"Yes, Peter," she said. "Who would it ruin?" She caught her husband's eye and for a second, only a second, they were allies, almost lovers, again.
Brandenburg sipped his martini. He was forty-four years old and had all the advantages that youngish/oldish age could offer. People who didn't know him assumed he must be sixty because he had that kind of power and had been in print forever. Yet there were boyish things about his looks that allowed him still to pass, in any but the harshest light, for not much more than thirty. His reddish hair had neither thinned nor faded. He was lean as he'd been in prep school, his astute hazel eyes were every bit as clear. His posture was firm and rather stiff, inviolate; he was as self-contained as something kept in Tupperware. He didn't answer the question.
"Of course," Claire Steiger goaded, "it was really your review that got the whole thing rolling. Is that what's bothering you, Peter?"
"I stand by my review," the critic said. "Well, then," said Kip Cunningham. Brandenburg turned petulant. "I just don't want to feel that I've been duped. And I don't want to feel that I've been party to a hoax."
Augie's agent ate the filbert on her coaster. "Peter, Peter, I swear to you I've tried to get to the bottom of this. I called the house. The houseboy answers, acts like he doesn't speak English. I tried Nina at the gallery. She's got the answering machine on, she's screening calls, she hasn't called me back. She's still angry about the retrospective. I doubt she even knows about the auction—"
"Sotheby's has a certain aversion to scandal," said Brandenburg. "I can see reputations destroyed. I can see the whole thing blowing up."
Claire reached out and took the critic's hand. It was not a gesture of kindness: She'd noticed many times that Peter Brandenburg did not like to be touched, it only made him jumpier. "Peter, I assure you this is not a hoax. The tone set by your review—"
Kip Cunningham waited a beat, then reached out and patted Brandenburg's wrist. "We've got to wind you down, old boy. A squash game and a good long steam. Whaddya say? Tomorrow, four o'clock?"
*
Augie Silver was feeling slightly stronger, his progress measured in the small, sweet, private victories of the convalescent.
He discovered that if he rested his eyes, just closed them for a few deep breaths now and then, it was much easier to stay awake for more than several hours at a time. He could read, could hold a book and sometimes concentrate. He found that if he stood up slowly, very slowly, he could keep enough blood in his brain so that his vision didn't go blank around the edges, so that he hardly felt the ocean dizziness anymore.
He began to wean himself off broth and return to solid food—soft food, like the peeled, sliced mangoes Reuben the Cuban was bringing to him on a tray.
"Meester Silber?" he said quietly, having softly knocked on the frame of the open bedroom door.
"Come in, Reuben," said the painter. "And Reuben, would you stop it already with the Meester Silber bullshit?"
The young man did not answer until he'd smoothed the convalescent's sheets so that the tray fit neatly over them and didn't pull. "Please, Meester Silber, it is a respect."
"I know it is, but that kind of respect I don't need. I want you to call me Augie."
Reuben folded his hands in front of him and looked down at the floor. Then his eye was caught by the vase of flowers at Augie Silver's bedside. The morning's hibiscus blooms were starting to curl; he'd replace them with sprigs of jasmine before he left.
"Awk," said Fred the parrot. "J&B. Where's Augie?"
"Ya see, Reuben, even the goddamn bird calls me Augie."
At this the young man could not help smiling shyly. The parrot was a crazy bird. And Reuben liked it when Mister Silver cursed, he wasn't sure why. Maybe because when other men cursed, cursed in English or in Spanish, there was anger in it, and mockery, and violence. But Mister Silver cursed like telling a joke, like whistling a song, it was not about anger, but freedom.
"So come on, say it: Augie."
Reuben hesitated. To say a name was no small thing. It carried a weight, an honor. It was a kind of touch. He took a breath, then looked the painter in the eye. It was a bolder look than he had ever cast at Mister Silver and he found it not much less difficult than looking at the sun, but he knew in his heart that the saying of a name should go together with a look like that, a look with nothing hidden. "Augie," he softly said.
"Bravo," the painter answered, dimly aware that this leap into informality, into the first chamber of intimacy, was as much a victory for Reuben as was conquering solid food for him. "Now siddown."