Reuben the Cuban fretted with his dish towel, closed the drawer that held the flatware. He pressed his teeth together to keep his face composed but his heart was wild with a secret, modest pride, the knightly ecstasy of one who stands ready to do all and asks nothing in return. "You do," he said, leaning just slightly across the kitchen counter. "You do, Meesus Silber."
8
"So this Steiger woman," said Ray Yates. "She call you?"
Clayton Phipps took a small sip of extremely nasty white wine and silently cursed himself for being talked into slumming at the Clove Hitch bar. It was well and good for Yates to play out this man-of-the-people routine; he had to, being a radio host, a local personality. But why should Phipps have to subject himself to this resinous, oxidized fluid out of a green gallon screw-top jug with an ear? "Yes," the connoisseur said reluctantly. "She called."
"She want your paintings?" Yates pressed.
"She wants to show my paintings," Phipps corrected. "There's an understanding that it's strictly NFS."
"NFS," muttered Robert Natchez, who was sitting on Phipps's other side. Like most pretentious people, the poet was uncannily sensitive to pretension in others, it irritated him like sand in the mesh cup of a bathing suit. "Goddamnit, Clay, can't you just say 'not for sale' like a normal human being?"
Phipps shrugged. The whole subject of the paintings made him highly uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him feel as nasty as the wine. "O.K., Natch," he said. "Not for sale. Like your journals."
There was a pause. The three friends blinked across the glare of Garrison Bight and watched the charter boats straggle in, their practiced captains working shifters and throttles to back them into their slips with swagger. Red and seasick tourists gathered at the sterns, jockeying for position to be the first ones back on land. Pelicans sat in the water, still as bathtub toys, cormorants stood on pilings and spread their prehistoric wings to dry.
"How many paintings ya got?" asked Ray Yates.
The question fell just as Clay Phipps had let himself imagine that the topic of Augie's canvases was closed, and for all Yates's efforts to sound offhanded, there was something inherently rude, salacious even, about the inquiry, like casually asking someone the length of his dick or the amount of money in his Keogh plan.
There had always been a certain competitiveness among Augie Silver's friends. It stemmed from the fact that they all admired Augie more than they did each other, and more than they did themselves. There was something about the man that made it seem crucial to be liked by him. He was a natural arbiter, he conferred esteem the way a king grants titles of nobility, and his favor suggested not just personal preference but fundamental worth. In the matter of gift paintings, his favor could also confer large amounts of cold cash, but that was something no one wanted to be crude enough to be the first to mention.
"Six," said Clayton Phipps. He said it softly, shyly even, looking down at his cheap scratched wineglass, yet could not quite squelch a nervous smile, a hint of bragging.
"Six!" said Ray Yates. His voice was also soft, but an octave above its usual smooth range.
"Three large, three small," Phipps went on. It seemed he'd decided to make a full disclosure of his holdings and have it over with. 'Three oils, one acrylic, two watercolors. Done over a span of twenty years."
"You sound like a fucking exhibition catalogue," groused Robert Natchez.
Phipps did not immediately answer. He glanced across the pier, saw fishermen hanging grouper on scales and nailing angry-eyed barracuda onto posts. Jealousy. He knew he was dealing with Natchez's scattershot corrosive jealousy and that the higher course would be to let it slide. But lately Phipps's higher impulses had been consistently losing out. Augie's death, his rebuff at the gentle but definite hands of Augie's widow—things like that made him weary of the vigilance it took to be dignified. "How many d'you have?" he taunted Natchez.
"Just the one. You know that."
"Ah. It's one of the nicer of the small ones."
"I have two," Ray Yates volunteered. "A good-size oil on the boat and a little watercolor I hung at the studio."
"Take it home, Ray," said Natchez bitterly. "It's gonna be worth money."
Money. So there it was. The unholy word was dropped like a plateful of soup and was as hard to ignore as a food stain on a tie, but the other two men strove gamely to ignore it. They sipped their drinks, glanced around them at the bar beginning to fill up now with boat crews and returning sailors. The sun was low enough that there were hems of pink on the bottoms of the puffy clouds.