East is East

“Just for a second. I was bringing the tank in with Owen and she was on her way out the door—said she was going back out to the studio …”

“At this hour?”

Saxby shrugged. The water felt suddenly cold on his hands.

“She missed dinner? And cocktails?”

“I guess.” The tank was three-quarters full now, and its water seemed as gray as a field of stones. “I could always have Rico fix her something—or we could get a loaf of bread and a package of Swiss down at the Handi-Mart.”

His mother’s eyes had a faraway look. He imagined she was summoning up the hundreds of artists who’d passed through Thanatopsis House in her time—from the minor to the major, from the unknown and unknowable to the celebrated and great—and calculating just how many had ever missed cocktails. He lifted his hands from the cold tank and buried them in a towel. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “I was just—”

“You don’t have to worry about Ruth,” she said suddenly.

“Oh, I wasn’t worried”—he gestured with the towel—“it’s just that she’s new here and she feels a little out of her league, I guess—a little overawed, maybe—and I feel bad about it. I told her I was only going to be gone two days, but then two stretched into four and …” he trailed off.

“Saxby, honey,” she said, and her voice was cloudy again, shivered with age, “stop foolin’ with that thing and come on over here and sit with your mother a minute.”

The outside of the glass was beaded with condensation, the hose running liquid ice up out of the deep roots of the earth, and he realized it would be three or four days at least until the water warmed up enough to put the fish in. The thought was mildly depressing—the excitement was in the completion, six days of labor and one to kick back and see that it was good—and he took a step toward his mother and hesitated, giving the tank one last critical appraisal. He watched the plants nod and bow in the current generated by the hose and the big humming filtration system, saw the secret caves and hollows and piscine apartments he’d sculpted of rock, ever so briefly admired the scope and magnitude of the thing—six feet long and two hundred gallons!—and then sidled across the room to ease himself down at the foot of his mother’s chair. Immediately he felt her hand on his shoulder, the maternal fingers tugging gently at his ear.

“I want to tell you somethin’,” she said, her voice trembling still, but infused now with a bright contralto hint of playfulness, “and I want you to listen to me. We don’t ever disturb our artists at work, no matter what the hour or how anxious we are to”—she paused—“to show them how much we’ve missed them. Now do we, honey?”

He didn’t answer. He was listening to the slow, steady heartbeat of the pump circulating the dense atmosphere of the little world he’d brought to life behind a wall of glass, and all of a sudden he felt sleepy.

“Workin’ through dinner,” Septima sighed, and her cool lineal hand massaged the nape of his neck, “that girl must really be on to somethin’.”

It was late—past one—by the time he finally did get ruth to bed, and he was a little miffed—just a little; he’d been around too, after all—that she wasn’t a whole lot more anxious to leave the billiard room and fall into his arms. They’d had an omelet and a bottle of wine together in the kitchen about nine, and she’d been coy and sexy and he’d tugged at her blouse and pinned her up against the meat locker to rotate his hips against hers and feel his blood surge. “Let’s go fool around,” he said, and she said sure, but led him instead up the stairs to the billiard room.

The usual crowd was there—Thalamus, Bob Penick, Regina, Ina and Clara, the new guy, Sandy, and a couple of others—but there’d been a change in the interior weather since he’d been gone—that much was apparent the minute they stepped in the door. “Hey, Ruthie!” Thalamus cried, rising up out of his chair at the card table like a lizard skittering off a rock, and someone else shouted “La Dershowitz!” and only then did they acknowledge him, though he’d been gone four days.

Ruth poured herself a waterglass of bourbon—neat—and took a seat between Thalamus and Bob at the card table. Sandy and Ina were playing too—the usual, five-card stud—and so was a guy he’d never seen before, a gawky character with dyed hair and a splotched face who looked as if he’d been put together with spare parts. Regina was draped over the billiard table, rattling off one daunting and professional shot after another, and the two women in the far corner—he didn’t recall their names—were absorbed so deeply in conversation they might as well have put a Plexiglas wall up around themselves. And where did that leave him? To sit and listen to Clara Kleinschmidt go on about Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale till his brain dissolved from boredom?