Scavenger Reef(11)

Women loved the place—or used to. Lank-haired and blithe, they came to him easily in the early years, drawn by the aura of the pure and struggling artist. They were won over by the chipped coffee cups, content to get politely plastered on syrupy Liebfraumilch or vinegary Bardolino swigged from glasses that had formerly held grated supermarket parmesan. And when Natchez had a poem accepted at one of the little magazines and a check for fifteen or twenty-five dollars arrived, there was cause for pride and celebration.

Then the eighties descended and the honor went out of being poor. Women no longer seemed titillated at the thought of sleeping in Robert Natchez's platform bed that one had to crawl across to reach the john. Inconveniently, the poet passed the age of forty, and season by season his image slipped from that of someone very intriguing to that of someone not quite suitable. His apartment underwent a similarly discouraging change. It was no longer cozy; it was cramped. It was no longer quaint; it was dark, musty, and held a perennial and unromantic whiff of mildew.

"My God, man," Augie Silver had said to him the very first time he visited, "you need a window."

So Augie went home and painted him one. It was a canvas full of fight and air, with suggestions of brilliant sky, hints of spring-green lawn, a calm movement running through it as of wind-tossed fronds. It was the cheeriest object by far in Natchez's apartment and had recently become by a vast margin the most valuable.

The poet looked over at it now, dropped his pen, and turned his thoughts to the dead painter. There is an awe spiked with envy and verging on hatred that those for whom life is difficult feel for those to whom life comes easily. And life, or so it seemed, had come easily to Augie Silver. He didn't agonize about painting; he painted. He didn't agonize about quitting; he quit. He had with his wife the sort of apparently effortless contentment that is the steadiest form of affection and regard, and that remains an utter mystery to those outside of it. He made enough money and, perversely, seemed to make more the less he worked.

And he wasn't, even by his own assessment, a major artist. That was the part that nettled Natchez, or that justified his pique. To the great artist, much was allowed, maybe everything; that was basic. But why should Augie Silver—a gifted dauber, a freakishly facile lightweight—have been admired, fawned on, taken seriously, while Natchez, who knew beyond a doubt that he was an important poet, a major voice, was still filling out applications like a goddamn high school senior? Where was the justice in it? He burned to know.

Disgusted, feeling wronged and righteous, Natchez pushed aside the grant forms, switched off his desk light, and walked the one step to the kitchenette to pour a glass of rum. Justice. It mattered deeply to Robert Natchez, as it matters to all profoundly frustrated people. As long as they themselves are the ones defining what is just and, in fantasy at least, the ones with the awful power to see that every person ends up as he deserves.





7


"Darling, how are you?" asked Claire Steiger.

Nina Silver briefly hesitated at her end of the phone line. How was she? Only lately had the widow noticed how often and offhandedly this bedeviling little question was asked. Take it seriously, and it was intimate as a bath. "I'm as well as I can be, Claire. How are you?"

"Me?" She sounded faintly surprised at the inquiry, but that, Nina reflected, was Claire. It was axiomatic that she was fine. The self-made woman who'd opened a dinky exhibition space in a side-street storefront, given it the grand name Ars Longa, and in less than a decade turned it into one of New York's most formidable taste-making galleries. Who'd snagged herself a square-jawed husband from among the East Side's thin crop of croquet-playing, equestrian bluebloods. Who'd done all this, moreover, without independent wealth or the cheap currency of great beauty or any particular genius except a genius for reaching the end point of her wishes. "Very busy. Hectic. ... It was a lovely memorial the other week."

What did one say to this? Thank you for approving of my taste in mourning? Nina had years ago stopped competing with her former boss on issues of style and refinement, had stopped competing with anyone about anything. She kept silent and looked around her own modest premises, the Vita Brevis Gallery. Augie had suggested the name over a bottle of champagne, and it had proven irresistible. It was a sweet space, the Vita Brevis, pine-floored and washed in north light, and its overhead was low enough that Nina Silver could turn a profit while showing exactly what she pleased. With modesty of aims came freedom. That was something Nina's former colleagues in New York found it difficult to understand.

"Nina," Claire Steiger resumed, "let me tell you why I'm calling. I'm mounting a show of Augie's work. A retrospective."