East is East

There was no breakfast for ruth the next morning—she couldn’t have digested anything anyway. She was up before Owen, up before the birds stirred in the trees or the night gave way to the first thin gray wash of dawn. But then, she’d barely slept. She’d lain there in her narrow bed in her cramped and chintzy room, seething, raging, her mind pounding on like a machine out of control: God, how she loathed that bitch! Saxby had tried to console her, but she wouldn’t let him touch her—it was perverse, she knew it, but she had to sleep in her own room, right there on the other side of the wall from her, had to drink in her own hurts and distill them, purify them, turn them into something she could use.

The path to her studio, familiar in daylight, was a pit of shadow, blacker than the trees, blacker than the thicket that rose up on either side of her. She had no flashlight, and the names that came to her were the names of reptiles: cottonmouth, copperhead, diamond-back. During the drive out from Los Angeles, Saxby had fascinated her with his tales of unwitting tourists in open-toed shoes, of developers and real estate agents bitten in the lip, eyelid and ear, of moccasins thick as firehoses dropping from the trees. Each of these stories, in the most minute and horrific detail, came back to her now, but they didn’t deter her, not for a minute. She edged along that invisible path, hearing, smelling, tasting, all her taps open wide. The danger, the oddness of the hour, the thick simmering swelter of the air made her feel alive all over again.

By the time she rounded the final loop of the S curve that gave onto the cabin, the eastern sky was half lit and Jane Shine was receding, ever so gradually, from the front hallway of her consciousness. The place was still, the air soft. The first light in the windowpanes gave back the phantasmagoric shapes of the trees behind her. A cardinal shot across the clearing. As she mounted the steps, she was thinking of her story, her novella, of the woman in Santa Monica Bay, and of Hiro and his persecution and sufferings, and of how that was her story too. Yes: the woman’s husband, that was it. He’d deserted her and they were looking for him, the police were, and he’d run off into the—

She stopped cold. The food was gone—the blackened bananas and maculated pears, the tins of fish and moldy crackers and all the rest—and the table was a mess, and there was someone, a form, a shape, yes, huddled on the couch. A surge of pleasure shot through her—Someone’s been tasting my porridge, she thought,

Someone’s been sleeping in my bed—and she eased through the door in silence, standing there with her back to the wall—just standing there—until the form on the couch became Hiro Tanaka. But he was different somehow. It took a moment before it came to her: he was clean. Free of Band-Aid flesh-colored strips, free of scratches and blotches and insect bites. And the soles of his feet, one set atop the other, were clean too—and unmarked. He was still wearing Irving Thalamus’s Bermudas, his haunches glowing in the half-light with all the inchoate colors of the tropical spectrum, but he was wearing a new shirt, a generic gray sweatshirt with what looked like a coat of arms emblazoned across the chest. She tilted her head to make out the legend: GEORGIA BULLDOGS. And then she spotted the shoes—not Thalamus’s worn-out tennies with their tears and perforations, but a gleaming new pair of Nike hightops. Ruth smiled. Tomcat, indeed.

She didn’t want to wake him, already picturing the startled eyes, the jaw slack with horror, Goldilocks up and out the window, but she couldn’t stand there all day and she did want a cup of coffee. After a while—five minutes, ten?—she tiptoed across the room, filled the kettle and set it on the hot plate to boil. Then she began to tidy up, sweeping the crumbs from the table into a cupped palm, dropping the empty tins into an old supermarket bag she’d stuffed behind her desk, dribbling water over the stiff pink funnels of her pitcher plants. The lid of the kettle had just begun to rattle when she turned and saw that Hiro’s eyes were open. He was lying there motionless, hunched like a lost soul on a park bench, but his eyes were open now, and he was watching her. “Good morning,” she said. “Welcome back.”

He sat up and mumbled a greeting. He looked groggy. He dug at his eyes with the blades of his knuckles. He yawned.

Ruth stirred a spoonful of the replenished instant coffee into a mug. “Coffee?” she offered, holding the mug out to him.

He took it from her with an elaborate half-body bow and sipped gratefully, his eyes reduced to slits. He watched her pour herself a cup and then he stood, rising awkwardly above her. “I want to sank you so very much,” he said, and then faltered.