East is East (26 page)

All right, it was true—he had gotten a little carried away, what with the champagne and the music and the general high-spirited roar of the festivities, and for long stretches at a time he'd forgotten Ruth altogether. He was enjoying himself—was that a crime? She was late. She was dressing. I'll catch up with you later, she said.
And so he found himself standing at the bar, all dressed up and nowhere to go, and he found Jane Shine standing there beside him. “Hi,” she said, and he returned the greeting, social animal that he was, and she took a breath and said that Irving had told her he was interested in aquaria—that's how she put it: “interested in aquaria”—and he was hooked. She'd had several tanks as a girl, and her ex-husband had taken her up the Orinoco in a pirogue and there they'd met Herbert Axelrod himself. The patron saint of aquarists was on a collecting trip, and he took them back to his base camp for a dinner of
piracuru
and onions and showed them a tank crowded with a new species of characin he'd discovered just that morning.

To Saxby, it was the voice of heaven.

When it began to get late and Ruth still hadn't appeared, he crossed the lawn to the house, went up to her room and knocked for the fourth time that evening. There was no answer. He put his head in the door and saw that she was gone. Puzzled, he checked the two upstairs bathrooms, made a quick circuit of the parlor and veranda, and cut back across the lawn to the party, figuring he'd somehow missed her in the crush. He circulated through the crowd, looking for her, and he took a glass of champagne, and when somebody put a plate of food in his hand, he ate. She wasn't on the dance floor, and she wasn't at the bar. He had a bourbon on the rocks, and then another. He talked with Sandy, Abercorn, Regina and Thalamus. Thalamus had seen her an hour or so ago, he thought, heading away from the bar—had he looked on the dance floor? Saxby assured him that he had, and then he downed another bourbon while contemplating the mystery of it all. He went back to the house and asked everyone he ran into if they'd seen her, and he checked the bathrooms again, and the kitchen. She'd vanished.

Back at the party, he had a bourbon with Wellie Peagler and washed it down with a glass of champagne. Wellie was representing a group of investors who wanted to build a golf course and resort on the island, and before he knew it, Saxby was arguing passionately for the inviolability of Tupelo and the claims of historicity,
and he snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray and told Wellie he could take his investors and shove them up his ass. Wellie didn't flinch—just gave him a paternal smile and introduced him to a big pale blustery character who said he was a venture capitalist and they had a drink to that—venture capitalism, that is—and they had a drink to nine irons and holes in one. And then, before he knew what was happening, a girl he'd had a brief thing with when he was home to visit his mother two Christmases ago took him by the arm and led him out onto the dance floor. The rest was a blur, though he did remember standing at the bar at some indeterminate hour talking to somebody he couldn't recall about something he'd forgotten, when his mother put a hand on his arm and asked him where Ruth was.

Ruth. The name came back to him as if from some coat closet of memory. Ruth's face rose before him, and it was knit with fury. He looked at his mother and shrugged.

Was she all right? his mother wanted to know. Was she feeling ill? Had they quarreled?

He defended himself in all his innocence—no, no quarrel; he'd been looking for her all night—and he was about to have another drink when Septima put her arm in his and announced in a quavering voice that she was tired. She kept a tight grip on him as she said her unending goodbyes, and then she led him across the lawn, up the steps and into the house, where she put him to bed and sleep came like a guillotine.

In the morning, he had a headache.

Rico made him some poached eggs and a Bloody Mary, and he ate the eggs and drank the drink and felt worse. It was two in the afternoon when he mounted the stairs to check on Ruth. The enigma of her disappearance had settled on him while he was numbly slicing egg and watching the yolk run, trying to decide whether his stomach could handle that much gravity. Ruth, he thought. Jesus Christ, what happened to Ruth? As he mounted the stairs, he felt a sense of impending crisis, ominous and inescapable, but chalked it up to misfiring neurons and the egg that lay there
like death on his stomach. Ruth wasn't in her room. Her cosmetics—jars of this and that, mascara, lipstick—were scattered all over her dressing table, and her bed was unslept in. Or it had been slept in and remade. It
was
two o'clock, after all. She would be at her studio at this hour, working. For a moment he thought of hiking out there to clear up the mystery surrounding the party—and any little misunderstanding that may have arisen from it—but his legs felt like wax and he went back to his room to lie down a bit and let the world readjust itself to him.

He woke for dinner, feeling hollow as a reed. After washing his face and slicking back his hair with a little gel, he lumbered up the stairs to try Ruth's door again. This time, his knuckles had barely made contact with the wood when the door flew back on its hinges.

Ruth stood there before him, small, cold, wicked and glittering, her face drained of blood, her eyes like cut glass. “You son of a bitch,” she said.

“But I—”

“Tell it to Jane Shine,” she snarled, and the door slammed shut with an explosion that resounded all the way down the hall.

He was about to reach for the doorknob, call out her name, protest his innocence, when he heard the screech of wood on wood and watched the door shudder as some immovable piece of hereditary furniture settled against it. He couldn't resist trying the doorknob anyway. It turned, but the door itself was stuck fast.

So she'd seen him with Jane Shine—so that was it. He felt bad about it, but he was blameless. He was. And as he stood there in the hallway, a stream of dinner-bound colonists making their way around him with nods of greeting and knowing smiles, he began to feel put upon, abused, wronged and shamed, a man condemned without a trial. But Ruth was hot—he knew her temper only too well—and he wasn't about to plead with her through a closed door while celebrated composers and Jewish legends sauntered by and smirked at him. In the end, he stood there speechless for two whole minutes, and then he shrugged and went down to dinner.

During the course of the next several days, he tried to get close
to Ruth, tried to make amends, explain himself—though he was guilty of nothing, except maybe playing along with her neurotic games. But she wouldn't talk to him. She turned away from him in public, refused to answer his knock, spent more and more time holed up in her studio. He was depressed about the whole thing, and the more depressed he became, the more he found himself seeking out the company of Jane Shine over cocktails or dinner or around the billiard table in the small hours of the morning. He was playing with fire, and he knew it, but it wasn't just Ruth that depressed him, it was his project too—and Jane Shine, with her knowing smile and luminous eyes and her easy conversance with fishes, lent a sympathetic ear.

The biggest problem with the project was that it just wouldn't fly. If the albino pygmy sunfish had ever existed, it was extinct now, gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur—or so it seemed. He'd made a standing offer—fifty dollars a fish—to all the entomologists, piscatologists and amateur aquarists dipping their nets in all the backwaters, bayous, rills, puddles, cataracts and creeks in the state, and nothing had turned up. His own nets were seething with all sorts of intriguing things: stickleback larvae and catfish fry, cooters and frogs and newly hatched cottonmouths the size of pipe cleaners, whole glistening fistfuls of
Elassoma okefenokee
(all of them brown, of course, a disappointing and unvarying brown, a brown the color of shit and heartbreak). Not a single milk-white mutant showed its scaly little head. Finally, out of boredom and impatience, and despite his initial resolve, he began bringing home specimens for the aquarium. He couldn't resist. He was a boy in a man's clothes, and this was his new toy.

The first day he dumped in about a hundred
Elassoma,
all of them a depressing uniform brown, though some of the males, in a certain light, showed an encouraging grayish tinge. The fish, barely an inch and a quarter long, all but vanished in the vastness of his two hundred gallons, and he began to think that a smaller tank would have served his purpose just as well. But the tank was inhabited now, and he was excited, lit by the same charge that had electrified
him when his father surprised him on his eighth birthday with a ten-gallon starter tank. The next day he added another hundred pygmy sunfish and a sampling of other species too—the warmouth, the flier, the least killifish and the golden topminnow, and a pullulating little swarm of half-inch bullheads to patrol the bottom.

He woke the following morning—the morning of the party—to find thirty of his pygmies floating belly up in a slick of mucus at the surface. He checked the pH of the water, and it was fine—slightly acidic, like the peat-tinctured waters of the swamp itself. Puzzled, he fished out the pale bloated little corpses and dumped them in the flowerbed beneath the window. When he came back later that afternoon, half the fish in the tank were dead and even the bullheads were struggling near the surface—and you couldn't kill them with a hammer. And then he noticed that the water had a distinct yellowish cast to it, as if the fish were swimming in pickling brine or urine instead of the pure filtered well water he'd been careful to provide. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and he turned to the pages of Axelrod's
Exotic Aquarium Fishes
for enlightenment.

Under the section headed “Invasive Organisms,” he discovered that the pristine world he'd created had been infiltrated by undesirable elements. Protozoa—he remembered them from freshman biology, virulent little animalcules with waggling microscopic tails—were blooming in the water—his water—and wiping out the desirable elements. He discovered too that the solution to the problem was permanganate of potash, which would eradicate the protozoa and leave the fishes unharmed, and after driving to a pet shop on the mainland, procuring the chemical and dosing the aquarium with it, he watched most of the remaining fish float slowly to the surface and breathe their last. The next day a swarm of carnivorous water beetles materialized from nowhere to finish off the survivors.

In the absence of Ruth, Jane Shine provided solace. After dinner that evening, he led her down the hallway and into the back parlor, where they stood gazing on the pale massed bodies of the dead.

“It's a shame,” she said. “All that wasted effort.”

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, her face lit in the soft glow of the aquarium, and he felt guilty. Ruth would kill him. Eat him alive. But he was depressed and discouraged and where was she when he needed her? He sighed. “I guess I'm going to have to tear down the whole thing and start over.” He gave her a rueful smile. “God had the same problem. Or so I hear.”

“It's so beautiful,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the aquarium.

They watched as a crippled killifish rose feebly to the surface, enfolded in the spidery grip of a water beetle.

Jane turned to him. “It's the plants,” she said. “They're coming in on the plants.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“I'd go to a place like Aquarium City—do you have anything like that around here, in Savannah maybe? Get your plants there. At least you know they're clean.”

He nodded. Aquarium City. It was so simple: nature was subversive and untidy, and the kindly folks at Aquarium City would be only too happy to sanitize it for him. Yes, of course. And the way she spoke, clipping off each phrase as if it were too precious to part with, reduced him to helplessness. How could he question that voice? She spoke, and he felt like a toppling tree.

Otherwise”—she gestured toward the quivering fish—“well, you could wind up with
anything
in there.”

When ruth finally came back to him, he felt nothing but relief. Yes, he'd been around the singles bars of La Jolla and West-side L.A., and yes, Jane Shine couldn't have been any more compelling if she'd been soaked in pheromones, but Ruth was what he wanted. Ruth was palpable and real in a way that Jane Shine, with her puffed-up, otherworldly beauty, could never approach. She was pretty in her own way, uniquely Ruth, and he couldn't get enough of her. But it went beyond pretty, way beyond: she was a life force, a tidal wave, and she swept all before her, and yet at the
same time there was something vulnerable and uncertain about her and it made him feel strong to be there for her. And her obsession with writing—the whole lexicon of her books and writers and reviews, her lists of who was in and who was out—it was the perfect counterbalance to his fish, an obsession he could relate to, a reason for being. And it didn't matter if the obsession was for stamp collecting or paleontology or Renaissance art—it didn't even matter if she was good at it or not—it gave her a fire and a life that made other women seem dull by comparison. He had his fish, and that was all right by her; she had her writing.