East is East

For a long moment he stood there, his eyes riveted on her. He was bigger than she’d remembered, sadder, his eyes gone hollow and cheeks sunk in on themselves, but when he reached for the door she froze again. Maybe he was dangerous, she thought. Maybe the reports were true. He was a foreigner, after all. He had different values. He could be a fanatic. A maniac. A killer.

The door swung open and he took a tentative step into the room. He clung desperately to the lunch pail. His eyes were wild. He nearly cried out when the door slammed shut behind him.

Then she saw what it was knotted round his head: shiny nylon, a thin band of white elastic: Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t hold it any longer—the armed and dangerous alien was an overgrown kid with Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties wound round his head—and suddenly she was laughing, laughing so hard she thought she’d choke.

Later, after he’d devoured the lunch, a box of saltines, two apples and a string of Medjool dates her mother had sent her, he fell face forward on the white wicker settee and slept the sleep of the dead. For a long while she just watched him, studying him as a medical student might have studied a corpse or an artist a model. She examined his limbs, his blistered back and scarred feet, the snarl of his knotted hair, the dimensions of his face, even the string of saliva that dangled from his half-open mouth. He was a mess. A real mess. A week and a half of crouching in the swamps hadn’t done him much good. His flesh—every visible inch of it—was a crusted quilt of bites and scabs and pustules; an infected contusion had swollen the lobe of his right ear—the upward one—to twice its normal size; and a long hyphenated slash trailed away from his eyebrow like the exaggerated makeup of a clown or whore. His face was puffy, his skin sallow and sunburned. The only article of clothing he wore—a pair of ill-fitting overalls—was torn, seam-split, pinched in the rear and stiff with filth. Worst of all was the odor he brought with him, rank and elemental, the stink of rotting meat, of something dead along the road.

She didn’t know how long she sat there watching him—he never moved, but for the rise and fall of his breathing, and the sun slid imperceptibly across the sky. It was cocktail hour (or thereabout: the angle of the sun as it struck the western window and illuminated her pitcher plants told her that much) when she finally made up her mind to get him some clothes, soap, hydrogen peroxide—she was afraid he’d decompose without it. She thought of a piece of fruit—a pear or banana—its skin speckled, jaundiced, blackening finally and collapsing on itself. She pushed herself up, eased out the door and made her way back to the big house.

If she’d hoped to slip in unnoticed, luck was against her. It was a day of unadulterated sunshine and sweet wafting ocean breezes, and her fellow colonists had taken the cocktail hour outside. They were gathered on the patio, glasses glinting in the sun, as she came up the walk. “Ruthie!” Irving Thalamus called, his face lit with chardonnay. “La Dershowitz,” raising his glass high, “fictioneer extraordinaire, come and drink some vin ordinaire!”

She had no choice, really: she needed him, and he’d begun, in a big way, to notice her. She crossed the sunstruck lawn, aware of the turned heads and the lull in the chatter, moving in her inevitable way, the heroine of her own movie, picturing herself in that dazzle of sunlight, in her tight jeans and clingy blouse. “Irving,” she said, moving into his embrace and exchanging a salutatory kiss that lingered half a beat too long, and then she was nodding to Ina Soderbord and Sandy De Haven and Regina Mclntyre and chattering nonstop until someone stuck a glass of wine in her hand and she could pause, for a second, to drink. She let the moment subside and then she was pleading the need to bathe and change for dinner—she’d been working so well she’d missed the time—and her empty glass was on the serving cart and the oaks leapt up at the edge of the two-acre lawn and the sun sat in the windows of the great gabled three-story house and she was up the steps and in.

She was thinking she could get the Band-Aids and antiseptic in the communal bathroom—nobody in the foyer, three quick steps and up the stairs—but what about pants, shoes and socks, a clean shirt? She could rifle Saxby’s room—he’d never notice—but Saxby had the washboard front and fall-away hips of the athlete, and she knew his pants would never fit. Ditto Sandy and the austere and long-shanked Peter Anserine. There was Bob the poet, but he was too short, and Detlef Abercorn, who’d been given a back room on the third floor, but he was too tall. She could always buy something in Darien, but she’d have to wait for Saxby and the ferry and she’d have to make explanations—and she didn’t want to make explanations, not even to Saxby.