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less he worked.
    And he wasn't, even by his own assessment, a
major artist. That was the part that nettled Natchez, or that
justified his pique. To the great artist, much was allowed, maybe
everything; that was basic. But why should Augie Silver—a gifted
dauber, a freakishly facile lightweight—have been admired, fawned
on, taken seriously, while Natchez, who knew beyond a doubt that he
was an important poet, a major voice, was still filling out
applications like a goddamn high school senior? Where was the
justice in it? He burned to know.
    Disgusted, feeling wronged and righteous,
Natchez pushed aside the grant forms, switched off his desk light,
and walked the one step to the kitchenette to pour a glass of rum.
Justice. It mattered deeply to Robert Natchez, as it matters to all
profoundly frustrated people. As long as they themselves are the
ones defining what is just and, in fantasy at least, the ones with
the awful power to see that every person ends up as he
deserves.
     

 
7
    "Darling, how are you?" asked Claire
Steiger.
    Nina Silver briefly hesitated at her end of
the phone line. How was she? Only lately had the widow noticed how
often and offhandedly this bedeviling little question was asked.
Take it seriously, and it was intimate as a bath. "I'm as well as I
can be, Claire. How are you?"
    "Me?" She sounded faintly surprised at the
inquiry, but that, Nina reflected, was Claire. It was axiomatic
that she was fine. The self-made woman who'd opened a dinky
exhibition space in a side-street storefront, given it the grand
name Ars Longa, and in less than a decade turned it into one of New
York's most formidable taste-making galleries. Who'd snagged
herself a square-jawed husband from among the East Side's thin crop
of croquet-playing, equestrian bluebloods. Who'd done all this,
moreover, without independent wealth or the cheap currency of great
beauty or any particular genius except a genius for reaching the
end point of her wishes. "Very busy. Hectic. ... It was a lovely
memorial the other week."
    What did one say to
this? Thank you for approving of my taste
in mourning? Nina had years ago stopped
competing with her former boss on issues of style and refinement,
had stopped competing with anyone about anything. She kept silent
and looked around her own modest premises, the Vita Brevis Gallery.
Augie had suggested the name over a bottle of champagne, and it had
proven irresistible. It was a sweet space, the Vita Brevis,
pine-floored and washed in north light, and its overhead was low
enough that Nina Silver could turn a profit while showing exactly
what she pleased. With modesty of aims came freedom. That was
something Nina's former colleagues in New York found it difficult
to understand.
    "Nina," Claire Steiger resumed, "let me tell
you why I'm calling. I'm mounting a show of Augie's work. A
retrospective."
    The news should hardly have shocked the
widow. This was how it happened: A painter died, and after a brief
interval came a show, a look back, a reconsideration of the work,
now that the work was finished. But usually when a painter died it
was clearer he was dead. There was a body. There was a chance to
look down at the dead face and confirm that it was lifeless, an
opportunity to lay one's cheek against the still chest and convince
oneself that it was void of breath. There was the final sound of
tossed dirt crunching down on a lowered coffin. Nina Silver felt a
moment of bewilderment and mistrust. It seemed to her that people
were conspiring in some sadistic hoax to persuade her that her
husband wasn't coming back—when in her heart, against all evidence
and all rules of the natural world, she yet believed he was. She
saw him, after all, nearly every night, his ruddy face flush with
life, his meandering step as full of curiosity as ever. . . . The
widow groped for something to say, something that would reconnect
her with the ordinary waking world in which plans were made, things
decided.
    "But Claire," she