Phipps was not yet totally awake, but he was awake enough to know what he was being asked. He blinked, glanced around his living room as if it were a stranger's house. He sighed, walked heavy-footed and obliquely toward a chair, and sat down on the edge of it. He said nothing.
"Why, Clay?" Augie repeated. "Why all of them?"
Phipps stayed silent. He put his elbows on his knees and ran his hands across his head, but his sparse hair came away no less disheveled than before.
"Money?" Augie asked. He waited a beat then answered his own question. "No, I don't think so. You've always liked to pamper yourself, but I've never known you to be greedy. If you needed money, you'd sell one, two-you wouldn't sell all six."
Phipps kept quiet. Augie locked his hands behind his back and looked up at the ceiling as if puzzling out a problem in the higher math.
"Were you just showing off, Clay? Is it as simple as that? Were you hoping to get kissed up to as a big collector, invited to some fancy East Side parties?"
Clay Phipps tried to speak, but all that came out was a low rasp, a sound like someone stirring gravel with a spoon. He tried again. "Augie, we all thought you were dead."
The painter moved away from the guilty wall and stood above his friend. "I don't want to sound like a sentimental fool," he said, "but it seems to me that that might be a reason to keep the fucking paintings. A little something to remember me by."
"I don't need pictures to remember you," Phipps said weakly, but it sounded smarmy even in his own ears and it evoked nothing but an icy stare from Augie. A moment passed and then Phipps spoke again. He spoke so softly that Augie had to lean down low, straining in the pre-dawn quiet to catch the words. "Or maybe it's that I didn't want to remember you."
Augie straightened up. He felt a pain that was also a relief; the decay of a lie had been scraped away, a nerve was open to the air. "Ah," he said, "a bit of naked honesty creeps in. How bracing. How rare."
"I need a drink of water," Clay Phipps said. Abstractedly, almost as if sleepwalking, he got up and padded barefoot toward the kitchen. Augie dogged his steps.
"You thought I was dead," he said to Phipps's back. "Well, I had some things wrong too. I thought I had friends to come home to."
Phipps switched on the kitchen light. He was a fastidious bachelor and the place was neat. A single place setting had dried in the drain-board. Wineglasses gleamed on a shelf. There was a handsome wooden knife block on the counter with every knife in place. "You do," he said as he drew a glass of water from the cooler.
"Bullshit," Augie answered. He watched his old friend gulp down his drink, watched his throat pulse with swallowing and his belly stretch a little farther, and he was suddenly seized by a physical revulsion mingled with an aching and useless compassion not just for Clay Phipps but for all things human. Drinking water and pissing urine; getting old and getting fat; disappointing friends and being disappointed; all of it a noisy and befuddled prologue to the lonely act of dying. "Clay, what did I do to you? What did I do that you need to forget about?"
Phipps leaned back against his kitchen counter. He blinked down at the floor, he scratched his scalp. The sleepiness seemed finally to fall away from him and was replaced by a whining defiance, a complaining that had gone unspoken for far too long and turned rancid. "You want to know, Augie? You really want to know? You shamed me. You shamed all of us. Me. Yates. Natchez. You made us feel like shit."
They locked eyes. The kitchen was narrow and they were standing very close. The knife block bristled near Phipps's right elbow. Augie said nothing.
"I don't think any of us realized it until you disappeared," the heavy man went on. "Until we thought you died. It's like… how can I explain it? When you were around, we figured we were your friends, we must be like you. Then you were gone, and it was very clear we weren't like you at all. You had your work. You had your marriage. You had your way of getting on with people, different kinds of people, making everybody feel good. We had none of that. Not really. And the worst thing, the humiliating part? We didn't even know we didn't have it-you had it for us.
"You feel betrayed, Augie? I feel betrayed. When you hit the reef, we all hit the reef. Don't you see that? This pleasant little life we had down here, we thought there was some heart to it, some depth. But no, it only seemed that way because you buoyed it up. You had an obligation-"
Almost casually, almost as if the gesture were an accidental fidget, Augie reached for a knife. His left hand moved forward abruptly but with no special quickness. It went past Clay Phipps's flank and seized the biggest handle. The blade was long and thin, the flexing metal rang softly as it was whisked out of the block. Phipps fell silent, his breath caught with a strangled gurgling sound. He tucked his chin and the loose flesh underneath it began instantly to tremble.
"Someone's trying to kill me, Clay," said Augie. "Is it you?"
Phipps didn't answer. He stared at the knife, his eyes throbbed in and out of focus. Augie held it loosely, carelessly; it glinted in the electric light, and the point was a few inches from Phipps's bare pink stomach. He arched his back and tried to shrink, he leaned back hard against the counter and squeezed the edges of it with white fingers.
"You think I'm going to stab you, Clay? Terrible thing, a guilty conscience. Hold out your hand."
Slowly, warily, Phipps lifted his eyes. He let go of the counter edge; his palm made a moist sound as it came away. He presented his soft plump hand and Augie gently placed the knife in it. "Feel better now?" he asked.
Phipps just stared at him.
"I asked you a question," Augie went on. "Answer it."
Phipps blinked. He remembered to breathe, but he seemed as baffled and as terrified to find the knife in his own hand as he had been to see it in his friend's. "Augie, Jesus Christ-"
"All right, let's try a different question. You want me dead, Clay?"
The refrigerator switched on; the sudden noise was shocking. Somewhere far away a dog yelped. Outside the small kitchen window the darkness was changing from pure black to a veiled and grainy purple. All at once the knife felt not just brutal but unutterably obscene, disgusting, in Phipps's hand. He turned and put it on the counter, and when he faced Augie again he was crying. The tears didn't fall, they just made his irises look melted, smeared; the rims of his eyelids were bright red and the corners of his mouth began to quiver.
"I've wished you were dead," he said softly. "Once you'd gone, once the secret was out about how small my life is, how alone I am, how ridiculous…" He shook his bald head, lightly slapped his belly with a mix of self-mockery and affection without respect. "Yeah. I've felt maybe there'd be less to be embarrassed about, less to feel like a failure about, if you didn't exist."
He paused, dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. He sniffled, and then, through the wet and childlike noise, he gave a little laugh. The laugh carried a bleak but genuine amusement. He pinched the bridge of the nose, then made a dismissive gesture that seemed to take in his striped pajamas, his tender pink feet, his neat kitchen with his cookbooks and his saucepans and his wooden spoons. "But Augie, for God's sake, I'm not a killer."
Augie stood back and appraised him. Phipps's face would not stay still. His mouth held the bleak smile for just a moment, then collapsed, folded down as if he would begin to sob. The eyes crinkled with the last pinch of a laugh, then clouded over in shame, and finally opened wide and liquid with a naked hope: the hope that he would be forgiven.
Augie didn't know if he could come across with that forgiveness. If it happened, it wouldn't happen by decision but by feeling, and the feeling needed time to ripen or to shrivel.