East is East

As the evening wore on, Ruth did get up and pay some attention to him—Why was he brooding? she wanted to know—but she skipped round the room like the Queen of May, and always found her place again at the poker table—beside Thalamus. Saxby drank vodka and brooded, though he denied he was brooding, and made small talk with Peter Anserine and one of his disciples, who’d paid a rare visit to the billiard room; discussed the fine points of bedding irises with Clara Kleinschmidt, who proved to him that she was more than just a composer; and finally, in desperation, challenged Regina Mclntyre to a game of eight ball, which he lost without taking a single shot. As he became progressively more inebriated, the elation he’d felt over setting up the aquarium and beginning a new project dissipated like a stain in water. And then it was late and Ruth fluttered up to squeeze his arm and give him a kiss with a lot of tongue in it, the guy with the splotched face shook his hand and introduced himself as the INS agent he’d spoken to on the phone, and Irving Thalamus cuffed him on the shoulder and told him a lewd story about Savannah and a whore he’d once had there. Ruth won thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents.

Later, in bed, after he’d stripped her garment by garment and run his fingers the length of her and showed her how much he’d missed her in the most essential ways, he lit a cigarette and wondered aloud about the sudden shift in billiard-room relations. They were in his room, the room he’d had since he was a boy, just down the wainscoted corridor from his mother’s room. The night was close, palpable, breathing in through the screen with a sharp wild whiff of the marsh and the tidal creeks and the slow wet burning death of vegetation. Ruth lay apart from him, her skin silvered with sweat in the light of the moon. And then she leaned into him, her breast flattening against his bicep as she lit a cigarette off his. Her face glowed in the flare of tobacco, she exhaled with a deep sweet luxurious breath, and told him that the billiard room was hers, no problem, and that now—finally—she was really starting to enjoy herself.

He reflected on this for a moment, leaning back against the headboard of his childhood bed, squeezed tight and sweltering against her, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. His cigarette glowed hot in the dark. “Miss me?” he murmured.

In answer, she took hold of his penis and smoothed it against her palm, a touch as soft and silken as a fluttering sail. “I’ll give you three guesses,” she said in her smokiest voice and leaned over to kiss him.

He felt that touch and flexed his thighs, tasted her lips and smelled the heat of her. “What about Thalamus?” he said.

She let her hand go slack. “What about him?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking away though he knew she couldn’t have seen his eyes in that light, “it’s just that he seems awful friendly all of a sudden …”

Her hand started up again, proprietary, insinuating. “Jealous?” she breathed.

He set his cigarette down on the edge of the scarred night table and covered her rhythmic hand with his own. He held her there and rose up with a screech of the old bedsprings to kneel between her thighs and bring his face down to hers. Thalamus was nothing, a joke, dried up and juiceless, a string of jerky in a slick plastic wrapper. He could have run him down, could have denigrated him, but he didn’t. Instead, he answered her question. Plainly. Simply. Truthfully. “Yes,” he said.

She was there beneath him, sweat-slick and venereal, salt skin, breath hot on his face, whispering close. “Don’t be,” she murmured. “I’m just … playing the game. You should know that … you, Sax … you,” and she pulled him down into the place where words have no meaning.