"Augie Silver," intoned his best friend, Clayton Phipps, once a promising playwright, now for many years the publisher, editor, and sole contributor to a quaint little newsletter called Best Revenge. "Augie Silver."
Phipps paused, leaning against a makeshift lectern set up at the deep end of the dead man's pool. He let the syllables hang in the bright, clear morning air, hoping to evoke the entire miracle and tragedy of a human being through the thin yet potent fact of his name. Much underrated, the magic of a name. It was the ultimate container, the profoundest and most elegant summing-up of the passions, capacities, follies, likes and dislikes, the fears, quests, and eccentricities that made one person distinguishable from all others.
"Augie Silver." Phipps chanted it a third time, and under a poinciana tree, very near the table with the liquor, Ray Yates elbowed Robert Natchez in the ribs.
"Only guy I know who's a more pompous asshole than you are."
Natchez frowned his disapproval and tugged at the cuffs of another black shirt. Reuben the Cuban slunk silently among the guests, content in the belief that in pouring coffee and delivering mimosas he was paying homage to the dead husband and bringing comfort to the widow.
Perhaps a hundred fifty people had come together to honor Augie Silver's memory, and they reflected the breadth and oddness of the painter's personal democracy. The art establishment, of course, was represented. There was an editor from Picture Plane, a publication that had once dubbed the deceased "a minor yet searing talent, achingly pure and infuriatingly unambitious." There was the famously snide yet annoyingly accurate critic Peter Brandenburg, who years before had described Silver as "a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll paint." There were reviewers from the newsmagazines and from papers in New York, Chicago, and Washington. There was even a gallery owner from Paris who happened to be vacationing in South Beach.
But when, ten years before, Augie Silver had moved to Key West from Manhattan, it was with the clear intention of escaping the hothouse atmosphere of the art capitals, broadening his circle beyond the clutch of those who could do favors and those who wanted favors done. To be sure, the Key West artsy set had gravitated to him: the writers who didn't write, the sculptors who didn't sculpt, the trust-funders kept just shy of suicidal self-loathing by the mercifully untested belief that they were in some sense creative. They could be quite amusing, these constipated, deluded bohemians and hangers-on: Their vision had nowhere to go except into what they said and how they lived, and their frustrations often gave rise to piquant comments on human nature and the state of the world.
Still, it was not the Ray Yateses and Bob Natchezes who had given the greatest zest to Augie Silver's last years. It was the people who were strangers to poetry, innocent of art. It was the wharf rats like Jimmy Gibbs, half of whom had done jail time. It was the fishing captains who at first took Augie out as one more pain-in-the-ass know-nothing client, then later invited him as a soothing companion. It was the old Cubans who poled out in the back country and showed him how to dig a sponge. They too were represented at Augie's corpseless send-off. They milled shyly along the periphery, these outsiders, bashful of the canapes, made nervous by the thinness of the glassware. They wanted to pay their respects and get the hell out of this elegant backyard, but Clayton Phipps was not about to race through his moment of high praise for his friend and spotlight for himself.
"Augie Silver was the most generous man I ever knew," said the eulogist. "Ya know, some people decide to be generous. It occurs to them to give you something. Augie wasn't like that. He didn't decide. It just happened. It was his nature. Gifts flowed from him. He was a source, a well. Life burned in him, and he could not help but give back warmth."
Phipps looked toward the shady place where Nina Silver was sitting, all alone. A hundred people had greeted her, many had embraced her, and yet there had remained a dread and stubborn space around her, a cuticle of passionate blankness that she would not allow to be moved aside or filled.
"Who among us," he went on, "does not have something of Augie's? Some remembered story, some flash of insight or shred of his wise-ass wisdom. Some taste or preference we learned from him. A sweater he gave you because you said you liked the color. A jacket he put around your shoulders because you were cold and he was not. A tool he lent and promptly forgot about, a book he thought you might like…"
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.
She'd come through the French doors, silently skirted the pool, and stood before them; in her drained look there was something very touching but uncomfortably intimate, an exposure like the sudden scrubbing off of makeup, like a privileged glimpse of a sleeping face on a pillow. Her gray eyes were weary, the slight smile she managed held no joy but only a tired tenderness. The widow had decided against wearing black, and her sea-green linen suit was slightly wilted. Only her hair remained perfect. Short, thick, raven, it framed her face and tucked under her jawline the way an acorn top hugs the smooth curve of the acorn. She put one hand on Ray Yates's shoulder, the other on Bob Natchez's.
"Gents," she said, "I have to go lie down. You'll help yourselves to whatever you want?"
It was an innocent offer but perhaps an injudicious one from a woman newly alone. Nina managed something like a smile, then turned, and had any of the men been watching the others' eyes instead of her retreating form, he might perhaps have noticed a glimmer of something beyond mere disinterested concern for the widow of their fallen friend.