East is East

of his plate. The card from his son—a freshman at Yale—had been bitter stuff. The son was planning to spend the holidays with the estranged wife in Mount Kisco; Irving Thalamus had apparently written to offer him a room in the house he was renting on Key West. The son had written back to say no, unequivocally, and to add that he considered his father a hypocrite, a narcissistic overpraised hack and a moral dwarf who couldn’t keep the patriarchal penis in his pants. The letter from the agent was worse. So bad Ruth had experienced a momentary pang of guilt while reading it—but it was only momentary, because, after all, she was an artist, an intellectual, and she made her own rules. The agent—one of the most venerable in New York—had written to say that Irving Thalamus’s publisher, the publisher who’d done his last six books, was advising him against coming out with the new novel. Dog Days was an embarrassment. Misguided. Incoherent. The publisher—and the agent concurred, gently and at length—knew that he would see the light. In six months’ time, with a little distance, he’d repudiate the work himself. He would. And he had his career to think about now, his future in the pantheon of American letters, and why spoil it with an ill-considered move at this juncture? The agent signed off by trusting that the rest cure in the bucolic atmosphere of Thanatopsis House was doing him a world of good.

“So how’s your new story coming?” he said, swinging his hard jaw back to her.

She knew he didn’t want to hear the truth, knew that the only answer to that question was to grumble, denigrate herself, whine about the blank page and how useless she was and wonder, awe in her eyes, how he managed to produce one astonishing book after another. She took another sip of coffee, set her mug down and leaned in close to him. “I’ve never worked better in my life,” she said.

“Hey, terrific,” he said, “that’s great, it really is.” His eyes looked wounded.

Bob shouted something about poker that night and then rose to leave the table. Ina Soderbord, wearing a pink sweat suit though it must have been ninety already, got up to leave with him and Ruth raised her eyebrows. Irving Thalamus nodded in affirmation. Then Rico cha-cha’d out of the kitchen, a muted blast of salsa music coming with him, and set down Ruth’s plate of egg and toast. She took a moment to upend the egg on the toast and dose it with salt and pepper before she turned back to Thalamus and asked the question that had, by all rules of writerly etiquette, to follow from his: “And how about you? Dog Days going well?”

He gave her a strange look, the look of a man who’s had his shorts stolen and his mail rifled. But no, how could he know? He’d talked about nothing but Dog Days since she’d got here—she wasn’t giving anything away. “Oh, that,” he said, shrugging. “Fine. Okay.” He paused. “I’m on to something new now anyway, something totally different for me, a real departure. I’m excited about it.” He didn’t look excited. Or he looked about as excited as a middle-aged legend contemplating moving his bowels in the communal bathroom, which is exactly what he was.

She was going to say something banal, like “I’m really happy for you” or “It’s the least we can expect from you, Irving,” but he turned to her suddenly and his face lit up. “Hey,” he said, “you hear the news?”

She hadn’t. She pursed her mouth and folded her hands in her lap. She was expecting something juicy, something to chew over and digest and laugh about till lunch, the thrilling little kernel of gossip that would make her whole billiard-room routine for the next week. The last thing he’d given her—and it was too much, she couldn’t have invented anything better—was the news that Peter Anserine had climbed the stairs to his room one night only to find Clara Kleinschmidt, lumps and all, reclining across his bed like the naked Maja—and the best part of it was, she didn’t leave till the morning. “No,” Ruth said, arching her back and darting a quick glance round the room, “tell me.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Guess who’s coming—for a six-weeks’ residency?”

She couldn’t guess.

Plates rattled in the kitchen, Bob took Ina’s hand and sauntered out the door, Sandy yawned, stretched and stood up. Irving Thalamus leaned toward her, his eyes bright, his grin as sharp as a watchdog’s. “Jane Shine,” he said. “Jane Shine’s coming. Can you believe it?”

Fea Pure

I want to help you, she whispered as he stood there in the doorway, the lunch bucket clutched in his hand. They all wanted to help him. That’s why they blasted their shotguns at him and hunted him with their dogs, that’s why they played Donna Summer in the swamps and tried to run him down in their speedboats. It was this one’s lover, her boifurendo, the beef-eater and butter-stinker, naked and hairy and with his big dog’s prick hanging down like a sausage, who’d run the boat at him when he was half drowned and chased him out of the store when he was starving. He’d wanted to help too.

Still, there was something about her—he couldn’t say what it was, couldn’t find the word for it in English or in Japanese either. She was sitting at her desk, her back to him, and when she turned he saw her silken legs, long and slim, American legs, and he saw the movement of her breasts and the weight of them. He remembered those breasts from his night in the water, though he was terrified and exhausted and fighting for his life at the time. He was drowning, he was dying, and there were her breasts, naked and appealing under the pale glaze of moon and stars. The whiteness, that’s what he remembered, the whiteness of her there and below, skin like milk in a porcelain bowl. He stepped through the door.

He was terrified, though he had Jocho and Mishima to sustain him—he was sure she’d betray him, screech till her tonsils fell out, rouse up every sweating hakujin cowboy and kinky-haired Negro in the county—but then he caught the look in her eyes and saw that she was afraid of him. For a long moment he just stood there inside the door, watching her eyes. And then, when he saw them soften, when he watched the smile play across her lips and heard her laugh, he shuffled into the room and squatted in the corner. “Arigato,” he whispered, “sank you, sank you so much.” And then he opened up the lunch bucket and he ate.

She offered him more—apples, dates, crackers—and he took it, took it greedily, though he was humiliated. He crouched there like an animal, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, bleeding in a hundred places, stinking like a hog. And in rags. Stolen rags. Negro rags. Jocho would have despised him; Mishima would have turned his back. He recalled the words of Jocho on the importance of grooming and personal appearance—life was a dress rehearsal for death, and you always had to be prepared for it, right down to the smallest detail of your toilet, your underwear, your pedicure, your hands and teeth and the color in your cheeks—and he felt humiliated to the depths of his being. He was polluted. Degraded. Impure. Lower than a dog.

“I’ll get you clothes,” she said.

He was nothing. He stank. He loathed himself. “Domo arigato,” he said, and though he was already squatting, he bowed from the waist.

Then she stood. Stood on those lovely slim ghostly white legs and crossed the room to him. She didn’t speak. She hovered over him, her eyes lush and consolatory, and held out her hand. “Here,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, and when he took her hand she pulled him to his feet. “Come, lie down,” and she offered him the couch. He gave up then and let her lead him like a child, let her tuck the pillow beneath his head and whisper to him in her sacramental tones until his muscles went loose and he felt himself tumble through the wicker, the wood, the earth itself, and into a realm where nothing mattered, nothing at all.

His dream was of baseball—besuboru—the game that was his whole life until he discovered Jocho. He was with his grandmother, his obasan, and she was having a sake and he a hotto dogu and the players on the field were swinging their bats and the pitcher was pounding the ball into the dark secret pocket of the catcher’s mitt. And then suddenly he was down there amongst them, standing at the plate and swinging … not a bat, but the hotto dogu, chili, mustard and all… swinging it till it began to swell and grow and he felt he could do anything, clout a homer with every swing, soar into the air like a bird or rocket. He turned to wave at his obasan, but she was gone, replaced by a girl with a baby at her breast… but no, it wasn’t just a single girl, there were hundreds, thousands of them, and every one with a suckling infant and every one with breasts as pure and white as … breasts … an avalanche of breasts …

He woke slowly, gradually, a diver rising to the surface of a murky lagoon, and the sleep clung to him like water. It took him a moment, disoriented by his exhaustion and all that had happened to him—he was home in bed, safe in his bunk on the Tokachi-maru, nodding off over a lecture at the maritime