East is East

Three times it rang, four, and then it choked off in the middle of the fifth ring. She couldn’t begin to hear the murmur of Owen’s voice, but she imagined it, and she listened as the footsteps started up again, as the dull stealthy tread of them recrossed the foyer, mounted the stairs and started down the upper hallway. She sat up. It was her father, she was sure of it. The doctor had warned him—the stress of the courtroom, the late nights, the obsessive tennis and racquetball, the cigarettes, martinis, New York steaks. Her father! Grief flooded her. She saw his face as clearly as if he were standing there beside her, the glint of his wire-frame glasses, the splash of gray in his beard, the look of the menscb, the lawgiver, the man of wisdom and peace … there would be a funeral, of course, and that would mean she’d have to leave Thanatopsis for a week, maybe longer. Black crepe. She’d look good in that, slim through the hips, and her tan would glow … but her father, it was her father, her daddy, and now she was naked to the world—

The footsteps halted outside her door, and then came Owen’s knock and his subdued rasp—no language games, no chirp of humor: “Ruth, it’s for you. Long-distance.”

She knew it, she knew it.

“It’s Saxby.”

Saxby? Suddenly the picture clouded over. Her father was all right, he was okay, as healthy as the Surgeon General himself and sleeping peacefully at one of the better addresses in Santa Monica. But it was—six o’clock? What could Saxby want at six o’clock? Her heart gave a little skip of fear—was he hurt? But no. Why would he be calling if he was hurt—it would be the police or the hospital, wouldn’t it? And then she thought of his fish. If he was dragging her out of bed because of some damned little loopy-eyed fish—

“Ruth, wake up. Telephone.”

She caught herself. “Yes, yes, I’m awake. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

The footsteps retreated. She bent to shuffle through the mess on the floor. She was looking for her terry-cloth robe, and her cigarettes, and maybe something to wrap round her hair in case anyone was up. She found the robe—she’d borrowed it from a hotel in Las Vegas on her way out from California, and there was a rich reddish stain over the left breast where she’d upended a glass of cranberry juice on it—and she came up with the cigarettes too, but no lighter and no scarf. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bureau mirror—sunken eyes, too much nose, a frenzy of fractured little lines tugging at her mouth—and then she ducked out the door, cradling her cigarettes, and found herself staring into the huge startled gypsy eyes of Jane Shine.

Jane was on her way to the bathroom. She was wearing an antique silk kimono over a white voile nightgown and her feet were prettily encased in a pair of pink satin mules. Her hair, ever so slightly mussed from sleep, was thicker, curlier and glossier than any mere mortal’s had a right to be. Her face, bereft of makeup, was perfect.

Ruth was wearing a fifty-nine-cent pair of Taiwanese flipflops, the stolen robe was six sizes too big and practically stiff with filth, and her face, as she knew from her glancing appraisal in the bureau mirror, was the face of one of the walking dead. Sleepy, oblivious, off-guard, Ruth had stepped out of her room with a vague idea of the telephone, and there she was, Jane Shine, her greatest enemy, looking like some forties actress having breakfast in bed on the backlot of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Jane’s eyes narrowed. Her face was alert but impassive. She blinked twice, stepped round Ruth as if she were a minor nuisance, a small but annoying impediment to her majestic progress—a pile of luggage, a potted palm left out of place by the help—and floated on down the hall with a gentle swish of silk. Oh, the bitch, the bitch! Not a word, not an excuse me or beg pardon, not a good morning, hello, goodbye, drop dead, anything. Oh, the icy arrogant bitch!

Ruth just stood there, immobilized, rigid with hate. She waited for the click of the bathroom door behind her, and then she started down the hallway, clenching her jaws so hard her teeth had begun to ache by the time she reached the phone at the foot of the stairs. “Sax?” she practically snarled into the receiver.

His voice came right back at her. He was excited about something—fish, no doubt—and her mood, which was poisonous to begin with, took a turn for the worse. “Ruth,” he was saying, “listen, I’ve got to tell you this before anybody else does—”