Roberto Natchez dropped Friday morning's paper on his dim disheveled desk and coaxed the top off his Styrofoam cup of cafe con leche. With the usual snarls and sneers he read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments, riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root the vileness out.
Approvingly, he examined his scowl in the alcove mirror, sipped some coffee, then turned to the second section and saw the big lead article, its headline sprawled across the whole front page: Augie Silver- Key West's Greatest (Twice-) Living Artist.
This sent Natchez briefly back to his looking glass. He did a double take, snapped the paper in what he intended as a gesture of mocking disbelief. Then, with a throbbing pulse in his temple and a quickly tightening knot in his stomach, he began to read.
"Our town," went Arty Magnus's opening, "is a cultural mecca with many pilgrims and very few prophets."
Already Natchez was so affronted that he laughed out loud, erupted in a demonic cackle that hurt his throat. Was it conceivable that this cipher of a local reporter was going to call Augie Silver-a dauber, a decorator-a prophet? No, it was too ridiculous, too grotesque.
"Artists come here," the article went on, "expecting — what? To be magically, effortlessly infused with the island's atmosphere? To absorb talent by some sort of painless tropical osmosis? Well, it doesn't work that way, as longtime Key West resident Augie Silver can testify. To understand the allure, the resonance, and the dangerous beauty of our corner of the world is a difficult, harrowing-and potentially fatal-experience."
There followed what Roberto Natchez considered a strained transition to an unctuous, overblown account of Augie's misadventure at sea-and this evoked another derisive chortle from the poet: The man has a trivial mishap in a sailboat, a rich child's toy, and this is evidence of his profundity, this marks him as a seer?
Absurdity followed absurdity in the article. Augie Silver's bland commercial work was described as "haunting and uncompromising." His prissy bourgeois house was characterized as "cozy and devoid of ostentation." Augie himself-sloppy, haphazard, careless Augie-was passed off as "a man of unpretentious dignity, who wears his great gift with modesty and humor."
Great gift? thought Natchez. Ha! A gift for public relations maybe, a gift for facile showmanship…
But then the profile took a darker turn. Fame also had its perils, and there had recently been threats, the piece revealed, against the artist's life. The details were withheld, though Arty Magnus allowed himself to observe that Key West had no shortage of crackpots to whom any outrage, from the sickest prank all the way to murder, might conceivably seem justified. "Indeed" — and here the journalist ended with a flourish-"such twisted and deluded souls are symptomatic of the untamed hothouse life of the tropics-the life that Augie Silver so powerfully and unsparingly portrays."
Natchez let the paper fall flat against his desk. He glanced at the mirror and attempted a supercilious smile, but his face was too tense for that, his upper lip did a mad-dog twitch against his eyeteeth. " Crackpots." He said the word aloud, then he gave a bitter laugh that curdled in his windpipe and closed his throat like the taste of sour milk. Crackpots. Wasn't that just too typical? Anyone who took a stand against a fraud like Augie Silver must by definition be a crackpot. What simpler, more insidious way for the mendacious, mediocre status quo to maintain its death grip on the imagination than by pinning the label crackpot on anyone who saw beyond its narrow, constipated limits?
The poet did not remember rising from his chair, but he found himself pacing the confines of his small apartment. He paced, he wheeled-and then he saw the Augie Silver canvas still hanging on his wall. Why in God's name did he keep that wretched thing? He wouldn't stoop to sell it-never! — but why did he allow it to sully his workplace? Maybe, long before, he'd kept it as a kind of private joke, a goad, but that was in a less ripe phase of his development. Such frivolity, such an invasion of marketplace crassness, could no longer be abided.
Roberto Natchez had a silver-plated letter opener. He'd bought it many years before; it had struck him as a necessary accoutrement for a budding literary man, though the implement, weighty and portentous, seemed designed for the unsealing of more important mail than the poet ever got. He grabbed it now and stood before the painting Augie Silver had given him in friendship. His face contorted, he raised the blade and let the point of it rest lightly near the center of the canvas, poking at a swath of sunshot sky. He breathed deeply, gripped his weapon as tightly as though he were about to plunge it into flesh, and he slashed. He slashed again and again, the canvas made a rasping, screaming sound as it was rent, flecks of brightly colored paint floated off the sundered cloth like tinsel glitter. He slashed until the picture was in shreds too narrow to hold the knife, and then he stepped back, breathless and sweating, to see what he had done.
The frame had been knocked askew, ribbons of canvas hung down at random angles over the bottom of it. Natchez smiled. He examined the ghastly smile in the mirror, then turned to the painting again. He moved toward it, intending to take it off the wall, smash it, and put it in the garbage. Then he had a different idea. He'd leave it where it was and as it was. Let it hang there in tatters. Let it hang there dead. It struck him as somehow more authentic that way, more in the spirit of the crackpot tropics.
Clayton Phipps had not left his house in four days and was turning a sickly shade of yellowish gray. He hadn't shaved, he'd slept only for brief intervals at odd hours. His scalp seemed to have stretched from the weight of fatigue; a roll of loose skin gathered at the base of his skull, another formed a curving ledge above his eyebrows. When he finally ventured out late on Friday afternoon, the damp white light stung his eyes, and the concrete sidewalks felt bruisingly hard against his feet.
He walked to Augie Silver's house and knocked softly, tentatively, on the door.
Reuben opened it. "Meester Pheeps," he said. There was surprise in his voice, though it was unclear whether it had to do with the visit itself or the neat man's slovenly condition.
"Is Augie home?"
Reuben recognized suffering; he recognized repentance. He answered gently. "He is home. I do not know if he likes to see you."
Phipps gave a resigned and tired nod. "Would you ask him, please?"
Reuben left the visitor standing at the door; in deference to his unhappiness, he did not close it in his face. Augie was in the backyard sketching Nina as she swam. He put his pencil down at Reuben's news, and hesitated only for an instant. "Yes," he said, "of course I'll see him."
There is a kind of fondness that can co-exist with disappointment and that persists even in the absence of forgiveness-a fondness that itself becomes an unexalted but tolerable species of forgiveness-and this is what Augie Silver felt as his old friend came through the French doors and approached him. He looked at the white stubble on Phipps's jowls, the black bags under his sagging eyes, and he found it unexpectedly easy to muster a wry affection. "Clay," he said, "you look like hell."
The other man managed something like a smile. "Thank you."
"Whisky?"
Phipps's shirt was damp, he was itchy behind the knees. "Awfully hot for whisky," he said.
"That's obvious," said Augie. "Let's have whisky anyway."
Reuben went for drinks. Nina, dimly aware of muffled voices, peeked above the water just long enough to identify their guest; she decided she would keep on swimming. For a few moments no one spoke; Phipps seemed to be recharging, taking nourishment from the fact that he had been invited in, that he had not been turned away forever. Not until the Scotch and ice arrived and the two men had clinked glasses did he say another word. "Augie, those paintings. I was thinking. Maybe it's not too late to withdraw-"
"I don't ever want to see those pictures again, Clay." The artist's voice was soft but it was definite. "I don't imagine you do either. It's history. Cheers."
The chilled whisky was both cold and hot; it tickled first and then it burned.
Phipps looked into his glass. The ice was melting so fast he could see water streaming off the cubes, shimmering pale currents snaking through the brown liquor. "What happened to us, Augie? To our hale little group of buddies?"
"I know what happened to me," Augie said. "Damned if I know what's going on with you guys." He watched his wife swim. He loved the way she turned, reaching for the wall then becoming a liquid J as she reversed direction underwater. After a moment he said, "You going to the auction?"
Phipps listened hard for a note of rancor, but he heard no blame. "I was going to," he said. "Now I just don't know."
"You might want to decide," Augie said. "It's three days from now."
Phipps shrugged absently. "There's a fellow does charters in a Learjet. Dies in the off-season. Said he'd take me anywhere, anytime for a mention in the newsletter."
Augie could not help smiling. Incorrigibility might not be the loftiest of human traits, but there is always comfort in consistency. "Same old Clay," he said, "the freeloader's freeloader."
By way of answer, Phipps raised his glass. But the twinkle in his eye lasted only for an instant. Then his face caved in, his gray cheeks went slack, his voice turned shrill and maudlin. "Isn't there anything I can do? I feel like such a shit."
"Don't feel like a shit," said Augie. "And no, there's nothing you can do."
With effort, Phipps leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. There was a creaking sound, it was unclear whether it was the furniture or his disused joints. "Augie, these threats, are you really in danger?"
"D'you think I was grandstanding the other night?"
"Maybe I can help," said Phipps. "There has to be some way I can help."
The painter regarded him. He was fat, he was old, he was bald, he was slow, he was searching desperately for some shred of grandeur within himself. Augie patted his knee and with his other hand poured him half a glass of Scotch. "Maybe there will be, Clay," he said. "In the meantime, drink up, go home, and get some sleep."