"He could always start again," said Effingham. "He won't," said the agent, with greater certainty than in fact she felt. "I know him. He's—"
"What does he think about the prices?" put in Theo Stanakos.
Damn him, Claire thought. Damn his bitchily sharp way of cutting through to what someone doesn't want to talk about. "I don't know," she admitted. "I haven't spoken to him."
"Odd," said the chairman. "He's ill. He's weak. His wife is hiding him—" "Then presumably," Effingham went on, "he doesn't even know his works are being offered."
Claire Steiger struggled to control her voice. "If he knows, he doesn't know, what's the difference? The point is that in terms of reputation, in terms of output, he's . . . he's—"
"As good as dead?" suggested Theo Stanakos. Charles Effingham shook his noble head. "In this business nothing is as good as dead."
There was a pause. Someone's stomach gurgled, the sound was like the last swirl of water going down a half-clogged bathtub drain.
Campbell Epstein cleared his throat. "Right. But we still have the question of whether we revise the estimates downward, and if so, how to do it most discreetly and with least damage."
The chairman of the board looked quickly at his Cartier watch. "I have a luncheon to get to," he announced, and the spry old fellow was on his feet before the short statement was completed.
Epstein rose with him and tried to smile. The attempt was accompanied by a sharp convulsive pain in the gut. The head of Paintings understood corporate shorthand. He knew the chairman had just washed his hands of the Solstice Show, the event whose success or failure defined Campbell Epstein's performance for the year. His job, which he hated far too much to be able to imagine losing, seemed now to hinge on whether Augie Silver living was worth anywhere near as much as Augie Silver dead.
26
Robert Natchez, dressed all in black, sat alone in his tropical garret. From the jungly lot next door came the musky smell of decomposing leaves, the utterly baffled clucks and screams of citified chickens that had blundered into this patch of wild and were unable or unwilling to escape.
An old lamp threw stale yellow light across the poet's desk, put a brown glow in his glass of rum. At his elbow lay a grant application that had grown limp in the steamy air. The South Florida Rehabilitation League was offering two thousand dollars for a poet to teach haiku to crack addicts in halfway houses. Natchez didn't like haiku, found its modesty fake, and he wasn't crazy about crack addicts either. Their eyes were a spooky red and they had a lot of tics. Their shoulders twitched and their noses ran. They tended to like crack more than life, and Robert Natchez, given his own passionate morbidity, would have had a tough time mustering the conviction to talk them out of that preference. But he needed the money.
He needed the money, yet his one Augie Silver canvas still hung on the wall above his desk.
This was because there were other things that Robert Natchez needed more. He needed to feel exceptional. He needed to maintain the rigid priestly purity that justified him as the final arbiter of right and wrong. He needed to feel superior to Phipps, to Yates, to everyone who had run out to hock his Augie Silver paintings, and as he had lately realized, he needed maybe most of all to triumph in some final way over Augie Silver himself. Augie the sudden darling of the marketplace. Augie the lightweight who had somehow bamboozled the critics with the illusion of substance. Augie whose lucky and so far inconclusive dance with death had cast a falsely dramatic fight on what was in the end a small, conventional, bourgeois talent.
Natchez sipped his rum, breathed deeply of the molasses fumes that blended with the lewd and fetid smells of the rotting flowers from the lot beyond the alley. Fine, he thought, as he glanced once more at the application angled on the blotter: Let Augie be the sweetheart of the trendoids from New York, the moneyed philistines with their vapid pictures in their vapid houses filled with vapid conversation. He, Natchez, would fill a nobler, more heroic role: Poet Laureate to the addicted and the retarded, troubadour to the incontinent and the insane. Now here was a mission: bringing haiku to the doomed, sonnets to the senile, nonsense verses to those pure and damaged souls beyond the iron grip of sense. This would be no mere dabbling, no whore's diddling in the gross lap of commerce. It would be a liberation.
Yes. And he, Robert Natchez, would be a Liberator.
The word excited him, warmed his chest like a sudden image of remembered sex. Poet and Liberator. He swigged rum, pushed his chair back on its hind legs, narrowed his eyes as if contemplating some grand vista, as if orating to a rapt multitude. Liberator. Freeing men from their slavery to a wan and mediocre falseness. Pointing the way to a new order where reigned a more muscular and savage truth, where the authority of the artist was untrammeled and supreme.