East is East

Even on this morning, when the turmoil of the storm was building inside her, when she felt light, almost weightless, when she felt giddy and excited for no good reason, Ruth chose the silent table. She’d been at the colony two weeks now—fourteen mornings—and in that space of time she’d never, even for an instant, thought of sitting anywhere else. Aside from Irving Thalamus, whose trade-in-stock—urban Jewish angst—throve on confusion, the name artists, the serious ones, all chose the silent table. Laura Grobian sat here, and Peter Anserine, and a celebrated punk sculptress with staved-in eyes and skin so pale she looked three days dead. Ruth reveled in it. She pretended to read the Savannah paper—delivered on the previous afternoon’s ferry and always a day out of date—while she watched Laura Grobian, with her concave cheeks and haunted eyes—her famous haunted eyes—to see how she spooned up her cold cereal and how the unflagging hours of the night had treated her. Or she’d study Peter Anserine, recently divorced, with his long nose and prominent nostrils, as he hacked and snorted surreptitiously over his food and the book—always European, and never in translation—that seemed attached to him like some sort of growth. And, too, she got to see who was breakfasting with whom at the convivial table, as they had to pass through the silent room on their way. Ruth watched and brooded and plotted, and when it got to be too much, when the table was deserted and she could put it off no longer, she pushed herself up from her chair and walked the quarter mile to her studio in the woods. Saxby, of course, slept till twelve.

It hadn’t yet started to rain when Ruth gathered up her things—the satchel with her notebooks, breath mints, her compact and hairbrush and one of the fat pulp romances she devoured in secret—folded the day-old newspaper under her arm, plucked an umbrella from the stand in the front hall and sallied out the door. This was her favorite part of the day. The path, set with flagstones and planted in some bygone era with jonquils and geraniums, took her through a stand of bearded oak and pine and within a good sniff of the marsh. The misery of writing was at hand, it was true, but the smell of the mudflats and the open ocean that drove in twice a day to swallow them stirred memories of her girlhood in Santa Monica—her simple, ingenuous and carefree girlhood, uncomplicated by the mania for fame (and its unfortunate concomitant, work) that had set in when she reached sixteen. And though at this time of year the heat and humidity were unrelenting—the entire state, as she often said, was like a shower stall in a dormitory—and she knew that the mosquitoes and deerflies lay in wait for her beneath the trees, she couldn’t help feeling exhilarated. Here she was, at Thanatopsis, writing—or trying to write; the colleague of Laura Grobian, Peter Anserine and Irving Thalamus—and yes, of the walleyed composer too, who, despite appearances, was the most famous of all the twenty-six artists now in residence.

Ruth, known to her intimates as La Dershowitz, was thirty-four, though she admitted only to twenty-nine. She’d been writing since her junior year in high school, when John Beard, her English teacher, as interested perhaps in her triumphant breasts and pouting smirk as in her adolescent poems and stories, encouraged her during the long hours of their late-night tutoring sessions. She’d put in time at most of the better summer workshops, courtesy of her father, and she held a shaky B.A. in anthropology from Sonoma State. She spent a year at Iowa and another at Irvine without managing to come away with a degree from either, and she’d published four intense and gloomy stories in the little magazines (two in Dichondra,

the editor of which she’d met at Bread Loaf, and one each in Firefly

and Precious Buttons). Money had become a problem, waitressing a terminal disease. When she met Saxby, who was flunking out of the oceanography program at Scripps, she fell in love with his dimples, his laugh, his shoulders and the idea of the big house on Tupelo Island. And now she was here. For good. Or at least for a good long while.