East is East

Eulonia White was a well-built woman, fortyish, with bad teeth and a sweet faraway look behind the flashing lenses of her wire-rim glasses. She didn’t respond.

Saxby poured the iced tea from a stoneware pitcher, and as he sliced a round of lemon and the scent of it rose to his nostrils, he suddenly realized he was famished. “That shrimp salad you’re making there, Eulonia?” he asked.

She nodded, her lenses throwing fire. “She say she gone eat in here tonight.”

“How about a little sandwich for me, could you do that? Rye or wheat—check with Rico, I think he’s got both in the main kitchen—with some mayo, black pepper, squeeze of lemon. Okay? I’ll be in with my mother.”

Back in the sitting room, he slipped the cold glass into his mother’s hand, and then picked up the dead egg sandwich—famished, absolutely famished—and gave it a tentative sniff. “I just been sittin’ here watchin’ that aquarium, Saxby,” his mother said, sipping at her iced tea, “and I do swear it is the prettiest one you’ve ever gone and created, but I said to myself, Where are the fee

-ish?”

It was closing in on cocktail hour when he pushed himself up and left the room. His mother, the empty glass cradled in her hands and her head thrown back so that the painter’s cap rode like a raft on the permed white swells of her hair, was snoring lightly from the depths of the chair as he eased the door shut behind him. He snatched a towel out of the bathroom, slipped into his swim trunks and dug his mask, snorkel and fins out of the closet. Then he headed out the back door and across the lawn for the boat, figuring to get some exercise in before drinks and dinner turned his limbs to dough.

The sun was so hot on his back it felt ladled on, but it felt good too. He waved to Ina Soderbord, who was sunning herself in one of the lawnchairs, caught a whiff of the ocean and a faint distant snatch of disco music, and then he was in the shadowy fastness of the trees. The smell of life was stronger here, primal, earthy. Butterflies fell like confetti through shafts of light, birds vanished and reappeared, a chameleon the color of astroturf clung to a mossy stump. He felt good. Felt connected. And he saw the remainder of the day opening up before him in a concatenation of simple pleasures: the plunge into the Atlantic, the drifting eternal silence of the ocean floor, the first fragrant sip of vodka, Ruth, crab cakes and endive salad, brandy, billiards, love. The misery of his long vodka-drenched evening in the billiard room was behind him now. It was nothing, an aberration, a misconception: Ruth was playing the game, that was all, she was networking. When he came up on the boat slip he was jubilant, elated, so full of the moment he found himself kicking up his heels and whistling like Uncle Remus himself, his shoulders alight with corny cartoon bluebirds.

But what was this?—there was someone in his boat. Someone long, lanky, the build of a basketball player, L.A. Dodgers cap, acid-washed face: Abercorn. His jubilation was gone, switched off like a light. “Hello,” he said, feeling the mud between his toes, feeling foolish, as if this weren’t his boat, his water, his trees, as if this weren’t the ground on which his ancestors had been born and breathed their last for two centuries and more.

Abercorn was hunched over a yellow notepad and writing furiously, oblivious to Saxby, the day, the drift and tug of the boat on its painter. He was wearing headphones. Saxby followed the connection past Abercorn’s blotched ears, spattered neck and wrinkled collar to the Walkman in his shirt pocket, and figured he was either writing a novel dictated by spirit guides or transcribing the tapes of his interviews with the various boneheads who populated the island. “Hello,” Saxby repeated, raising his voice.

When there was no reaction, he tossed his flippers into the boat, and that was all it took: Abercorn jumped as if he’d been attacked from within, betrayed by his own body. He gaped up—damn, if his eyes weren’t pink, like a bunny’s—and then flipped the ’phones from his ears with a confused wheeze of greeting. “Oh, hey,” he sputtered, looking as if he’d just come back from a long way off, “I’m just, uh—I hope you don’t mind the boat and all, I was just, it was such a nice day, I—” and then, as if the air had run out of his balloon, he fell silent.

“Sure,” Saxby said, hardly less embarrassed than the pink-eyed wonder before him, “no problem. I was just going to take the boat out. For a little swim. That’s all.”

Abercorn made no effort to rise. Instead, he fixed, his suddenly shrewd eyes on Saxby and said, “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

Saxby sighed. The sun was like syrup and everything was drowning in it. “I’ve only got a minute,” he said, stepping into the water, gripping the boat to steady it and then swinging himself nimbly over the side.