East is East

Hiro didn’t show up that day. Perversely. It was almost as if he knew she wanted to reach out to him but that he had some kind of cultural thing—some kind of weird Japanese machismo or whatever—that kept him from her. And that evening, since Saxby was still in Savannah and she was just beginning to flex her wings in the billiard room, and because she was bored too and felt like it—the secret, her secret making it all the more delicious—she sat down in the parlor over cocktails and chatted with Abercorn. He’d spent a fruitless day interviewing the blacks at Hog Hammock—“I couldn’t understand a word they said, I mean not a single word,” he said, “and after a while it was embarrassing”—while his assistant had snooped around in the woods with a boom box. She shared a good laugh with him over that, over Turco’s boom box. “Yes,” she said—she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help fooling around with him, just a little bit, just for practice—“I thought I heard Donna Summer out there somewhere today.”

And where was Turco that evening? Was he tracking down the criminal even as they spoke? “Oh, no,” Abercorn had said, “he’s not that fanatical. No, he just doesn’t like roofs.” “Roofs?” she echoed, her lips drawn tight in an incipient smile. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, and he lifted a can of warm Coke to his mouth and then put it down again, “but last night, when it was raining?” She nodded. “He takes off out of the room with his backpack and pitches his tent out there in the bushes someplace.” And then they had a good laugh over that one, and Ruth looked into Abercorn’s pink eyes and thought he was kind of cute in a way.

Two days passed. Abercorn mooned around Thanatopsis House and some of the artists—Regina Mclntyre, in particular—began to grumble. Turco was invisible, out there in his tent, creeping through the marsh, putting his loathsome all into deracinating Ruth’s secret before it had a chance to bear fruit. In the lull of the afternoon, she heard disco music, distant, faint, deadly. The lunch bucket remained on its hook.

And then, on the third day, Hiro appeared again. It must have been an hour at least after Owen had crept up to the porch and hung the aluminum container on its hook—she’d heard him, heard the groan of the second step, the loose one, but she hadn’t turned, hadn’t moved, and she covered herself with a furious burst of typing. A line of x’s marched across the page, and then another, before she glanced over her shoulder to catch the back of Owen’s bristling head receding down the trail to Diane Arbus, where the precocious Sandy was hard at work on his second novel. Ruth lost track of the time, though her stomach grumbled and she got Hiro’s face confused with that of her failed and hopeless heroine, and she was in another world, the cries of the doomed children echoing around her, the tide pulling at her feet, when the stair creaked again.

She froze. Slowly, she told herself, slowly. She gave him her profile and held it, and then she looked full-face over her shoulder. He was there, in the doorway, derealized behind the grid of the screen. The red headband was gone—he was wearing something else now, something tan and twisted—and he was naked to the waist, both straps of the coveralls dangling forlornly behind him. He made no move toward the lunch pail.

“I want to help you,” Ruth whispered.

He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there. His face seemed softer somehow, as if he were exhausted or about to cry … and she had a sudden leap of intuition: he was just an overgrown child, scared, hurt and hungry.

“Take the food. I left it for you. Take it,” she whispered, afraid to raise her voice, afraid he’d bolt.

She saw him swallow hard. He shuffled his feet. And then he lifted the lunch bucket from the hook and cradled it to him.

“Listen,” she said, whispering still, whispering like a hunter in a blind, “they’re after you, do you understand? Two men, they’re in the big house.”

He said nothing, but his face looked softer still. He was finished, she could see it. He’d had it. He was ready to give up, throw in the towel, slip the handcuffs over his wrists.

“I won’t let them take you,” she said. “I’ll get you clothes, food, you can stay here, out of sight.” She lifted one leg and very slowly swung the chair round to face him. She’d made do with an ordinary face and figure all her life, had triumphed with it, had left a legion of men stunned in her wake, because she had the indefinable something they all wanted and because she knew it. Now, at thirty-four, she had all that and twenty years of experience too, and she was irresistible. “Come in here,” she said, and she was still whispering, but her voice had an edge to it now, peremptory and sharp. “Open the door. Sit and eat”—she made the motions with her hands and mouth—“and then you can rest there on the couch. I won’t hurt you. I give you my word.”