East is East

All right, it was true—he had gotten a little carried away, what with the champagne and the music and the general high-spirited roar of the festivities, and for long stretches at a time he’d forgotten Ruth altogether. He was enjoying himself—was that a crime? She was late. She was dressing. I’ll catch up with you later, she said. And so he found himself standing at the bar, all dressed up and nowhere to go, and he found Jane Shine standing there beside him. “Hi,” she said, and he returned the greeting, social animal that he was, and she took a breath and said that Irving had told her he was interested in aquaria—that’s how she put it: “interested in aquaria”—and he was hooked. She’d had several tanks as a girl, and her ex-husband had taken her up the Orinoco in a pirogue and there they’d met Herbert Axelrod himself. The patron saint of aquarists was on a collecting trip, and he took them back to his base camp for a dinner of piracuru and onions and showed them a tank crowded with a new species of characin he’d discovered just that morning.

To Saxby, it was the voice of heaven.

When it began to get late and Ruth still hadn’t appeared, he crossed the lawn to the house, went up to her room and knocked for the fourth time that evening. There was no answer. He put his head in the door and saw that she was gone. Puzzled, he checked the two upstairs bathrooms, made a quick circuit of the parlor and veranda, and cut back across the lawn to the party, figuring he’d somehow missed her in the crush. He circulated through the crowd, looking for her, and he took a glass of champagne, and when somebody put a plate of food in his hand, he ate. She wasn’t on the dance floor, and she wasn’t at the bar. He had a bourbon on the rocks, and then another. He talked with Sandy, Abercorn, Regina and Thalamus. Thalamus had seen her an hour or so ago, he thought, heading away from the bar—had he looked on the dance floor? Saxby assured him that he had, and then he downed another bourbon while contemplating the mystery of it all. He went back to the house and asked everyone he ran into if they’d seen her, and he checked the bathrooms again, and the kitchen. She’d vanished.

Back at the party, he had a bourbon with Wellie Peagler and washed it down with a glass of champagne. Wellie was representing a group of investors who wanted to build a golf course and resort on the island, and before he knew it, Saxby was arguing passionately for the inviolability of Tupelo and the claims of historicity, and he snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray and told Wellie he could take his investors and shove them up his ass. Wellie didn’t flinch—just gave him a paternal smile and introduced him to a big pale blustery character who said he was a venture capitalist and they had a drink to that—venture capitalism, that is—and they had a drink to nine irons and holes in one. And then, before he knew what was happening, a girl he’d had a brief thing with when he was home to visit his mother two Christmases ago took him by the arm and led him out onto the dance floor. The rest was a blur, though he did remember standing at the bar at some indeterminate hour talking to somebody he couldn’t recall about something he’d forgotten, when his mother put a hand on his arm and asked him where Ruth was.

Ruth. The name came back to him as if from some coat closet of memory. Ruth’s face rose before him, and it was knit with fury. He looked at his mother and shrugged.

Was she all right? his mother wanted to know. Was she feeling ill? Had they quarreled?

He defended himself in all his innocence—no, no quarrel; he’d been looking for her all night—and he was about to have another drink when Septima put her arm in his and announced in a quavering voice that she was tired. She kept a tight grip on him as she said her unending goodbyes, and then she led him across the lawn, up the steps and into the house, where she put him to bed and sleep came like a guillotine.

In the morning, he had a headache.