Scavenger Reef(27)

"Only problem was, these little strands of memory started tugging at me, more and more each day. It didn't bother me especially that I didn't have a name. So what? But I was getting to ache about other things. Yearn. Yearning. I'd used those words, everybody does, but now I knew what they meant. I knew I had a home somewhere and I yearned to get back to it. I believed I had a mate, someone it was my proper destiny to be with. And I had this nagging and, if this doesn't sound too crazy, religious sense that I had work, some kind of work, to do."

"It doesn't sound crazy," said Nina Silver, but her husband continued as though he hadn't heard. Even through his weakness, it seemed a kind of frenzy was upon him now, and he hurtled through the rest of his story as if the meaning of it existed not in the details but in the sheer momentum.

"Day to day," he said, "I felt that I was getting stronger, but the strength wasn't going to my body, it was being siphoned off into this groping quest for memory, this blank struggle to recall or invent who I was and what I was put on earth to do. Everything had to be relearned; it was exhausting as childhood. Little bits of things triggered recollections that, maddeningly, went nowhere. A color. A smell. I knew them. But how? From where? I asked for a paper and pencil and I started to draw. I didn't know I knew how, I just drew. I looked for hints in the pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.

"Then one day it clicked. By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big sport-fishing tournament—marlin, sailfish—international. Big beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate—part of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes by. Lip Smacker, Key West. I'm standing on the beach, taking turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see it on the transom.

"Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the stupor, and I remembered.

"The tournament headquarters was about thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado. The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a passport."

The painter paused and settled in farther against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.

"I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings."

It was full dark beyond the windows now, and the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips to smile.

"You don't think that's a good idea?" he asked.





15


Clayton Phipps expertly sliced the lead foil from the top of a bottle of Gruaud-Larose 1975 and centered his corkscrew in the spongy wood of the stopper. He wasn't quite sure why he was squandering such a venerable wine on the unschooled palate of Robert Natchez; part of him, moreover, disapproved of the whole notion of quaffing a serious red on such a thick and sticky evening, a night that called for talcum powder, fume blanc, and a cool washcloth on the brow. But goddamnit, there were times in a man's life when he wanted Bordeaux and nothing but Bordeaux, and Clay Phipps saw less and less the virtue of denying himself what he wanted at the moment that he wanted it. He pulled the cork. The festive pop carried with it instant scents of black currants, pepper, forest floor, and violets. Thank God there were some things, some few things, that a man could count on and that did not lose their savor.