East is East (27 page)

She came up to him at cocktail hour and laid a hand on his arm (blessedly, as the Fates would have it, he was leaning over the bar with Sandy at the time; Jane was nowhere to be seen). “Hi,” Ruth said, and that was it, the six days of silence forgotten, Jane Shine a
verboten
subject, the party a distant memory. And without another word she took him by the hand and led him upstairs to her room.

In the morning, before she tripped off to breakfast in the convivial room, she woke him with a gentle rub and lubrication and told him she'd be needing a ride into Savannah that afternoon—for groceries. “Savannah?” he said. “What's wrong with Darien?”

“Oh”—offhand, gazing out the window—“you know, there are some things I want that you're just not going to find at the local Winn Dixie.” She turned to him and grinned and he felt the relief again, coursing and strong, washing over him like a hot shower. “Let's face it, Sax—Darien, Georgia, isn't exactly gourmet heaven.”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging, “fine,” and at four he drove her to an address on De Lesseps and had a beer in a place he knew on the waterfront while she pushed a shopping cart around. When he swung by to pick her up an hour later, she was waiting for him on the street, engulfed in brown paper bags. He was surprised by how much she'd bought—eight bags of canned goods—and even more surprised when she declined his offer to help carry the stuff out to her studio. “What do you mean?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the mountain of groceries as he put the car in gear. “You're going to haul all this shit out to the cottage by yourself? Cans and all?”

Ruth was examining her nails. “I'll do it in shifts,” she said, “don't worry about it.”

“But it's no problem, I mean I'd be happy—”

“Don't worry about it,” she said.

But Saxby did worry about it, all the way down the highway to the ferry and all the way across Peagler Sound and up the blacktop road to the house. How was she going to get eight bags of canned goods out to her studio—and what in god's name did she need them for anyway? She had her breakfast and dinner at the house and each afternoon Owen brought her a gourmet lunch—finest lunch offered by any artists' colony anywhere, or so his mother claimed. It was crazy. Was she expecting a siege or something?

And then, as they were staggering through her bedroom door with the booty, one of the bags split, spilling cans all over the floor, and Ruth stopped him when he bent to pick them up. “I can do it myself,” she said, turning her back to him and crouching over the cans as if she meant to hide them. That was odd. And it was odder still when he retrieved the two cans that had escaped her.

“Fried dace?” he said. “Bamboo shoots? What are you, going Oriental on us?”

She spun round on him, and while she didn't exactly snatch the cans out of his hand, she took them firmly from him and dropped them into the unrevealing depths of the bag on the table behind her. “No,” she said, smiling then, “not really. It's just that… I like to try new things.”

“Fried dace?” He shook his head and returned her smile, and then she fell into his arms, but the whole thing was very peculiar, very peculiar indeed.

On the weekend, jane shine went off to sea island with some clown in a silver XKE and he watched Ruth come to life again. She practically pirouetted round the room at cocktail hour, and at dinner she couldn't sit still, flitting from table to table like a gossip
columnist at a premiere. Saxby didn't mind. He was glad to see her enjoying herself, reasserting her preeminence, shining like a supernova in the Thanatopsis firmament. And he was glad too that she seemed to have forgotten all about the party, letting him off the hook vis-à-vis the Jane Shine incident and any number of related peccadilloes he wasn't necessarily even aware of, but condemned for all the same. While she was clowning with Thalamus at the next table, he laid his aquarium woes on Clara Kleinschmidt, talking to hear himself talk—and to pay her back, in small measure, for Arnold Schoenberg.

After dinner, there was a recital by Patsy Arena, a squat, broad-faced woman of Cuban extraction who looked as if she'd stepped out of a Botero painting. She was new to the colony, having come just that week at the invitation of Clara Kleinschmidt, and she played the old Steinway in the front parlor as if she were tenderizing meat. In all, she was to play three compositions that evening, two of her own and one of Clara's. Owen turned the lights down. Ruth held Saxby's hand. The colonists cleared their throats, twisted in their seats, leaned forward in fear and expectation.

Bang!
Patsy Arena hit the piano like a boxer. Silence.
One and two, one and two,
she whispered, bobbing her frizzy head.
Bang! Bang!
she slammed at the keyboard with the ball of her fist. And then: nothing. For three full agonizing minutes she sat rigid, staring at the cheap plastic alarm clock perched atop the gleaming ebony surface before her. Finally the alarm went off—
ding-ding-ding
—and
Bang!
she hit the keyboard. The piece was called
Parfait in Chrome,
and it went on for forty-five minutes.

Afterward, as a kind of dessert, there was the weekly movie
(Woman in the Dunes,
a nod to Owen, who was in one of his Japanese phases). Nearly everyone sat through both the recital and the film, which ultimately had more than a little in common. Life at Thanatopsis, as stimulating as it might have been to the artistic sensibility, was problematic as far as entertainment was concerned—Saxby was aware that most of the colonists found it a
grinding bore—and the nightly readings, recitals and exhibitions, as well as the weekly film, were small moments of release in a bleak continuum.

Of course, none of that stopped Ruth from spontaneously rewriting the film's dialogue, much to the amusement of her fellow colonists, or from parodying Patsy Arena's performance later on in the billiard room. She had the whole crew in hysterics. They were red in the face and pounding at their breastbones as she pantomimed the pianist's clumsy assault on her instrument, but then Clara and her protégée hunkered into the room and Ruth deftly threw the ball to Abercorn, who'd been giggling innocently in his beer. “Catch anything in your snares today, Det?” she asked.

The laughter subsided. Clara poured Patsy a drink. Everyone looked at Abercorn.

Abercorn had been mooning round the place off and on for the past week or so. Sometimes he had the other character with him, sometimes not. Ruth's question had a barb in it, and Saxby swirled the ice in his drink, watching Abercorn squirm. He kind of liked the guy, actually—or maybe he just felt sorry for him. Abercorn looked up at Ruth out of his big darting rabbit's eyes. The question seemed to sadden him. “Nothing,” he said. He tugged at his nostrils, scratched an ear. “Lewis and I think somebody else is involved.”

Ruth looked away. Suddenly she was deeply interested in the way the bourbon in her glass caught the light. At the time, Saxby thought nothing of it—but there was a look on her face, lips pursed, eyes downcast but alert, that he was to recall later. “I don't get it,” he said. “What do you mean—like somebody on the island is hiding him or something?”

Abercorn nodded, slowly and gravely, his chin stabbing at the circle of colonists gathered round him. Everyone was listening now. “I can't think of anything else—he's been out there for five weeks, and aside from that business down at Tupelo Shores and the shit he's been able to steal here and there, don't you wonder what he's eating?”

Saxby hadn't given it a thought—at this point the big awkward Japanese kid who'd lurched out of Peagler Sound that night and run from him at the market was more amusing to him than anything else. But now—just for a moment and so quickly that he dismissed it the moment the thought flashed into his head—an answer came to him: fried dace.

The next night—saturday—ruth didn't turn up for Cocktails, and Saxby sat with his mother on the veranda and watched for her. When Armand rang the dinner bell and still she hadn't come in from the studio, he ambled into the main dining room and sat at one of the small tables in back with Septima and Owen. His mother rattled on about colony business—who was coming in the fall and how so-and-so had been turned down at Yaddo and how she wouldn't dream of inviting her—and he closed his ears, shut down his brain and lifted the fork to his lips. After dinner he retired to the back parlor to brood over his aquarium. That morning he'd drained the tainted water, discarded the plants and gravel and rocks—he was going to give the thing a rest for a couple of days, and then he was going to start all over again. But he'd learned his lesson. This time he was going to Aquarium City and he was going to be patient. No more fooling around: he was going to breed albinos and he was going to make money. And what's more, he was going to take his place among the great amateur aquarists of the century: William Voderwinkler, Daniel DiCoco and Paul Hahnel, father of the fancy guppy.

He tried the title out on himself—
Saxby Lights, father of the albino pygmy sunfish
—and then he put on a tape—Albinoni, one of his mother's favorites—and settled into the easy chair with the latest
National Geographic.
He tried to read an article about the declining resilience of beards among Pacific Coast mussels and its implications for the future of the shellfish industry, but he couldn't concentrate. He was restless. There was a reading that night—Bob Penick was previewing some new poems—but Saxby really didn't have much
use for poetry and would have gone only to please Ruth—and Ruth wasn't back yet. A shadow fell over the house, and he reached to turn on the lamp: it was coming on to dusk.

And then suddenly he was out of the chair, his mind made up in an instant—damn it, he didn't care what the rules were, he was going out there to surprise Ruth. She'd been working for twelve hours straight, for Christ's sake—she could have written
War and Peace
backwards and forwards by now. Enough was enough. If he fractured her creative bubble, so much the worse, but she could reconstruct it tomorrow. He was tired of waiting.

Red dirt, green gone to gray: the path lay before him like a coil of smoke. He hurried along, sandflies giving way to mosquitoes, anoles rustling through the deepening clots of undergrowth. Up ahead, he heard the soft
chuck
and plaintive sobbing
wills-widow
of the night-flying bird whose call gives rise to its name, and the branches above him were filled with the roosting chatter of the day birds. It was the hour of evening when the diamondback extracts itself from a hole in the ground, drawn to the scurrying warmth of the quick-blooded mammals on which it preys. Saxby stepped lightly.

And then, as he was coming down the final stretch to the cottage, a shadow settled into the path before him. Thick, furtive, dark with the shades of night. It was probably just a cornsnake, but he and Ruth would be coming back up this path in a few minutes, and he didn't want any surprises. Ten feet from the thing—it was a snake, all right, coiling itself like a lariat, dead center in the middle of the path—Saxby bent for a stick. Crouching, one foot extended and the stick outstretched like a foil, he inched toward the thing and felt his heart freeze within him when it struck at the stick and thrashed its rattles all in the same instant. The chirring was explosive, grating, loud as castanets. But it subsided almost immediately, and the shadow of the snake melted into the undergrowth with the faintest crepitation of leaf and twig.

Saxby dropped the stick and moved on up the path, blood pounding in his ears. Always fun playing with snakes, he thought, setting
one foot down after the other with the exaggerated care of a man wading through wet cement. Night was settling in as he came round the final loop in the path, and he cursed himself for having forgotten his flashlight. But Ruth would have one—and if she didn't, they'd cut a stick and sweep the path before them, as he used to do when he was a boy coming home late from some adventure on the other end of the marsh. He was thinking of Ruth, a comical version of the snake encounter already taking shape in his mind, when the cottage came into view.