East is East

Next morning—or rather, afternoon; it was half past twelve when he woke—Saxby took a cup of coffee, an egg sandwich and yesterday’s just-delivered newspaper into his mother’s sitting room. He had a vague recollection of Ruth stirring at first light and bending to kiss him as she hurried off to breakfast at the convivial table, but it was so vague as to dissolve instantly into the glow of the sitting room and the strong vertical shafts of light that penetrated the windows and made a theater of the aquarium. Overnight, the tank had been transformed. The water was clear now, absolutely limpid, filtered free of the detritus he’d stirred up in the act of creation, the plants stood tall and held a trembling virescent light, and the shelves of rock loomed against the deep matte background like reefs six fathoms down. He took a standing bite of the egg sandwich, a sip of coffee, and set his breakfast aside. He was too excited to eat. In the next moment he had his hands in the water, adjusting this rock or that, fanning out the gravel, moving a plant as a painter might adjust a still life. But what gave him the most satisfaction, what made him forget all about the congealing egg, cooling coffee and day-old newspaper, was the expectation that his perfect microcosmic world would soon be tenanted. If he was lucky. And luck would necessarily play a major role in the project unfolding beneath his wet cold hands.

For Saxby was no scientist—a committed, even passionate amateur, perhaps, but no scientist. Academic rigor, required courses in physics, biochemistry, geology and anatomy, these were things he could do without. He’d been to several colleges—his mother admired science, and was willing to support him in anything, though she herself, having been a poet in her youth, preferred the Arts—and he’d done decreasingly well at each of them. His love was animals—aquatic vertebrates in particular—and the curricula of these fine, leafy, heavily endowed and venerable schools just didn’t seem to meet his needs. Finally, in his midtwenties and after some six years of errant scholarship, he’d dropped out altogether, well short of the credits for a B.S. degree, and he’d done some traveling—Belize; the Amazon; lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika; Papua New Guinea—before settling down on the West Coast. There, drawing on his trust fund for support, he was able to work for minimum wages at Sea World and the Steinhart Aquarium and as mate on a sportfishing boat out of Marina Del Rey (his job to bait the hooks for pale bloodless jowly men in leisure suits). He’d gone back to school—at Scripps—the previous year, but not in the celebrated oceanography program, as he’d told his mother and, later, Ruth. He’d been more or less a hanger-on there, attending the odd lecture in holothurian morphology and allowing boredom and inertia to fix him in a perpetual late lingering boyhood. And then, at a party, he met Ruth, and Ruth brought him back home to Georgia.

When the sun had shifted in the sky and the egg of the egg sandwich had passed from inedible to emetic, the door behind him creaked open and his mother glided into the room. She was wearing an old painter’s cap pulled down over her eyes, a pair of jeans, sandals and an oversized blouse, and she fell into her easy chair as if she’d been shoved. “I swear I’ll never get used to this heat if I live a thousand years,” she sighed.

Saxby had been wandering. He’d been reprising all the aquariums he’d had as a child, all the guppies, swordtails, mollies and oscars he’d escorted through their brief passage of life, and dreaming of this new project, his inspiration, the one that would bridge his childhood love and the sort of seriousness of purpose expected of a man in his thirtieth year. Now he looked up sharply. “You haven’t been gardening again?”

There were telltale stains of earth on both the sagging knees of his mother’s sagging jeans. She didn’t attempt to deny it.

“Mama, in this heat? You’ll kill yourself yet.”

She waved him off as she might have waved off a fly. “Be a sweet,” she said, “and fetch me a glass of iced tea.”

He crossed the room without a word—angry at her; why, if she must poke around in the garden, couldn’t she do it in the evening?—and went through her bedroom to the back parlor and kitchen beyond it. This was the old core of the house, the original structure around which Saxby’s great-grandfather, DeTreville Lights, had built the house as it now stood. Septima had reserved it to herself, as her private living quarters, when she’d set up the colony twenty years earlier. The kitchen had a low beam ceiling and it was long and narrow, peg and groove floors, thick fieldstone walls over which generations of plaster had been smoothed. It was cool here, the windows shaded by the huge snaking moss-hung oaks that antedated the house. Eulonia White, Wheeler’s daughter, was shelling shrimp at the table. “She’s been gardening again,” he said, and went straight to the refrigerator.