He nodded toward the bedside chair, and Reuben the Cuban didn't budge. A breeze rustled the palm fronds, they scratched at the tin roofs of Olivia Street. The wet smell of mango wafted up from the tray and mingled with the baked aromas of cracked sidewalks and softening streets after a day of blistering heat.
"Reuben, you're here to keep me company. So keep me company, goddamnit. You need a written invitation?"
Again the painter gestured toward the chair, and Reuben glanced at it as though he were standing on a high-dive platform looking down at a bucket of water.
"What the hell is this about?" Augie asked. "Is it just because you work for us? Because I'm an old fart with white hair? You think we're fancy people? What?"
Reuben shuffled his feet. He glanced at Fred the parrot. For reasons known only to itself, the bird had ruffled its feathers and the lifted edges cast purple shadows against the green. Instead of answering the question, Reuben softly said, "You really want me to sit with you, Augie?"
"Christ, Reuben. Yes."
Lightly, gracefully, the willowy young man settled on the edge of the chair. He didn't sit, he perched, an apron across his thighs, most of his weight still carried on the balls of his feet. "Augie," he said, "the reason it is hard for me to sit with you, it is none of the things you say. It is because I think you are a great man."
Either Augie Silver put down a sliver of mango or the wet fruit slithered through his fingers. "Ah, bullshit," he said, and Reuben the Cuban could not help smiling shyly.
21
On the stroll up Olivia Street, Clay Phipps counted seventeen cats and eleven dogs. The cats were nearly all in motion—skulking over hot curbstones and slinking through the latticework under porches, stalking palmetto bugs or just being sneaky for the hell of it. The dogs tended to be princely still—laid out on the pavement with their chins on their crossed paws, panting softly, contentedly drooling, fixing passersby with the flatteringly interested glances that canines turn on humans. The day had been cloudless, with an odd desiccating wind from the east. The cactuses were gloating, they seemed to stand up straighter and taller as the palms drooped and the poincianas let their feathery leaves hang down lank as Asian hair. Finger-sized lizards clung to tree trunks and climbed the pocked sides of coral rocks; they were brown, gray, invisible until sex or vanity got the best of them and they puffed up their scarlet throat sacs, making themselves impressive and absurd.
Clay Phipps was not ordinarily a rapt observer of dogs and cats, plants and lizards. But this evening he was trying, with mixed success, to distract himself from the errand he was on. It was, on the face of it, a simple mission, potentially a joyous one, yet Phipps could bring himself to feel no joy. Everything had gotten too screwed up in his feelings toward Augie Silver, his feelings toward himself. Everything made him feel ashamed. He had tried to seduce the woman he took for Augie's widow but who may have been his wife. He was selling, at the first opportunity and with hardly a moment's hesitation, the paintings Augie had given him as tokens of their friendship.
Why was he so willing, secretly eager even, to part with those canvases? There was, of course, the nasty vulgar business of the money. It was fatiguing, a high-wire strain to live wealthily year after year while having, in fact, so little cash, so little real security. His newsletter could go out of fashion, the perks and freebies could dry up, and that would be the end of the amber-edged Bordeaux, the turreted hotel rooms. What would he do with himself? Minus the trappings, Clay Phipps would look to all the world like the small-timer, the perennial freeloader, the facile lightweight he suspected himself to be.
That was why he was secretly relieved to have Augie Silver's paintings off his walls: The pictures, like almost everything else to do with Augie, had come to seem a reproach to him, a reminder of how he'd gypped himself for want of nerve, shortchanged his life in the name of doing what was easy. They'd been earnest young artists together, Clay and Augie had. Augie had stuck to his work and eventually won through to mastery, while Clay had given up on the slow salvation of writing plays and used his skill to carve himself a blithe and cushy niche. They'd been bachelors together back when being a bachelor was rambunctious, ribald fun.
Augie had emerged from the debauch with the mysterious readiness for love, for marriage; Clay had not emerged at all, just grown stale within the ever staler game. He had been left behind; no, he had left himself behind, and that was worse.
He walked up Olivia Street and was assaulted by an ugly thought: Certain things would be easier if Augie Silver stayed dead and gone. There'd be a great deal less explaining to do. There'd be no more mute reproaches. Phipps's life had in some sense shriveled to accommodate the fact of his friend's death; he was, if not happy, at ease now in the smaller space, the tighter orbit. Maybe Robert Natchez in some crazy way was right: The world closed up around a dead person, there was no room for his return.