veldt, vultures swooping in, hyenas laughing in the bush.
So she sat there, seething. Orlando Seezers brayed with a rich too-loud laugh when Jane’s story ran to what passed for wit, and toward the end, where the star-crossed fourteen-year-old lovers paint each other’s toenails prior to parting eternally, Mignonette Teitelbaum had to hold his hand to keep him from blubbering aloud. Jane was shameless. Not only did she pander to the audience, raving like a madwoman and repeatedly pushing a carefully coiffed strand of hair out of her face, she even did a Swedish accent as if she thought she was Meryl Streep or something (the boy was Swedish, a Nordic demigod in short pants; the girl, of course, was a Connecticut ingenue with the hair of a Catalonian shepherdess and outer-space eyes). When she was finished, there was a stunned silence, and then someone—was it Irving?—shouted “Yes!” and the applause fell on her like a landslide. Brie had tears in her eyes, and Ruth would never forgive her that. Sandy whistled and pounded his hands together till they were red, and Ruth would never forgive him either.
The reception afterward was just one of those things you had to live through. The last thing Ruth wanted was to stand around and congratulate Jane Shine, but she had no choice really. If it came right down to it she could put on a face and play the game, no problem. She loved Jane Shine. She’d been to school with her. She wished her well. Right?
If only it was that easy.
Someone put on a tape of old Motown hits—Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Four Tops—and Ruth almost let the beat infect her, almost let go, until she realized that the music was for Jane, who’d made a big deal of praising it in a recent issue of
After the applause had died down, Ruth wandered into the party with Brie—Owen had taken the whole thing inside because of the bugs, but the French doors stood open to the patio and the sound system was still wired out there in case anyone wanted to liberate the carnal spell of Jane’s reading with a bout of groin-rubbing and hip- grinding. Ruth didn’t. She planned to remain relatively inconspicuous—a presence, yes, La Dershowitz after all, star of last night’s dramatic scene on the patio, reigning queen of the hive, impresario of the whole Hiro Tanaka adventure—a looming figure certainly, but not the cynosure. Not tonight. Brie began to bob her head to the music and then she had a drink and before Ruth could stop her she was gushing over the reading. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” she gasped, “I mean knock me down, blow me away, that’s the best story I’ve ever heard. The best reading I’ve ever heard. Anywhere. I mean it.”
Brie was goggling at her, vapid, open-faced, a little mustachio of pale sweat trembling atop her upper lip. Ruth held herself perfectly still. “Bullshit,” she snapped. “Cheap theatrics, that’s all. You call that reading? You call that
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
“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
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
