East is East

steady and good-looking, the candlelight playing softly off the golden nimbus of his hair, his eyes locked on hers; he was solicitous, sweet, sexy, worth any ten Nordic types in their Jaguars. The image of Jane Shine would rise before her over her soup, a crust of French bread or a morsel of ecrevisse, and he would banish it with a joke, a kiss, a squeeze in just the right place. And then, midway through the meal, he proposed a toast.

Ruth was savoring the cleansing frisson of a glace of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, when a waiter appeared at her side with a bottle of champagne. She looked up at Saxby. He was beaming at her. She felt a flush of pleasure as they touched glasses—he was such a sentimentalist, forever reprising these ceremonial gestures, reminding her that they’d been together for eighteen weeks or twenty-two or whatever it was—but this time he took her by surprise. “To Elassoma okefenokee,” he said.

“To who?”

“Drink,” he said.

She drank.

“Elassoma okefenokee,” he repeated, “the Okefenokee pygmy sun-fish.” He refilled her glass. His grin was wild, alarming, the grin of a man who at any moment might bound up from the table and waltz with one of the waiters. “Not to be confused with Elassoma evergladei,” he added, dropping his voice in confidentiality.

An elderly gentleman seated at the next table blew his nose with authority. Ruth was aware in that moment of the gentle smack of mastication, the patter of muted laughter. She didn’t know what to say.

“My new project, Ruth,” Saxby said, elevating the tapered green neck of the bottle over her glass. “The pygmy sunfish. It’s rare enough as it is, the whole range occurring between the Altamaha and Choctowhatchee rivers, but I’m looking for something even rarer.” He paused, groped for her hand. His eyes sprang at her. His grin was demented. “The albino phase.”

Ruth was feeling the wine. She lifted her glass to his. “Here’s to albinos!” she whooped.

Saxby barely noticed. He was earnest now, his hands juggling out a series of gestures, rattling on about this pygmy fish and how So-and-so had first described the albino tendency and how the field biologists from State were occasionally turning the odd one up in their nets on the St. Mary’s and how he, Saxby, was going to collect and breed them and turn the reflecting pool at the big house into a breeding pond so he could ship them out to aquarists all over the world. “They all go to Africa or South America,” he said, “but there’s a gold mine right here in the Okefenokee and the St. Mary’s River. Think of it, Ruth. Just think of it.”

She had a hard time with that proposition. She wasn’t thinking of fish—as far as she was concerned, fish existed for the sole purpose of being broiled, poached or deep-fried—but she wasn’t thinking of Jane Shine either. Saxby’s voice was a soothing murmur, the wine good, the food even better, the sound of the waves plangent and lulling beyond the dark lacquered strips of the shutters. She drank to Saxby’s project, and gladly. When the first bottle was gone, they ordered another.

Later, standing at the bow of the Tupelo Queen and watching the low dark hump of the island emerge from the black fastness of Peagler Sound, she felt the strength rise in her. Jane Shine. What did she care if she was surrounded by Jane Shines—she had Saxby, she had Hiro (he’d be back, of course he would), she had the big house and the billiard room and she had her work. She felt powerful, expansive, generous, ready to bury the petty jealousies that had nagged at her all these years. Art wasn’t a foot race. There were no winners or losers. You became a writer for the sake of the work, for the satisfaction of creating a world, and if someone else— if Jane Shine—stepped in and won the prizes, usurped the pages of the magazines, took the best room at Thanatopsis House, well, so much the better for her. It wasn’t a contest. It wasn’t. There was room for everybody.

What with the wine and her revelation aboard the ferry, Ruth felt almost saintly—a Juliet of the Spirits, a Beatrice, a Mother Teresa herself—as she mounted the stairs to the billiard room, arm in arm with Saxby. The usual crew was there. Smoke hung in the air. Pool balls clattered. As they pushed through the door, laughter darted round the corners of the room and fell off to a wheeze, and then Ruth dropped Saxby’s arm and started across the floor for the card table. All eyes were on her. She was looking demure, she knew it, looking shy and sweet and gracious. “Ruthie,” Irving Thalamus said, glancing up from his cards.

That “Ruthie” should have alerted her—there was no joy in it, no verve; it was merely an announcement, pared down as if with a knife—but Ruth wasn’t listening. She was walking, crossing the room, the corners of her mouth turned up in a wide full-lipped airline hostess’s smile of greeting, all her attention focused on Jane Shine. She was vaguely aware of Sandy, off to her left, and of Bob the poet, but the only one she saw clearly was Jane, seated at the right hand of Thalamus, seated in her own spot.

No one said a word. Ruth’s feet were moving, her thighs brushing lightly beneath the new red tube dress she’d worn to the restaurant, but she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, the floor was a treadmill, she was in the middle of a dream gone sour. And then, suddenly, too suddenly, she was standing over the card table and Jane Shine was glancing up at her. Jane was in white, in a high-collared linen dress with a thousand perfect pleats, though the room was as hot as Devil’s Island. Her Andalusian hair, blackly glittering, teetered over her face in thick loose coils, and her eyes—her icy violet eyes—were shrunk to pinpricks.

“Jane,” Ruth said, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears, as if she were shouting underwater, as if it were coming back at her from a tape recorder set on the wrong speed, “welcome to Thanatopsis.”

Jane didn’t move, didn’t speak, merely held her there in the silence that roared with the clatter of insects from the void beyond the windows. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, “but have we met?”

There was no breakfast for ruth the next morning—she couldn’t have digested anything anyway. She was up before Owen, up before the birds stirred in the trees or the night gave way to the first thin gray wash of dawn. But then, she’d barely slept. She’d lain there in her narrow bed in her cramped and chintzy room, seething, raging, her mind pounding on like a machine out of control: God, how she loathed that bitch! Saxby had tried to console her, but she wouldn’t let him touch her—it was perverse, she knew it, but she had to sleep in her own room, right there on the other side of the wall from her, had to drink in her own hurts and distill them, purify them, turn them into something she could use.

The path to her studio, familiar in daylight, was a pit of shadow, blacker than the trees, blacker than the thicket that rose up on either side of her. She had no flashlight, and the names that came to her were the names of reptiles: cottonmouth, copperhead, diamond-back. During the drive out from Los Angeles, Saxby had fascinated her with his tales of unwitting tourists in open-toed shoes, of developers and real estate agents bitten in the lip, eyelid and ear, of moccasins thick as firehoses dropping from the trees. Each of these stories, in the most minute and horrific detail, came back to her now, but they didn’t deter her, not for a minute. She edged along that invisible path, hearing, smelling, tasting, all her taps open wide. The danger, the oddness of the hour, the thick simmering swelter of the air made her feel alive all over again.

By the time she rounded the final loop of the S curve that gave onto the cabin, the eastern sky was half lit and Jane Shine was receding, ever so gradually, from the front hallway of her consciousness. The place was still, the air soft. The first light in the windowpanes gave back the phantasmagoric shapes of the trees behind her. A cardinal shot across the clearing. As she mounted the steps, she was thinking of her story, her novella, of the woman in Santa Monica Bay, and of Hiro and his persecution and sufferings, and of how that was her story too. Yes: the woman’s husband, that was it. He’d deserted her and they were looking for him, the police were, and he’d run off into the—

She stopped cold. The food was gone—the blackened bananas and maculated pears, the tins of fish and moldy crackers and all the rest—and the table was a mess, and there was someone, a form, a shape, yes, huddled on the couch. A surge of pleasure shot through her—Someone’s been tasting my porridge, she thought, Someone’s been sleeping in my bed—and she eased through the door in silence, standing there with her back to the wall—just standing there—until the form on the couch became Hiro Tanaka. But he was different somehow. It took a moment before it came to her: he was clean. Free of Band-Aid flesh-colored strips, free of scratches and blotches and insect bites. And the soles of his feet, one set atop the other, were clean too—and unmarked. He was still wearing Irving Thalamus’s Bermudas, his haunches glowing in the half-light with all the inchoate colors of the tropical spectrum, but he was wearing a new shirt, a generic gray sweatshirt with what looked like a coat of arms emblazoned across the chest. She tilted her head to make out the