she was, but she hesitated and lost hold of the moment. Her face was working. Her brain was in overdrive. They were all—every one of them—waiting.
“Ruthie”—Septima had her by the hand and she began to chatter as if nothing had happened, as if the cold talentless bitch hadn’t just called her out, humiliated her, smashed open the hive and stung her to death—“Ruthie, darlin’, we was all—Orlando and Mignonette and Laura and I—we was all just sayin’ what a pleasure it would be to have you read from your work too, and you know, as everyone here does, that while we don’t require room and board from our artists, we do feel privileged to receive payment in kind …” She looked up at the ceiling as if it were transparent, a faraway smile fixed on her lips. “Some of the things we’ve heard in this very room …”
This was the challenge. This was it. This was the slap in the face, the gauntlet at her feet. She’d wanted to be inconspicuous, let Jane have her moment, fight her with subterfuge and innuendo, but she’d blown it. Her heart was going, her eyes must have been wild, but she knew her lines, oh yes indeed. “Septima,” she said in her calmest, steadiest tones, and she looked into those milky old gray eyes as if they were the only eyes in the room, as if Jane Shine weren’t standing there twelve inches to the right, as if she didn’t exist, had never existed, as if this were a private tete-a-tete with the woman who could well be her future mother-in-law, “I’d be honored.”
The doyenne of Thanatopsis House broadened her smile till her thin old lips were stretched taut. “Tomorrow night, then?” she said, and something flickered to life in the depths of her moribund eyes.
Ruth nodded.
“Same time as tonight’s?”
Marvin Gaye: what was he singing?
In the morning, she cursed herself. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let herself get sucked in like that? Jane Shine. She wished her an early death, wished her sagging breasts and pyorrhea, wished she’d explode like the puffed-up frog in Aesop’s fable.
But wishes get you nowhere.
Ruth was in her studio, working hard, before anyone in the big house had even the vaguest semiconscious presentiment that morning had arrived and that breakfast and work and the slow miraculous unveiling of the day awaited them. She was working with an ease and concentration that would have amazed her if she’d stopped to think about it, hammering away at the keyboard and wielding her Liquid Paper like a sword while a stack of clean new perfectly wrought pages mounted before her. By ten o’clock she’d substantially rewritten sections of “Two Toes,” “Of Tears and the Tide”—it wasn’t so bad, not really—and the piece that had come back from the
She worked through lunch, worked through the racket of hammering and cutting and banging as Parker Putnam—or was it Putnam Parker?—did his best imitation of a working carpenter. Hunched and sinewy, burned the color of tobacco, he showed up at eleven with a toolbox the size of a small vehicle, claiming in a halting rheumy voice that “Miz Lights” had asked him to come out and clean the place up. It took him most of the afternoon to knock the shards of broken glass out of the windows and nearly an hour just to get the old screen door off the hinges, but she hardly noticed. Normally, he would have driven her crazy, but today she welcomed him—he was there to test her, to lay one more stone atop the cart to see if it would tip over. But it wouldn’t. Her concentration was complete.
It was getting late—four? five?—when he packed up his tools (a process that in itself involved half an hour) and left for the day. The hammering ceased. The splintering of glass, the wheezing and spitting and dull reverberant booming were no more. Silence fell over the studio, and it was then that Ruth felt the first faint stirrings of uncertainty. What if—what if the work was no good, after all? What if they didn’t like it? What if she got up there and froze? She imagined the satisfaction that would give Jane Shine, and she felt her stomach clench. But no, it was hunger, that was all, and she realized in that moment that she’d skipped lunch.
She sat at her desk and ate dutifully—cherry tomatoes fresh from the kitchen garden, salmon mousse with Dijon mustard and a sort of cracker bread Armand had devised himself—and she began to feel better. She thought of her makeup and hair and what she would wear. Nothing pretentious, that was for sure, no lace collars and Edwardian brooches. Jeans and a T-shirt. Earrings. Her aqua heels, the ones that showed off her toes and instep. She would keep it simple. Honest. Genuine. Everything the Shine extravaganza was not. And if the stories weren’t finished, weren’t yet what she wanted them to be, it wouldn’t matter one whit—she was reading sections only, and the sections were strong. The thought lifted her spirits—food, that was all it was—and she felt the strength seeping back into her.
She rose from her desk and gathered up her papers, inserting the new crisply typed pages in an old unpretentious manila folder. The room was still. The sun held in the windows. She was aware for the first time that day of the birds slashing through the shadows, lighting in the bushes, making music for her alone. She was standing there at the window, her back to the door, having one last cigarette before heading back to get ready, when a sudden noise on the front porch startled her. Turning, expecting to see Parker Putnam fumbling around for some tool he’d forgotten, she had a shock: this wasn’t Parker Putnam. It was Septima.
Septima. Ruth’s first thought was that she’d lost her way, an embarrassment of age, but the look in the old lady’s eye told her different. Septima stood there on the doorstep, giving the place a tight-lipped scrutiny, Owen at her side. She was wearing her gardening clothes—a straw sunbonnet, an old smock over a pair of jeans, men’s shoes. “Ruthie,” she called in a voice that sounded harsh and strained, “I hate to disturb you, but I—may I come in?”
Ruth was so surprised she couldn’t answer—Septima made it a strict rule never to visit any of the artists’ studios, out of respect for their privacy, and Hart Crane was a long walk for a woman of her age. Ruth crossed the room wordlessly and swung open the door.
Something was wrong. She could see it in Owen’s face, see it in the way Septima avoided her eyes as she moved past her and lowered herself into the cane rocker. “Whew!” the old woman exclaimed, “this heat! I swear I’ll never get used to it, never. Would you have a glass of water for me, please, Ruthie?”
“Of course,” Ruth said, and she poured a glass for Owen too, who remained standing in the doorway as if he hadn’t really meant to come in. “Thanks, Ruth,” he said, draining the glass in a gulp. “Think I’ll just step outside here a minute and inspect the damage,” he said to the room in general, setting the glass down on the windowsill. He focused on Septima. “You call if you need me.”
When Owen had gone, the screen door tapping gently behind him, Septima lifted her head to give Ruth a long slow look. The air was still, heavy with a premonition of rain. The crepitating sounds of the forest rushed in to fill the silence. “I see Parker’s been here,” Septima said finally.
Ruth nodded. “He was banging around here all day—but it didn’t disturb me, not really. I was lost in my work.”
“It’s a pity,” Septima sighed, and Ruth agreed, though she wondered just what the old woman was referring to—Parker Putnam’s dismal showing, the weather, the danger of being lost in one’s work? “A real pity the way they shot up this place, Theron Peagler and all the rest of them. You’d think they’d know better. And the way they harried that poor Japanese boy—”
Again Ruth nodded. Again the old lady fell silent. Just outside the window a bird hit four notes in quick succession, up and down, up and down.
“Ruthie,” Septima said after a minute, “I’m very sorry for dis-turbin’ you out here, and especially at a time when you’d be workin’ hard to prepare for your readin’, but a matter of the utmost importance has come up.”
Ruth had been fussing round the little room in an unconsciously defensive way, a proprietary way, but now she took hold of the arms of the other rocker and settled into it as if it might come alive at any moment with the
