East is East

When ruth finally came back to him, he felt nothing but relief. Yes, he’d been around the singles bars of La Jolla and West-side L.A., and yes, Jane Shine couldn’t have been any more compelling if she’d been soaked in pheromones, but Ruth was what he wanted. Ruth was palpable and real in a way that Jane Shine, with her puffed-up, otherworldly beauty, could never approach. She was pretty in her own way, uniquely Ruth, and he couldn’t get enough of her. But it went beyond pretty, way beyond: she was a life force, a tidal wave, and she swept all before her, and yet at the same time there was something vulnerable and uncertain about her and it made him feel strong to be there for her. And her obsession with writing—the whole lexicon of her books and writers and reviews, her lists of who was in and who was out—it was the perfect counterbalance to his fish, an obsession he could relate to, a reason for being. And it didn’t matter if the obsession was for stamp collecting or paleontology or Renaissance art—it didn’t even matter if she was good at it or not—it gave her a fire and a life that made other women seem dull by comparison. He had his fish, and that was all right by her; she had her writing.

She came up to him at cocktail hour and laid a hand on his arm (blessedly, as the Fates would have it, he was leaning over the bar with Sandy at the time; Jane was nowhere to be seen). “Hi,” Ruth said, and that was it, the six days of silence forgotten, Jane Shine a verboten subject, the party a distant memory. And without another word she took him by the hand and led him upstairs to her room.

In the morning, before she tripped off to breakfast in the convivial room, she woke him with a gentle rub and lubrication and told him she’d be needing a ride into Savannah that afternoon—for groceries. “Savannah?” he said. “What’s wrong with Darien?”

“Oh”—offhand, gazing out the window—“you know, there are some things I want that you’re just not going to find at the local Winn Dixie.” She turned to him and grinned and he felt the relief again, coursing and strong, washing over him like a hot shower. “Let’s face it, Sax—Darien, Georgia, isn’t exactly gourmet heaven.”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging, “fine,” and at four he drove her to an address on De Lesseps and had a beer in a place he knew on the waterfront while she pushed a shopping cart around. When he swung by to pick her up an hour later, she was waiting for him on the street, engulfed in brown paper bags. He was surprised by how much she’d bought—eight bags of canned goods—and even more surprised when she declined his offer to help carry the stuff out to her studio. “What do you mean?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the mountain of groceries as he put the car in gear. “You’re going to haul all this shit out to the cottage by yourself? Cans and all?”

Ruth was examining her nails. “I’ll do it in shifts,” she said, “don’t worry about it.”

“But it’s no problem, I mean I’d be happy—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

But Saxby did worry about it, all the way down the highway to the ferry and all the way across Peagler Sound and up the blacktop road to the house. How was she going to get eight bags of canned goods out to her studio—and what in god’s name did she need them for anyway? She had her breakfast and dinner at the house and each afternoon Owen brought her a gourmet lunch—finest lunch offered by any artists’ colony anywhere, or so his mother claimed. It was crazy. Was she expecting a siege or something?

And then, as they were staggering through her bedroom door with the booty, one of the bags split, spilling cans all over the floor, and Ruth stopped him when he bent to pick them up. “I can do it myself,” she said, turning her back to him and crouching over the cans as if she meant to hide them. That was odd. And it was odder still when he retrieved the two cans that had escaped her.

“Fried dace?” he said. “Bamboo shoots? What are you, going Oriental on us?”

She spun round on him, and while she didn’t exactly snatch the cans out of his hand, she took them firmly from him and dropped them into the unrevealing depths of the bag on the table behind her. “No,” she said, smiling then, “not really. It’s just that… I like to try new things.”

“Fried dace?” He shook his head and returned her smile, and then she fell into his arms, but the whole thing was very peculiar, very peculiar indeed.