East is East

Rico made him some poached eggs and a Bloody Mary, and he ate the eggs and drank the drink and felt worse. It was two in the afternoon when he mounted the stairs to check on Ruth. The enigma of her disappearance had settled on him while he was numbly slicing egg and watching the yolk run, trying to decide whether his stomach could handle that much gravity. Ruth, he thought. Jesus Christ, what happened to Ruth? As he mounted the stairs, he felt a sense of impending crisis, ominous and inescapable, but chalked it up to misfiring neurons and the egg that lay there like death on his stomach. Ruth wasn’t in her room. Her cosmetics—jars of this and that, mascara, lipstick—were scattered all over her dressing table, and her bed was unslept in. Or it had been slept in and remade. It was two o’clock, after all. She would be at her studio at this hour, working. For a moment he thought of hiking out there to clear up the mystery surrounding the party—and any little misunderstanding that may have arisen from it—but his legs felt like wax and he went back to his room to lie down a bit and let the world readjust itself to him.

He woke for dinner, feeling hollow as a reed. After washing his face and slicking back his hair with a little gel, he lumbered up the stairs to try Ruth’s door again. This time, his knuckles had barely made contact with the wood when the door flew back on its hinges.

Ruth stood there before him, small, cold, wicked and glittering, her face drained of blood, her eyes like cut glass. “You son of a bitch,” she said.

“But I—”

“Tell it to Jane Shine,” she snarled, and the door slammed shut with an explosion that resounded all the way down the hall.

He was about to reach for the doorknob, call out her name, protest his innocence, when he heard the screech of wood on wood and watched the door shudder as some immovable piece of hereditary furniture settled against it. He couldn’t resist trying the doorknob anyway. It turned, but the door itself was stuck fast.

So she’d seen him with Jane Shine—so that was it. He felt bad about it, but he was blameless. He was. And as he stood there in the hallway, a stream of dinner-bound colonists making their way around him with nods of greeting and knowing smiles, he began to feel put upon, abused, wronged and shamed, a man condemned without a trial. But Ruth was hot—he knew her temper only too well—and he wasn’t about to plead with her through a closed door while celebrated composers and Jewish legends sauntered by and smirked at him. In the end, he stood there speechless for two whole minutes, and then he shrugged and went down to dinner.

During the course of the next several days, he tried to get close to Ruth, tried to make amends, explain himself—though he was guilty of nothing, except maybe playing along with her neurotic games. But she wouldn’t talk to him. She turned away from him in public, refused to answer his knock, spent more and more time holed up in her studio. He was depressed about the whole thing, and the more depressed he became, the more he found himself seeking out the company of Jane Shine over cocktails or dinner or around the billiard table in the small hours of the morning. He was playing with fire, and he knew it, but it wasn’t just Ruth that depressed him, it was his project too—and Jane Shine, with her knowing smile and luminous eyes and her easy conversance with fishes, lent a sympathetic ear.

The biggest problem with the project was that it just wouldn’t fly. If the albino pygmy sunfish had ever existed, it was extinct now, gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur—or so it seemed. He’d made a standing offer—fifty dollars a fish—to all the entomologists, piscatologists and amateur aquarists dipping their nets in all the backwaters, bayous, rills, puddles, cataracts and creeks in the state, and nothing had turned up. His own nets were seething with all sorts of intriguing things: stickleback larvae and catfish fry, cooters and frogs and newly hatched cottonmouths the size of pipe cleaners, whole glistening fistfuls of Elassoma okefenokee (all of them brown, of course, a disappointing and unvarying brown, a brown the color of shit and heartbreak). Not a single milk-white mutant showed its scaly little head. Finally, out of boredom and impatience, and despite his initial resolve, he began bringing home specimens for the aquarium. He couldn’t resist. He was a boy in a man’s clothes, and this was his new toy.