Yates stopped reading and looked up at the clock. It was twenty seconds before 7 p.m., and behind the engineer's booth window his producer was flashing him the O.K. sign. The host searched for some final comment, a capper, and when none came he decided that the most effective way to end the show was to let the Brandenburg review hang in the air through a rare moment of radio silence. He paused a double beat, then said, "This is Ray Yates, and this is WKEY, the voice of the lower Keys. See you tomorrow on Culture Cocktail."
He gave a nod and a point, and the producer played his theme music. It was a tune that always made Yates thirsty. Most evenings he bolted immediately from the padded womb of the studio and went directly to Raul's for several drinks. Tonight he broke the pattern. He looked at the painting on the wall. It was an impression of wind-lashed trees against a green sky full of reverence and menace. More important, it was a signed original Augie Silver. Picasso, thought Ray Yates. Matisse. You didn't leave such things around a public place where anyone could grab them. He decided to bring the picture to the houseboat, and reminded himself to install the dead bolt he'd meant to put on months ago. He owned two works by someone in the top rank of contemporary painters, and he felt a twinge as at a betting window when he let himself imagine how much they might be worth.
10
Nina Silver switched off the radio, walked softly through the French doors at the back of the living room, and sat down near the pool. Strange, she thought, what happens to a person when he's dead. He becomes the property of others, part of some ghastly common pot from which anyone may feed, a shared blurred memory that can be put to many uses. He can be talked about, written about, set up as a yardstick to measure or to shame the living. A person, dead, becomes a topic, a silent, neutral thing about which others have opinions. Chatter that would be called mere gossip in regard to the living passes for serious appraisal, something right and fitting, when applied to someone dead.
But it was still gossip, reflected Nina Silver. Gossip and presumption by people trying to lay claim to a ghost. What did any of the chatter have to do with the flesh and blood man who had been her husband? What did it say about the smell of coffee on his morning breath, the glad gleam in his open eyes when their faces were close and they were making love? What did it say about the particular warp of his wit, the gruff charm that was indescribably different from the charm of other charming men, as ticklish, comforting, and sometimes prickly as an unshaved cheek?
The widow sat and smelled the evening. Salt and iodine flavored the air, a slippery odor as of earthworms in wet dirt wafted up from the cooling ground. The poinciana was just coming into flower, and Nina noticed for the thousandth time what tiny, feathery leaves it had for such a big and spreading tree; it always made her think of a great fat man with the palest, daintiest fingers.
Time passed. She knew this because the mosquitoes had come and gone, the western sky had phased from pink to lavender to jewel-box blue, and higher up Castor and Pollux, the tall spring twins, were nearly at the zenith. Nina Silver was wondering if she too was trying to lay claim to a ghost. Her claim, she told herself, at least was lawful—lawful in that vague portentous sense of lawful wedded wife. But what did that really mean? Did it set her up beyond dispute as the keeper of the true memory, the vestal standing guard against the vandals? She had built, was still building, a shrine of remembrance; other people—friends, colleagues, self-appointed judges—were building other shrines. Nina told herself her own temple was the grandest because it was built with the greatest love. But what it had in common with all the others was that it was meant to house, contain, hold captive the ghost of Augie Silver—and maybe Augie's ghost did not wish to be held.
This was a terrible thought, a thought to turn grief guilty. Perhaps, of all the rudenesses and well-meaning indignities that the living heaped upon the longed-for and admired dead, the worst was simply that they wouldn't let them go. Perhaps the dead were like tired guests who truly wanted nothing more than to leave the party and have some peace. Why did the noisy, selfish, stubborn living try to bully them into staying?
"Augie," Nina Silver said aloud, "do you really want to go?"
11
That night, as usual, she dreamed of her dead husband.
In the first dream he was walking with her down a New York street. It was winter, night, big halos of icy blue surrounded all the streetlights. The parked cars were so black they gleamed like schist, and the brownstones all had stately stoops that exactly paralleled each other, like something out of Egypt. It was cold, with a gritty wind, but Nina didn't mind because she had her warmest jacket on and she was holding Augie's arm. He wore a camel topcoat, carelessly buttoned, and though she couldn't see his hands she knew they were balled lightly into fists at the bottom of his pockets. She was looking at the sidewalk; it had small shiny stones embedded in it. Then something went wrong. Nina had the sudden certainty that she was holding not her husband's arm but an empty sleeve. When she looked up they were standing at a broad intersection. Many traffic lights were flashing and the wind was blowing from everywhere at once. Augie was now standing outside his coat. He was naked, pale as egg, and skin was blowing off of him, his face was distorted and flesh was being stretched and torn away like leaves from a tree in the first November storm.