"You know what they're starting to say," said Peter Brandenburg, the art critic for Manhattan magazine. "They're starting to say the whole thing-his disappearance, the retrospective, this supposed miracle return-was one big cheap publicity stunt."
"That's ridiculous," said Claire Steiger.
"Absurd," put in Kip Cunningham.
"Is it?" Brandenburg prodded, and he lifted his martini. For his money, which it rarely was, Coco's Bar at the Hotel France still made the best cocktail in town. The classic glass alone made it worth the seven dollars. And there were no peanuts in the mix served up in heaping cut-glass bowls. Only the more aristocratic nuts: pecans with perfect cleavage, brazils like small canoes, cashews curled like salted shrimp.
"Think about it," the critic resumed. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, then plucked at the neckline of his woven silk vest. "You've got a painter who hasn't painted in three years. Who knows if he can paint anymore? He dies and he's suddenly a star. A speculative frenzy kicks in. Then, just when the momentum is perhaps beginning to slow, there's a dramatic new twist: a rumor that he's back! Really, doesn't it seem-"
"Seem what?" Claire Steiger cut him off. Her fingers reached toward the nut bowl and grabbed a couple of depth charges of sodium and fat. She chomped a walnut, then seemed to realize what she was doing and dropped a filbert onto her coaster.
"Convenient," said Brandenburg, and he managed to make the word sound dirty.
"It's hardly convenient," said Augie Silver's agent. "Peter, you remember what happened to prices when Warhol died, when Rothko killed himself. They take a huge leap, we all know that. If it turns out he's alive-" "Alive, not alive," said Brandenburg impatiently. "I'm telling you that people are suspicious, confused, and ready to be very pissed off. It's the kind of thing that ruins people."
"Ruins who?" asked Kip Cunningham. Peter Brandenburg flashed him a quick glance from underneath his eyebrows and pretended not to understand the question. He was known at Coco's and it did not do for a critic to look upset, to appear to be taking things personally. But Brandenburg did look upset, if only for an instant, and only to someone who knew him fairly well. Claire Steiger saw the twitch at the corner of his eye and went at it the way a boxer attacks a cut.
"Yes, Peter," she said. "Who would it ruin?" She caught her husband's eye and for a second, only a second, they were allies, almost lovers, again.
Brandenburg sipped his martini. He was forty-four years old and had all the advantages that youngish/oldish age could offer. People who didn't know him assumed he must be sixty because he had that kind of power and had been in print forever. Yet there were boyish things about his looks that allowed him still to pass, in any but the harshest light, for not much more than thirty. His reddish hair had neither thinned nor faded. He was lean as he'd been in prep school, his astute hazel eyes were every bit as clear. His posture was firm and rather stiff, inviolate; he was as self-contained as something kept in Tupperware. He didn't answer the question.
"Of course," Claire Steiger goaded, "it was really your review that got the whole thing rolling. Is that what's bothering you, Peter?"
"I stand by my review," the critic said. "Well, then," said Kip Cunningham. Brandenburg turned petulant. "I just don't want to feel that I've been duped. And I don't want to feel that I've been party to a hoax."
Augie's agent ate the filbert on her coaster. "Peter, Peter, I swear to you I've tried to get to the bottom of this. I called the house. The houseboy answers, acts like he doesn't speak English. I tried Nina at the gallery. She's got the answering machine on, she's screening calls, she hasn't called me back. She's still angry about the retrospective. I doubt she even knows about the auction-"
"Sotheby's has a certain aversion to scandal," said Brandenburg. "I can see reputations destroyed. I can see the whole thing blowing up."
Claire reached out and took the critic's hand. It was not a gesture of kindness: She'd noticed many times that Peter Brandenburg did not like to be touched, it only made him jumpier. "Peter, I assure you this is not a hoax. The tone set by your review-"
Kip Cunningham waited a beat, then reached out and patted Brandenburg's wrist. "We've got to wind you down, old boy. A squash game and a good long steam. Whaddya say? Tomorrow, four o'clock?"
Augie Silver was feeling slightly stronger, his progress measured in the small, sweet, private victories of the convalescent.
He discovered that if he rested his eyes, just closed them for a few deep breaths now and then, it was much easier to stay awake for more than several hours at a time. He could read, could hold a book and sometimes concentrate. He found that if he stood up slowly, very slowly, he could keep enough blood in his brain so that his vision didn't go blank around the edges, so that he hardly felt the ocean dizziness anymore.
He began to wean himself off broth and return to solid food-soft food, like the peeled, sliced mangoes Reuben the Cuban was bringing to him on a tray.
"Meester Silber?" he said quietly, having softly knocked on the frame of the open bedroom door.
"Come in, Reuben," said the painter. "And Reuben, would you stop it already with the Meester Silber bullshit?"
The young man did not answer until he'd smoothed the convalescent's sheets so that the tray fit neatly over them and didn't pull. "Please, Meester Silber, it is a respect."
"I know it is, but that kind of respect I don't need. I want you to call me Augie."
Reuben folded his hands in front of him and looked down at the floor. Then his eye was caught by the vase of flowers at Augie Silver's bedside. The morning's hibiscus blooms were starting to curl; he'd replace them with sprigs of jasmine before he left.
"Awk," said Fred the parrot. "J amp;B. Where's Augie?"
"Ya see, Reuben, even the goddamn bird calls me Augie."
At this the young man could not help smiling shyly. The parrot was a crazy bird. And Reuben liked it when Mister Silver cursed, he wasn't sure why. Maybe because when other men cursed, cursed in English or in Spanish, there was anger in it, and mockery, and violence. But Mister Silver cursed like telling a joke, like whistling a song, it was not about anger, but freedom.
"So come on, say it: Augie."
Reuben hesitated. To say a name was no small thing. It carried a weight, an honor. It was a kind of touch. He took a breath, then looked the painter in the eye. It was a bolder look than he had ever cast at Mister Silver and he found it not much less difficult than looking at the sun, but he knew in his heart that the saying of a name should go together with a look like that, a look with nothing hidden. "Augie," he softly said.
"Bravo," the painter answered, dimly aware that this leap into informality, into the first chamber of intimacy, was as much a victory for Reuben as was conquering solid food for him. "Now siddown."
He nodded toward the bedside chair, and Reuben the Cuban didn't budge. A breeze rustled the palm fronds, they scratched at the tin roofs of Olivia Street. The wet smell of mango wafted up from the tray and mingled with the baked aromas of cracked sidewalks and softening streets after a day of blistering heat.
"Reuben, you're here to keep me company. So keep me company, goddamnit. You need a written invitation?"
Again the painter gestured toward the chair, and Reuben glanced at it as though he were standing on a high-dive platform looking down at a bucket of water.
"What the hell is this about?" Augie asked. "Is it just because you work for us? Because I'm an old fart with white hair? You think we're fancy people? What?"
Reuben shuffled his feet. He glanced at Fred the parrot. For reasons known only to itself, the bird had ruffled its feathers and the lifted edges cast purple shadows against the green. Instead of answering the question, Reuben softly said, "You really want me to sit with you, Augie?"
"Christ, Reuben. Yes."
Lightly, gracefully, the willowy young man settled on the edge of the chair. He didn't sit, he perched, an apron across his thighs, most of his weight still carried on the balls of his feet. "Augie," he said, "the reason it is hard for me to sit with you, it is none of the things you say. It is because I think you are a great man."
Either Augie Silver put down a sliver of mango or the wet fruit slithered through his fingers. "Ah, bullshit," he said, and Reuben the Cuban could not help smiling shyly.