They sat. A scrap of breeze sent tiny ripples across the pool and lifted a wet green smell from the hedge. Inside the house, soft yellow lights gleamed against the dark wood walls. Augie's paintings loomed, unmoved in the week since the memorial. The parrot cage stood near the door; Fred was covered for the night, dreaming what visions of jungle, berries, feathers, and flight might come to a bird in sleep.
And Nina Alonzo saw Augie Silver for the first time.
It was twelve years ago. She was twenty-nine. She was sitting at her desk at the gallery on 57th Street. She heard a strange scuffing sound on the marble floor and looked up to see her future husband strolling in his meandering way, looking over first one shoulder, then the other, halfway twirling, wearing boat shoes. Boat shoes in midtown Manhattan in March. He approached her. He had on a black cashmere turtleneck, the collar askew but tucked high under the chin, and over the sweater was a light jacket of fawn-colored pigskin suede. It vaguely occurred to her that these were tiger colors, black and tan, and it registered only very dimly that everything the painter wore would feel good. His hair was thick, wavy, and almost perfect white, tinged here and there with an oddly pinkish bronze, but his skin was youthful, smooth and ruddy as an Indian's. His eyes were an electric blue, and they rested far back in sockets so deep that they suggested lighthouse beams, piercing, narrow-focused lenses that swept across his range of vision and shone with unsettling concentration on one thing at a time. And now they were fixed on Nina Alonzo. "Hello," he said. "I'm Augie Silver." Then he did something that quietly amazed her when she thought about it afterward, amazed her because it could only have been carried off with perfect confidence, perfect ease, with a manner as comfortable as his clothes. He half-sat on her desk, stretched a leg alongside the phone, the files, the exhibition catalogues. His trousers were of beefy corduroy, and some of the wales were rubbed almost smooth…
"Nina, are you all right?"
She flinched just slightly at the sound of Phipps's voice, and felt not gratitude but resentment for the intrusive concern that had pulled her back to the here and now. "No," she said after a moment, "I'm not all right. My husband has been gone-what is it, Clay, three months now? — and he's more alive to me than anybody living. I'm not all right."
Phipps took her hand, and neither of them could help glancing down at the suspect twining of their fingers. Twenty minutes ago, before his bizarre and meager attempt at lust, the contact would have been clean. "Nina, is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?"
Even in his own ears, the question sounded a shade unwholesome, and Clay Phipps understood that he had forever forfeited the privilege of being totally trusted, of being mistaken for unselfish.
The widow took her hand away. "Don't try to be Augie, Clay. That's what you can do for me. Don't try to be the man I love."
Later, asleep, Nina again saw Augie Silver.
She saw him often in dreams, and savored these meetings as if they were deliciously forbidden trysts. They were always different and always the same, these dreams, full of the sore joy of reunion which then melted into a growing but never serene acceptance that the reunion was unreal.
This time Nina saw Augie while she was sitting in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. The front door opened and there he was. He hadn't shaved, his face gleamed with a steely stubble, and his throat was very tan beneath the collar of his shirt. "Augie," she said. She held her mug in front of her, smelling the fragrant steam and embracing the miracle of her husband coming back.
"Coffee?" he said, and walked through the living room toward the counter. She glanced at the coffee maker and noticed that the red brew light was flickering, blinking like a buoy at sea. She watched Augie walk, and though his walk was casual, shuffling as always, he became more insubstantial with each step, his form flattening, his feet in less secure contact with the floor, and the sleeping Nina felt him slipping away yet again. With the dreamer's comforting illusion that she could choose, she wrestled with the choice of waking up to dream-capture him before he had vanished, or staying asleep and willing him not to fade, willing him to explain but most of all to keep existing. "Just a cup of coffee," she said in the dream, and in her empty bedroom the words came out only as a soft mumble that woke her up. She opened her eyes, lifted onto her elbows for just a moment, and tried to memorize this most recent visit with her husband. He'd looked so handsome coming through the door.
5
Jimmy Gibbs pushed the point of his knife into the anus of a six-pound mutton snapper and slit its belly to the arc of bone beneath its jaw. Absently, he felt the fish deflate, then reached into the body cavity and plucked out the guts. Tubes and membranes, red nodes and green sacs came away in his hand, and he flung them into the shallow water shimmering with fish oil. It was a measure of Jimmy Gibbs's mood, where he flung the guts. When he was happy, feeling benign, he tossed them in the air so the wheeling gulls could snag the unspeakable morsels from the sky. When he was feeling foul, he threw the slimy viscera into Garrison Bight and made the squawking, miserable scavengers dunk for them.
Today Jimmy Gibbs was feeling especially foul. His back hurt. His hands were stiff, his fingers crosshatched with tiny cuts from spiny fish fins, edges of scales, other people's hooks. He had complaining knees, a swollen liver, a weakening bladder, and he was too damn old to be a mate on someone else's boat. Fifty-two, and a beat-up fifty-two at that. Living in a trailer; driving an ancient pickup that sifted rust every time he closed the door; and having something under nine hundred dollars of cash money in the bank. He yanked the innards out of another fish and swept them disgustedly off his cleaning table. They left behind a bloody and slightly iridescent smear.
"Whole or fillet?" Gibbs said to the tourist who, with a great deal of help and plenty of coaching, had managed to catch some fish. The tourist just stood there blankly. Was it too fucking difficult a question? Was it unthinkable that the tourist, God forbid, might sometime have to eat something with a bone in it? It was five o'clock, the sun was still hot, and Jimmy Gibbs had two more buckets of dead fish to clean.
"Fillet," the tourist said at last; and with more force than was required, Gibbs slashed the glistening flesh away from the pliant backbones. The tourist reached a clean hand into a clean pocket and came up with a dollar. He took his fish fillets in a plastic bag and dropped the bill onto the cleaning table, where it soaked up some slime. It was breezy on the dock but the dollar didn't blow away because fish stuff was gluing it to the plywood.
Gibbs looked down at the bill. What the fuck was a dollar? Two-thirds of a beer. Three quarts of gas. One three-hundredth of his rent. Nothing that would last the evening. Gibbs's hairline itched. He raked his forearm across it, then took a moment to look up and down the dock at the Key West charter fleet. There were maybe thirty boats that cost an average, say, of eighty thousand bucks apiece. Fuck had all that money come from? Some of it, Gibbs knew, was drug money. Well, O.K., people would do what they had to do, and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot. Some of it had come from land that the old families, the real Conchs, sold off to developers for what seemed at first vast sums then always turned out to be a lousy deal, a deal that ate the soul. Then of course there were the guys who acted like big shots but were really hired help, the paid captains with the silent partners in Dallas, Atlanta, or New York. They'd use the boat a week or two, these money guys, and take most of the profits the rest of the time. They liked the idea of being able to say they had a fishing boat in Key West. My boat. My captain. My crew. It gave them a hard-on, they could run around all thinking they were little Hemingways.