East is East

Ruth was in the front parlor waiting for Marker McGill to return her call when they brought Jane in. Earlier, it must have been about three or so, she’d looked up from the magazine she was numbly paging through to see Jane, in English riding habit, striding across the foyer as if she were auditioning for National Velvet. Already that afternoon Ruth had talked to the New York Times,

the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston papers, CBS Radio and Mr. Shikuma of the Japan-America Society, who wanted to warmly congratulate her on her part in the apprehension of his errant countryman and to apologize, at length, for any inconvenience or unpleasantness Seaman Tanaka may have caused her and to assure her that the vast majority of the Japanese—indeed, the entire country but for Seaman Tanaka, who was of course mentally ill—were great respecters of the law and proper behavior. The calls had made her feel better, and she began to warm to the prospect of a book on Hiro and had even begun to daydream about the amount of the advance and what she would do with it, when she looked up and saw Jane and felt incinerated all over again.

The Nordic slave was there at the door—or was he just a Swedish oaf?—and Jane pranced up to enfold him in a public embrace, looking ever so self-consciously cute in her jodhpurs and boots and that ridiculous little riding hat perched like a napkin on the spill of her hair. She was going riding. Ruth was at the center of a media storm, Ruth had risked her life in the swamps and assisted in the capture of a desperate fugitive and thumbed her nose at the law, but Jane was going riding. All the hatred Ruth had for her festered to the surface in that moment and she squinted her eyes to bore into her with a corrosive look. But Jane caught her out again—just as Ruth was about to drop her gaze to the page in her lap, Jane swiveled her head to lock eyes with her, to catch her watching, snooping, prying, envying the Nordic embrace, and gave her a perfect little bee-stung smirk of triumph.

Two hours later they brought her in. The horse had gone down on her and broken her right leg in three places. Jane’s face was a snarl of pain, there was blood on her jodhpurs where the jagged face of the bone had sliced through the flesh. They rushed her into the parlor and laid her out on the couch, the Swedish oaf and Owen, who came away with a smear of the anointed one’s blood on his shirt. Jane shrieked like a woman giving birth to triplets, she shrieked breathlessly and without remit, save to break down in the occasional throaty rush of curses and sobs. Ruth moved aside while the whole colony fluttered round. She was horrified, she was, genuinely horrified. She could never take joy in another’s pain, no matter how despicable the person nor how much that person had it coming, could she? No. No, she couldn’t. And yet there was a thin tapering thread of satisfaction in it—even as Jane writhed and screamed and cried out for her mother and cursed the Swedish oaf: “Oh god, oh god—don’t you touch me, Olaf, you pig, you—aiee, Mommy, Mommy, it hurts, it hurts!”—and the thread raveled out like this: now Jane would be out of action. At least for a while. It was a pity, a real pity. Ruth was already thinking up her billiard-room routine.

They took Jane to the hospital. Dinner that night was subdued, a joyless affair that ran to hushed conversation and furtive glances, the colonists numbly lifting Armand’s lobster tortellini to their lips in a state of shock over the events of the past few days. Septima took her meal in the old wing of the house. Jane’s place was conspicuously vacant. Somber rumors circulated—about Hiro, about Ruth, about Jane. After dinner, while Saxby—who alone of all the company remained ebullient and irrepressible—tended to his fish, Irving Thalamus took Ruth aside.

“So tell me,” he said, swirling amber liquid in a snifter, “how’d it go with Marker?”

McGill had called just after the excitement over Jane’s accident had subsided; he was taking Ruth on. He was sure he could sell the book. He’d made some calls and was fielding offers. “Oh, Irving”—she clapped her hands like an ingénue, like Brie—“he’s taking me on.” And then she gave him a look of such melting gratitude, such starry-eyed, humble and worshipful thanksgiving, that he set down his snifter and took her hand in both of his. “Irving,” she repeated, her voice appropriately raw, “how can I ever—?”

“It’s nothing,” he murmured, and he was studying her, giving her a long sly look from beneath the hooded Thalamudian eyes. “Terrible about Jane,” he said after a moment. He still had hold of her hand.

Ruth searched his eyes. What did he want her to say? Was he on her side after all, was that it? “Yes,” she said. “Terrible.”