East is East

It was a steamy oppressive tropical day, flies everywhere, the reek of low tide settling in the nostrils like a kind of death, a day on which Ruth didn’t bother with breakfast at the convivial table. She didn’t feel even faintly convivial, and after greeting Owen with a stony face and wordlessly appropriating two hot buttered rolls from Rico, she started up the path for Hart Crane, though she didn’t feel much like working either. What she felt like doing was getting off the island, getting out of there altogether—she felt like dressing for two hours and lingering over an eight-course meal at the best French restaurant in New York and then insulting the waiter, the chef, the sommelier and the maître d’. She felt like kicking dogs, pulling teeth, stepping into one of the endless workshops she’d suffered through as a student and annihilating some starry-eyed fool with scarifying and hurtful words.

Gnats darted at her face. Her feet hurt. It was a rotten day. A cataclysmic day. A stinking deadly washed-out low-tide sort of day, the day on which Jane Shine, in all her cheap and overblown glory, was set to descend on Thanatopsis House.

Ruth worked through the morning on her Japanese story—she called it “Of Tears and the Tide”—though what she wrote wasn’t very good and she kept getting bogged down on individual phrases and the sorts of choices that are second nature when you’re working well and impossible when you’re not. At lunchtime, she was up from her desk the moment Owen stole away, and she lifted the bucket off the hook and ate greedily, hungrily, without a thought for Hiro. She hadn’t seen him in a week now, and there was no sign he’d been back. The fruit and cheeses she’d left for him were rotting, the canned goods were untouched, the crackers going soft with mold. And that rankled her too: he’d deserted her. He was a living story, a fiction come to life—she’d imagined him and there he was—and she needed him. Didn’t he realize that?

She was worried about him too, of course—that was part of it. He could have drowned, fallen into a bog, could have been treed and peppered with shot by one of the fired-up redneck coon hunters who haunted the porch out front of the VFW post. But no, if he’d been shot she would have heard about it before the gun was cool, no secrets on Tupelo Island. Maybe he’d got away altogether—maybe he’d swum to the mainland or stowed away on the ferry. Or—and the thought depressed her—maybe he’d taken up with someone else, some altruistic soul who even now was feeding him a hot bowl of steamed rice and chopped vegetables with a splash of Kikkoman soy sauce and a handful of crunchy noodles. Sure, that was it: he’d found a soft touch someplace else. Richer food. A better deal. Some old blue-nosed widow with trembling hands who fussed over him as if he were a wandering tomcat. Yes, that was it. For a moment the thought arrested her: he was

a tomcat, a mercenary, and he didn’t give a damn for all the risk she’d taken to get him a clean change of clothes or the sacrifice of forgoing her lunch all this time. Suddenly she saw him in a new light: he’d been using her, that’s all, and he had no intention of coming back to her. She’d been fooling herself—there was no cross-cultural attraction there, no communication, no seduction. Damn him, she thought, and she went at her lunch as if she hadn’t eaten in a week.

Later, when her mind fell numb and she couldn’t stand it any longer, when she figured she’d given Jane Shine all the time in the world to settle in and clear out of her way, Ruth pushed herself up from the desk, glanced bitterly round the room—the blackened bananas, spotty pears, the dusty tins of sardines, anchovies and tuna—and slumped out the door. She was planning to skip cocktails and then have Saxby take her out to dinner on the mainland, putting off the inevitable—she just couldn’t face that hypocrite Jane Shine, not now, not today. But when she got to the big house and tried to duck up the stairs, Irving Thalamus shot out of the parlor, drink in hand, and caught her by the elbow. He wheeled her into his arms and dragged a quick kiss across her lips, and then he beamed at her, a little drunkenly, while she strained to look over his shoulder and scan the cocktail crowd for that ski-jump nose, that mass of dark iridescent flamenco-dancer’s hair, the extraterrestrial eyes and prim bosom, for that ethereal freak, Jane Shine.

Irving Thalamus squeezed her, smiling blearily and exhaling vodka fumes in her face. “Hey,” he said, his smile dissolving momentarily, “no Jane. She never showed.”