East is East

“Ruthie”—Septima had her by the hand and she began to chatter as if nothing had happened, as if the cold talentless bitch hadn’t just called her out, humiliated her, smashed open the hive and stung her to death—“Ruthie, darlin’, we was all—Orlando and Mignonette and Laura and I—we was all just sayin’ what a pleasure it would be to have you read from your work too, and you know, as everyone here does, that while we don’t require room and board from our artists, we do feel privileged to receive payment in kind …” She looked up at the ceiling as if it were transparent, a faraway smile fixed on her lips. “Some of the things we’ve heard in this very room …”

This was the challenge. This was it. This was the slap in the face, the gauntlet at her feet. She’d wanted to be inconspicuous, let Jane have her moment, fight her with subterfuge and innuendo, but she’d blown it. Her heart was going, her eyes must have been wild, but she knew her lines, oh yes indeed. “Septima,” she said in her calmest, steadiest tones, and she looked into those milky old gray eyes as if they were the only eyes in the room, as if Jane Shine weren’t standing there twelve inches to the right, as if she didn’t exist, had never existed, as if this were a private tête-à-tête with the woman who could well be her future mother-in-law, “I’d be honored.”

The doyenne of Thanatopsis House broadened her smile till her thin old lips were stretched taut. “Tomorrow night, then?” she said, and something flickered to life in the depths of her moribund eyes.

Ruth nodded.

“Same time as tonight’s?”

Marvin Gaye: what was he singing? Ain’t no mountain high enough/Ain’t no river deep enough. Ruth took a deep breath. “Sure,” she said, “no problem.”

In the morning, she cursed herself. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let herself get sucked in like that? Jane Shine. She wished her an early death, wished her sagging breasts and pyorrhea, wished she’d explode like the puffed-up frog in Aesop’s fable.

But wishes get you nowhere.

Ruth was in her studio, working hard, before anyone in the big house had even the vaguest semiconscious presentiment that morning had arrived and that breakfast and work and the slow miraculous unveiling of the day awaited them. She was working with an ease and concentration that would have amazed her if she’d stopped to think about it, hammering away at the keyboard and wielding her Liquid Paper like a sword while a stack of clean new perfectly wrought pages mounted before her. By ten o’clock she’d substantially rewritten sections of “Two Toes,” “Of Tears and the Tide”—it wasn’t so bad, not really—and the piece that had come back from the Atlantic, which in a burst of inspiration she’d retitled “Sebastopol,” to suggest the sort of battle her main characters—two couples—were engaged in. What she thought she’d do was present fragments from each of the stories—real work in progress, the real thing, not some typeset and justified artifact—ending up with the section of “Tears” that described the very Hiro-like husband of the doomed woman. They would sit there—Irving, Laura, Septima, Seezers and Teitelbaum and E.T. herself—and they would think of her, Ruth, and her triumph over the sheriff and Abercorn and the macho little toad who’d given them a taste of real-life drama right out there on the patio before their wondering eyes. Then too, there was sure to be a certain prurient interest in the piece—what did she know about Japanese sex? Had she slept with him? Had she helped him escape? And she’d give them her enigmatic smile, the smile of La Dershowitz, regnant and unassailable, and let it rest. Yes, she’d show them what a reading was all about.

She worked through lunch, worked through the racket of hammering and cutting and banging as Parker Putnam—or was it Putnam Parker?—did his best imitation of a working carpenter. Hunched and sinewy, burned the color of tobacco, he showed up at eleven with a toolbox the size of a small vehicle, claiming in a halting rheumy voice that “Miz Lights” had asked him to come out and clean the place up. It took him most of the afternoon to knock the shards of broken glass out of the windows and nearly an hour just to get the old screen door off the hinges, but she hardly noticed. Normally, he would have driven her crazy, but today she welcomed him—he was there to test her, to lay one more stone atop the cart to see if it would tip over. But it wouldn’t. Her concentration was complete.