East is East

him want to sob—of night-blooming flowers, of jasmine and honeysuckle and a thousand things he’d never smelled before.

He’d been ready to die, and now he was going to make it.

He was close. He knew it. He stirred his legs in the darkening waters.

“Shouldn’t we have a light or something?”

“Hm?” His voice was a warm murmur at her throat. He was half asleep.

“Running lights,” Ruth said, her own voice pitched low, almost a whisper. “Isn’t that what they call them?”

The boat rocked softly on the swells, serene and stable, rocked like a cradle, like the big lumpy bed with the Magic Fingers massage in the motel they’d stumbled across her first night in Georgia. There was a breeze too, salt and sweet at the same time, gentle, but just strong enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The only sound was of the water caressing the hull, soothing, rhythmic, a run and trickle that played in her head with the strains of a folk song she’d forgotten ten years ago. The stars were alive and conscious. The champagne was cold. He didn’t answer.

Ruth Dershowitz was lying naked in the bow of Saxby Lights’s eighteen-foot runabout. (Actually, the boat belonged to his mother, as did everything else in and attached to the big house on Tupelo Island.) Saxby was stretched out beside her, the drowsy flat of his cheek pressed to the swell of her breast. Each time the boat dipped beneath her, the friction of his fashionable stubble sent small fires burning all the way down to her toes. Five minutes earlier Saxby had knelt before her, adjusted her hips on the broad, flat plank of the seat, stroked open her thighs and moved himself into her. Ten minutes before that she’d watched him grow hard in the dimming light as he sat across from her and tried, unsuccessfully, to inflate a plastic air mattress to cushion them. She’d watched him, bemused and excited, until finally she’d whispered, “Forget it, Sax—just come over here.” Now he was asleep.

For a while she listened to the water and thought nothing. And then the image of Jane Shine, her enemy, rose up before her and she banished it with a vision of her own inevitable triumph, her own inchoate stories jelling into art, conquering magazines and astonishing the world, and then she was thinking about the big house, thinking about her fellow writers, the sculptors and painters and the single walleyed composer whose music sounded like slow death in the metronome factory. She’d been among them for a week now, one week of an indefinite stay—a succession of months that came alive in her mind, months with little gremlin faces and hunched shoulders, leapfrogging into the glorious, limitless, sunlit and rent-free future. No more waitressing, no more hack work, no more restaurant reviews, Parade banalities or Cosmo dreck on safe sex, sex in the shower or waking up at his house. She could stay as long as she pleased. Stay forever.

She had connections.

The thought lulled her, and before she knew it she was drifting off, drawn down into the murk of the unconscious by the champagne, the blanket of the night and the luxurious undulations of the boat, and soon the streaking white forms of sea creatures moved through her dream. She was in the water, floating, and a dozen pallid shapes rushed at her like torpedoes and she cried out … but it was all right, she was in Saxby’s boat and the stars were alive and she was awake—for an instant—before she fell back into her dream. Porpoises, they were only porpoises, she saw now, and they frolicked with her, poked their bottle snouts between her legs and hoisted her onto their slick and streamlined shoulders … but then something went wrong and she was alone in the water again and there was something else there, a shadow rising from the depths, sinister and quick, and it hit her, hard, with a thump that woke her. “Sax?” she said, and at first she thought a boat had run into them because of the lights, because of the lack of lights—she wasn’t thinking clearly—“Sax? Did you feel that?”

Saxby was a heavy sleeper. She’d been with him once in California when he slept through three blasts of the clock radio, an earthquake severe enough to knock the pictures off the wall and a practice session the university marching band had held on the field behind his apartment. “Wha’?” he said, “huh?” and his head slowly lifted itself from her chest. “Feel what?”

And then all at once Saxby froze. She was lying back, watching him, when she felt his muscles go tense and heard his grunt of surprise—“What in hell?”—and then she looked up and locked eyes with an apparition. A face, ghostly and astonishing in the blanched light of the moon, hovered over the stern; beneath it, a pair of impossible hands clung to the engine mount. It took her a moment, but then she understood: there was a man there. Clinging to their boat, at night, in the middle of Peagler Sound. She saw him, yes, hair in his eyes, something odd about his features, saw the look of fuddlement and exhaustion on his face, and watched as it turned, as if in slow motion, to one of horror. He gave a yelp—a yelp that transcended the puny limitations of language and culture—and then, before she had time even to recollect her own nakedness, he was gone.

In the next instant she and Saxby were on their feet, fumbling to get into their clothes and tangling their limbs as the boat lurched and heaved beneath them. “Goddamn it!” Saxby cursed, clutching his shorts in one hand and tearing at the anchor rope with the other, “you sorry son of a bitch! Come back here!”

Whoever he was—ghost, voyeur, prankster, errant surfer or castaway—he had no intention of doing anything of the kind. Just the opposite: he was in full flight. Ruth could hear him flailing in the water, and now, sitting heavily and groping for her T-shirt, she could just barely make him out: the dark wedge of his head driving against the black water, a flash of something white—a life jacket? a boogie board?—and the foam, phosphorescent with plankton, trailing behind him like a chimerical tail.

Cursing, Saxby raked the anchor over the side and flung it to the bottom of the boat. The smell of the mud, fecal and corrupt, rose to her nostrils. “What’s with this jerk, anyway?” Saxby muttered, and his hands were shaking as he pulled the starter cord. “Is he some kind of pervert, or what?”

Ruth was seated in front, still watching the shadow of the distant swimmer. “He looked”—she didn’t yet know what she wanted to say, didn’t yet realize what it was about him that had struck her—“he looked different somehow.”

“Yeah,” Saxby grunted as the engine whined to life, “Chinese or something.” And then he goosed the throttle, the boat swung round on its axis and they shot off in the swimmer’s wake.

The breeze caught Ruth’s hair as she wriggled into her shorts. Her heart was pounding. She was confused. What had happened? What were they doing? There was no time to think. The waves thumped under her, she clutched at the seat and felt the spray in her face. They were closing fast on the thrashing swimmer when she twisted round and cried out to Saxby.

She was afraid suddenly, afraid of Saxby for the first time in all the months she’d known him. He was decent, kind, easy-going, she knew that, a guy who drank Campari and soda and felt self-conscious about the size of his feet, and yet there was no telling what he’d do in a situation like this. “Son of a bitch,” he spat, and she could see him gritting his teeth in the cold light, and for an instant she pictured the hapless swimmer pounded flat beneath the smooth glistening fist of the hull. “No!” she cried, but he cut the throttle just as they pulled even with the dark twisting shape in the water.

“Let me get a look at this shithead,” Saxby said, and the beam of his flashlight came to life.

For the first time she saw the intruder clearly. There he was, struggling in the wash of the boat, no more than five feet from her. She saw a drift of reddish hair, his odd distorted features, the unfathomable eyes that threw back the light in alarm, and then he was kicking away from the boat, frantic, as Saxby swung the tiller to stay with him. He was panicking, this man in the water, flailing and gasping, fighting at the life buoy under his arm, and all at once she knew he was going to drown. “He’s drowning, Sax,” she cried, “he fell off a ship or something.” The engine sang, throttle up, throttle down. The waves slapped at the hull. “We’ve got to save him.”

She turned to Saxby. His anger was gone now, his face composed, contrite even. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. Yeah, of course,” and he rose to his feet, rocking back and forth with the motion of the boat, holding his flashlight as if the strength of its beam could hoist the drowning man aboard.

“Throw him a line,” she urged. “Hurry.”

The man in the water, thrashing and blind, reminded her of the little two-foot alligator Saxby had gigged one night in the beam of a flashlight on the pond out back of the big house. The thing was floating, inert, no more animate than a stick or a clump of weed but for the fire its eyes gave back in the light, and then Saxby struck and it folded up like a pocketknife, gone, sucked down into the matted depths, only to come back at them like a switchblade, mad and stung and toothy and dying. “You grab him, grab his arm,” Saxby said, forcing the boat in tight.