"Clay, don't," said Nina Silver.
She gently but firmly grasped the family friends thick wrist before his hand could slide down onto her breast, and pushed his large warm face away from her neck.
Phipps, a gentleman more or less, didn't wait for the attempted embrace to become a grovel, a grope, some unseemly echo of adolescence. He sat up straight on the settee alongside Augie Silver's blue-lit swimming pool, partly disappointed, part contrite, maybe even part relieved. "Nina," he said, "I'm sorry." In a move to recapture his dignity, he smoothed the placket of his linen shirt the way a riled bird resettles its feathers. "Loss does strange things to people. I'm a mess."
Augie's widow gave him a soft smile and patted him on the knee. It was a gesture of caring and acceptance, but it somehow made Phipps feel worse. Was he so ridiculous a suitor that the woman he'd just been trying to seduce would feel not the slightest threat in touching his leg? He took stock. He was fifty-eight years old. O.K., not young, but only one year older than Augie. He was bald, yes, but had always been told he had a well-shaped head. He wasn't rich, but managed to live as though he was. He wasn't famous, but enjoyed many of the perks thereof. His little newsletter was highly respected by those who knew and cherished the finer things; his endorsement was coveted around the world. Clayton Phipps was acknowledged as a formidable judge of wine, a gourmet of nice discernment and enviable experience, a canny traveler who had filled ten passports with visa stamps.
All those hotel rooms, he reflected wryly, sitting next to Augie Silver's lovely widow. Overlooking the Bay of Naples, Sydney Harbor, the Tyrolean Alps. All those beautiful, romantic, complimentary suites-brass beds, marble bathtubs-he'd occupied alone. All those marvelous dinners taken at small tables in the sycophantic company of proprietors. All those tastings of legendary Bordeaux, sipped elbow to elbow with a bunch of crotchety old men in caves. Nearing the age of sixty, Clayton Phipps admitted to himself what a damnably clever job he'd done of living life for free, keeping himself unfettered, independent, sought after, and alone.
"Nina, Nina, you know what it is?" Emerging from his thoughts, Phipps didn't notice the abruptness of his voice in the night air that was perfumed with frangipani and chlorine. "What it is I really want? I want what you and Augie had."
"Of course you do," the widow said softly. Loss, for her, had made everything seem simple, obvious, reduced to its essentials. People wanted love, intimacy, the sense of being mated. They wanted to feel the profound familiarity that made another person's nearness as basic as the taste of water. "Everyone wants what Augie and I had. I want it. I want it back."
Clayton Phipps was not an unfeeling man, not usually, but in the grip of his newly acknowledged loneliness he failed to see that the widow's pain was infinitely sharper than his own because she knew exactly what she was missing while he had only the vague awareness that something precious had eluded him all his life. "With someone else…" he began. It wasn't quite a question, not quite a statement. It was off the beat and had the awkwardness of doomed pleading.
'There is no one else, Clay," said the widow, and there was defiance in her voice. The defiance was not aimed at Clayton Phipps, but still it stung him, made him feel a flash of shaming envy and even bitterness, even spite, toward his dead friend. Why should Augie Silver be so loved?
"Come now, Nina," he said. Phipps felt as if he'd slipped into a chasm of longing that had little to do with Nina Silver, a slippery pit in which his isolation was the only fact, and he tried to climb out of it with handholds of cynicism couched as worldliness. "Aren't we a little old to believe in this one right person nonsense?"
"I don't believe in that," said Nina. "I think there are any number of right people for each other-"
"Well then," Phipps cut in. His tone had turned professorial. If charm couldn't rescue the moment, maybe logic would save him. "If there are any number-"
The widow interrupted in turn, soft but unstoppable as a train. "Until you really fall in love with one. Then the others dim out, fade away, come to seem-I don't mean this personally, Clay-a little bit absurd."
They sat. A scrap of breeze sent tiny ripples across the pool and lifted a wet green smell from the hedge. Inside the house, soft yellow lights gleamed against the dark wood walls. Augie's paintings loomed, unmoved in the week since the memorial. The parrot cage stood near the door; Fred was covered for the night, dreaming what visions of jungle, berries, feathers, and flight might come to a bird in sleep.
And Nina Alonzo saw Augie Silver for the first time.
It was twelve years ago. She was twenty-nine. She was sitting at her desk at the gallery on 57th Street. She heard a strange scuffing sound on the marble floor and looked up to see her future husband strolling in his meandering way, looking over first one shoulder, then the other, halfway twirling, wearing boat shoes. Boat shoes in midtown Manhattan in March. He approached her. He had on a black cashmere turtleneck, the collar askew but tucked high under the chin, and over the sweater was a light jacket of fawn-colored pigskin suede. It vaguely occurred to her that these were tiger colors, black and tan, and it registered only very dimly that everything the painter wore would feel good. His hair was thick, wavy, and almost perfect white, tinged here and there with an oddly pinkish bronze, but his skin was youthful, smooth and ruddy as an Indian's. His eyes were an electric blue, and they rested far back in sockets so deep that they suggested lighthouse beams, piercing, narrow-focused lenses that swept across his range of vision and shone with unsettling concentration on one thing at a time. And now they were fixed on Nina Alonzo. "Hello," he said. "I'm Augie Silver." Then he did something that quietly amazed her when she thought about it afterward, amazed her because it could only have been carried off with perfect confidence, perfect ease, with a manner as comfortable as his clothes. He half-sat on her desk, stretched a leg alongside the phone, the files, the exhibition catalogues. His trousers were of beefy corduroy, and some of the wales were rubbed almost smooth…
"Nina, are you all right?"
She flinched just slightly at the sound of Phipps's voice, and felt not gratitude but resentment for the intrusive concern that had pulled her back to the here and now. "No," she said after a moment, "I'm not all right. My husband has been gone-what is it, Clay, three months now? — and he's more alive to me than anybody living. I'm not all right."
Phipps took her hand, and neither of them could help glancing down at the suspect twining of their fingers. Twenty minutes ago, before his bizarre and meager attempt at lust, the contact would have been clean. "Nina, is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?"
Even in his own ears, the question sounded a shade unwholesome, and Clay Phipps understood that he had forever forfeited the privilege of being totally trusted, of being mistaken for unselfish.
The widow took her hand away. "Don't try to be Augie, Clay. That's what you can do for me. Don't try to be the man I love."
Later, asleep, Nina again saw Augie Silver.
She saw him often in dreams, and savored these meetings as if they were deliciously forbidden trysts. They were always different and always the same, these dreams, full of the sore joy of reunion which then melted into a growing but never serene acceptance that the reunion was unreal.
This time Nina saw Augie while she was sitting in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. The front door opened and there he was. He hadn't shaved, his face gleamed with a steely stubble, and his throat was very tan beneath the collar of his shirt. "Augie," she said. She held her mug in front of her, smelling the fragrant steam and embracing the miracle of her husband coming back.
"Coffee?" he said, and walked through the living room toward the counter. She glanced at the coffee maker and noticed that the red brew light was flickering, blinking like a buoy at sea. She watched Augie walk, and though his walk was casual, shuffling as always, he became more insubstantial with each step, his form flattening, his feet in less secure contact with the floor, and the sleeping Nina felt him slipping away yet again. With the dreamer's comforting illusion that she could choose, she wrestled with the choice of waking up to dream-capture him before he had vanished, or staying asleep and willing him not to fade, willing him to explain but most of all to keep existing. "Just a cup of coffee," she said in the dream, and in her empty bedroom the words came out only as a soft mumble that woke her up. She opened her eyes, lifted onto her elbows for just a moment, and tried to memorize this most recent visit with her husband. He'd looked so handsome coming through the door.