East is East

But it wasn’t the urgency of her need or the pain either that ultimately drove her from her bed: it was guilt. Wholesome, fruitful, old-fashioned, gut-wrenching guilt. She had to get up. She was a writer, after all, and writers got up and wrote. Her enemies—and here the specter of Jane Shine, in all her phony, scheming, hateful and shy-smiling beauty, seized her like a pair of hot tongs—would already be up and at their typewriters and monitors, already out of the blocks and hurtling down the inside track to usurp her rightful place in Harper’s or

Esquire, at Knopf or Viking or Random House. Besides which, it was so much easier to make use of the guilt if you were working well—and she was, finally, working well.

The transformation had begun on the night she’d flared up in front of the little group gathered in the billiard room, though she hadn’t realized it at the time. In fact, the ensuing week had been worse than the first. At least during the first week she had the excuse of disorientation, but as the second week dragged on, she felt increasingly bored and out of touch. She continued to sit at the silent table, brooding and defensive, the evenings with Saxby her sole release. But something had happened, some subtle alteration had taken place among the fixed stars of the Thanatopsis firmament, and Ruth’s was on the rise. For one thing, she had the patronage of Irving Thalamus. He’d noticed her that night, oh yes indeed, and his attentions—the ironic glances, the little jokes and nudges—became her safety net. By the third week he’d lured her from the silent room to establish her as his chief ally at the raucous, gossipy and sacrilegious table in the convivial room. Together they would pass through the doleful, dingy corridor of the silent room—smirking, always smirking, a joke on their lips—while Laura Grobian dwelt in the trembling deeps of her hollow-eyed middle-aged beauty and Peter Anserine and his young disciples frowned ascetically over their incomprehensible texts. And at night—and this was the root and cause of this morning’s hangover and the hangover she’d had two mornings ago and the one she’d have tomorrow morning too—he brought her into his after-hours circle, where she could really shine, where she could thrust and parry, charm, ridicule, demolish and redeem, where she could become her old self—La Dershowitz—once again.

In a way, she almost felt sorry for her rivals. In the aftermath of that fateful night on Peagler Sound, none of them was really in the running. Ina Soderbord was attractive, she guessed, in a big, blocky, heavy-breasted, white-eyebrowed sort of way, but she inhabited her own little corner of interplanetary space and spoke in the breathless, lisping pant of the brain-numb ingénue. Gravity had not been kind to Clara Kleinschmidt and she had a sad sour smell to her, the smell of inherited lace, hope chests and the lingering loveless death of the game show and rocking chair. And the punk sculptress—Regina Mclntyre, a product of Ladycliff and Mount Holyoke, Ruth learned after some probing—was too consumed in self-loathing to speak, but for the occasional vitriolic outburst, and her personal style was strictly for the leather crowd. Neither Irving Thalamus nor Bob the poet was the type, not to mention Sandy De Haven, a late and supremely interesting addition to the group, twenty-six, bleached locks dangling in his eyes as he bent over the billiard table, his first novel due out in the fall from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. No. Ruth was supreme here, queen of the hive.

As her confidence improved, so did her work. She revised an old story and sent it off to The New Yorker with Irving Thalamus’s blessings, and her Japanese piece suddenly began to take off, to blossom, to feel like something bigger than a mere short story. That’s where the second thing came in, the other factor that turned Ruth’s life around at Thanatopsis, as serendipitous in its way as Irving Thalamus’s tutelage—the appearance, on her studio porch, of Hiro Tanaka. Hiro Tanaka, the outlaw, the renegade, the terror of Tupelo Island, filcher of Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties, castigator of Bobby and Cara Mae Cribbs, eluder of the sheriff and the INS, Hiro Tanaka, lunch bucket thief. He was her secret, her pet, her own, and it gave her an edge on all of them.

She’d caught him in the act, caught him there on her porch on that rainy afternoon ten days back, caught him with the evidence in his hands while the trees strained their backs and the earth shook and the stink of sulfur fell like a blanket over the trapped and stifling air. Lightning flashed, rain raked the trees. He hesitated—she could see it in his eyes, recognition and confusion both: he’d seen her naked, her breasts, her navel, her secret hair—and for a moment the dull shock of animal surprise left his face. Food was one thing, the first thing, yes, and this was the second.