East is East

Ruth felt a surge of hope. She pictured the wreckage of the plane scattered across a rocky slope, twisted shards of steaming metal, flesh for the crows to pluck, the auto crushed like an accordion, the train flung from the rails. I’m sorry, Ruthie, very sorry, Septima had told her, but once the board has made its decision, I don’t presume to challenge it. If they feel Miss Shine is qualified—and I must say her reputation precedes her—then I can only welcome her and make her feel at borne, as I do hope I do with all our artists.

“I thought she was supposed to be here this morning?”

Thalamus shrugged.

“Has she called? Has anybody heard anything?”

“You know Jane,” he said.

Yes, she knew her. They’d been at Iowa together, the first year, before Ruth dropped out and tried her luck at Irvine. From the moment she walked into the classroom with her downcast eyes and bloodless pale skin beneath a bonnet of pinned-up hair, Jane was royalty—anointed and blessed—and Ruth was shit. She wrote about sex—nothing but—in a showy over-refined prose Ruth found affected, but which the faculty—the exclusively male faculty—discovered to be the true and scintillating voice of genius. Ruth fought it. She did. This was her arena, after all, and she did manage to captivate one of the instructors, a skinny bearded hyperkinetic visiting poet from Burundi. But he didn’t speak English very well, and perhaps for that reason—or perhaps because he was temporary and wore tribal tattoos on his lips and ears—he didn’t carry much weight. At the end of the year, when the second-year fellowships were announced, Jane Shine swept all before her.

In anger and frustration, Ruth had quit Iowa and gone home to California and Irvine, where she managed to produce the story that won her her first acceptance in Dichondra. But even that small triumph was soured for her—ruined, squashed, throttled in the cradle—when she came home after a modest celebration with two of her classmates to find that month’s Atlantic

in the mailbox and Jane Shine’s story—the very same overwrought sexual saga she’d presented in class at Iowa—nestled there in that familiar hieratic print between a Very Important Article and a Very Important Poem. And then, in quick succession, Jane’s stories appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker and the Partisan Review, and then she had a collection out and her picture was everywhere and the critics—the exclusively male critics—fell over dead with the highest, most exquisite praise of their careers on their dying lips. Yes, Ruth knew her.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“She likes to make an entrance, is what I mean. Stir up a little drama, make us stew a bit. She’s a killer, she really is. One of the heavyweights.”

It was an awkward moment. Worse: it was a moment of grinding despair, of defeat and desolation. She couldn’t tear at the edifice of Jane Shine directly—Jane and Irving Thalamus had been at a writers’ conference in Puerto Vallarta together and they were soulmates and eternal buddies, if not something even more intimate than that—and to hear her praised, let alone even mentioned, was like having fishhooks jerked through her flesh. Ruth was racking her brain to think of how to say something devastating under the guise of being positive, supportive, unhateful and unjealous, as if she wished anything for Jane Shine but loss of hair, teeth, good looks and whatever trickle of talent she’d ever had, when someone shouted, “Hey, there’s a car coming up the drive!”

Ruth froze, a named and very specific dread rising inside her till she felt like the heroine of some cheap horror film being dragged down through a sudden rent in the earth. There, framed in the beveled oblong pane of the foyer window, was a silver Jaguar sports car, gliding to a graceful halt at the curb. The top was down. The wire wheels chopped at the light. There was a man in the driver’s seat—square-jawed, Nordic, a flash of blond hair, the fluorescent gleam of teeth—and beside him, glittering like a Christmas tree ornament, was Jane Shine, in a flaming silk scarf and oversized sunglasses. The miniature U-Haul trailer, symbol of all that was grubby and gauche, of hurried moves and tacky furniture, would have given Ruth universes of satisfaction in another context, but attached as it was to that gleaming low silver-flanked wonder of a car, it almost managed to look chic.