East is East

Brie looked stunned, lost; she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“And the story itself”—Ruth gave her a withering look—“it’s the cheapest kind of melodrama. Fourteen-year- old Swedes, I mean give me a break.”

“Ruthie”—the tone was admonitory, two attenuated syllables, a punch on the first and a long trailing tongue-cluck on the second—“you can’t really mean that, can you?” Irving Thalamus had materialized at her elbow. He was wearing a chartreuse and yellow shirt, open at the neck to show off the black creeping jungle of his chest hair. Ruth realized with a jolt that this was the matching top to the shorts she’d pilfered for Hiro. Irving was smiling at her, his lips tight and sardonic, a smile that caught at the corners of his mouth and pricked her like a goad.

Brie began to gulp for breath as if they were treading water in the deep end of a swimming pool. “That’s what I was saying, Mr. Thalamus—”

He forestalled her with a raised palm and a tender squeeze of the elbow that managed to be both fatherly and lewd at once. “Irving,” he said, “call me Irving,” his voice rich and promiscuous.

“That’s just what I was saying, Irving”—she gave him a smile, cute, cute—“I mean I’ve heard a lot of readings at school, and in New York, and this one just blew me away, I mean knock me down with a stick, it’s like she’s possessed or something, I mean talk about acting, talk about dramatic interpretation …” Brie was so worked up she couldn’t go on. She just stood there, bare-shouldered, wide-eyed, goggling and gasping like a goldfish.

“And how do you feel about it, Ruthie?” Irving’s eyes were hooded. Somehow he’d managed to work an arm round Brie’s waist. He was really enjoying this.

But Ruth wasn’t about to give him a show. And she certainly didn’t want to talk about Jane Shine, let alone get drawn into a debate over her trumped-up stories and half-witted histrionics. She was going to be cool. Olympian. Above it. “Give me a break, Irving,” she said, leveling her eyes on him. “That wasn’t a reading, it was a premenstrual breakdown.” And then she turned on her heels and left them to their flesh-squeezing and body hair.

She went to Sandy for solace, but Sandy was as bad as Brie. He sat on the far side of the room with Bob, tapping his fingers to the music and basking in the afterglow of Jane’s reading. Ruth tried to turn him, tried to steer him away from idolatry and sow the seeds of disaffection, but it was no use. He pulled blissfully at the neck of a beer, glancing over at the little group around Jane—Seezers and Teitelbaum, Septima, Laura Grobian, Clara and Patsy and half a dozen others—as if they were disciples gathered round the Messiah himself. Or herself.

She found Regina in the corner, scowling into a glass of rum, and she knew that at least she would have no qualms about calling shit shit and seeing Jane for the imposter she was. Regina had darkened her eye sockets with kohl and dyed her hair an interstellar black; she looked like a woman in purdah who’s had the veil snatched away from her face. “So,” Ruth said, sidling up to her, “do we bury her next to Wordsworth or what? Or maybe P.T. Barnum would be more like it.” She gave a mirthless little laugh.

“Jane?” Regina snubbed out a cigarette in the potted palm behind her. She straightened up with a shrug, searched Ruth’s eyes for a second and then looked away. “I don’t know—she can be a real pain in the ass, a real prima donna, if you know what I mean, but I thought the thing tonight was at least dramatic.”

“Dramatic?” Ruth echoed. She was incredulous.

“Half of this shit puts me to sleep after about six words—at least she, like, held my interest.”

Ruth couldn’t help herself—her voice got away from her. “Yeah, but with what? Fakery. Crap. The kind of trumped-up horseshit that hides the fact that there’s nothing there.”

Regina attempted a smile, but it faded as quickly as it bloomed. She fumbled in her leather jacket for another cigarette.

“Damn it,” Ruth cried, yelped—she was going too far, she knew it, but she couldn’t stop now—“can’t you see that Jane”—she tried to lower her voice, tried to contain the damage—“Jane Shine is nothing but hot air and horseshit?”

Ruth became aware in that instant that Regina wasn’t looking at her—she was looking just over her shoulder and she was trying to do something with her mouth and blackened eyes. Ruth turned as if she were caught in taffy, tar, as if she were up to her neck in the La Brea pits.

Septima stood there before her, her expression climbing up and down the ladder of emotion. Not ten feet away was Jane Shine, on the move, regal, her feet, hips and shoulders touched ever so gracefully by Motown funk, her face locked up like a vise beneath the towering shako of her hair. Between them, the ring of toadies and yea- sayers had opened up like a receiving line. All eyes were on Ruth.

Jane kept coming. When she reached Septima’s side, she pulled herself up. “Yes,” she said, and you could skewer meat on the edge in her voice, “I’m sure we’re all holding our breath till you get up there, La Dershowitz”—she spat out the sobriquet as if it burned her tongue and then paused to let it gather force. “That is, if you’ve got anything to read—you do, don’t you? You must have been working on something all this time.”

Ruth didn’t know what to do. Marvin Gaye was dancing all over her head and every face in the room was turned toward her. Her instinct was to lash out, slam the clenched white ball of her fist into those outer-space eyes, rip the lace collar from her throat, demolish the hair, call her out for the conniving leg-spreading literary whore that she was, but she hesitated and lost hold of the moment. Her face was working. Her brain was in overdrive. They were all—every one of them—waiting.

“Ruthie”—Septima had her by the hand and she began to chatter as if nothing had happened, as if the cold talentless bitch hadn’t just called her out, humiliated her, smashed open the hive and stung her to death—“Ruthie, darlin’, we was all—Orlando and Mignonette and Laura and I—we was all just sayin’ what a pleasure it would be to have you read from your work too, and you know, as everyone here does, that while we don’t require room and board from our artists, we do feel privileged to receive payment in kind …” She looked up at the ceiling as if it were transparent, a faraway smile fixed on her lips. “Some of the things we’ve heard in this very room …”

This was the challenge. This was it. This was the slap in the face, the gauntlet at her feet. She’d wanted to be inconspicuous, let Jane have her moment, fight her with subterfuge and innuendo, but she’d blown it. Her heart was going, her eyes must have been wild, but she knew her lines, oh yes indeed. “Septima,” she said in her calmest, steadiest tones, and she looked into those milky old gray eyes as if they were the only eyes in the room, as if Jane Shine weren’t standing there twelve inches to the right, as if she didn’t exist, had never existed, as if this were a private tete-a-tete with the woman who could well be her future mother-in-law, “I’d be honored.”

The doyenne of Thanatopsis House broadened her smile till her thin old lips were stretched taut. “Tomorrow night, then?” she said, and something flickered to life in the depths of her moribund eyes.

Ruth nodded.

“Same time as tonight’s?”

Marvin Gaye: what was he singing? Ain’t no mountain high enough/Ain’t no river deep enough. Ruth took a deep breath. “Sure,” she said, “no problem.”

In the morning, she cursed herself. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let herself get sucked in like that? Jane Shine. She wished her an early death, wished her sagging breasts and pyorrhea, wished she’d explode like the puffed-up frog in Aesop’s fable.

But wishes get you nowhere.

Ruth was in her studio, working hard, before anyone in the big house had even the vaguest semiconscious presentiment that morning had arrived and that breakfast and work and the slow miraculous unveiling of the day awaited them. She was working with an ease and concentration that would have amazed her if she’d stopped to think about it, hammering away at the keyboard and wielding her Liquid Paper like a sword while a stack of clean new perfectly wrought pages mounted before her. By ten o’clock she’d substantially rewritten sections of “Two Toes,” “Of Tears and the Tide”—it wasn’t so bad, not really—and the piece that had come back from the Atlantic, which in a burst of inspiration she’d retitled “Sebastopol,” to suggest the sort of battle her main characters—two couples—were engaged in. What she thought she’d do was present fragments from each of the stories—real work in progress, the real thing, not some typeset and justified artifact—ending up with the section of “Tears” that described the very Hiro-like husband of the doomed woman. They would sit there— Irving, Laura, Septima, Seezers and Teitelbaum and E.T. herself—and they would think of her, Ruth, and her triumph over the sheriff and Abercorn and the macho little toad who’d given them a taste of real-life drama right out