East is East

It sounded like an exit line to Ruth, and she was thinking of the routine she could make of this, of Laura Grobian’s gloom and doom, and if she’d dare it, when the buzz of conversation in the room suddenly died and all heads turned to the doorway. The two other new arrivals had appeared for cocktails. Both of them. Together.

Ruth watched Brie squinting toward the doorway in expectation of some new revelation, some further miracle of earthbound celebrity, and then watched as her head turned, her brow furrowed and her lips formed the question: “Isn’t that—?”

“Orlando Seezers,” Ruth said.

The figure was unmistakable. Though Ruth had never met him, she’d seen photographs. He was sixtyish, black, goateed and confined to the gleaming electric wheelchair in which he now appeared. During the campus riots of the sixties he was injured in an altercation with a student who claimed he only wanted to go to class. It was at NYU, as Ruth recalled, on a staircase. Before the accident he wrote bittersweet blank verse about blues and jazz figures and fiery outraged polemics that won him comparison with James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver; afterward, he wrote sestinas and a series of very popular comedies of manners centered on life on the Upper East Side.

“And—?” Brie wondered aloud, squinting till her face seemed on the verge of falling in on itself.

“Mignonette Teitelbaum.” Ruth didn’t know her either, not personally, but Septima had informed her that she was coming with Orlando Seezers—“I heah they are practically inseparable”—and she knew of

her, of course. Teitelbaum—and Ruth couldn’t help hearing a breathless “La” affixed to the surname—was six foot three, flat-footed, hipless, breastless and Seezers’s junior by some thirty years. She was the author of two books of minimalist stories set in the backwoods of Kentucky, though she’d been born and raised in Manhattan, attended Barnard and Columbia and lived in Europe most of her adult life. Rumor had it they’d met at a dance club in SoHo.

The couple hesitated there on the threshold until Irving Thalamus rose with a mighty roar—“Orlando! Mignonette!”—and crossed the room to embrace them. The buzz started up again. Brie, a look of rapture on her face, began drifting toward the triumvirate of embracing lions as if in a trance. It was then that Laura Grobian took hold of Ruth’s arm. Brie seemed somehow to sense the motion and froze. Ruth looked down at Laura, not yet alarmed, but afraid she was about to start up with the Masada business again while the precious minutes of the cocktail hour dwindled away to nothing. “Ruth”—Laura held her with those fathomless eyes—“I’ll see you tonight, after dinner?”

“Yes, sure,” Ruth said, though the ground had shifted beneath her again. She was Laura Grobian’s intimate, yes, but what in god’s name was she talking about now?

Laura smiled up at her as if they’d just come back from sailing around the world together. “Jane’s reading. Jane Shine’s. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

Brie swooped back in on them at the mention of Jane. “Jane Shine?” she gasped, hovering over them as if one of the secret names of Jehovah had just been revealed to her. “She’s here too?”

The tectonic plates were really shaking now, grinding up against one another with all their terrible rending force. Off balance, Ruth could only nod.

“Oh, Ruthie”—Brie glanced wildly from Ruth to Laura and back again—“do you know her?”

Where the Earth Trembles

Vast and primeval, unfathomable, unconquerable, bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. It gives birth to two rivers, the St. Mary’s and the Suwannee, fanning out over 430,000 leaf-choked acres, every last one as sodden as a sponge. Four hundred and thirty thousand acres of stinging, biting and boring insects, of maiden cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck, mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce. The swamp is home to two hundred and twenty-five species of birds, forty-three of mammals, fifty-eight of reptiles, thirty-two of amphibians and thirty-four of fish—all variously equipped with beaks, talons, claws, teeth, stingers and fangs—not to mention the seething galaxies of gnats and deerflies and no-see-ums, the ticks, mites, hookworms and paramecia that exist only to compound the misery of life. There are alligators here, bears, puma, bobcats and bowfin, there are cooters and snappers, opossum, coon and gar. They feed on one another, shit and piss in the trees, in the sludge and muck and on the floating mats of peat, they dribble jism and bury eggs, they scratch and stink and sniff at themselves, caterwauling and screeching through every minute of every day and night till the place reverberates like some hellish zoo.