Weakly, desperately, Nina and Augie dragged themselves across the patch of lawn and tumbled in. The splash of their landing was lost in the sputter and whoosh of the fire, the mild water felt like dry ice against their reddened flesh. For a moment they did not realize that Reuben was not with them.
Then they turned back toward the blazing skeleton of their home. The tin roof had buckled, entire walls had burned away, the house was ceasing to exist. Against the wreckage of what was left, moving through the indigo smoke sparked with orange flame, they saw a slender form. Reuben was going back in; he was going to rescue Augie's canvas.
"My God," the painter said. He screamed out Reuben's name to call him back; the sound was swallowed by the fire and the futile whine of approaching sirens, for all its anguish it went no farther than an unfelt prayer.
The young man vanished in the black and choking fog. When he appeared again, the huge prophetic picture of the parrot was on his shoulders and he was struggling toward the doors. But the flames were beyond all boundaries now, there was no inside and no outside, there was only fire everywhere. The fire caught up with Reuben, and when he staggered through the blazing archway, he himself was burning. Yellow flame crawled up his legs; pathetically he tried to run and the flames streamed back behind him; a blue gleam came off his burning hair. He struggled forward then pitched down on the patch of grass; with supreme effort he tried to throw the monumental painting clear of the inferno; it landed very near him, singed but not destroyed.
Augie, dazed, acting without the need of thought, pulled himself from the water and crawled beneath the waves of smoke to the unconscious Reuben. An acrid smell came from the young man's scalp, flames still licked at his back and legs; Augie smothered them with his own wet body, choked back nausea at the unspeakable feel of his friend's oozing skinless flesh. He pulled and rolled the ravaged form toward the coolness of the pool; it left a trail of ash and blood. Nina helped him lower the unmoving body into the water, then cradled it against herself as Augie, weeping, worked desperately to breathe life back into Reuben's slack mouth.
46
Charles Effingham, the white-maned chairman of Sotheby's, had been in the business forty years and could predict the success or failure of a given sale by the presence or absence of a certain smell in the auction room. This smell needed to be ferreted out behind the aromas that always pertained in gatherings of the wealthy-the round spiced scents of expensive perfumes, the creamy leather musk of the finest shoes and handbags. The odor Effingham sought out was rather less refined. It was a lusty, avid smell; nervous and glandular, it was a grown-up, toned-down version of the soupy stink of prep school dances. It was a smell that happened when people wanted something badly and were willing to be as stupid as necessary to get it.
In the minutes before the opening of bidding at the Solstice Show, the chairman worked the room. He greeted, he joked, he sniffed; he didn't smell much lust.
"I think I'll sit in the back," he said to Campbell Epstein, the head of Paintings. Epstein got the message; it made his stomach burn and caused the scallop-pattern furrows in his forehead to etch themselves a trifle deeper.
And yet the turnout wasn't bad at all. Perhaps a hundred fifty people were treading the huge Bokhara carpet in the auction room, chatting softly under the Venetian crystal chandeliers. The heavy critics, the important dealers, the big collectors were there in force. Claire Steiger was there, hiding her hangover and her despair. She talked with Avi Klein and several other of her clients, clients to whom she had refused to sell Augie Silvers back when the price was skyrocketing; she felt them gloating now, she smiled but her face hurt. She made a point of keeping far away from Peter Brandenburg, whose calamitous article had already been read by nearly everyone and was the subject of half a dozen conversations in that room. Dressed in perfect linen, distant and impregnable, he stood by himself and made notes in his well-thumbed copy of the auction catalogue.
Among the debonair crowd were a few people who were less so. One of these was Ray Yates. Bearded, wearing sunglasses and an ill-fitting jacket over a palm-tree shirt, he skulked in a corner and avoided the insulting glances of the security guards. He'd been running for his life for almost two weeks now; the habit of furtiveness did in fact make him look decidedly suspicious. And lonely, desperately lonely. So much so that when, just at ten o'clock, Clay Phipps, looking frazzled but not inelegant in a pale yellow suit, swept into the room, Yates almost threw himself against his chest.
The new arrival barely had time to drop a mention of his Learjet ride before the auctioneer pounded the gavel and people were asked to take seats.
The auction began, and it went badly from the start.
Works by Larry Rivers and Jim Dine sold for disappointing prices after languid bidding; a Helen Frankenthaler was practically stolen. Campbell Epstein, sitting near the auctioneer at a table manned by unbusy spotters, looked slightly jaundiced. A Jasper Johns was carried for display through a door at the auctioneer's left; no one ante'd up the work's lofty minimum, and the spurned canvas was ignominiously carted back to storage.
After twenty minutes a young assistant approached Charles Effingham and whispered in his ear. The head of Paintings, his yellow tie dancing against his throbbing Adam's apple, watched the chairman rise and leave, and wondered if the sly old boy had arranged to be called away from the debacle.
The sale dragged on; people started looking out the windows. "The next lots," droned the auctioneer, "numbers C-forty-seven through C-seventy-four, are by the contemporary American Augie Silver."
There was a stirring at the mention of the name, but it was perverse. Heads turned toward Peter Brandenburg; heads turned toward Claire Steiger. As during a streak of lousy weather, people perked up not in hopes of improvement but with a morbid curiosity as to how bad things could get.
"What am I bid," the auctioneer continued, "for lot C-forty-seven, an early work, a lovely seascape, eighteen by twenty-four inches? The medium is oils, the estimated value is twenty thousand dollars."
"Three dollars," someone said. "Same as an issue of Manhattan magazine."
An edgy titter went through the room; the auctioneer squelched it with the gavel. "Serious bids only, please. Do I hear an opening of five thousand dollars for the Augie Silver seascape?"
Silence spread like a fissure in the earth. Ray Yates and Clay Phipps, sitting side by side, looked between their feet and saw their hopes of a windfall slipping down into some black and bottomless chasm.
Finally a plump hand went up. It belonged to Avi Klein. He had a wry look on his face, as if it were intrinsically droll to buy something, anything, for a mere five thousand dollars. No one topped his paltry bid.
The next two works, whose estimates had been thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars, were sold for seven and nine respectively, to another longtime customer of Claire Steiger's, another high roller turned bargain hunter.
Had Charles Effingham still been seated in the auction room, his keen nose would have by now detected a smell of something funky, something feral. It was not the reek of acquisition, however, but the meaner stink of scandal, the nasty excitement of being witness to a disaster, seeing the undoing of a career in art. A fourth Augie Silver was gaveled at less than a quarter of its estimate; a fifth picture did no better. Moment by moment, bid by grudging bid, Augie was being pulled down from the ranks of painters who mattered, was being flayed, shrunk, expunged from fashion, chipped away at like a toppled monument.