East is East

have become self-destructive, hateful. Shooting drugs, drinking, whoring around. She would never make the national news again, and she knew it, her life a downward spiral from the age of one and a half on. And what would she do then? She’d marry some tattooed greaseball fifteen years her senior, a drummer in a rockabilly band, and then—but that was as far as Ruth had gotten. And now, reading over what she’d written, sifting through her notes, she felt nothing but despair. The idea stank. She stank. The whole miserable muggy drizzling world stank.

She lurched up from her desk and stepped out on the porch. It was no later than ten, ten thirty, though with the cloud cover it was hard to judge. She wondered if Owen was planning to bring her lunch. They’d seen plenty here over the years, from nervous breakdowns to fistfights to heart attacks and every sort of drunken and debauched behavior imaginable—artists would be artists, after all—but they’d never seen this. Hiro Tanaka, the Japanese desperado; La Dershowitz, his self-sacrificing succorer—or that didn’t sound right: protector, then; and the glorious, full-color, Dolbyenhanced Attack of the Rednecks! They’d never seen a studio shot up before. If for nothing else, they’d remember her for that—even if she never wrote another word. In years to come they’d lean over the bar or push back their dinner plates or bubble round the convivial table to corner some newcomer, some ingenue, and allow the incredulity to light up their faces as some one of them, queen of the hive or king of the jungle, gasped, Don’t tell me you’ve never beard the story of the bullet holes in Hart Crane?

Yes, Owen would bring lunch, all right. Business as usual. They’d seen everything but this, and it would go down in Thanatopsis legend, but Septima would never allow anything to interfere with the orderly business of creation, let alone the frenzy of the mob, destruction of property, attempted murder, anarchy and Yahooism. The only thing was, Ruth wouldn’t be there to eat the lunch Owen would bring her. She was too dispirited. Too anxious, too depressed even to work. And then she had a thought: maybe it was closer to eleven, after all. If so, the mail would be in. Maybe she’d just take a stroll back to the big house and see if there was anything for her. She couldn’t work today. Not today. And who could blame her?

* * *

As it turned out, there was something for her. Two things, actually. She checked her box in the coatroom, her eyes hungrily scanning the grid of mailboxes, noting as she did every day the volume of mail jamming Laura, Irving and even Jane’s boxes while her own remained conspicuously and degradingly empty. They got letters from publishers, agents and editors, high-tone magazines, review copies, fan mail. She got nothing. (For a while she’d toyed with the idea of stuffing envelopes with dummy letters and mailing them to herself, but she was afraid the postmarks would give her away—to Owen, at any rate. He was the one who sorted the mail—and any secret, any tidbit about anyone was fair game at Thanatopsis; the place was a jungle, it really was—and if that got out she’d never be able to show her face again.)

She envied Laura Grobian, who got fan mail from all over the world. When she was alone in the mailroom, when she was sure no one was looking, Ruth pulled the letters out and fanned through them, transfixed by the postmarks, the addresses, the exotic foreign stamps and legends. She was envious of Irving too. And Jane, though it sickened her to admit it even to herself. Jane got letters from her publisher, of course, and proofs to correct, and once she’d even gotten an envelope from Harper’s that looked and felt suspiciously like an acceptance letter, not to mention the thin blue aerograms from Italy that came two or three times a week. As often as not, Ruth got nothing—and everyone knew it. They probably made a joke of it—who would want to write her, anyway? She didn’t have a publisher. She didn’t have an agent. She didn’t have fans or a mysterious hot-blooded Venetian lover who franked his letters only with the initials C. da V. or even friends. Her mother never even wrote her.

But today she was surprised.

She spotted the big manila envelope projecting from her box the moment she stepped through the door, and she knew instantly what it was. It was the manuscript of “Days of Fire, Nights of Ashes,” returned from the Atlantic. The New Yorker had rejected it promptly, but she’d prevailed on Irving once again to lend his name and influence to her cause and she’d held out high hopes for the Atlantic. They’d had it for three weeks. And now here it was, back again, a dead albatross, refuse in a neat foursquare envelope, one more dismissal from the world at large. As she snatched the thing from the box, her second piece of mail fluttered to the floor. It was a postcard, glossy and inviting, showing the sunstruck beach at Juan-les-Pins. On the reverse, six lines from Betsy Butler, a poet she knew from Iowa who if anything was even more obscurely published than she, and therefore someone Ruth could continue to enjoy. Betsy was on the beach. She had a poem coming out in a magazine Ruth had never heard of. All right. Fine. But there was a P.S.: had Ruth heard the news? About Ellis Disick who’d been at Iowa with them? His first novel had just gone at auction for $250,000, movie rights went to Universal and the book was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month for the spring: wasn’t that just too much? Gritting her teeth, Ruth tore grimly into the envelope from the Atlantic. Just as she’d suspected, her manuscript, slightly worn about the edges, stared back at her. The rejection slip, signed in a mad indecipherable scrawl, was curt: “Too hot for us. Try Hustler.”

* * *

Ruth spent the afternoon in bed. She licked her wounds, brooded, poked desultorily through a Czechoslovakian novel Peter Anserine had recommended with an emphatic quiver of intellectual fervor animating his Brahmin’s nostrils, and ate her way miserably through a two-pound box of tollhouse cookies. She found she was missing Sax—the old Sax, the ardent sexy Sax who lately seemed to have sublimated all his libidinous energy in the pursuit of pygmy fishes—and she very nearly let her malaise overwhelm her desire for cocktails and company. But she struggled back beyond the humiliation of the scene on the patio and the grimness of the cabin to the moment of her triumph over the entire affair of Hiro, and that cheered her. There was plenty of mileage to be got yet from that—and too, this was the day that the new arrivals would be putting in their initial appearances, and it would be a shame to miss that. Ruth spent half an hour on her face, fished through her wardrobe for something red, and came down the big staircase to cocktails as a queen to coronation.

The first person she laid eyes on was Brie Sullivan, who was standing in the foyer amidst a clutter of mismatched suitcases, looking bewildered. Ruth knew Brie from Bread Loaf and she liked her for her myopic pursed-lip expression—she always looked slightly dazed—and her air of the eternal hick and newcomer, and because, like Betsy Butler, she hadn’t published much (and judging from her workshop stories, all of which seemed to be about disembodied brains and talking unicorns, she never would). She had a broad smooth forehead and strong hands and hair that flew round her face as if she were caught in a perpetual windstorm. “Brie,” Ruth said, offering her outspread palms as she swept down the staircase, her voice rich with noblesse oblige.

Brie’s response registered somewhere on the scale between a yelp and a screech, before trailing off into frequencies audible only to more sensitive lifeforms. “Ruthie!” was the rough sense of the sound she produced, and then they were in each other’s arms, sisters torn asunder by the Fates and at long last reunited. After a moment they fell back a pace, still clutching one another but attaining enough distance for a quick but keen mutual appraisal. Brie looked good, Ruth had to admit it—but then why wouldn’t she, she was only twenty-six. “I’m knocked out,” Brie gasped, her dull gray gaze licking about the foyer, darting into the fuzzy purviews of the parlor where the dim forms of the cocktail crowd could be seen hanging protectively over their drinks, and then settling again on Ruth, “—I really am. I’m stunned. The place is fantastic, much tonier than I’d imagined even—”

“Yes,” Ruth agreed with a proprietary air, “it’s first class all the way here. Septima—that’s my boyfriend Saxby’s mother?—she keeps the place competitive, that’s for sure. They know how to spoil you. The food alone …” Ruth put three fingers together and waggled them in appreciation.

Brie was treating her to a broad open-faced look of wonder and unadulterated joy. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said in a kind of bark. “I thought I was going to be the only one—” Brie hesitated. “The only …”

Only what? Ruth wondered. Talking unicorn? Ditzy blonde? Rank amateur? Was Brie insulting her, was that it? Was she saying that she’d thought it would be all Grobian, Anserine, Kleinschmidt and Thalamus, all celebrity and anointed royalty, but that now she saw there was a peonage here as well and that Ruth was part of it? Like herself? Ruth could feel her ears turning red.

Brie never finished the thought. She squealed something unintelligible followed by “Oh, Ruthie, it’s so good to see you!” A second obligatory hug ensued, slightly less fervent than the first, and then Ruth led Brie into the parlor for cocktails.

At the bar, Ruth introduced her to Sandy, Regina, Ina and Bob, each of whom received in return a look of such awe and abasement they might have been Salinger, Nevelson, Welty and Ashbery. Brie then grilled them, as a