East is East

She finished her champagne—was that her third glass?—and took another from the man with the iron face. (She wanted to tease him the way people tease the guards outside Buckingham Palace—tickle him or blow in his ear or something—but she thought better of it: after all, how much latitude could you expect from an old black man in a starched tuxedo at a white people’s party in Georgia?) She was feeling a bit giddy, enjoying herself even if she had been denied her entrance. Abercorn with Ina Soderbord. It was funny: the pale with the paler still. And what if they had children? They’d be eyebrowless, hairless, white as grubs, with little pink fishy eyes, and they’d grow up to be giants upon the earth, with shoulders and tits and feet that would give shoe salesmen nightmares. The boys would buy cheap overcoats and the girls would hyphenate their names—Soderbord-Abercorn—and people would think they were an agricultural product, something to spray on the crops to prevent cutworm. Oh, yes, it was hilarious. And Ruth was giddy. But where was Sax?

It was then that the band pulled the string on the horns and rolled into a piano-thumping boogie-woogie—they were eclectic, all right—and Irving Thalamus’s dry sniggering laugh jumped out at her from the direction of the bar. She turned and elbowed her way through the crowd, following the sound as unswervingly as a cat stalking a rustle in the grass. A pair of minor poets and a clutch of old ladies in pink chiffon gave way, and there he was—Thalamus—leaning against the bar and laughing down the front of Regina Mclntyre’s dress. Regina was showing acres of dead-white shoulder and bosom, and she was wrapped in a black leather dress that gave her the look of an extra in a movie about outer space vampires. But Ruth’s eye didn’t rest long on Regina or Thalamus either, because at that moment she spotted Saxby at the far end of the bar, and in the next she felt hot and sick and panicky all at once, felt like Madama Butterfly when they come to take her child away: Saxby was with Jane Shine.

Jane Shine.

It was a blow, and it staggered her. There she was, the woman she loathed more than anyone alive, her enemy, her nemesis, her bugaboo, and she had Saxby in her grip. Flawless, sickening, cool as a model poised on the runway, she was leaning into Saxby, one cold white hand fixed like a grappling hook to his arm. Ruth saw black silk and diamonds, hair on the attack, a roiling cloud of it enveloping Saxby in its fatal nimbus, and all at once she pictured him in the Jaguar, Jane Shine established as the doyenne of Thanatopsis House, her own stay cut mysteriously short. It was too much. She couldn’t handle it. She recoiled as if from some unthinkable horror—Saxby hadn’t seen her yet, nor Shine nor Thalamus either—and then Regina’s eyes caught hers and Regina smiled—or smirked—and Ruth was fighting her way back through the crush, Thalamus’s tentative “Ruthie?” floating somewhere behind her, the piano player up off his stool and banging the keyboard now with his feet and elbows and hams, the crowd roaring, roaring.

Stabbed in the back. Betrayed. A moment ago she’d exulted in Clara Kleinschmidt’s tears, above it all, Olympian, La Dershowitz, and now—now she felt the tears burning in her own eyes. How could he? How could he even talk to her? Ruth pushed blindly through the crowd. She felt as if she’d been slapped in the face, humiliated, and there was nothing to do but hide herself, run. She shoved past the old waiter—Out of my way, Uncle Tom, she thought bitterly—and he gave her a look, nothing more than a fractional lift of the eyelids, that said shame,

and the whole group of wispyhaired lawyers did a little dance step to avoid her. She was vaguely aware of the horns ricocheting off the canvas above her as the song ended in a slamming excruciating finale, and then she saw the rosy exit looming up before her.

She was there—Just let me hold it back, she prayed, please god don’t let me break down yet—there under the bower, practically running, when Septima appeared at the other end. Made up to look twenty years younger, her hair tinted and curled, her gown alone worth more than every scrap of clothing in the place combined and her jewelry liberated from the safe deposit box, Septima was making her own grand entrance. On Owen’s arm. She seemed to stagger on her heels as Ruth came at her, and she forced her lips into a smile. “Why, Ruthie,” she gasped, stopping her with a veiny desiccated hand, a hand that felt to Ruth like the touch of death, “whatever has happened to you? You’re pale as a ghost.”