Florida Straits (37 page)

Claire Steiger kept right on toweling her
hair. "Darling," she said, "you're pathetic enough to be jealous
of a dead man. Am I supposed to be jealous of a live widow?"

*

"Lemme tell ya somethin' about Augie
Silver," said Jimmy Gibbs.

He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar,
dockside at City Marina, and tucked between his spread-out elbows
was a shot of Jack Daniel's and a bottle of Bud. He was speaking in
the general direction of Hogfish Mike Curran, the proprietor, but
he wanted to talk and he didn't much care who if anyone was
listening.

"Augie Silver was the best damn sailor I
ever saw. Always calm. A natural. The wind talked to him. The seas
like made a road to let him through. Currents, he always managed it
so they helped him. That boat a his —thirty-seven feet,
single-handed he sailed it nimble as a dinghy. . . . What happened
t'Augie, it coulda happened t'anyone. It was a freak. Fuckin'
world is all fucked up. Fuckin' weather, ya can't count on it no
more. Waterspout in January. Who ever heard of a fuckin' waterspout
in January?"

"Happens," said Hogfish Mike. "Not often,
but it happens."

Gibbs snorted disapproval, then nipped into
his shot and his beer. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair pulled
tightly back in a little ponytail, and after several boilermakers
his scalp felt pinched. He reached up and loosened the elastic
band. A pelican jumped clumsily from a nearby piling and splashed
into the shallow water of Garrison Bight.

"Vicious, those waterspouts," Hogfish Mike
went on. He crossed his ropy forearms and almost smiled. The ready
violence of the natural world was for him a kind of confirmation.
"Funnel comes down. Black as sin, you can almost see it spinning.
Holy shit—do ya zig or zag? If it catches ya, you're fucked. Spout
digs a hole innee ocean, makes a whirlpool that churns like a
goddamn Maytag. Sucks fish right outta the water, twirls boats
around till they rip apart or crash up onna reef. Breaks off masts
like fuckin' breadsticks. I hate to think what would happen to a
man in one of those. He'd get yanked to pieces, busted up like the
dummy without the seat belt on."

Hogfish paused and finally noticed that his
description was causing pain. He leaned across the bar toward Jimmy
Gibbs and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Jimmy,
hey, it's not like the guy was your bubba. He was a Yankee. Nice
house. Big boat. O.K., he paid you fair to do the grunt work. Maybe
he bought you a drink now and then. But come on—"

"Augie wasn't like the others," said Jimmy
Gibbs, and there was something in his tone that made Hogfish Mike
back off. "He treated a person like a person. Lemme get another
round."

"Got cash, Jimmy? No tabs here, you know the
rules."

Gibbs looked sadly down at his shot glass
with nothing at the bottom but an amber stain. Then he considered
his beer and sloshed around the last lukewarm pull. A seagull
screamed nearby. "Come on, Hogfish, we known each other a lotta
years."

"That's the problem, Jimmy," said Hogfish
Mike. 'That's the problem."

*

"You like'a heah?" said Reuben the Cuban,
suspending a huge vase of lilies and orchids above the center of a
long split-willow table.

Nina Alonzo-Silver stood hands on hips in
the middle of her living room and weighed the arrangement with her
eyes. "Too heavy there," she said. 'Try it over by the lamp."

The housekeeper moved the flowers. He was a
slight, wiry young man with the surprising yellowish pallor of
certain Key West Cubans; he moved in a low-slung whisper like a cat
or a Japanese woman, and he nearly disappeared behind the thick
stems of the lilies. "Oba heah?" he said.

The widow nodded. Then she cast an
appraising glance at the buffet dishes and glasses already arrayed
on the sideboard, and at her dead husband's paintings beautifully
hung and immaculately lit on every wall. Through the French doors
at the rear of the house, a soft blue gleam wafted up from the
lights in the pool. In a big enameled cage near the door, a twitchy
green parrot looked on. The widow squared a picture frame that had
been perhaps a quarter-inch off-true. Then she tried to smile.

"You see, Reuben," she said. "It's just like
getting ready for an opening."

"Art sucks," said the parrot. "Johnnie
Walker." The sound was metallic and wildly abrupt, scratchy as the
sand in the bird's idiot throat.

"
Tranquilo
, Fred," said Reuben the
Cuban.

"Cutty Sark. Where's Augie?" the parrot
responded, and the widow started to cry. She made no sound. Her
shoulders hunched slightly and flat streaks of wet almost instantly
appeared under her slate-gray eyes.

"Noon tomorrow," she said.

Reuben didn't understand exactly what she
meant. He stood there silent, hoping to be able to help.

"Service at ten," she said, her voice soft
but without a quaver. "No rabbi. No minister. No God. No Heaven.
The way Augie would have wanted. Just some stories, some laughing,
some crying, some wine. A lot of wine. Then noon."

"Noon what?" asked Reuben.

The widow tried to smile again and the tear
streaks took a sudden turn around the changed contours of her face.
"Noon tomorrow. The official unofficial time to give up hope."

"Augie Silver," intoned his best friend,
Clayton Phipps, once a promising playwright, now for many years the
publisher, editor, and sole contributor to a quaint little
newsletter called
Best Revenge.
"Augie Silver."

Phipps paused, leaning against a makeshift
lectern set up at the deep end of the dead man's pool. He let the
syllables hang in the bright, clear morning air, hoping to evoke
the entire miracle and tragedy of a human being through the thin
yet potent fact of his name. Much underrated, the magic of a name.
It was the ultimate container, the profoundest and most elegant
summing-up of the passions, capacities, follies, likes and
dislikes, the fears, quests, and eccentricities that made one
person distinguishable from all others.

"Augie Silver." Phipps chanted it a third
time, and under a poinciana tree, very near the table with the
liquor, Ray Yates elbowed Robert Natchez in the ribs.

"Only guy I know who's a more pompous
asshole than you are."

Natchez frowned his disapproval and tugged
at the cuffs of another black shirt. Reuben the Cuban slunk
silently among the guests, content in the belief that in pouring
coffee and delivering mimosas he was paying homage to the dead
husband and bringing comfort to the widow.

Perhaps a hundred fifty people had come
together to honor Augie Silver's memory, and they reflected the
breadth and oddness of the painter's personal democracy. The art
establishment, of course, was represented. There was an editor from
Picture Plane
, a publication that had once dubbed the
deceased "a minor yet searing talent, achingly pure and
infuriatingly unambitious." There was the famously snide yet
annoyingly accurate critic Peter Brandenburg, who years before had
described Silver as "a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining
renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll
paint." There were reviewers from the newsmagazines and from papers
in New York, Chicago, and Washington. There was even a gallery
owner from Paris who happened to be vacationing in South Beach.

But when, ten years before, Augie Silver had
moved to Key West from Manhattan, it was with the clear intention
of escaping the hothouse atmosphere of the art capitals, broadening
his circle beyond the clutch of those who could do favors and those
who wanted favors done. To be sure, the Key West artsy set had
gravitated to him: the writers who didn't write, the sculptors who
didn't sculpt, the trust-funders kept just shy of suicidal
self-loathing by the mercifully untested belief that they were in
some sense creative. They could be quite amusing, these
constipated, deluded bohemians and hangers-on: Their vision had
nowhere to go except into what they said and how they lived, and
their frustrations often gave rise to piquant comments on human
nature and the state of the world.

Still, it was not the Ray Yateses and Bob
Natchezes who had given the greatest zest to Augie Silver's last
years. It was the people who were strangers to poetry, innocent of
art. It was the wharf rats like Jimmy Gibbs, half of whom had done
jail time. It was the fishing captains who at first took Augie out
as one more pain-in-the-ass know-nothing client, then later invited
him as a soothing companion. It was the old Cubans who poled out in
the back country and showed him how to dig a sponge. They too were
represented at Augie's corpseless send-off. They milled shyly along
the periphery, these outsiders, bashful of the canapes, made
nervous by the thinness of the glassware. They wanted to pay their
respects and get the hell out of this elegant backyard, but Clayton
Phipps was not about to race through his moment of high praise for
his friend and spotlight for himself.

"Augie Silver was the most generous man I
ever knew," said the eulogist. "Ya know, some people
decide
to be generous. It
occurs
to them to give you something.
Augie wasn't like that. He didn't decide. It just happened. It was
his nature. Gifts flowed from him. He was a source, a well. Life
burned in him, and he could not help but give back warmth."

Phipps looked toward the shady place where
Nina Silver was sitting, all alone. A hundred people had greeted
her, many had embraced her, and yet there had remained a dread and
stubborn space around her, a cuticle of passionate blankness that
she would not allow to be moved aside or filled.

"Who among us," he went on, "does not have
something of Augie's? Some remembered story, some flash of insight
or shred of his wise-ass wisdom. Some taste or preference we
learned from him. A sweater he gave you because you said you liked
the color. A jacket he put around your shoulders because you were
cold and he was not. A tool he lent and promptly forgot about, a
book he thought you might like . . ."

Around the dead man's yard and through the
open doors of his house, the mourners shifted from foot to foot,
remembered, smiled privately, and glanced at each other, secretly
wondering who'd gotten the sweaters, the jackets . . .

"And the paintings," Clayton Phipps resumed.
"My God, the paintings! The man gave them away like they were so
much scratch paper. His life's work, his livelihood, his legacy.
Where did he find the strength and the humor that enabled him to
take it all so lightly? 'Here,' he'd say, about a canvas that had
taken him a month. 'You like it? Put it in your house.' 'Here,'
he'd say with this amazing casualness. 'This little one? Sell it if
you can—get your boat fixed.' 'Here, put this over your desk for
luck.' 'Here, put this in your kid's room.' How many beautiful and
precious paintings did Augie Silver give away? Does anybody even
know?"

The question rose up over the swimming pool
and hovered there. Claire Steiger, the dead man's agent, read her
bankrupt husband's face and despised him for the bloodless
calculations she knew were going on behind it. And she wondered if
it showed in her own expression that she could not help but do some
calculating too.

*

By 1 p.m. the speeches were over, the ice
cubes were melted, the crowd had thinned, and Nina Silver had
barely noticed that her promised deadline of hope had come and gone
and nothing whatever had changed in her heart. She bid farewell to
the dispersing guests, accepted their sincere and irrelevant
sympathies, nodded to all the well-meant pledges to stay close, to
see more of one another. She yearned for everyone to be gone and
dreaded the moment when the house would once again be empty.
Emptier than before, with no event to plan, no exquisitely small
details—irises or lilies? champagne or chardonnay?—to rivet her
attention. She straightened a picture frame that a departing friend
had shouldered awry, then stared at the level edge to steady
herself, the way a seasick man searches for sanity in a clear
horizon.

Out in the garden, a few men whose nature it
was to be the last to leave were honoring Augie the way the men of
Athens honored the martyred Socrates, by talking and drinking,
drinking and arguing.

"Here's the part I still don't get," Ray
Yates said, slipping into the mock-ingenuous interviewer's tone he
used in his radio show. He was sitting on a white wrought-iron
chair and his inappropriately cheery shirt was darkened here and
there with moisture. Yates was thickly built, squat and hairy, the
type that's always sweaty. It didn't help that there was no ice
left for his rum. "Guy's got this great career. A New York gallery
that loves him. He can sell whatever he paints, prices are better
all the time. . . . Then he just stops working. Why?"

Clayton Phipps sipped his warmish Sancerre
and noted how the flinty taste turned cactusy as the wine
approached body temperature. He hooked a thumb through one of his
suspenders and slid it to a fresh place on his shoulder. "Ray," he
said, "this might be tough for you to grasp, but it had to do with
standards.

I remember a dinner I had with Augie, about
five years ago. We were drinking a Lynch Bages 'seventy-eight,
rather young but very concen—"

"Who gives a shit what you were drinking?"
interjected Robert Natchez.

Phipps glared at him from under his heavy
brows. "It speaks of the quality of the moment, Natch. Isn't that
what you poets supposedly care about? Anyway, we were talking about
standards. About the difference between talent and genius. Between
skilled painting and great painting. Augie had no fake modesty—we
all know that. He knew he had talent. He knew he had skill. He
doubted he had genius. And he was coming to feel that if he didn't
have genius, then what was the point—"