an idea. I think I can raise enough for July at least, maybe the whole nut. But it comes with a price tag, Kip. I bail you out, the Sagaponack house goes into my name and my name alone."
Kip Cunningham had the kind of fragile handsomeness that one moment seemed polished, cocksure, and composed, and with the smallest shift could collapse into the sniveling pout of a spoiled child, a defeated brat snuffling outside a squash-court door. He glanced sideways at his wife, his mouth flat as snake lips, his eyes hard with the furtive meanness of the weak. He gave a brief laugh that was meant to be sardonic. "So what are you saying, Claire? Are you saying you're going to divorce me?"
She flashed her tender eyes at him. "I might."
She reached again for a petit four and didn't stop herself this time. She bit into it, luxuriating in the rasp of grainy sugar against her teeth, the squish of yellow cake and apricot preserve against her tongue. "It seems more possible every day."
4
"Clay, don't," said Nina Silver.
She gently but firmly grasped the family friends thick wrist before his hand could slide down onto her breast, and pushed his large warm face away from her neck.
Phipps, a gentleman more or less, didn't wait for the attempted embrace to become a grovel, a grope, some unseemly echo of adolescence. He sat up straight on the settee alongside Augie Silver's blue-lit swimming pool, partly disappointed, part contrite, maybe even part relieved. "Nina," he said, "I'm sorry." In a move to recapture his dignity, he smoothed the placket of his linen shirt the way a riled bird resettles its feathers. "Loss does strange things to people. I'm a mess."
Augie's widow gave him a soft smile and patted him on the knee. It was a gesture of caring and acceptance, but it somehow made Phipps feel worse. Was he so ridiculous a suitor that the woman he'd just been trying to seduce would feel not the slightest threat in touching his leg? He took stock. He was fifty-eight years old. O.K., not young, but only one year older than Augie. He was bald, yes, but had always been told he had a well-shaped head. He wasn't rich, but managed to live as though he was. He wasn't famous, but enjoyed many of the perks thereof. His little newsletter was highly respected by those who knew and cherished the finer things; his endorsement was coveted around the world. Clayton Phipps was acknowledged as a formidable judge of wine, a gourmet of nice discernment and enviable experience, a canny traveler who had filled ten passports with visa stamps.
All those hotel rooms, he reflected wryly, sitting next to Augie Silver's lovely widow. Overlooking the Bay of Naples, Sydney Harbor, the Tyrolean Alps. All those beautiful, romantic, complimentary suites-brass beds, marble bathtubs-he'd occupied alone. All those marvelous dinners taken at small tables in the sycophantic company of proprietors. All those tastings of legendary Bordeaux, sipped elbow to elbow with a bunch of crotchety old men in caves. Nearing the age of sixty, Clayton Phipps admitted to himself what a damnably clever job he'd done of living life for free, keeping himself unfettered, independent, sought after, and alone.
"Nina, Nina, you know what it is?" Emerging from his thoughts, Phipps didn't notice the abruptness of his voice in the night air that was perfumed with frangipani and chlorine. "What it is I really want? I want what you and Augie had."
"Of course you do," the widow said softly. Loss, for her, had made everything seem simple, obvious, reduced to its essentials. People wanted love, intimacy, the sense of being mated. They wanted to feel the profound familiarity that made another person's nearness as basic as the taste of water. "Everyone wants what Augie and I had. I want it. I want it back."
Clayton Phipps was not an unfeeling man, not usually, but in the grip of his newly acknowledged loneliness he failed to see that the widow's pain was infinitely sharper than his own because she knew exactly what she was missing while he had only the vague awareness that something precious had eluded him all his life. "With someone else…" he began. It wasn't quite a question, not quite a statement. It was off the beat and had the awkwardness of doomed pleading.
'There is no one else, Clay," said the widow, and there was defiance in her voice. The defiance was not aimed at Clayton Phipps, but still it stung him, made him feel a flash of shaming envy and even bitterness, even spite, toward his dead friend. Why should Augie Silver be so loved?
"Come now, Nina," he said. Phipps felt as if he'd slipped into a chasm of longing that had little to do with Nina Silver, a slippery pit in which his isolation was the only fact, and he tried to climb out of it with handholds of cynicism couched as worldliness. "Aren't we a little old to believe in this one right person nonsense?"
"I don't believe in that," said Nina. "I think there are any number of right people for each other-"
"Well then," Phipps cut in. His tone had turned professorial. If charm couldn't rescue the moment, maybe logic would save him. "If there are any number-"
The widow interrupted in turn, soft but unstoppable as a train. "Until you really fall in love with one. Then the others dim out, fade away, come to seem-I don't mean this personally, Clay-a little bit absurd."