He poured two glasses and carried them into the living room, where Robert Natchez was sitting, dressed all in black. Phipps wore tan linen, and the two of them might have been the only people in the Florida Keys, not counting maitre'd's and cops, in long pants just then. Clay Phipps was self-conscious about his pale and hairless calves; Robert Natchez keenly felt that shorts did not befit his dignity. So they sweated behind the knees and felt well dressed.
"Cheers," said Phipps, handing the poet a glass. "It's too good for you, but what the hell."
"Ever the gracious host," said Natchez, and he nosed into the wine.
They settled into their chairs. Clay Phipps had bought his Old Town house around a dozen years before, in the wake of the infamous Mariel boat lift. Fidel Castro, in a gesture of great magnanimity, slyness, and spite, had thrown open the gates of his country's loony bins and prisons and allowed anyone who wished to escape to America. Most of the fruitcakes, murderers, catatonics, child molesters, mental defectives, and petty thieves had made landfall in Key West, which did the local real estate market no good at all. Those who, like Clay Phipps, believed that the island outpost was a tough town to kill, scarfed up historic houses at a small fraction of their worth, and found themselves gentry when the Marielitos, not surprisingly, were absorbed into the population with barely an uptick in the crime rate and no discernible effect on the community's overall level of weirdness and delusion. So Phipps now owned a sweet dwelling on a prime block. It was one more instance of his traveling first class without paying for it, living well but without the resonance of believing that living well was an earned reward.
The walls of his house were made of horizontal slats of white-painted pine, and here and there were brighter rectangles where Augie Silver's paintings had formerly been hung. There was something naked, naughty about those paler patches, they grabbed the eye like an unexpected flash of a woman's panties. Robert Natchez looked up from his glass of ruby wine and peeked rather lewdly at the empty places.
"Show's been over a week or more," he said. "When're the pictures coming back?"
This was a taunt, and no mistake. Phipps took it in stride. Taunting was what he expected and in some perverse way what he needed from Robert Natchez. "They're not," he said.
The poet smirked in his Bordeaux. A glad cynicism opened up his sinuses and he suddenly smelled cedar and mint in the wine. "Don't tell me you've decided to sell them? I thought everything was strictly NFS."
"They're being offered at auction," said the allegedly dead artist's alleged best friend. In an effort to appear casual, he swung a leg over the opposite knee. The dampness on his thigh made the nubbly linen itch. "Sotheby's. Next month."
"Ah," said Natchez. He leered from under his black eyebrows at the nude rectangles, and managed to work into his expression both disapproval and nasty enjoyment. The look maneuvered his host into an abject stance of self-defense.
"You think it matters to Augie?" Phipps heard himself saying.
"I have no opinion on what matters to the dead," said the poet. This was just the sort of pronouncement, portentous yet inane, that delighted Natchez, and he was tickled with himself for mouthing it. He paused, sipped some wine, then added, "But they were gifts."
At this, Clay Phipps could not hold back a nervous snorting laugh, a laugh that rasped his throat. "A sentimentalist! You of all people a sentimentalist!"
The swarthy Natchez almost blushed at the charge, which was nearly the most debasing accusation he could imagine. "It has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with what's dignified and fitting. Those paintings were given in friendship."
"Friendship is complicated," said Clay Phipps.
"So is envy," said Robert Natchez. "So is old stale jealousy. So is hate." He swirled his wine the way he'd seen Phipps do it, drained his glass, and licked his lips. "Any more of this?" he asked.
Phipps somewhat grudgingly got up to fetch the bottle.
*
Augie Silver nestled the thin smock between his skinny thighs and slowly, cautiously settled back onto the examination table. "I feel like Mahatma Gandhi in this thing," he said.
"You look like an anorectic Father Time," said Manny Rucker, his doctor for the past ten years. "Now lie still and let me goose you."
Rucker put his soft hands on Augie's belly, pressed under his ribs to palpate the liver, felt for enlarged spleen, for hernia, for strangled loops of intestine. Augie blinked at the ceiling and was almost lulled asleep by the visceral massage. He'd spent the morning with electrodes taped onto his head and glued across his chest. He'd given blood, produced urine samples, labored mightily but without success to deliver a stool. He was exhausted.