"I really don't need a baby-sitter," said Augie.
It was just after seven that evening. The artist was wearing baggy shorts and an ancient denim shirt with fraying buttonholes and paint dabs on the sleeves. His white hair rose and fell in random waves, his deep blue eyes were bright with the prospect of some good talk with his friends; he seemed almost his old self, minus forty pounds and most of his robustness.
"I only drive you there," said Reuben. "I wait outside."
"You're not a coachman," said Augie. "I don't want you to wait outside."
There was a pause, a stalemate in the living room. Nina had asked Reuben to accompany Augie to Raul's, and, by God, Reuben wasn't letting his friend go out alone.
Augie sighed, defeated. "All right," he said, "you'll drive me. But none of this waiting outside bullshit. You'll come in, you'll have a drink."
"No," said Reuben, "I be in the way."
This time it was the younger man who lost the stare-down.
"Okay," he said, "I have a drink. But at the bar. I leave you with your friends."
They got into the old Saab and drove the ten blocks to Raul's. Reuben, a fretful and unpracticed driver, never got past second gear and was hunkered over the steering wheel all the way.
The cafe was crowded, noisy, roiled with the converging currents of people eating on the early side and people extending cocktail hour to the late side. Waitresses slid by with big trays of iced oysters, loud drunks clamored for more beers. Augie, unaccustomed to the clatter of dishes and the press of bodies, felt both invigorated and drained as he picked his way among the tables. Reuben peeled off at the bar, laid claim to a corner stool while waving away the cigarette smoke, and the painter continued toward the alcove under the knuckly bougainvillea, where he knew his friends would be.
He saw them before they saw him, and he was comforted, reassured somehow, that his companions had stayed within the small snug orbit afforded by island life, that certain things about the universe had stayed in place, were still familiar. Clay Phipps still wore long linen trousers that crinkled up behind his knees. Robert Natchez still dressed all in black, in token of some showy grief or theoretical outlaw-hood. Ray Yates, more local than the locals, still wore faded palm tree shirts and drank tequila.
Augie, unseen, crept up to their table and said, "Hi guys, what's new?"
Conversation stopped, faces froze, there was a slow distended moment of some nameless guilt, as though the three seated men were kids caught doing something dirty. The awkwardness went on just long enough for Augie Silver to have the first faint inkling that something had gone wrong among his friends. Like rusty musicians, they were off the beat somehow; gestures were stiff, smiles tentative, nothing flowed.
But then Clay Phipps, gracious if not tranquil, was on his feet. For a moment the two old friends stood back and appraised each other in the brave and galling way that old friends do, each seeing in the other the deflating but tenderness-inspiring evidence of his own aging, his own mortality. To Augie, Phipps looked paunchy and somewhat dissolute: a bald, distracted man whose earlobes were stretching and whose shoulders were folding inward. To Phipps, Augie looked decrepit, dried up, stringy as a sparerib; there was something wrenching and undignified about the empty skin around his knees.
They were a couple of fellows on the cusp of being old; they moved together and embraced.
Reuben discreetly but unflinchingly watched them from the bar. He saw, as Augie could not see, the uneasy, ashen look on Phipps's face, a look not of joy but shame.
Yates and Natchez had stood up as well, they reached handshakes across the table that was bejeweled with rings of condensation from their glasses.
"Ray," said Augie warmly. "Bob."
The poet could not help wincing at the bland and Anglo syllable. He looked at Augie hard and said, "Roberto."
Augie thought he was kidding, though he didn't see the joke. "I go away a few months, and you have an ethnic reawakening?"
Natchez didn't laugh, didn't answer. He just resumed his seat, and Augie was more baffled than before. He decided to try his luck with Yates. "And Ray," he said. "Or Raymond. How're things with you?"
The fact was, things were worse than they had ever been, but the talk-show host didn't feel like going into it. He gave a beefy shrug accompanied by a head tilt that brought into the light the lingering remains of the black eye Bruno had given him the week before. A greenish bruise was ringed by purple clotting; it was hard to overlook.
"Walk into a door?" Augie asked him.
By way of answer, Ray Yates said, "Siddown, have a drink."
The painter was settling into a chair when the waitress bustled over. Her name was Suzy, she knew Augie only as a customer, a friendly face, yet she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled broadly when she saw him, and he could not help thinking that this stranger seemed more unambiguously glad to see him than did his closest friends. He ordered a Scotch and water, weak.
"Weak!" exclaimed Clay Phipps as Suzy walked away. "My God, man, you must really have been through something. Tell us."
So Augie nursed his watery cocktail and told the story. He knew he'd be asked to tell it many times, it was already taking on a life of its own. It was a story with three characters, even though they were all called Augie. The burly, vigorous Augie who had gone off sailing on that unmenacing day in January was not the same as the mindless half-dead Augie floating away from Scavenger Reef, nor was he the same as the chastened re-emerging Augie who was spinning out the yam. The name was like a briefcase, monogrammed but hollow, the only thing that stayed the same as the contents were shuffled in and shuffled out. "So here I am," the latest Augie concluded, "back where I started, beat to hell, and in some weird way happier than I've ever been."
He broke off. Bar noise flooded the silence, the sun-seared bougainvillea rustled with a papery sound. Then Roberto Natchez said, "A charmed life."
The comment was not generous. It was sour, grouchy, warped by the annoyance people tend to feel at the excessive good fortune of another. Augie looked at the poet not in accusation but with mute inquiry: Was he jealous even of another man's near death? Natchez's face told him nothing; he glanced at Yates and Phipps and came away with the unsettling feeling that the poet had somehow spoken for all of them, that all were envious of his adventure, his resilience, that his return in some dim way affronted them. Suddenly Augie was depressed, confused. He wanted to believe that he was only tired, maybe the noise and the smoke and the unaccustomed sociability were draining him too much, overloading him and skewing his perceptions. But sitting there among his buddies he felt more exiled, more cast adrift, than when he had been lost at sea.
"I think I'd better go," he said, and no one tried to talk him out of it. "Doesn't take much to exhaust me."
He rose amid uneasy smiles, paused for handshakes that fell short of being hearty, and slipped out past the bar. Reuben the Cuban, vigilant and silent, slid gracefully off his barstool and was ready to take him home.
The next day, in answer to a call from Augie, Clay Phipps came to visit.
He arrived at the door with beads of sweat strung along his bald pink head and a bakery box neatly tied with string in his hands. Reuben took the box and held it like it might contain a bomb. He remembered the Key lime tart; he remembered the guilty look, the Judas look, on the heavy man's face when he and Augie had embraced.
Augie, fresh out of the shower, came into the living room and said hello.
"I brought some cake," the visitor said. "Want some cake?"
"Later," said Augie, "later. I want to talk."
He led the way through the painting-strewn house, out toward the backyard. Reuben wondered why a fleeting look of disappointment had crossed Clay Phipps's face when Augie declined the pastry. Maybe it was just that the husky man wanted a slice himself. Or maybe there was some other reason.
Augie motioned Clay Phipps toward the love seat where the family friend had felt up Nina, but he slid away from the illicit spot and took a single chair instead. He settled in, then nodded toward the west end of the pool. "That's where I delivered your eulogy. Set up a lectern so I wouldn't fall in if I swooned."
"Nina tells me you praised me out of all proportion."
"It's easy to be generous to the dead."
"And extremely difficult to be fair to the living."
This was a throwaway, a random bit of repartee, but Phipps felt sure it was somehow aimed at him. How much did Augie really know?
"Clay," his host went on, "about last night…"
"What about it?"
Augie pushed some breath through his teeth, it made a hissing sound. "Is it just me, or was there some unease, some tension…"
Phipps frowned. He didn't especially want to answer, nor was he content to let Augie go on probing. "Well, you know, the shock, the suddenness…"
Augie stroked his chin. "I'd like to think it was only that. But I felt… I felt… unwelcome."
It hurt to say the word, and Augie looked down when he said it. His looking down made it easier for Phipps to tell a lie.
"Nonsense," he said. "Ray and Natch, they seem to have a lot on their minds these days, they've been distant with me too."
The painter considered, decided not without conflict to be satisfied. "Okay," he said, "okay. Death, you know, I guess it's made me touchy."
Phipps saw an opportunity to change the subject. "Touchy but happy. Last night you said you were happier than ever. How come?"
Augie looked around his yard, smiled at the oleanders and the pendant bundles of poinciana flowers. "I used to take myself too seriously," he said. "I didn't think I did, but I did. This whole thing about not painting. Maybe it could pass for modesty, but it was arrogance, pretension. I mean, what gave me the chutzpah to think I had to be that good? So I'm not Vermeer- who cares? The paintings you have, Clay-am I wrong to think they give a certain pleasure?"
Phipps squirmed, gestured vaguely, made a soft harrumphing sound. Augie went right on.
"So I'll paint as well as I can paint, and the hell with it. The people who are happy are the people who get up in the morning and do their best, don'tcha think?"
The question hung a moment in the hot thick air. It was precisely what Clay Phipps thought; and precisely what Clay Phipps had never done. Augie knew that.
Was he goading him? Was he mocking him now not only by example but by precept? Or was Phipps, in his guilt and his festering disappointment, simply that determined to take offense, to find or imagine scraps of justification for turning against his friend?
Reuben, moving soundlessly and with his low-slung self-effacing geisha's grace, appeared near the two men and offered them something cold to drink. "A beer?" he said. "A glass of wine?"
"And there's the cake," said Clayton Phipps. "It's apricot."
"Ah," said Augie. He seemed to be considering. "Will you have some?"
"Me?" said Phipps, as if he was being singled out in a crowded room. "No, I've just had lunch. I brought it for you."
Augie pursed his lips, pulled his eyebrows together. A lot went into a man's decision about whether to have a piece of cake. Was he hungry? Would the sweetness be too cloying in the heat? Did he want the coffee the cake cried out for? Reuben leaned far forward on the balls of his feet, so far forward that he had to flex his toes as hard as he could to keep from falling over. For one mad instant it seemed to him that he should throw himself on Clayton Phipps's neck, wrestle him to the ground, and unmask him at once as the would-be killer. But he waited. He didn't want to make a scene in front of Augie; besides, if Augie said no to cake there would be no emergency.
The painter frowned through to the end of his deliberations. Then he said, "Yes, I think I'll have a piece. A small one." He paused a half-beat, then added, "Sure you won't join me, Clay?"
Phipps shook his head and Reuben didn't like the shadowy smile that slithered quickly across his face.
The young man glided back to the house and paced around the kitchen. He took a knife and cut through the string around the bakery box. He opened the package and looked inside. He saw a neat arrangement of apricot halves, round and orange as just-risen moons, overlaid with a glaze like tinted glass and bordered with a butter-rich marzipan crust. Reuben liked sweets. His mouth, one of the body parts that didn't know what was good for it, watered perversely even as his mind recoiled. He shook his head and swallowed, then brought down the top of the box like the lid of a coffin. He got the stepstool and put the cake on the highest shelf of the least-used cabinet, hid it like a gun from a curious child. He put a bottle of mineral water and two glasses on a tray and went outside again.
"The cake," he announced, "I'm sorry, you can't have any." He poured water for Augie and Phipps, handed them their glasses.
"Whaddya mean, I can't have any?" Augie asked. His body had readied itself for cake, the taste buds were prepared, the passageways open, and now, goddamn it, he wanted something sweet.
"The cake, it will make you sick," said Reuben. He spoke to Augie but looked at Phipps, and Phipps seemed unable to stay still in his chair.
"Reuben," Augie said, "I'd like a piece of cake."
The young man balanced his tray, bit his lower lip. "The cake, I didn't want to say this, is full of bugs."
"That's impossible," blurted Clay Phipps, who suddenly seemed far more exasperated than was called for by a spoiled cake. "I just bought it. It's from Jean Claude's. It's-"
"It's the tropics," Augie interrupted with a shrug. O.K., he'd live without the cake. "There are bugs here."
"Well, damnit," said Clay Phipps, "there shouldn't be! Not in a fancy cake from a fancy baker. I'll bring it back."
This, Reuben had not counted on. But for Phipps to take the cake away was out of the question. The cake was very important. The cake was evidence. It would end the danger to Augie and would prove that Nina was not crazy.
"I'm sorry," Reuben said. "The cake, I put it in the garbage. The compactor. The cake it is squished."
Phipps tisked, threw a damp leg over the opposite knee. Reuben turned back toward the kitchen, wondering if he had seen, along with Phipps's exasperation, a hint of something like relief that the cake had been destroyed. But Augie saw only his visitor's annoyance. He watched him writhe and sweat, and gently mused on how easily rattled people were before they got on terms with death.
"It's nothing, Clay," he softly said, and he put a hand across the other man's forearm.
"But it was a gift," the visitor said miserably, and immediately wished he hadn't used the word. It was a gift like Augie's paintings had been gifts, and he, Clay Phipps, was always doing just the wrong thing where gifts were concerned, gifts always seemed to be the litmus test that pointed up his smallness, the unintentional and unchangeable lack of generosity that was poisoning his life. Gift. The word and Augie's all-forgiving touch made him feel as loathsome as a serpent, and as spiteful. He sipped his mineral water, mopped his forehead, and wished that he was home, alone.