Florida Straits (38 page)

"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.

'That isn't how it's done," Claire Steiger
said.

"How many paintings do we still have?"
pressed her husband.

"We?" She spit out the word as if it were a
rotten piece of fruit and went back to her magazine. The northbound
plane was somewhere off Cape Hatteras, and in the first-class cabin
coffee was being offered with petit fours, little pink squares
whose icing stuck to the ribbed paper of their nests.

"Look, there's a psychological moment to
these things," said Kip Cunningham. "How long does a dead artist
stay fashionable? A few months maybe? While he's still news, while
he's still being talked about at dinner parties. After that he's
just one more dead painter. Last year's tragedy. Who cares?"

Exasperated, Claire Steiger grabbed a petit
four and ate half of it before she realized what she was doing.
More annoyed than before, she put the other half back into its
paper cup and squashed it past all temptation. Raspberry jam oozed
out on her thumb. "Kip," she said, "now you're explaining to me the
mental quirks of art buyers?"

"I'm only saying—"

"You're only saying things you would have
heard a hundred times if you listened when I talked."

'This again, Claire?"

"Yeah, Kip, this again. Because now you
can't afford to ignore me. Now you can't act like your business is
the be-all end-all, and mine's a little hobby, good for some social
cachet, nice for getting us invited . . ."

The husband rolled his head against the back
of the leather seat and entertained the unholy wish that the wings
would fall off the airplane, that the naked fuselage, aerodynamic
as a cucumber, would plummet into the sea, settling everything with
a gruesome splash no one would hear. At that moment, no price
seemed too high to pay to get another human being to shut up, and
without actually deciding to, Kip played a card he'd been saving
for some time, one of the few cards he had left.

"Claire, we're going to lose the Sagaponack
house. Are you aware of that?"

There are two best ways to hurt someone. One
is through what is most feared, the other through what is most
loved. Claire Steiger's mouth stayed open but sound stopped coming
out. Something had slammed shut at the back of her throat, and her
eyes had started instantly to burn. She loved that house, took
delight from every colorless weather-beaten board of it. It was
half a block from the beach, always swollen and ripe with moisture
and salt. The first porch step gave a welcoming squeak when she
arrived on summer Fridays. The shutters were the most wonderful
shade of grayed-out blue, and the wet light that filtered through
the bedroom curtains reminded her of the radiance that came through
angels' wings in seventeenth-century murals.

"There's a huge payment due the first of
July," Kip went on. "The house is collateral against it." His tone
had become weirdly threatening, as if he had willed himself back to
the good old days when he was the one foreclosing and not the one
foreclosed. "We've gotta turn some cash, Claire. A lot of
cash."

She turned away and looked out the window.
It was an unrewarding view: flat tops of featureless clouds gapping
here and there to reveal a blank gray ocean. "Kip," she said, "you
don't understand. I've spent a lot of years building a clientele,
making a reputation for doing business a certain way. A dignified,
discreet way, Kip. I don't do fire sales. I don't cash in on
drowned artists. I don't slap paintings on the walls with price
tags dangling from them. The Ars Longa Gallery has a certain
image—"

"Fuck the image," said Kip Cunningham
without parting his small and perfect teeth. "We're broke."

Claire Steiger reached for another petit
four, then regarded her outstretched hand as if it belonged to
someone else, some piggish guest, and yanked it back before it had
snatched the pastry. Claire was not fat, just round, put together
out of circles. Her coarse curly hair haloed her head in a
spherical do. Her face was round, her hips were round, her breasts
were round. When she lost weight, certain dimensions flattened out
and became disk-like but never angular.

"It wouldn't work," she told her husband.
"Even if I said the hell with being classy, let's go for the quick
score—it wouldn't work. Serious collectors don't buy that way, Kip.
They're not impulsive. They wait for assurance from the critics.
They're going to spend six, maybe seven figures for a canvas, they
want the big auction houses' stamp of approval—"

"So why don't we sell through an auction
house?"

"Then why do we have a gallery?"

"Sotheby's," Kip Cunningham said. It sounded
like a prayer. "Don't they do a big painting sale in June?"

"The Solstice Show. Biggest of the year. But
Kip, what'll it accomplish? Say we're the only ones unloading Augie
Silvers. If anything, it'll drive the prices down. It'll look like
we're dumping. Like we're desperate."

"We are desperate."

The flight attendant came by to refresh
their coffee, and had the tact not to ask if everything was all
right. The speaker system switched on and a voice from the flight
deck informed them that those seated on the left side of the
airplane could look down and see Washington, DC.

"Who gives a good goddamn?" grumbled Kip. He
pushed his coffee aside and asked for a brandy. He was sipping it
sullenly when his wife spoke again.

"How much we need for the July payment?" she
asked.

"Two million four," said Kip.

"And the total indebtedness?"

"Personal or corporate?"

"Corporate's not my problem." Claire fixed
her husband with her tender brown eyes. "I'm asking how much you're
in hock on things that are half mine."

Kip blinked down at his tray table. It
befuddled him that he couldn't figure exactly when or how this toy
called debt was transfigured into money he actually had to pay.
"Eight million," he mumbled. "A little less."

His wife considered. "I've got an idea. I
think I can raise enough for July at least, maybe the whole nut.
But it comes with a price tag, Kip. I bail you out, the Sagaponack
house goes into my name and my name alone."

Kip Cunningham had the kind of fragile
handsomeness that one moment seemed polished, cocksure, and
composed, and with the smallest shift could collapse into the
sniveling pout of a spoiled child, a defeated brat snuffling
outside a squash-court door. He glanced sideways at his wife, his
mouth flat as snake lips, his eyes hard with the furtive meanness
of the weak. He gave a brief laugh that was meant to be sardonic.
"So what are you saying, Claire? Are you saying you're going to
divorce me?"

She flashed her tender eyes at him. "I
might."

She reached again for a petit four and
didn't stop herself this time. She bit into it, luxuriating in the
rasp of grainy sugar against her teeth, the squish of yellow cake
and apricot preserve against her tongue. "It seems more possible
every day."