The painter seemed surprised at the word. He smiled, and his wife noticed how deep were the fissures in his burned lips. They seemed to divide his mouth almost into tiles of flesh. "Painful? I wasn't aware of it being painful. Beautiful and terrifying. Painful, no."
He looked at his wife and realized he had been misunderstood, and that the misunderstanding had hurt her. "Missing you," he said. 'That was painful. The thought of leaving you by dying—that was painful. But those things I didn't feel till later—till I remembered. For a long time I knew nothing except what I imagine an animal knows: I knew I was alive. I knew I was in danger. And that was all."
He paused and closed his eyes. His wife nestled closer and waited for him to continue. But he didn't continue. His breathing fell back into the rhythm of sleep, his foot kicked weakly under the sheet and half awakened him. "I love you, Nina," he mumbled, and then his breath began to whistle softly through his nose. His wife stayed in bed a few minutes more, then went, as on any ordinary morning, to put up coffee.
13
"No," said Claire Steiger, "there won't be any sales before the auction."
She hugged the phone against her shoulder and looked down at her fingernails. It was a muggy morning in springtime New York, a May day on the lam from August. Viscous, dirty light spilled in through the windows of the gallery office. Below, on 57th Street, people looked stylishly limp in the season's first wilting linens.
"Yes, Avi," the dealer was saying, "I know you've been a terrific client. I appreciate it. But this time I can't make any special deals. The situation's too volatile, you know that as well as I do."
The would-be buyer paused, then there was a soft popping sound as of heavy lips reluctantly letting go of a damp cigar. Avi Klein resumed his wheedling, and Claire Steiger reflected with gamy zest on the perverse and malleable machinery of human wants. What was so especially delicious about the phantom cookie at the bottom of the empty bag? What was so particularly beautiful about the painting that could not be had? Why was Avi Klein, a generally shrewd and cool-headed collector, suddenly prostrating himself for the privilege of paying more by far than had ever been paid for an Augie Silver canvas?
"Half a million is a lot of money," Claire Steiger purred. She gave an impressed curl to her lips, as though the client were in the room, looking to be stroked. "Are you sure it's worth that much?"
Klein was the fourth big customer to call that morning, and Claire Steiger was having a better time than she could easily remember having. She was dusting off some of her favorite moves, the feints and tactics she had refined in the years when the building of her business had seemed each day an adventure. There was flattery, of course; nothing so crude as compliments, but the passive flattery of sitting tight and letting someone show off the size of his wallet. There was the preempting of doubt, the sly reversal that forced the buyer to defend his judgment and so sell the painting to himself.
Though in the present instance the idea was not to sell the painting—and this offered an impish satisfaction all its own. Withholding. There was a power in it that was like the power of sex. The power to entice and frustrate, to beckon and dismiss. When its exercise was temporary, playful, that power could be delicious, could stoke appetites and make the nerve synapses incandescent. But when withholding became one's normal stance, a habit of the heart . . .
Claire Steiger did not ask to be visited by this thought. It simply descended in the midst of her negotiations and spoiled her mood the way a swarm of gnats spoils a walk in the garden. She fell out of her professional trance and remembered her life. She was married to a man she no longer loved. She was no longer on the glad ascent of making her reputation and her fortune, but was locked now in the squalid scramble of trying to hold on to those very few things she still cared about. A wave of bitterness squeezed up from her belly and brought an evil taste to her throat. Avi Klein was still talking moistly in her ear, still trying to persuade her, and his voice had become maddening, appalling, a devil voice that spoke glozingly of wanting and paying, selling and haggling, a wet salacious voice that made all transactions seem inherently shameful, fundamentally corrupt, and somehow humiliating. For an instant the dealer envied Augie Silver, serenely dead and beyond the fray. When she spoke again, her voice was sour and abrupt, the charm had dried up like a lemon forgotten at the back of the fridge.
"Avi, I'm leaving this to the open market. I hope to see you at Sotheby's."
*
"What the fuck is Sotheby's?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.
Ray Yates, his apricot and turquoise shirt sticking to his broad and furry back, sucked an ice cube and reminded himself where he was and who he was talking to. Key West. A piece of limestone crust barely poking out of the ocean a hundred fifty miles from anywhere, the very tip of the very long tail of keys tucked under the sandy ass of the American dog. Difficult of access, bathed in sun and myth, splendidly uninterested in the high dry world outside, it was one of the last places where a person could truly be provincial. Had Jimmy Gibbs ever read a newspaper other than the Key West Sentinel? Did he read that for any farther-afield intelligence than the hopeful fibs of the fishing report and to see which of his bubbas had made the police blotter? What the fuck is Sotheby's? This was in its way a glorious question, a question full of archaic purity.