The cop left. Nina shivered, not from cold but from a spasm of disgust. Her skin felt itchy, oily, soiled with the guilt of others. She dropped underwater, kicked out to the middle of the pool, and stayed down as long as she could, cleansing herself, fending off the bright and scorching surface, hiding.
Mood swings are tiring, and the morning's ups and downs left Augie feeling mopey.
He tried to put some finishing touches on the portrait of Fred, but not one brush stroke pleased him, he felt himself dangerously pulled toward muddying up his sprightly greens with brown, and rather than give in to that he put his paints aside.
After that, time dragged. It was four days before the summer solstice, the heavy sun struggled up the highest part of the sky like a fat man climbing stairs, and when it reached the zenith it seemed to pause a long time, panting, and the earth panted underneath it. Fronds drooped; flowers wilted; the blades of ceiling fans labored through the viscous air as though through pancake batter.
Around three o'clock there was a downpour which by rights should have ended the day. But it didn't. The sun was back in twenty minutes, as punishing as before. Steam rose from pavements, from the crowns of shrubs, and in the Silver house a small sin was committed: Everyone gave up on the endless afternoon and waited dully for the release of night and sleep.
After a cold dinner Nina went to bed to read. Reuben cleared the table, did the dishes. Augie stayed up just long enough to watch the early stars come out, and then he too retired.
He was going to his room when he saw something that redeemed the day. He saw Reuben praying.
The young man's bedroom door was open slightly, and behind it Reuben was at his bedside, on his knees. His hands were crossed on the cotton blanket, his forehead lay against them, a lamp on his nightstand threw a soft gleam on his dark and curly hair. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt that showed his delicate shoulders and skinny chest, and he looked like a little boy. His lips moved, his head bobbed slightly as he prayed. After a moment he seemed to feel Augie's eyes on him. He looked up with a small shy smile.
Augie was nonplussed, embarrassed to be caught watching. "Reuben," he said. "I… I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you."
"You do not disturb me," Reuben said. His hands were still crossed in front of him; he still smiled.
"I didn't know you prayed," Augie fumbled. "You told me once you'd stopped believing."
Reuben nodded solemnly. "Yes," he said. "I stopped. I start again."
"Ah," said Augie.
"I start again," said Reuben, "because I am here. In this house. I have never known a house like this. There is much life here, much kindness. I must believe God smiles on this house."
Reuben didn't stand but he lifted his back, twisted his slender shoulders, and turned his head straight on toward Augie. His torso was traced by the lamp's yellow glow, one side of his face shone as if in firelight, the other side was shadowed. It was an image Augie would remember.
"I hope He does," said Augie. "Good night, Reuben."
"Good night, Augie. Sleep well."
42
Roberto Natchez dropped Friday morning's paper on his dim disheveled desk and coaxed the top off his Styrofoam cup of cafe con leche. With the usual snarls and sneers he read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments, riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root the vileness out.
Approvingly, he examined his scowl in the alcove mirror, sipped some coffee, then turned to the second section and saw the big lead article, its headline sprawled across the whole front page: Augie Silver- Key West's Greatest (Twice-) Living Artist.
This sent Natchez briefly back to his looking glass. He did a double take, snapped the paper in what he intended as a gesture of mocking disbelief. Then, with a throbbing pulse in his temple and a quickly tightening knot in his stomach, he began to read.
"Our town," went Arty Magnus's opening, "is a cultural mecca with many pilgrims and very few prophets."
Already Natchez was so affronted that he laughed out loud, erupted in a demonic cackle that hurt his throat. Was it conceivable that this cipher of a local reporter was going to call Augie Silver-a dauber, a decorator-a prophet? No, it was too ridiculous, too grotesque.
"Artists come here," the article went on, "expecting — what? To be magically, effortlessly infused with the island's atmosphere? To absorb talent by some sort of painless tropical osmosis? Well, it doesn't work that way, as longtime Key West resident Augie Silver can testify. To understand the allure, the resonance, and the dangerous beauty of our corner of the world is a difficult, harrowing-and potentially fatal-experience."
There followed what Roberto Natchez considered a strained transition to an unctuous, overblown account of Augie's misadventure at sea-and this evoked another derisive chortle from the poet: The man has a trivial mishap in a sailboat, a rich child's toy, and this is evidence of his profundity, this marks him as a seer?
Absurdity followed absurdity in the article. Augie Silver's bland commercial work was described as "haunting and uncompromising." His prissy bourgeois house was characterized as "cozy and devoid of ostentation." Augie himself-sloppy, haphazard, careless Augie-was passed off as "a man of unpretentious dignity, who wears his great gift with modesty and humor."
Great gift? thought Natchez. Ha! A gift for public relations maybe, a gift for facile showmanship…
But then the profile took a darker turn. Fame also had its perils, and there had recently been threats, the piece revealed, against the artist's life. The details were withheld, though Arty Magnus allowed himself to observe that Key West had no shortage of crackpots to whom any outrage, from the sickest prank all the way to murder, might conceivably seem justified. "Indeed" — and here the journalist ended with a flourish-"such twisted and deluded souls are symptomatic of the untamed hothouse life of the tropics-the life that Augie Silver so powerfully and unsparingly portrays."
Natchez let the paper fall flat against his desk. He glanced at the mirror and attempted a supercilious smile, but his face was too tense for that, his upper lip did a mad-dog twitch against his eyeteeth. " Crackpots." He said the word aloud, then he gave a bitter laugh that curdled in his windpipe and closed his throat like the taste of sour milk. Crackpots. Wasn't that just too typical? Anyone who took a stand against a fraud like Augie Silver must by definition be a crackpot. What simpler, more insidious way for the mendacious, mediocre status quo to maintain its death grip on the imagination than by pinning the label crackpot on anyone who saw beyond its narrow, constipated limits?
The poet did not remember rising from his chair, but he found himself pacing the confines of his small apartment. He paced, he wheeled-and then he saw the Augie Silver canvas still hanging on his wall. Why in God's name did he keep that wretched thing? He wouldn't stoop to sell it-never! — but why did he allow it to sully his workplace? Maybe, long before, he'd kept it as a kind of private joke, a goad, but that was in a less ripe phase of his development. Such frivolity, such an invasion of marketplace crassness, could no longer be abided.