East is East

“My new project, Ruth,” Saxby said, elevating the tapered green neck of the bottle over her glass. “The pygmy sunfish. It’s rare enough as it is, the whole range occurring between the Altamaha and Choctowhatchee rivers, but I’m looking for something even rarer.” He paused, groped for her hand. His eyes sprang at her. His grin was demented. “The albino phase.”

Ruth was feeling the wine. She lifted her glass to his. “Here’s to albinos!” she whooped.

Saxby barely noticed. He was earnest now, his hands juggling out a series of gestures, rattling on about this pygmy fish and how So-and-so had first described the albino tendency and how the field biologists from State were occasionally turning the odd one up in their nets on the St. Mary’s and how he, Saxby, was going to collect and breed them and turn the reflecting pool at the big house into a breeding pond so he could ship them out to aquarists all over the world. “They all go to Africa or South America,” he said, “but there’s a gold mine right here in the Okefenokee and the St. Mary’s River. Think of it, Ruth. Just think of it.”

She had a hard time with that proposition. She wasn’t thinking of fish—as far as she was concerned, fish existed for the sole purpose of being broiled, poached or deep-fried—but she wasn’t thinking of Jane Shine either. Saxby’s voice was a soothing murmur, the wine good, the food even better, the sound of the waves plangent and lulling beyond the dark lacquered strips of the shutters. She drank to Saxby’s project, and gladly. When the first bottle was gone, they ordered another.

Later, standing at the bow of the Tupelo Queen

and watching the low dark hump of the island emerge from the black fastness of Peagler Sound, she felt the strength rise in her. Jane Shine. What did she care if she was surrounded by Jane Shines—she had Saxby, she had Hiro (he’d be back, of course he would), she had the big house and the billiard room and she had her work. She felt powerful, expansive, generous, ready to bury the petty jealousies that had nagged at her all these years. Art wasn’t a foot race. There were no winners or losers. You became a writer for the sake of the work, for the satisfaction of creating a world, and if someone else—if Jane Shine—stepped in and won the prizes, usurped the pages of the magazines, took the best room at Thanatopsis House, well, so much the better for her. It wasn’t a contest. It wasn’t. There was room for everybody.

What with the wine and her revelation aboard the ferry, Ruth felt almost saintly—a Juliet of the Spirits, a Beatrice, a Mother Teresa herself—as she mounted the stairs to the billiard room, arm in arm with Saxby. The usual crew was there. Smoke hung in the air. Pool balls clattered. As they pushed through the door, laughter darted round the corners of the room and fell off to a wheeze, and then Ruth dropped Saxby’s arm and started across the floor for the card table. All eyes were on her. She was looking demure, she knew it, looking shy and sweet and gracious. “Ruthie,” Irving Thalamus said, glancing up from his cards.

That “Ruthie” should have alerted her—there was no joy in it, no verve; it was merely an announcement, pared down as if with a knife—but Ruth wasn’t listening. She was walking, crossing the room, the corners of her mouth turned up in a wide full-lipped airline hostess’s smile of greeting, all her attention focused on Jane Shine. She was vaguely aware of Sandy, off to her left, and of Bob the poet, but the only one she saw clearly was Jane, seated at the right hand of Thalamus, seated in her own spot.

No one said a word. Ruth’s feet were moving, her thighs brushing lightly beneath the new red tube dress she’d worn to the restaurant, but she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, the floor was a treadmill, she was in the middle of a dream gone sour. And then, suddenly, too suddenly, she was standing over the card table and Jane Shine was glancing up at her. Jane was in white, in a high-collared linen dress with a thousand perfect pleats, though the room was as hot as Devil’s Island. Her Andalusian hair, blackly glittering, teetered over her face in thick loose coils, and her eyes—her icy violet eyes—were shrunk to pinpricks.

“Jane,” Ruth said, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears, as if she were shouting underwater, as if it were coming back at her from a tape recorder set on the wrong speed, “welcome to Thanatopsis.”

Jane didn’t move, didn’t speak, merely held her there in the silence that roared with the clatter of insects from the void beyond the windows. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, “but have we met?”