East is East (24 page)

As she moved around the place, fussing over the coffee things, setting the table, she could feel his eyes on her. The sky was overcast, close and gray. She'd brought soft-boiled eggs, wheat toast, marmalade and fruit juice. “Are you hungry?” she said, just to make conversation. “I brought some things.” He didn't move. After a moment he gave her the faintest nod of his head—a parody of a bow—and rose to his feet. He looked like a waif, looked young, looked angry, sullen, ungrateful. Suddenly she was furious. “What did you want me to do,” she said, “—invite him in to play checkers?”

Hiro stood there, shoulders slouched, and turned his wounded eyes on her.

“He's my man. My lover.” They were three feet apart. The eggs were getting cold. “You understand that?”

It took him a long moment to answer. “Yes,” he said finally, in a voice so soft she could barely hear him.

“You and I,” she began, gesturing with a single emphatic finger, “you and I are”—she couldn't seem to find the word—“friends. You understand?”

There was the dull distant throb of a woodpecker assaulting a tree, and then the whine of a chainsaw starting up somewhere. The
water on the hot plate came to a boil. Yesterday's page curled over the typewriter.

“Yes,” Hiro said. “I understand.”

The next week passed without incident.

Hiro spent his days reading the books and newspapers she brought him, rocking in the chair and watching her as she pecked away at the keyboard, scribbled notes or gazed out on the wall of green, waiting for a word or phrase to come to her. He made himself scarce at lunchtime—she didn't know where he went and more often than not didn't even know he'd gone, so furtive had his movements become. But he reappeared, looking hopeful, the moment Owen turned and loped off down the path. And then he went through his daily routine—it was comical, really. He bowed, he smiled, he scraped and writhed and wrung his hands and he wouldn't touch the lunch bucket—wouldn't even look at it—till Ruth had assured him ten times over—and reassured him again—that she wasn't hungry, that she didn't want it, that it was for him and him alone.

In the evenings, when she left him, he made a poor meal of the groceries she'd smuggled in for him—bread and jam, wilted lettuce, a cupful of polished white rice—and then curled up on the couch beneath the thin blanket, and, as she imagined, dreamed of the City of Brotherly Love. In the mornings, he was always waiting for her, neatly dressed in the Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt or the madras plaid she'd borrowed from Saxby, and the cottage bore no trace of him but for his presence and the lingering faindy yeasty odor of his living and breathing. The books, the blanket and the groceries were hidden away, the floors swept, the mantel dusted, her papers and pens and pencils lovingly arranged on her desk. And there he was, her own pet, waiting for her, a toothy pure uncomplicated grin propping up his eyes and creasing the big joyful moon of his face.

At the same time, very gradually, in the way of a guerrilla band
working its way down from the hills to infiltrate the provinces and finally lay siege to the capital, Ruth began to work her way back into the inner circle of Thanatopsis House. Since Jane Shine's arrival, she'd kept a low profile—she had no choice, since she couldn't stomach being in the same room with her. The battle lines had been drawn when Jane cut her that first night and Ruth had been left to fumble over the Iowa connection till Jane's eyes had leaped the ski jump of her nose to settle on her as if on some insect, some legless beggar tugging at the hem of her imperial skirts, and she'd said finally, with a sigh, “Oh, yes, I think I remember you now—but wasn't your hair a different color?” It had taken Ruth a day or two to map out her strategy—and she'd been preoccupied with Hiro, anyway—but now she moved in to do battle in earnest.

Jane was a late riser—she needed her beauty rest, needed time to do her face peels and bust-building exercises, time to run a thousand brushstrokes over her pure white scalp and apply the foundation and concealer and hi-liter, the blusher, eyeliner, mascara and translucent powder that gave her that spontaneous girl-next-door-with-the-Gypsy-hair-and-outerspace-eyes look. And this was the chink in her armor. Ruth began getting up early, anticipating Owen's knock. She dressed as if she were going on a date with a literary critic—hair, makeup, low-cut blouse, the works—and she made certain she was the first at the convivial table each morning and the last to leave. She was charming, clever and seductive, and she made as many oblique but devastating references as she could to La Shine, as they'd begun to call her. And when Irving Thalamus came down, pouches under his eyes, his face as rucked and seamed as the floor of the Dead Sea and a whiff of early-morning bourbon on his breath, she was his girl all over again. She touched him as she spoke, leaned into him, threw back her head to laugh so he could admire her throat and cleavage.

At cocktail hour, she gathered Sandy, Ina and Regina around her—and Saxby too, when he wasn't off stalking the swamps for his pygmy fish—and formed a sphere of influence at one end of the room, while Jane Shine gathered her forces at the other. Sometimes,
after cocktails, she'd take dinner with Saxby and his mother in Septima's rooms—this was the
real
inner circle, after all—and then, instead of fencing with Jane Shine in the billiard room, she'd watch an old movie on the VCR or stare for hours into the glowing green vacancy of Saxby's aquarium. She'd preen herself around Septima, conscious of her favor, and she'd think about Hiro and count the days till Jane Shine took her literary freak-show home with her.

It was at the end of the week that Abercorn and Turco showed up again, as inevitable as junk mail. Turco left his boom box at home this time—things had gotten serious and he had a new method now, infallible, couldn't miss. He'd pitched his pup tent in a patch of scrub beyond the north lawn, while Abercorn had been given a closet-sized room on the third floor (and how he'd ever managed to sweet-talk Septima into letting him stay on a second time, Ruth couldn't begin to imagine). Ruth was just coming up the front steps, fagged but exhilarated after working through the shank of the afternoon and making what she felt was real progress on the novella, when she spotted Turco through the foyer window. He was in his fatigues and combat boots and he had Laura Grobian pinned up against the staircase, waving something in her face. Ruth hesitated—
Hiro,
she thought, but then she couldn't very well back down the stairs without arousing suspicion, and so she steeled herself and breezed through the door as if nothing in the world were the matter.

Laura Grobian gave her a frozen smile. She towered over Turco, half a foot taller at least. “—And robotics,” Turco was saying, his voice dropping to a snarl, “how do you think our Japanese friends got the lead there? They're cagey, is all. No doubt about it. But you've got nothing to worry about, lady, because we're going to get this one, I'd say within the week, maybe sooner—”

“Laura,” Ruth said, gliding through the foyer to poke her head in the mailroom before swinging round to face them, “and Mr. Turco. Back again?”

Turco released Laura Grobian and fastened on Ruth. First he shifted his head, then swiveled his torso and pivoted his legs, and
Ruth couldn't help thinking of a chameleon drawing a bead on an insect. He paused a moment, as if trying to place her, and then he took a step forward and held up the object—it was cotton, she saw, a garment of some kind—he'd been waving at Laura Grobian. “I was just telling the lady here that this whole thing with the illegal is making us look pretty bad, but not to worry—we've got his number now.”

The veins stood out in Turco's neck. The camouflage shirt clung to his chest and arms like body paint and he'd obviously worked on that penetrating stare, a little man striving for an effect. Ruth couldn't help herself. “No Donna Summer?”

A flash of anger flattened his eyes, but it passed. He took another step forward, invading her space. “Leg snares,” he said, and he unfurled the garment in his hand: it was a designer T-shirt with a chic name splashed across the breast. “And this is the bait—this and a couple pairs of Guess? jeans, maybe some scarves and T-shirts with shit like
Be Happy
and
Keep On Truckin'
printed on them. Anything in English. The Nips are suckers for it.”

“Excuse me,” Laura Grobian whispered, and then she was out the door and into the golden embrace of the afternoon sun. Turco never even turned his head. He just stood there, inches from Ruth, veins jumping in his neck, his eyes locked on hers, “it'll work,” he said. “Trust me.”

Ruth gave him a serene smile. Turco and Abercorn. They were incompetents, clowns, and they had about as much chance of catching Hiro as Laurel and Hardy might have had. They would be one more diversion for her, one more wedge to drive between the colony and Jane Shine, one more vehicle on which Ruth could hitch a ride. They'd poke around for a few days and find nothing. Not a trace. And each night, while Sax was engaged elsewhere, she'd bat her eyes at Abercorn, the poor idiot, and console him and sympathize with him and stick her finger in her cheek and offer all sorts of helpful suggestions. Had he looked in Clara Kleinschmidt's closet? The sheriff's henhouse?

“You're right,” she said finally, “I'm sure it will.” And then, as
she floated away from him and started up the stairs, she paused a moment to glance over her shoulder. “Good hunting,” she said, and it was real struggle to keep a straight face, “—isn't that what they say?”

Yes, she could feel it, things were looking up.

And then, suddenly and without warning, everything came crashing down again.

It was the night after Abercorn and Turco's arrival, a night that followed a day on which the artists of Thanatopsis House barely advanced their various projects. They were restive, preoccupied, unable to focus or concentrate. An easterly breeze had held steady throughout the day and the whole island seemed newly created from the sea; breakfast had been giddy, lunch forever in coming, and cocktails—people wandered in early for cocktails. There was excitement in the air, the scent of possibility and romance, the sort of incorrigible hopefulness that accrues to the prospect of a good party.

The party—organized by Owen for the dual purpose of paying homage to Septima on her seventy-second birthday and bidding adieu to Peter Anserine, who was going back to Amherst to lecture for the fall term—would feature a Savannah caterer, a dance band and an open bar. Invitations had gone out to the
haut monde
of Savannah and Sea Island and to members of the immediate community, as well as to each of the colonists, and Sheriff Peagler and his brother Wellie—the island's unofficial mayor—were expected to attend, along with a spate of lawyers, gallery owners, art collectors and blue-nosed widows from Tupelo Shores Estates and Darien. A photographer was coming down from Savannah to cover the event for the
Star's
society page. And the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, a onetime resident, was expected to phone. For Thanatopsis, it was the event of the year.

Ruth had been saving an outfit for the occasion, a calf-length black chiffon dress with a lace ruffle at the hip, and a pair of new
black pumps. It was a little heavy for the season, maybe—she'd been planning to wear it in the fall—but it was late August, the breeze had cooled things down and she really didn't have anything else—and it
was
a Geoffrey Beene, though she'd gotten it for a song. She'd spent the afternoon quizzing Hiro on Japan—Was it true that steak cost thirty dollars a pound? did he feel awkward using a fork? did they really pay people to squeeze you onto the train?—and then she left him early. “I'll be back in the morning,” she said. “Lie low. I'll bring you some treats from the party.” And to his inevitable question, she replied: “Soon.”

She took a long soak, spent half an hour on her nails. Sax and Sandy were planning to wear tuxedos—the rest would make do with skinny ties and polyester. There would be champagne—good champagne, Bollinger and Perrier-Jouët. Caviar. Lobster. Oysters from Brittany. Ruth groomed herself as if she were preparing for battle, lingering over each detail, seeking the sort of perfection that would make her impervious, invincible—and all the while she was aware that on the other side of the wall, Jane Shine was doing the same. Twice Saxby came for her and twice she turned him away. She moussed her hair, brushed on hiliter and blusher, did her eyes. When Sax knocked the third time, she told him to go on ahead without her—she'd be ready when she was ready.