him, wriggling her big hips and shoulders and bust as if she’d just been hosed down. And then the crowd drifted into a new pattern and Bob Penick and his wife (hair the color of chicken liver, shiny prom dress with wilted corsage) writhed into view, not ten paces from Ina. They were doing a modified frug, a dance Ruth had learned—and abandoned—in high school.
She finished her champagne—was that her third glass?—and took another from the man with the iron face. (She wanted to tease him the way people tease the guards outside Buckingham Palace—tickle him or blow in his ear or something—but she thought better of it: after all, how much latitude could you expect from an old black man in a starched tuxedo at a white people’s party in Georgia?) She was feeling a bit giddy, enjoying herself even if she had been denied her entrance. Abercorn with Ina Soderbord. It was funny: the pale with the paler still. And what if they had children? They’d be eyebrowless, hairless, white as grubs, with little pink fishy eyes, and they’d grow up to be giants upon the earth, with shoulders and tits and feet that would give shoe salesmen nightmares. The boys would buy cheap overcoats and the girls would hyphenate their names—Soderbord-Abercorn—and people would think they were an agricultural product, something to spray on the crops to prevent cutworm. Oh, yes, it was hilarious. And Ruth was giddy. But where was Sax?
It was then that the band pulled the string on the horns and rolled into a piano-thumping boogie-woogie— they were eclectic, all right—and Irving Thalamus’s dry sniggering laugh jumped out at her from the direction of the bar. She turned and elbowed her way through the crowd, following the sound as unswervingly as a cat stalking a rustle in the grass. A pair of minor poets and a clutch of old ladies in pink chiffon gave way, and there he was— Thalamus—leaning against the bar and laughing down the front of Regina Mclntyre’s dress. Regina was showing acres of dead-white shoulder and bosom, and she was wrapped in a black leather dress that gave her the look of an extra in a movie about outer space vampires. But Ruth’s eye didn’t rest long on Regina or Thalamus either, because at that moment she spotted Saxby at the far end of the bar, and in the next she felt hot and sick and panicky all at once, felt like Madama Butterfly when they come to take her child away: Saxby was with Jane Shine.
It was a blow, and it staggered her. There she was, the woman she loathed more than anyone alive, her enemy, her nemesis, her bugaboo, and she had Saxby in her grip. Flawless, sickening, cool as a model poised on the runway, she was leaning into Saxby, one cold white hand fixed like a grappling hook to his arm. Ruth saw black silk and diamonds, hair on the attack, a roiling cloud of it enveloping Saxby in its fatal nimbus, and all at once she pictured him in the Jaguar, Jane Shine established as the doyenne of Thanatopsis House, her own stay cut mysteriously short. It was too much. She couldn’t handle it. She recoiled as if from some unthinkable horror—Saxby hadn’t seen her yet, nor Shine nor Thalamus either—and then Regina’s eyes caught hers and Regina smiled—or smirked—and Ruth was fighting her way back through the crush, Thalamus’s tentative “Ruthie?” floating somewhere behind her, the piano player up off his stool and banging the keyboard now with his feet and elbows and hams, the crowd roaring, roaring.
Stabbed in the back. Betrayed. A moment ago she’d exulted in Clara Kleinschmidt’s tears, above it all, Olympian, La Dershowitz, and now—now she felt the tears burning in her own eyes. How could he? How could he even talk to her? Ruth pushed blindly through the crowd. She felt as if she’d been slapped in the face, humiliated, and there was nothing to do but hide herself, run. She shoved past the old waiter—
She was there—
A ghost, yes: she was already gone. And what did Septima care? Or Owen—smirking at her, looming up out of the night like an executioner? They probably had her bags packed for her already—she was nothing here, insubstantial, a ghost, and Jane Shine was all and everything. “I—it’s nothing,” she stammered, her eyes full, “I’m just not … I can’t—” and then she let it go, shook off the old hag’s hand and bolted across the lawn, all the bile of her eighteen years of setback and denial rising in her throat.
Her first thought was to make for her room, slam the door behind her and freeze the world in place—but there were guests on the veranda, in the foyer and the parlor, charting and laughing, fondling drinks and gobbling their bits of flesh and cheese. She couldn’t face them. Not now. Not in this state. And then she thought of the cottage. That was her refuge, her safe house, that was where she reigned, La Dershowitz still—that was where her Hiro was.
She shied away from the house and crossed the lawn in the opposite direction, hurrying, the night moonlit, the path composing itself beneath her feet. Almost immediately the sounds of the party began to fade, soaked up in the insensate mass of foliage, and she was aware of the smaller sounds of the night, the rustling and chattering of things killing, eating, humping. There were fireflies, mosquitoes, she heard the soft breathy call of an owl. Her legs moved, her feet rose and fell. What had she gotten so upset about? So he’d talked to her, so she had her hand on his arm. It didn’t mean a thing. Or did it? In that moment the argument fell in on itself and she knew that that hand on the arm did mean something—meant everything—and that he knew it too. He did. And he should have known better. The anger came up on her all over again, burning like acid, all the hotter now that the shock of discovery was behind her. And Saxby would pay for it—oh, how he would pay.
But now, before she knew it, she was coming out of the familiar switchback in the trail and the cottage lay before her, awash in lunar light. “Hiro,” she called, and she didn’t give a damn if the whole world heard her, “Hiro, it’s me. I’m back.”
Skittish, he’d fastened the latch from the inside, and she rattled the handle of the screen door. “Hiro, wake up. It’s me.”
“Rusu?” His voice came back at her from the deeps of the room, sleep-worn and tentative, and then she saw the shadowy form of him rise from the loveseat and reach for his shorts. He was naked, the moon slanting through the windows to reveal the bow of his legs and the awkward dangle of his arms. “I’m coming,” he cried, and she watched him fall back into the shadows to lift first one leg and then the other to the dark mouth of the shorts.
“What time is it?” he said, swinging back the door to admit her. “Somesing wrong?”
“No, nothing,” she said, turning to face him.
“I should put on a light?” He was right there, right beside her. His breath was musty with sleep, his skin glowed in the moonlight.
“No,” she said, whispering now, “no, we won’t be needing it.”
Parfait in Chrome
He didn’t know what she was so upset about—really, he didn’t. She wouldn’t even look at him, let alone talk to him, for six full days following the party. Saxby understood that it had to do with Jane Shine, and with Ruth’s own insecurities, and he understood too that he had to humor her—but what she had to understand was that he was free to talk to anyone he pleased. Just because Ruth wet her pants every time somebody mentioned Jane Shine didn’t mean he had to treat the woman like a leper, did it? He liked her. She was—
All right, it was true—he had gotten a little carried away, what with the champagne and the music and the general high-spirited roar of the festivities, and for long stretches at a time he’d forgotten Ruth altogether. He was enjoying himself—was that a crime? She was late. She was dressing. I’ll catch up with you later, she said. And so
