East is East

On the weekend, jane shine went off to sea island with some clown in a silver XKE and he watched Ruth come to life again. She practically pirouetted round the room at cocktail hour, and at dinner she couldn’t sit still, flitting from table to table like a gossip columnist at a premiere. Saxby didn’t mind. He was glad to see her enjoying herself, reasserting her preeminence, shining like a supernova in the Thanatopsis firmament. And he was glad too that she seemed to have forgotten all about the party, letting him off the hook vis-à-vis the Jane Shine incident and any number of related peccadilloes he wasn’t necessarily even aware of, but condemned for all the same. While she was clowning with Thalamus at the next table, he laid his aquarium woes on Clara Kleinschmidt, talking to hear himself talk—and to pay her back, in small measure, for Arnold Schoenberg.

After dinner, there was a recital by Patsy Arena, a squat, broad-faced woman of Cuban extraction who looked as if she’d stepped out of a Botero painting. She was new to the colony, having come just that week at the invitation of Clara Kleinschmidt, and she played the old Steinway in the front parlor as if she were tenderizing meat. In all, she was to play three compositions that evening, two of her own and one of Clara’s. Owen turned the lights down. Ruth held Saxby’s hand. The colonists cleared their throats, twisted in their seats, leaned forward in fear and expectation.

Bang! Patsy Arena hit the piano like a boxer. Silence.

One and two, one and two, she whispered, bobbing her frizzy head. Bang! Bang! she slammed at the keyboard with the ball of her fist. And then: nothing. For three full agonizing minutes she sat rigid, staring at the cheap plastic alarm clock perched atop the gleaming ebony surface before her. Finally the alarm went off—ding-ding-ding—and Bang!

she hit the keyboard. The piece was called Parfait in Chrome, and it went on for forty-five minutes.

Afterward, as a kind of dessert, there was the weekly movie (Woman in the Dunes, a nod to Owen, who was in one of his Japanese phases). Nearly everyone sat through both the recital and the film, which ultimately had more than a little in common. Life at Thanatopsis, as stimulating as it might have been to the artistic sensibility, was problematic as far as entertainment was concerned—Saxby was aware that most of the colonists found it a grinding bore—and the nightly readings, recitals and exhibitions, as well as the weekly film, were small moments of release in a bleak continuum.

Of course, none of that stopped Ruth from spontaneously rewriting the film’s dialogue, much to the amusement of her fellow colonists, or from parodying Patsy Arena’s performance later on in the billiard room. She had the whole crew in hysterics. They were red in the face and pounding at their breastbones as she pantomimed the pianist’s clumsy assault on her instrument, but then Clara and her protégée hunkered into the room and Ruth deftly threw the ball to Abercorn, who’d been giggling innocently in his beer. “Catch anything in your snares today, Det?” she asked.

The laughter subsided. Clara poured Patsy a drink. Everyone looked at Abercorn.

Abercorn had been mooning round the place off and on for the past week or so. Sometimes he had the other character with him, sometimes not. Ruth’s question had a barb in it, and Saxby swirled the ice in his drink, watching Abercorn squirm. He kind of liked the guy, actually—or maybe he just felt sorry for him. Abercorn looked up at Ruth out of his big darting rabbit’s eyes. The question seemed to sadden him. “Nothing,” he said. He tugged at his nostrils, scratched an ear. “Lewis and I think somebody else is involved.”

Ruth looked away. Suddenly she was deeply interested in the way the bourbon in her glass caught the light. At the time, Saxby thought nothing of it—but there was a look on her face, lips pursed, eyes downcast but alert, that he was to recall later. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you mean—like somebody on the island is hiding him or something?”

Abercorn nodded, slowly and gravely, his chin stabbing at the circle of colonists gathered round him. Everyone was listening now. “I can’t think of anything else—he’s been out there for five weeks, and aside from that business down at Tupelo Shores and the shit he’s been able to steal here and there, don’t you wonder what he’s eating?”

Saxby hadn’t given it a thought—at this point the big awkward Japanese kid who’d lurched out of Peagler Sound that night and run from him at the market was more amusing to him than anything else. But now—just for a moment and so quickly that he dismissed it the moment the thought flashed into his head—an answer came to him: fried dace.