East is East (39 page)

“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 group and individually both, about the minutest and most banal details of their personal histories, ending up with the
verboten
question: “So what are you working on now?”

Ruth smiled serenely throughout, exchanging occasional glances with her friends and giving them the odd shoulder shrug for their unspoken commiseration. She was the undisputed queen here, after all—or she was so long as the pretender, Jane Shine, remained under wraps. And where was La Shine, with her flamenco hair and phony laugh—choking to death on a bit of pickled truffle in her lofty and well-appointed room? Out for a drive with her Nordic slave? No matter. In giving Brie the great good gift of her patronage—if she was all right in La Dershowitz's eyes, she was all right, period—Ruth felt charitable, saintly even. It was the least she could do.

She let it go on a bit—“And you're a Scorpio too?” Brie was gurgling at Ina in a battle of shoulders and flying hair—and then she cut in and took Brie by the elbow. “You're going to want to unpack,” she said. “I'll get Owen for you. But first”—a pause, casual as a yawn—“would you like to meet Irving Thalamus?”

Brie was a game-show contestant, second runner-up for the title of Miss America, she'd won the lottery and hit the jackpot at Vegas. The squeal of sheer wonder, amaze and delight shot directly out of the bounds of human hearing, and Sandy, Ina and Bob smiled softly to themselves, as they might have smiled at the antics of a child or a puppy; Regina fell back on her punk scowl. “Really?” Brie managed when she'd caught her breath, “Irving Thalamus? Is
he
here?”

Ruth led her over to where Irving sat propped up in an armchair
with a double vodka and an issue of a literary magazine devoted exclusively to an appreciation of his work. It was good reading, and Irving was absorbed in it, oblivious, frowning behind his patriarchal eyebrows and the diminutive reading glasses perched like a toy on the end of his nose. He obliged them with a smile, and after Brie had made her obeisance—at the height of it Ruth thought she was going to roll on the floor and piss herself—he turned on the Thalamus charm and treated them to an in-depth, line-by-line assessment of the merits and failings of the critics the magazine had solicited to do honor to him.

Ruth got Brie a Calistoga and herself a bourbon, and she sat at Irving's right hand while he went on about a certain Morris Ro-senschweig of Tufts University with all the wit, charm and self-deprecating irony of a man who still had something to live for. Ruth watched, and listened, and thought it was a pretty good act.

Clara and Patsy were next, and then a group of minor figures who happened in the door as Ruth was guiding Brie back up to the bar, and lastly, Laura Grobian. Laura was seated alone in the far corner, as usual, a golden high-stemmed glass of sherry catching the light from the reading lamp beside her. She had her notebook with her—she always had her notebook with her; that notebook drove Ruth crazy—and she was writing in it, her head bent to the page. “Laura”—Ruth's voice was steady, chummy, full of cheer—“I'd like you to meet Brie Sullivan, one of our new colonists?”

Laura glanced up at them from beneath the celebrated black bangs and Ruth had a shock. She looked terrible. Looked haggard, confused, looked as if she'd been drinking secretly, living on the street, haunting graveyards.
Cancer
—the word leaped into Ruth's head—
an inoperable tumor. Two months. Three.
But then Laura smiled and she was her old self again, regal, unassailable, the ascetic middle-aged beauty with the devouring eyes and terrific bone structure. She held out her hand to Brie. “I'm pleased that you've joined us,” she said.

Brie squirmed, squared her shoulders, blew the hair out of her
face. She was working herself up for this one. Laura blinked at her in wonder, and then the flood came. “I'm honored,” Brie began, trying to control her voice, but it was pitched too high, unsteady with worship and excitement, “I mean, I'm blown away. I am. I mean the Bay Light trilogy, after I read it, it was the only thing I could read for the longest, for years … I think I know every word by heart. I'm, I'm—this is really amazing, it's an honor, it's—it's—”

“Do you know the story of Masada?” Laura asked suddenly, glancing down at the page in her lap and then back up at them—Brie and Ruth both. “Ruth, certainly you must know it?”

Masada? What was she talking about? Was it a quiz or something? “You mean where the Jews killed themselves?”

“A.D.73, April the fifteenth. Mass suicide. I've been reading about it. About Jonestown too. And the Japanese at Saipan and Okinawa. Did you know about Saipan? Women and children flung themselves from cliffs, cut out their own entrails, swallowed cyanide and gasoline.” Laura's voice was quiet, husky round the edges of its exotic ruination.

Brie puffed at her hair, shifted the glass from hand to hand: she was clearly at a loss. Ruth didn't know quite what to say either—this wasn't cocktail-hour banter, this wasn't gossip and publishing and wit—it was morbid, depressing. No wonder Laura always sat alone, no wonder she barely managed to look alive. “How horrible,” Ruth said finally, exchanging a look with Brie.

“The U.S. Marines were about to land and the civilians had been abandoned. The rumor was that to become a Marine you had to murder your own parents. Can you imagine that?—that's what they thought of us. The Japanese—
civilians,
women and children—leaped from a cliff into the sea rather than fall into the hands of such monsters.”

Ruth said nothing. She took a nervous sip of her second bourbon—or was it her third? What was she driving at?

“I read a story about that once—it was like the people were
lemmings or something,” Brie announced, settling on the arm of the chair opposite Laura. “In fact, I think it was called 'Lemmings'—yeah, it was, I'm sure of it. I think.”

“Exactly.” Laura Grobian held them with her haunted—and, Ruth was beginning to think, ever so slightly demented—gaze. “Mass hysteria,” she said, seeming to relish the hiss of it. “Mass suicide. A woman steps up to the edge of the cliff, clutching a baby to her breast, the five-year-old at her side. People are jumping all around her, screaming and weeping. It goes against all her instincts, but she shoves the five-year-old first, the half-formed limbs kicking and clawing at the poor thin air, and then she follows him into the abyss. And all because they thought we were monsters.”

Ruth had had a rough day, what with the cabin torn to pieces, the utter collapse of her work and inspiration, the excitement of Hiro's jailbreak and Saxby's phone call, not to mention the scene on the patio last night, and she didn't need this, not now, not even from Laura Grobian—but how to escape? And then, because she couldn't help herself, because the moment was so uncomfortable, she asked the interdicted question: “You're working on an essay? A new novel?”

Laura was slow to reply, and for a moment Ruth wondered if she'd heard her. But then, in a vague and distant way, she murmured, “No. Not really. I just… find the subject… fascinating, I guess.” And then she came back to them, shrugging her shoulders and lifting the sherry glass from the table.

It sounded like an exit line to Ruth, and she was thinking of the routine she could make of this, of Laura Grobian's gloom and doom, and if she'd dare it, when the buzz of conversation in the room suddenly died and all heads turned to the doorway. The two other new arrivals had appeared for cocktails. Both of them. Together.

Ruth watched Brie squinting toward the doorway in expectation of some new revelation, some further miracle of earthbound celebrity, and then watched as her head turned, her brow furrowed and her lips formed the question: “Isn't that—?”

“Orlando Seezers,” Ruth said.

The figure was unmistakable. Though Ruth had never met him, she'd seen photographs. He was sixtyish, black, goateed and confined to the gleaming electric wheelchair in which he now appeared. During the campus riots of the sixties he was injured in an altercation with a student who claimed he only wanted to go to class. It was at NYU, as Ruth recalled, on a staircase. Before the accident he wrote bittersweet blank verse about blues and jazz figures and fiery outraged polemics that won him comparison with James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver; afterward, he wrote sestinas and a series of very popular comedies of manners centered on life on the Upper East Side.

“And—?” Brie wondered aloud, squinting till her face seemed on the verge of falling in on itself.

“Mignonette Teitelbaum.” Ruth didn't know her either, not personally, but Septima had informed her that she was coming with Orlando Seezers—“I heah they are practically inseparable”—and she knew
of
her, of course. Teitelbaum—and Ruth couldn't help hearing a breathless “La” affixed to the surname—was six foot three, flat-footed, hipless, breastless and Seezers's junior by some thirty years. She was the author of two books of minimalist stories set in the backwoods of Kentucky, though she'd been born and raised in Manhattan, attended Barnard and Columbia and lived in Europe most of her adult life. Rumor had it they'd met at a dance club in SoHo.

The couple hesitated there on the threshold until Irving Thalamus rose with a mighty roar—“Orlando! Mignonette!”—and crossed the room to embrace them. The buzz started up again. Brie, a look of rapture on her face, began drifting toward the triumvirate of embracing lions as if in a trance. It was then that Laura Grobian took hold of Ruth's arm. Brie seemed somehow to sense the motion and froze. Ruth looked down at Laura, not yet alarmed, but afraid she was about to start up with the Masada business again while the precious minutes of the cocktail hour dwindled away to nothing. “Ruth”—Laura held her with those fathomless eyes—“I'll see you tonight, after dinner?”

“Yes, sure,” Ruth said, though the ground had shifted beneath her again. She was Laura Grobian's intimate, yes, but what in god's name was she talking about now?

Laura smiled up at her as if they'd just come back from sailing around the world together. “Jane's reading. Jane Shine's. You haven't forgotten, have you?”

Brie swooped back in on them at the mention of Jane. “Jane Shine?” she gasped, hovering over them as if one of the secret names of Jehovah had just been revealed to her. “She's here too?”

The tectonic plates were really shaking now, grinding up against one another with all their terrible rending force. Off balance, Ruth could only nod.

“Oh, Ruthie”—Brie glanced wildly from Ruth to Laura and back again—“do you know her?”

Vast and primeval, unfathomable, unconquerable, bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. It gives birth to two rivers, the St. Mary's and the Suwannee, fanning out over 430,000 leaf-choked acres, every last one as sodden as a sponge. Four hundred and thirty thousand acres of stinging, biting and boring insects, of maiden cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck, mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce. The swamp is home to two hundred and twenty-five species of birds, forty-three of mammals, fifty-eight of reptiles, thirty-two of amphibians and thirty-four of fish—all variously equipped with beaks, talons, claws, teeth, stingers and fangs—not to mention the seething galaxies of gnats and deerflies and no-see-ums, the ticks, mites, hookworms and paramecia that exist only to compound the misery of life. There are alligators here, bears, puma, bobcats and bowfin, there are cooters and snappers, opossum, coon and gar. They feed on one another, shit and piss in the trees, in the sludge and muck and on the floating mats of peat, they dribble jism and bury eggs, they scratch and stink and sniff at themselves, caterwauling and screeching
through every minute of every day and night till the place reverberates like some hellish zoo.

Drain it, they said, back in the days when technology was hope. They tried. In 1889, Captain Harry Jackson, a man with a vision, formed the Suwannee Canal Company to dredge the swamp and drain off the water, bugs, slime, alligators, snakes, turtles, frogs and catfish, and convert the rich remaining muck to farmland. He got some capital together, brought in half a dozen huge steam dredges capable of digging a canal forty-five feet wide and six feet deep at the rate of forty-four feet per day. He erected a sawmill to cut lumber for fuel and for profit, and he kept the dredges going round the clock, and the more he dug, the more the water poured in. But he kept at it, and the canal advanced at the rate of some three miles a year. The problem was that by all estimates it would take three hundred miles of canals to effectively drain the swamp, and even a man with vision couldn't expect to live to a hundred and forty. Captain Harry Jackson didn't. He died in 1895, having made a tiny wound in the flank of the unassailable swamp, a wound into which the water flowed as if an artery itself had been severed. The dredges rotted and sank, the sawmill fell to ruin. Leaves and vines and fine young trees closed over it all.