East is East

Brie turned to her, enraptured, her expression as vacant as a cow’s, her big watery eyes swollen beneath the skin of her contacts. “What are you saying?” she hissed back. “I think it’s—it’s magical.”

“… my very great pleasure, and a personal three-ill,” Septima boomed; she was clutching at the microphone as if it were a cobra she’d discovered in bed and seized in desperation. Ruth saw Saxby’s eyes in her eyes, Saxby’s nose, pinched with age, in her nose. She was wearing a tan linen suit, beige pumps and the pearls she never seemed to take off, and she’d had her hair done. “I repeat, a three-ill, to introduce an extraordinarily gifted young writer, author of a prize-winnin’ volume of stories and a novel forthcomin’ from”—here Septima paused to squint at a 3 × 5 card she held tentatively in her soft veiny hand—“from”—she named a major New York house and Ruth felt her jaws clench with hate and jealousy; “… youngest winner ever, I am told, of the prestigious Hooten-Warbury Gold Medal in Literature, given annually in England for the best work of foreign fiction, and the equally prestigious—”

Ruth tried to tune her out, but the amplification made it impossible: Septima’s stentorian words of praise throbbed in her chest, her lungs, her very bowels, vibrating there as if on a sounding board. Septima went on to compare Jane to just about every female writer in history, from Mrs. Gaskell to Virginia Woolf to Flannery O’Connor and Pearl S. Buck, using the term “prestigious” like a dental drill. (She must have used it twenty times at least—Ruth stopped counting at five.) And then finally, after what seemed an eternity, she wound it up with a carnival barker’s enthusiasm: “Ladies and gendemen, fellow artists and Thanatopsians”—yes, she actually said Thanatopsians

—“I give you Jane Shine.”

A burst of applause. Ruth felt ill. But where was she? Where was La Shine? Certainly not sitting quietly up front or standing modestly to one side of the microphone. People craned their necks, the applause fell off. But then, all at once, a murmur went up and the applause started in again, stronger than before—as if just by deigning to appear here before these mere mortals she should be congratulated—and there she was, Jane Shine, sweeping through the French doors and out onto the patio.

Her hair—her impossible gleaming supercharged mat of flamenco dancing hair—was piled up so high on her head all Ruth could think of was the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Dressed all in black—another one of those high-collared faux-Victorian things she paraded around in like a lost princess—she moved through the crowd with quiet determination, a small frown etched on her lips—oh, this was serious business, this was high drama—looking straight ahead of her, her back stiff, her steps tiny, delicate, the nibbling little mincing steps of a girl on her way to school. Flamenco siren, Victorian princess, schoolgirl: who was she kidding?

The light caught her face perfectly, exquisitely—even Ruth had to admit it. The overhead spot set her hair aflame, made a corona of it, a diadem, a glittering ball of light and highlight, while the second spot, the softer one, put a glow into her extraterrestrial eyes and lit her bee-stung lips from beneath. “Collagen treatments,” Ruth whispered to Brie, but Brie was mesmerized by the spectacle of Jane Shine, La Shine, who’d fucked her way to the top, and Brie didn’t acknowledge her. Jane bowed. Thanked Septima. Thanked the audience. Thanked Owen and Rico and Raoul Von Somebody for the lighting and audio, and then she fastened her eyes on the audience and held them, in silence, for a full thirty seconds.

And then she began, without introduction, her voice as natural and attuned to the microphone as Septima’s was not. Her voice was a caress, a whisper, something that got inside you and wouldn’t come out. The story she read was about sex, of course, but sex couched in elaborate and gothic imagery that made high art of painting one’s toenails and having a monthly period. Three lines into the story Ruth realized that this wasn’t work in progress at all—this was a story Jane had published two years ago and then polished—and repolished—for her first collection. It was finished work. Old work. Nothing from the “forthcoming” novel or the pages she’d presumably turned out here. Instead she was performing, giving them a set piece she’d read god knew how many times at the invitation of Notre Dame or Iowa or NYU. Ruth was so outraged—so pissed off, rubbed raw and just plain furious—that she nearly got up to leave. But then she couldn’t, of course. If she did, everyone would think she was, well, jealous of Jane Shine or something—and she couldn’t have them thinking that. Never. It would be like being gored out on the African veldt, vultures swooping in, hyenas laughing in the bush.