swung open the driver’s door.
He hadn’t had a chance to clean up—his hands stank of perch and darter and of the rich fecal muck of the Okefenokee, and the thighs and backside of his jeans were stiff with the residue of his fish-handling—and Ruth took him by surprise. No sooner had he swung open the door and set his feet on the ground, than she was there, rushing into his arms in a strapless cocktail dress that showed off the flashing lines and tawny hollows of her throat and shoulders. “Sax,” she moaned, holding him, kissing him, fish-stink and all, “I’m so glad you’re back.”
He held her, pressed her to him, hot already, hot instantly, a gas grill gone from pilot to high at the merest touch, and he wondered if he should gently push her away, for the sake of her dress, and he was embarrassed and he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t speak either—just held him—and that was odd: she was never at a loss for words. And then he felt it, a tremor running through her, seismic, an emotional quake: she was crying. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
She wouldn’t lift her face.
“Is something wrong? Did something happen while I was away? What is it, babe?”
Her voice was buried, it was doleful and hoarse. “Oh, Sax,” she said, and she paused, and she squeezed him and he squeezed her back. “You’ve got to talk to your mother, you’ve got to—for me.”
Talk to his mother?
“It’s Jane Shine,” she said. She looked up at him now—lifted her head from his shoulder and showed him the tears on her face and the cold fierce glare in her eyes. “She can’t come here. She can’t. She’s a bitch. A snob. She’s—all her talent’s between her legs, Sax, that’s all. She’s not worth it, she isn’t.”
He said something, anything, a rumble of disconnected words to comfort her, but she wouldn’t be comforted.
Her hands tightened on his biceps and her eyes were hard. “No, Sax, I mean it,” she said. “She can’t come here.”
There was a sudden shout of laughter from across the lawn and Ruth didn’t flinch, didn’t hear it, didn’t care. “It would ruin everything,” she said.
Rusu
It was a steamy oppressive tropical day, flies everywhere, the reek of low tide settling in the nostrils like a kind of death, a day on which Ruth didn’t bother with breakfast at the convivial table. She didn’t feel even faintly convivial, and after greeting Owen with a stony face and wordlessly appropriating two hot buttered rolls from Rico, she started up the path for Hart Crane, though she didn’t feel much like working either. What she felt like doing was getting off the island, getting out of there altogether—she felt like dressing for two hours and lingering over an eight-course meal at the best French restaurant in New York and then insulting the waiter, the chef, the sommelier and the maitre d’. She felt like kicking dogs, pulling teeth, stepping into one of the endless workshops she’d suffered through as a student and annihilating some starry-eyed fool with scarifying and hurtful words.
Gnats darted at her face. Her feet hurt. It was a rotten day. A cataclysmic day. A stinking deadly washed-out low-tide sort of day, the day on which Jane Shine, in all her cheap and overblown glory, was set to descend on Thanatopsis House.
Ruth worked through the morning on her Japanese story—she called it “Of Tears and the Tide”—though what she wrote wasn’t very good and she kept getting bogged down on individual phrases and the sorts of choices that are second nature when you’re working well and impossible when you’re not. At lunchtime, she was up from her desk the moment Owen stole away, and she lifted the bucket off the hook and ate greedily, hungrily, without a thought for Hiro. She hadn’t seen him in a week now, and there was no sign he’d been back. The fruit and cheeses she’d left for him were rotting, the canned goods were untouched, the crackers going soft with mold. And that rankled her too: he’d deserted her. He was a living story, a fiction come to life—she’d imagined him and there he was—and she needed him. Didn’t he realize that?
She was worried about him too, of course—that was part of it. He could have drowned, fallen into a bog, could have been treed and peppered with shot by one of the fired-up redneck coon hunters who haunted the porch out front of the VFW post. But no, if he’d been shot she would have heard about it before the gun was cool, no secrets on Tupelo Island. Maybe he’d got away altogether—maybe he’d swum to the mainland or stowed away on the ferry. Or—and the thought depressed her—maybe he’d taken up with someone else, some altruistic soul who even now was feeding him a hot bowl of steamed rice and chopped vegetables with a splash of Kikkoman soy sauce and a handful of crunchy noodles. Sure, that was it: he’d found a soft touch someplace else. Richer food. A better deal. Some old blue-nosed widow with trembling hands who fussed over him as if he were a wandering tomcat. Yes, that was it. For a moment the thought arrested her: he
Later, when her mind fell numb and she couldn’t stand it any longer, when she figured she’d given Jane Shine all the time in the world to settle in and clear out of her way, Ruth pushed herself up from the desk, glanced bitterly round the room—the blackened bananas, spotty pears, the dusty tins of sardines, anchovies and tuna—and slumped out the door. She was planning to skip cocktails and then have Saxby take her out to dinner on the mainland, putting off the inevitable—she just couldn’t face that hypocrite Jane Shine, not now, not today. But when she got to the big house and tried to duck up the stairs, Irving Thalamus shot out of the parlor, drink in hand, and caught her by the elbow. He wheeled her into his arms and dragged a quick kiss across her lips, and then he beamed at her, a little drunkenly, while she strained to look over his shoulder and scan the cocktail crowd for that ski-jump nose, that mass of dark iridescent flamenco-dancer’s hair, the extraterrestrial eyes and prim bosom, for that ethereal freak, Jane Shine.
Irving Thalamus squeezed her, smiling blearily and exhaling vodka fumes in her face. “Hey,” he said, his smile dissolving momentarily, “no Jane. She never showed.”
Ruth felt a surge of hope. She pictured the wreckage of the plane scattered across a rocky slope, twisted shards of steaming metal, flesh for the crows to pluck, the auto crushed like an accordion, the train flung from the rails.
“I thought she was supposed to be here this morning?”
Thalamus shrugged.
“Has she called? Has anybody heard anything?”
“You know Jane,” he said.
Yes, she knew her. They’d been at Iowa together, the first year, before Ruth dropped out and tried her luck at Irvine. From the moment she walked into the classroom with her downcast eyes and bloodless pale skin beneath a bonnet of pinned-up hair, Jane was royalty—anointed and blessed—and Ruth was shit. She wrote about sex— nothing but—in a showy over-refined prose Ruth found affected, but which the faculty—the exclusively male faculty—discovered to be the true and scintillating voice of genius. Ruth fought it. She did. This was her arena, after all, and she did manage to captivate one of the instructors, a skinny bearded hyperkinetic visiting poet from Burundi. But he didn’t speak English very well, and perhaps for that reason—or perhaps because he was temporary and wore tribal tattoos on his lips and ears—he didn’t carry much weight. At the end of the year, when the second-year fellowships were announced, Jane Shine swept all before her.
In anger and frustration, Ruth had quit Iowa and gone home to California and Irvine, where she managed to produce the story that won her her first acceptance in
