Around the dead man's yard and through the open doors of his house, the mourners shifted from foot to foot, remembered, smiled privately, and glanced at each other, secretly wondering who'd gotten the sweaters, the jackets . . .
"And the paintings," Clayton Phipps resumed. "My God, the paintings! The man gave them away like they were so much scratch paper. His life's work, his livelihood, his legacy. Where did he find the strength and the humor that enabled him to take it all so lightly? 'Here,' he'd say, about a canvas that had taken him a month. 'You like it? Put it in your house.' 'Here,' he'd say with this amazing casualness. 'This little one? Sell it if you can—get your boat fixed.' 'Here, put this over your desk for luck.' 'Here, put this in your kid's room.' How many beautiful and precious paintings did Augie Silver give away? Does anybody even know?"
The question rose up over the swimming pool and hovered there. Claire Steiger, the dead man's agent, read her bankrupt husband's face and despised him for the bloodless calculations she knew were going on behind it. And she wondered if it showed in her own expression that she could not help but do some calculating too.
*
By 1 p.m. the speeches were over, the ice cubes were melted, the crowd had thinned, and Nina Silver had barely noticed that her promised deadline of hope had come and gone and nothing whatever had changed in her heart. She bid farewell to the dispersing guests, accepted their sincere and irrelevant sympathies, nodded to all the well-meant pledges to stay close, to see more of one another. She yearned for everyone to be gone and dreaded the moment when the house would once again be empty. Emptier than before, with no event to plan, no exquisitely small details—irises or lilies? champagne or chardonnay?—to rivet her attention. She straightened a picture frame that a departing friend had shouldered awry, then stared at the level edge to steady herself, the way a seasick man searches for sanity in a clear horizon.
Out in the garden, a few men whose nature it was to be the last to leave were honoring Augie the way the men of Athens honored the martyred Socrates, by talking and drinking, drinking and arguing.
"Here's the part I still don't get," Ray Yates said, slipping into the mock-ingenuous interviewer's tone he used in his radio show. He was sitting on a white wrought-iron chair and his inappropriately cheery shirt was darkened here and there with moisture. Yates was thickly built, squat and hairy, the type that's always sweaty. It didn't help that there was no ice left for his rum. "Guy's got this great career. A New York gallery that loves him. He can sell whatever he paints, prices are better all the time. . . . Then he just stops working. Why?"
Clayton Phipps sipped his warmish Sancerre and noted how the flinty taste turned cactusy as the wine approached body temperature. He hooked a thumb through one of his suspenders and slid it to a fresh place on his shoulder. "Ray," he said, "this might be tough for you to grasp, but it had to do with standards.
I remember a dinner I had with Augie, about five years ago. We were drinking a Lynch Bages 'seventy-eight, rather young but very concen—"
"Who gives a shit what you were drinking?" interjected Robert Natchez.
Phipps glared at him from under his heavy brows. "It speaks of the quality of the moment, Natch. Isn't that what you poets supposedly care about? Anyway, we were talking about standards. About the difference between talent and genius. Between skilled painting and great painting. Augie had no fake modesty—we all know that. He knew he had talent. He knew he had skill. He doubted he had genius. And he was coming to feel that if he didn't have genius, then what was the point—"
"The point," said Ray Yates, "was that there were all these people who would buy his stuff."
Phipps shook his head, glanced upward through the feathery leaves of the poinciana tree. "No offense, Ray. You're a slut."
"Just because I think if a guy's making a good living—"
"Where's your judgment?" Phipps interrupted. "Where's your imagination? You believe something's good just because there's some schmuck out there who'll pay for it?"
"Usually it's just the opposite," put in Robert Natchez. "If something's commercial—"
Phipps wheeled toward him with a vehemence that surprised all three of them. "And that's bullshit too. Ray's a slut, you're an undergraduate. You're both children, for chrissake. Augie was a realist. He used his skill to buy himself the life he wanted. Period. No high-flown crap about art, no sucking up to the marketplace. He had a skill, he used it."
Phipps paused, and noticed rather suddenly that he was smashed. Grief, heat, alcohol, and candor: The blend was making him dizzy, and the shade of the poinciana offered no coolness but seemed rather to hold congealed sunshine that pressed directly on his bald and throbbing head. He glanced with a queasy blend of affection and despising at Natchez and Yates; he dimly wondered if they realized that when he compared people unfavorably to Augie, he was talking first and foremost of himself. It was probably for the best that he was prevented from rambling on by the sudden appearance of Nina Silver.