again.
She was something to watch, Ruth. She worked the cocktail hour, dinner and the ceaseless ebb and flow of billiard-room dynamics like a politician—or maybe a guerrilla. There was a little joke or routine for everyone, from the unapproachable Laura Grobian to the chummy Thalamus and the lesser lights too. She was amazing. Body signals, pursed lips, an arched eyebrow or nod of the head that meant worlds: every time he looked up she was holding a dialogue with somebody. One minute she’d be having a cocktail hour tete-a-tete with Peter Anserine and two of his skinny solemn attendants, and the next she’d be across the room, laughing with Clara Kleinschmidt till they both had tears in their eyes—and all the while mugging for Sandy or Regina or Bob Penick or for him—she never forgot him, no matter how wound up she got—and she would give him a look that passed like electricity between them.
And then she missed cocktails again one night and he stood around with a glass in his hand radiating his own brand of wit and charm, but all the while craning his neck to look for her. When she caught up with him—she slipped in beside him at the table halfway through dinner—she was out of breath and her eyes were big with excitement. “What’s up?” he’d asked, and she’d taken hold of his arm and pecked a kiss at him, all the while nodding and winking and grinning in asides to half the room. “Nothing,” she said, “just work, that’s all. This story I’m working on’s a killer. The best.” “Terrific,” he said, and meant it. She paused to slip a morsel of veal between her lips. “Listen,” she said, “can we drive into Darien tomorrow? I need to get some things.” “Sure,” he said, and she was eating, small quick bites, her teeth sharp and even. “Groceries. Crackers and cheese and whatnot—for my studio. You know,” she said, giving him a look, “a girl gets hungry out there.”
Hungry. All right. He whispered in her ear and when they kissed he tasted the meat on her lips and everyone was watching.
And then, at the end of the week—he couldn’t put it off any longer, didn’t want to—he had to make another collecting trip, this one in the hope of getting his project off the ground. He was going to collect the fish—the rare, almost legendary fish—that would make him his fortune—or rather, carve him his niche in the annals of the great aquarists: fortune he already had. Ruth didn’t want to come with him. Not this time. She was working too well, going with the flow, and she couldn’t risk it. She’d miss him—even if he’d only be gone overnight—and she’d come along with him next time. She promised.
He spent a full blazing bug-infested afternoon and the succeeding morning on the Okefenokee, casting nets, drawing seines, setting minnow traps, and he came up with a writhing grab bag of fascinating things—pirate perch, golden top minnow, needle-nosed gar, swamp darter and brook silverside—but not what he was looking for. It was a disappointment, but not a crushing one—certainly not a defeat. He’d hoped to get lucky, yes, but knew realistically that he might have to comb the swamp a hundred times before he scored. After all, Ahab hadn’t found the white whale in a day, either. Still, he enjoyed the drive, enjoyed the day out in the wilderness, even enjoyed his solitary night in a motel in Ciceroville, where he watched the Atlanta Braves on a color TV bolted to the wall. At noon on the second day he brought his rented boat in and dumped his catch over the side. (He was tempted, especially by the shimmering silver gar, to bring something back for the lifeless aquarium, but he resisted; he didn’t want his little world defiled by just any tawdry thing that happened to catch his eye.) Then he headed back for Tupelo Island, hoping to make the afternoon ferry and cocktail hour.
It was early evening when he rounded the bend of the long sweeping drive and the big house came into view. There was movement on the south lawn, and Saxby saw that the colonists had gathered there for a picnic supper, the women’s white summer dresses and men’s light jackets like so many pale flowers in a field of saturate green. He caught a glimpse of his mother, straw bonnet with a chiffon veil, erect and regal in a wooden lawnchair, and he waved. Ruth would be there somewhere, and he slowed the pickup ever so briefly, but didn’t see her, and then he was rumbling into the garage, a faint pink cloud of dust catching up with him as he killed the engine and swung open the driver’s door.
He hadn’t had a chance to clean up—his hands stank of perch and darter and of the rich fecal muck of the Okefenokee, and the thighs and backside of his jeans were stiff with the residue of his fish-handling—and Ruth took him by surprise. No sooner had he swung open the door and set his feet on the ground, than she was there, rushing into his arms in a strapless cocktail dress that showed off the flashing lines and tawny hollows of her throat and shoulders. “Sax,” she moaned, holding him, kissing him, fish-stink and all, “I’m so glad you’re back.”
He held her, pressed her to him, hot already, hot instantly, a gas grill gone from pilot to high at the merest touch, and he wondered if he should gently push her away, for the sake of her dress, and he was embarrassed and he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t speak either—just held him—and that was odd: she was never at a loss for words. And then he felt it, a tremor running through her, seismic, an emotional quake: she was crying. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
She wouldn’t lift her face.
“Is something wrong? Did something happen while I was away? What is it, babe?”
Her voice was buried, it was doleful and hoarse. “Oh, Sax,” she said, and she paused, and she squeezed him and he squeezed her back. “You’ve got to talk to your mother, you’ve got to—for me.”
Talk to his mother?
“It’s Jane Shine,” she said. She looked up at him now—lifted her head from his shoulder and showed him the tears on her face and the cold fierce glare in her eyes. “She can’t come here. She can’t. She’s a bitch. A snob. She’s—all her talent’s between her legs, Sax, that’s all. She’s not worth it, she isn’t.”
He said something, anything, a rumble of disconnected words to comfort her, but she wouldn’t be comforted.
Her hands tightened on his biceps and her eyes were hard. “No, Sax, I mean it,” she said. “She can’t come here.”
There was a sudden shout of laughter from across the lawn and Ruth didn’t flinch, didn’t hear it, didn’t care. “It would ruin everything,” she said.
Rusu
It was a steamy oppressive tropical day, flies everywhere, the reek of low tide settling in the nostrils like a kind of death, a day on which Ruth didn’t bother with breakfast at the convivial table. She didn’t feel even faintly convivial, and after greeting Owen with a stony face and wordlessly appropriating two hot buttered rolls from Rico, she started up the path for Hart Crane, though she didn’t feel much like working either. What she felt like doing was getting off the island, getting out of there altogether—she felt like dressing for two hours and lingering over an eight-course meal at the best French restaurant in New York and then insulting the waiter, the chef, the sommelier and the maitre d’. She felt like kicking dogs, pulling teeth, stepping into one of the endless workshops she’d suffered through as a student and annihilating some starry-eyed fool with scarifying and hurtful words.
Gnats darted at her face. Her feet hurt. It was a rotten day. A cataclysmic day. A stinking deadly washed-out low-tide sort of day, the day on which Jane Shine, in all her cheap and overblown glory, was set to descend on Thanatopsis House.
Ruth worked through the morning on her Japanese story—she called it “Of Tears and the Tide”—though what she wrote wasn’t very good and she kept getting bogged down on individual phrases and the sorts of choices that are second nature when you’re working well and impossible when you’re not. At lunchtime, she was up from her desk the moment Owen stole away, and she lifted the bucket off the hook and ate greedily, hungrily, without a thought for Hiro. She hadn’t seen him in a week now, and there was no sign he’d been back. The fruit and cheeses she’d left for him were rotting, the canned goods were untouched, the crackers going soft with mold. And that rankled her too: he’d deserted her. He was a living story, a fiction come to life—she’d imagined him and there he was—and she needed him. Didn’t he realize that?
She was worried about him too, of course—that was part of it. He could have drowned, fallen into a bog, could have been treed and peppered with shot by one of the fired-up redneck coon hunters who haunted the porch out front of the VFW post. But no, if he’d been shot she would have heard about it before the gun was cool, no secrets on Tupelo Island. Maybe he’d got away altogether—maybe he’d swum to the mainland or stowed away on the ferry. Or—and the thought depressed her—maybe he’d taken up with someone else, some altruistic soul who even now was feeding him a hot bowl of steamed rice and chopped vegetables with a splash of Kikkoman soy sauce and a handful of crunchy noodles. Sure, that was it: he’d found a soft touch someplace else. Richer food. A better
