He received the words like an anointment and answered with a knightly modesty. "Yes," he said. "A pal for you. And for Meesus Silber too. A pal." He stood up, wiped his eyes.
"The Cubans saved my life, you know."
"Yes?" said Reuben. There was confusion in his heart. The Cubans were his people, and if they were kind to Mister Silver he was proud. But the Cubans were also the ones who called him maricon and made him feel cast out, who scoffed and threatened and mimicked his walk. Why was he outside the circle of their kindness?
"I'll tell you about it sometime," Augie said, and then Nina caught Reuben's eye and gestured him out of the convalescent's room.
They went to the kitchen. Morning light was pouring in through the French doors at the back of the house. Hibiscus flowers were stretching fully open, their pistils brassy with pollen and thrust forth like silent trumpets. The dark leaves of the oleanders looked almost blue.
"Reuben," Nina said, "Mr. Silver has been very sick."
The young man breathed deeply, taking the weight of his friend's illness into himself. He nodded solemnly.
"He needs a long rest, a perfect rest. And he needs someone to spend the days with him, to make sure he isn't bothered. Someone whose company he finds soothing. So I was wondering—"
"I will do it," Reuben said.
She looked at him, began just barely to smile, then understood that a smile was not called for, would cheapen the moment. "Maybe you should think about—"
"I will do it," he repeated.
"But Reuben, your other jobs. You should speak to Mrs. Dugan."
"I will tell Mrs. Dugan."
Nina lifted her eyebrows and looked down at her cuticles. She knew Sandra Dugan slightly—a quiet woman and nobody's pushover, a recent New York transplant who ran her business as a business: She had imported to Key West the exotic notion that a person might show up to clean two weeks in a row. "Maybe you should ask Mrs. Dugan."
Reuben gave a philosophic shrug. "It is no difference. If I ask and she says no, I quit. If I tell and she doesn't like that I tell, I am fired. It is the same."
"But Reuben—"
"Meesus Silber, please. It is what I wish to do."
And so it was agreed.
Reuben put his apron on and started to clean, humming Cuban songs. He dusted, he vacuumed, he cut flowers from the yard and arranged them neatly in porcelain vases. He was happy and proud. He had been singled out, called upon to serve, to care, to have the privilege of watching his friend grow stronger. He would watch him like a fisherman watches the sky, alert and knowing, the first to see a change, a danger. He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.
18
"Maybe it's like an Elvis sighting," said Ray Yates. "You know, a delusion people have to link themselves to someone famous, to feel important."
"Our friend Augie," said Clay Phipps, "wasn't quite that much of a celebrity."
"Local celebrity," Yates countered, "local delusion."
The talk-show host had just finished work. His theme music, as usual, had made him thirsty, and now he was drinking with his buddies at Raul's. Overhead, misted stars showed here and there through the thinning bougainvillea. The relentless heat had baked most of the flowers away, they'd puckered up and fallen, fluttering to the ground like singed moths. What would survive the summer was mostly just a knuckly vine armed with thorns as sharp as fish hooks.
Robert Natchez took a pull on his rum, then clattered his glass onto the varnished table. The mention of Elvis had made him testy, as references to pop culture always did. Why did intelligent people gum up their brains with such garbage? How did such inane and trivial crap insinuate itself into the conversation of the sophisticated? "Look," he said, "it's one more instance of the Sentinel fucking up. Why not just leave it at that?"
"You don't have to get mad," said Clay Phipps. It was a way of egging the poet on, and it always worked.
"I do have to get mad," he said. "We're trying to have a civilized discussion here, and suddenly it's dragged down to the level of some Shirley MacLaine, Oprah fucking Winfrey, Nazi diet horseshit. Tabloid television. It's cheap. It's disgusting."
Phipps sipped his Meursault, noted how its caramel low notes came forward as the wine warmed, and tried to look contrite. "All right, Natch," he said, "you pick the level of discourse."
Natchez froze for an instant like a second-string halfback who's been clamoring all season to carry the ball and realizes suddenly he's got to run with it. "All right," he said, "all right." He cleared his throat, took a sip of rum. "First of all, we're all agreed that Augie is dead and the newspaper is wrong. Right?"