East is East

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—be thought of her hair, her eyes, her throat, the ever so faint lisp that made her sound as if she were translating from the Castilian—interesting. And besides, that’s all he’d done—talk to her—and if Ruth was going to get so worked up about it, why had she sent him on ahead of her in the first place? What did she expect—that he’d go deaf, dumb and blind? That he’d stand in a corner wearing dark glasses and holding up a sign that said PROPERTY OF R. DERSHOWITZ till she got there?

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 he found himself standing at the bar, all dressed up and nowhere to go, and he found Jane Shine standing there beside him. “Hi,” she said, and he returned the greeting, social animal that he was, and she took a breath and said that Irving had told her he was interested in aquaria—that’s how she put it: “interested in aquaria”—and he was hooked. She’d had several tanks as a girl, and her ex-husband had taken her up the Orinoco in a pirogue and there they’d met Herbert Axelrod himself. The patron saint of aquarists was on a collecting trip, and he took them back to his base camp for a dinner of piracuru and onions and showed them a tank crowded with a new species of characin he’d discovered just that morning.

To Saxby, it was the voice of heaven.

When it began to get late and Ruth still hadn’t appeared, he crossed the lawn to the house, went up to her room and knocked for the fourth time that evening. There was no answer. He put his head in the door and saw that she was gone. Puzzled, he checked the two upstairs bathrooms, made a quick circuit of the parlor and veranda, and cut back across the lawn to the party, figuring he’d somehow missed her in the crush. He circulated through the crowd, looking for her, and he took a glass of champagne, and when somebody put a plate of food in his hand, he ate. She wasn’t on the dance floor, and she wasn’t at the bar. He had a bourbon on the rocks, and then another. He talked with Sandy, Abercorn, Regina and Thalamus. Thalamus had seen her an hour or so ago, he thought, heading away from the bar—had he looked on the dance floor? Saxby assured him that he had, and then he downed another bourbon while contemplating the mystery of it all. He went back to the house and asked everyone he ran into if they’d seen her, and he checked the bathrooms again, and the kitchen. She’d vanished.

Back at the party, he had a bourbon with Wellie Peagler and washed it down with a glass of champagne. Wellie was representing a group of investors who wanted to build a golf course and resort on the island, and before he knew it, Saxby was arguing passionately for the inviolability of Tupelo and the claims of historicity, and he snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray and told Wellie he could take his investors and shove them up his ass. Wellie didn’t flinch—just gave him a paternal smile and introduced him to a big pale blustery character who said he was a venture capitalist and they had a drink to that—venture capitalism, that is—and they had a drink to nine irons and holes in one. And then, before he knew what was happening, a girl he’d had a brief thing with when he was home to visit his mother two Christmases ago took him by the arm and led him out onto the dance floor. The rest was a blur, though he did remember standing at the bar at some indeterminate hour talking to somebody he couldn’t recall about something he’d forgotten, when his mother put a hand on his arm and asked him where Ruth was.

Ruth. The name came back to him as if from some coat closet of memory. Ruth’s face rose before him, and it was knit with fury. He looked at his mother and shrugged.

Was she all right? his mother wanted to know. Was she feeling ill? Had they quarreled?

He defended himself in all his innocence—no, no quarrel; he’d been looking for her all night—and he was about to have another drink when Septima put her arm in his and announced in a quavering voice that she was tired. She kept a tight grip on him as she said her unending goodbyes, and then she led him across the lawn, up the steps and into the house, where she put him to bed and sleep came like a guillotine.

In the morning, he had a headache.

Rico made him some poached eggs and a Bloody Mary, and he ate the eggs and drank the drink and felt worse. It was two in the afternoon when he mounted the stairs to check on Ruth. The enigma of her disappearance had settled on him while he was numbly slicing egg and watching the yolk run, trying to decide whether his stomach could handle that much gravity. Ruth, he thought. Jesus Christ, what happened to Ruth? As he mounted the stairs, he felt a sense of impending crisis, ominous and inescapable, but chalked it up to misfiring neurons and the egg that lay there like death on his stomach. Ruth wasn’t in her room. Her cosmetics—jars of this and that, mascara, lipstick—were scattered all over her dressing table, and her bed was unslept in. Or it had been slept in and remade. It was two o’clock, after all. She would be at her studio at this hour, working. For a moment he thought of hiking out there to clear up the mystery surrounding the party—and any little misunderstanding that may have arisen from it—but his legs felt like wax and he went back to his room to lie down a bit and let the world readjust itself to him.