here, and he’d be more than happy to pay whatever they liked—he was on official government business, after all, and the alternative was, well, flashing his smile and wincing comically at a peal of thunder, the alternative was to go on out there and drown.
And so Ruth was up early, the first one at breakfast and the first to trot off to work, up before Abercorn could pin her down with any more questions. The woods were still, the morning fragrant with the previous night’s rain. The sun had risen golden and glorious from the chop of the cold Atlantic, and as she walked the path to her studio it seemed to melt into the hard unyielding posts of the slash pines. She walked slowly, breathing it all in, but still she arrived at her studio nearly an hour and a half earlier than usual. It was just past seven, and as she sat down at her desk and stared numbly at the curling page in the typewriter, she could think of nothing but lunch. Would he show up? And if he did, what would she do and what would it lead to? She envisioned her Japanese in bed, envisioned herself in Japan, a country of office buildings, claustrophobic streets and tiny feet, and then finally, to pass the time, she settled down to work.
Hiro didn’t show up that day. Perversely. It was almost as if he knew she wanted to reach out to him but that he had some kind of cultural thing—some kind of weird Japanese machismo or whatever—that kept him from her. And that evening, since Saxby was still in Savannah and she was just beginning to flex her wings in the billiard room, and because she was bored too and felt like it—the secret,
And where was Turco that evening? Was he tracking down the criminal even as they spoke? “Oh, no,” Abercorn had said, “he’s not that fanatical. No, he just doesn’t like roofs.” “Roofs?” she echoed, her lips drawn tight in an incipient smile. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, and he lifted a can of warm Coke to his mouth and then put it down again, “but last night, when it was raining?” She nodded. “He takes off out of the room with his backpack and pitches his tent out there in the bushes someplace.” And then they had a good laugh over that one, and Ruth looked into Abercorn’s pink eyes and thought he was kind of cute in a way.
Two days passed. Abercorn mooned around Thanatopsis House and some of the artists—Regina Mclntyre, in particular—began to grumble. Turco was invisible, out there in his tent, creeping through the marsh, putting his loathsome all into deracinating Ruth’s secret before it had a chance to bear fruit. In the lull of the afternoon, she heard disco music, distant, faint, deadly. The lunch bucket remained on its hook.
And then, on the third day, Hiro appeared again. It must have been an hour at least after Owen had crept up to the porch and hung the aluminum container on its hook—she’d heard him, heard the groan of the second step, the loose one, but she hadn’t turned, hadn’t moved, and she covered herself with a furious burst of typing. A line of
She froze. Slowly, she told herself, slowly. She gave him her profile and held it, and then she looked full-face over her shoulder. He was there, in the doorway, derealized behind the grid of the screen. The red headband was gone—he was wearing something else now, something tan and twisted—and he was naked to the waist, both straps of the coveralls dangling forlornly behind him. He made no move toward the lunch pail.
“I want to help you,” Ruth whispered.
He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there. His face seemed softer somehow, as if he were exhausted or about to cry … and she had a sudden leap of intuition: he was just an overgrown child, scared, hurt and hungry.
“Take the food. I left it for you. Take it,” she whispered, afraid to raise her voice, afraid he’d bolt.
She saw him swallow hard. He shuffled his feet. And then he lifted the lunch bucket from the hook and cradled it to him.
“Listen,” she said, whispering still, whispering like a hunter in a blind, “they’re after you, do you understand? Two men, they’re in the big house.”
He said nothing, but his face looked softer still. He was finished, she could see it. He’d had it. He was ready to give up, throw in the towel, slip the handcuffs over his wrists.
“I won’t let them take you,” she said. “I’ll get you clothes, food, you can stay here, out of sight.” She lifted one leg and very slowly swung the chair round to face him. She’d made do with an ordinary face and figure all her life, had triumphed with it, had left a legion of men stunned in her wake, because she had the indefinable something they all wanted and because she knew it. Now, at thirty-four, she had all that and twenty years of experience too, and she was irresistible. “Come in here,” she said, and she was still whispering, but her voice had an edge to it now, peremptory and sharp. “Open the door. Sit and eat”—she made the motions with her hands and mouth—“and then you can rest there on the couch. I won’t hurt you. I give you my word.”
For a long moment he stood there, his eyes riveted on her. He was bigger than she’d remembered, sadder, his eyes gone hollow and cheeks sunk in on themselves, but when he reached for the door she froze again. Maybe he
The door swung open and he took a tentative step into the room. He clung desperately to the lunch pail. His eyes were wild. He nearly cried out when the door slammed shut behind him.
Then she saw what it was knotted round his head: shiny nylon, a thin band of white elastic: Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t hold it any longer—the armed and dangerous alien was an overgrown kid with Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties wound round his head—and suddenly she was laughing, laughing so hard she thought she’d choke.
Later, after he’d devoured the lunch, a box of saltines, two apples and a string of Medjool dates her mother had sent her, he fell face forward on the white wicker settee and slept the sleep of the dead. For a long while she just watched him, studying him as a medical student might have studied a corpse or an artist a model. She examined his limbs, his blistered back and scarred feet, the snarl of his knotted hair, the dimensions of his face, even the string of saliva that dangled from his half-open mouth. He was a mess. A real mess. A week and a half of crouching in the swamps hadn’t done him much good. His flesh—every visible inch of it—was a crusted quilt of bites and scabs and pustules; an infected contusion had swollen the lobe of his right ear—the upward one—to twice its normal size; and a long hyphenated slash trailed away from his eyebrow like the exaggerated makeup of a clown or whore. His face was puffy, his skin sallow and sunburned. The only article of clothing he wore—a pair of ill-fitting overalls—was torn, seam-split, pinched in the rear and stiff with filth. Worst of all was the odor he brought with him, rank and elemental, the stink of rotting meat, of something dead along the road.
She didn’t know how long she sat there watching him—he never moved, but for the rise and fall of his breathing, and the sun slid imperceptibly across the sky. It was cocktail hour (or thereabout: the angle of the sun as it struck the western window and illuminated her pitcher plants told her that much) when she finally made up her mind to get him some clothes, soap, hydrogen peroxide—she was afraid he’d decompose without it. She thought of a piece of fruit—a pear or banana—its skin speckled, jaundiced, blackening finally and collapsing on itself. She pushed herself up, eased out the door and made her way back to the big house.
If she’d hoped to slip in unnoticed, luck was against her. It was a day of unadulterated sunshine and sweet wafting ocean breezes, and her fellow colonists had taken the cocktail hour outside. They were gathered on the patio, glasses glinting in the sun, as she came up the walk. “Ruthie!” Irving Thalamus called, his face lit with chardonnay. “La Dershowitz,” raising his glass high, “fictioneer extraordinaire, come and drink some vin ordinaire!”
She had no choice, really: she needed him, and he’d begun, in a big way, to notice her. She crossed the sunstruck lawn, aware of the turned heads and the lull in the chatter, moving in her inevitable way, the heroine of her own movie, picturing herself in that dazzle of sunlight, in her tight jeans and clingy blouse. “Irving,” she said, moving into his embrace and exchanging a salutatory kiss that lingered half a beat too long, and then she was nodding to Ina Soderbord and Sandy De Haven and Regina Mclntyre and chattering nonstop until someone stuck a
