East is East

the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Alec Guinness emerging from the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and then she lay face down on the bed and began to massage her temples.

Hiro. Poor Hiro. She had made love to him, after all—for the novelty, yes, and because the moment was right—but there was feeling there too. There was. And she ached for him in that parched and blistering cell, Abercorn and Turco hanging over him with their obscene and insatiable curiosity. She ached for him, she did, but she’d been through an ordeal herself, and now, as the afternoon settled in, she closed her eyes and drifted off into a sleep that was depthless and pure.

She woke to a discreet, solicitous tapping at the door. It was five in the afternoon. There was a stale taste in her mouth, the residue of nicotine and bourbon. “Yes?” she called.

It was Saxby, waking her for the second time that day. This time there were no recriminations. This time he was beaming, grinning, puffed up to the roots of his hair with boyish glee. “Ruth! Ruth!” he cried, and it sounded like a dog’s bark at the door, and then he was in the room, on the bed, snatching her hands up in his own.

“Ruth!” he cried again, as if she’d been lost for years. His eyes were swimming. He looked delirious. “Ruth!” he shouted, though he was right there, right on the bed beside her. He didn’t ask how she was feeling, how the interrogation had gone, whether they were going to shackle her to a bunch of spouse abusers on the chain gang or hang her by her thumbs—he just kept repeating her name, over and over. She wanted to know if he was drunk.

“Drunk? Hell, no: Ruth!”—there it was again—“Ruth!”—and again—“Roy Dotson just called!”

Yes? And so?

“He’s found them. My albinos. I’m out the door this minute.” And then he was up from the bed, shuffling his big feet, jerking his limbs and tugging at his ears like one of the afflicted.

“Really?” She was grinning back at him now, feeling good, feeling happy for him, though the fish business was an ongoing mystery to her. Why fish? she wanted to ask him. What was the attraction? Seals, she could see, otters, the purple gallinule, for Christ’s sake—but fish? They were cold-blooded, stupid, gaping mouths and cartoon eyes: she hated fish. Hated aquariums. Hated dip nets and seines, canoes, rivers, lakes, swamps, hated it all. But watching him there in the stippled shadows of the lace curtains, tasting his excitement, she was happy.

Then he bent to kiss her, deep and hard—the kiss of an explorer leaving home, the kiss of a lepidopterist or spelunker—and he was out the door. But then he was back, poking his head round the doorframe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, hanging there, his motor revving, fish on the brain, “I almost forgot: How’d it go? With the sheriff and all?”

The question brought her back, and for a moment she was afraid all over again, but then it passed. She was okay. She was in one piece. Hiro was in jail and her novella was shot full of holes—literally—but they weren’t going to do anything to her. She could write another novella, forget all about the Japanese and their weird rites and customs, let somebody else portray suicide in the surf and sex in kimonos. She had Sax and Septima and Thanatopsis House, she had Irving Thalamus and Laura Grobian—and Jane Shine was gone for the weekend. No, there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all.

“How’d it go?” She repeated his question, reaching for a cigarette and feeling Olympian, impervious, unscathed, La Dershowitz ascendant. She took a minute with the response, Saxby hanging there in the doorway, the late shafts of the sun gilding the curtains till they seemed solid as pillars. “Fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

On sundays, armand served dinner at seven and sometimes a bit later, depending on his whim and the mood of the colonists. Sunday was, after all, the day of rest, or so Septima reasoned, and long before she’d engaged her current chef she’d pushed back cocktails and dinner by an hour on the Lord’s Day, and it was now a Thanatopsis tradition. Sunday afternoons were long and languorous, and no one stirred before six, when the first sunburned and subdued clumps of artists began to gather on the patio or in the front parlor for cocktails. Sometimes there would be music—a poet would sit down at the piano or a biographer would reveal a hidden talent for the clarinet, ravishing the room with the adagio from Mozart’s concerto or a Gershwin medley—and the ice cubes would tumble into shaker or glass with a rhythmic click that was salvation itself for the sun-dazed and weary.

It was close to seven when Ruth came down for dinner. She’d scrubbed and showered and scrubbed again, ridding herself of any vestige of the sweaty film that had clung to her earlier that afternoon, clogging her pores and making her feel dirty and vulnerable while Abercorn hung over her with his unfinished face and chummy questions. She was wearing a white Guatemalan peasant blouse embroidered with bright blue flowers and matching full skirt, and she descended the steps and crossed the front hallway feeling light, airy, lustral, feeling unconquerable all over again.

When she entered the front parlor, Sandy was at the piano, stroking the petrosal keys as if they were flower petals, dripping his way through one syrupy Beatles tune after another. The melodies were perfect reconstructions of a thousand memories, syrupy or not, and with the help of their third or fourth cocktails, the colonists were in a mellow mood. Ruth stepped through the door and recognized them all, her friends and fellow artists, her community, her family, poised on sofas and ottomans, hovering over the bar, each and every one of them a joy and a solace.

Irving Thalamus was the first to call out her name, as usual—it was his way, chutzpah thrown up like a screen, the legend crowing—and then a murmur went through the room and they converged on her as if she’d just broken the tape in the marathon.

“You fox,” Thalamus said, shaking his legendary head, “you sly fox.” And then, turning to the others, “Can she keep a secret or what?” He was beaming at her, embracing her, squeezing her as if she were exotic fruit. “This,” he pronounced, “is a writer.”

Ruth hugged him back, giving them all a knowing but self-deprecatory grin, and reddening, if ever so slightly. Ina was staring at her in wonder. Bob’s eyes were glowing. Regina, in a chartreuse leather halter, looked up from a game of solitaire and one of the cigars she was now affecting, and Sandy broke off in the middle of “Fool on the Hill” to leap a barstool and pour Ruth a conspicuous martini—a whiff of vermouth and three olives, just the way she liked it. Clara and Patsy were there too, hovering at the edge of the press and looking like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in matching pantsuits.

“Hey, La D.: you’re just in time,” Sandy hollered, elbowing his way toward her with the drink held high, “—we just sent out for sushi.”

And oh, they laughed at that, her fellow colonists, mellow and proud, an excess of moisture in their eyes, warming up for the evening, the week, the month to come, with its string of Japanese jokes, its cops and robbers routines, and the audacious, awe-inspiring theme that would underlie it all: What La Dershowitz won’t do for a story, huh? And all the while the delectable questions—how long, how much, had she slept with him and what did the sheriff say?—hung in the air, awaiting fulfillment.

During the soup course, Ruth managed tete-a-tetes with Irving, Sandy, a myopic poet in a strapless gown with whom she’d never before exchanged a word, and a vacuous, wide-eyed Ina Soderbord. Over salad, Clara and Patsy pressed her for details, and while she tore into the main course—she found that she was ravenous after all the day’s excitement—Septima herself wanted clarification of some of the statements she’d made earlier. It wasn’t a dinner—it was musical chairs. By the time Rico brought out dessert and the big gleaming coffee urn, Ruth was the center of a group that wheeled out from her like planetary bodies, circling, tangential, held fast by the irresistible force of gossip.

After-dinner drinks were served on the patio.

Ruth was chatting with Bob and Sandy, enjoying the relative cool of the evening, feeling reborn, when she felt a hand slip into her own and looked up into the depthless haunted eyes of Laura Grobian. At fifty, Laura Grobian was the doyenne of the dark-eyed semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former-bohemian school of WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209-page trilogy set in 1967 San Francisco. She’d published a few slim volumes since (each phrase chiseled like sculpture—or dental plaster, depending on your point of view) and she’d been photographed by Karsh, Avedon and Leibowitz, her sunken cheeks, black bangs and haunted eyes as fixed an image in the public consciousness as Truman Capote’s hat or Hemingway’s beard. She dismissed Bob and Sandy with a neurasthenic bob of her head and drew Ruth aside.

“Oh, Ruth,” she gasped, fanning herself while bats careened overhead and mosquitoes hovered, “I heard, I heard all about it. How terrified you must have been—”