Scavenger Reef(47)

Augie didn't seem to have missed him. He was relaxing under his sheet, contentedly baking in the stressless all-over warmth of hot shade. The blood on his chin had thickened to the consistency of jam, solid enough to stem the tide of further bleeding. Reuben resumed his apologizing and Augie told him gently but firmly to shut up.

"For Christ's sake, Reuben, you make it sound as if you'd slit my throat."

After that the young man worked in silence. Water glinted in the swimming pool, lizards did push-ups on the pitted coral rocks. Dry white hairs fluttered down from Augie's face, they were almost light enough to float away like motes of dust.

Inside, Nina was coming back from the small death of a fainting spell.

Her brain turned on like an old television, the kind that started with a single point of quivering light then popped into a grainy gray in which void images moved like ghosts. One fact filled the screen: Reuben, this peculiar young man she'd trusted and even loved, had killed her husband and it was her fault absolutely for throwing them together. Her own life was finished, that much was clear. She'd forfeited it by this amazing blunder, this astonishing misjudgment. Her eyes opened of themselves, she looked out at the world she'd disowned. She saw the French doors, the flat indifferent light above the pool. The cloth with Augie's blood on it still lay crumpled on the counter. There was nothing left to do but go outside and find the body.

She sat up. Her veins had lost their will and the blood emptied down through them as if through rain spouts; she again grew lightheaded. After a moment she stood on legs that no longer seemed her own and moved slowly toward the open doors. She did not allow herself an imagined vision of Augie dead, yet she was assaulted by a lunatic memory of drawing class: a tilted oval standing for a human face, balanced on a stem of neck at an angle that could only be true in death.

She stood in the open doorway now and saw Augie, clean-shaven, shrouded in a sheet but very much alive.

Reuben had his back to her as he finished Augie's sideburns, and it was her husband who saw her first. "Darling," he said. He reached up and rubbed his own smooth cheeks. "I wanted to surprise you."

"You did," she said. She struggled to smile and struggled to move forward without letting Augie see that anything was wrong.

"You're very pale," he said to her. "Do you feel all right?"

"Hm?" she said. She glanced quickly at Reuben and he understood he should not speak. "Just feeling a little peaked."

Augie took her hand. "Upset about Fred."

It was not a question and Nina didn't have to answer. Instead, she took Reuben's hand with her free one. She felt she owed him that, and more, for the secret and grotesque insult of suspecting him.

The young man put the razor down and solemnly beamed at Nina's touch. Augie smiled softly. It seemed to him that the three of them were sharing a moment of mourning for the fallen parrot, and to complete the circle he took Reuben's other hand. They were silent for a while as the sun beat down. Doves cooed and blue butterflies flew past, and by the linking of their fingers a pact was formed that was no less sacred for the fact that each of them had a different notion of what the moment was about.





25


In the conference room at Sotheby's, everything had a name.

The chairs were not just chairs, they were Barcelona chairs. The lamps were Corbusier, the long blond tapered table was Eero Saarinen. The overhead lights were the same that Mies designed for the Seagram Building, and coffee was poured from a Bauhaus pot represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

None of this was affectation. It was business. In the world of antiques and collectibles, provenance was all. Who designed it? What was the vintage? Had the creator had the grace and the savvy to die and thereby join the Pantheon of bankable reputations? The auction houses had a clear mission to enhance the wealthy public's concern, not to say obsession, with questions such as these. It was all done to enlarge appreciation of the finer things.

Funny thing about the finer things, though: Their value could change dramatically while they themselves became neither finer nor less fine. And this was precisely the phenomenon being discussed in the Sotheby's conference room on the morning of the sixth of June.

Campbell Epstein, head of the Painting Department, flicked the white cuffs of his blue-striped shirt. "We're thrilled, of course, that the artist is alive," he said. "Delighted." He said this in the direction of Claire Steiger, as if he was paying her a personal compliment. But Epstein didn't look delighted. Nerves had put a yellowish tinge in his slightly hollow cheeks, crinkles gathered between his eyes from the tension that fanned in a scallop pattern across his forehead. "But it does put a radically different complexion on the auction."