East is East (32 page)

On sundays, armand served dinner at seven and sometimes a bit later, depending on his whim and the mood of the colonists. Sunday was, after all, the day of rest, or so Septima reasoned, and long before she'd engaged her current chef she'd pushed back cocktails and dinner by an hour on the Lord's Day, and it was now a Thanatopsis tradition. Sunday afternoons were long and languorous, and no one stirred before six, when the first sunburned and subdued clumps of artists began to gather on the patio or in the front parlor for cocktails. Sometimes there would be music—a poet would sit down at the piano or a biographer would reveal a hidden talent for the clarinet, ravishing the room with the adagio from Mozart's concerto or a Gershwin medley—and the ice cubes would tumble into shaker or glass with a rhythmic click that was salvation itself for the sun-dazed and weary.

It was close to seven when Ruth came down for dinner. She'd scrubbed and showered and scrubbed again, ridding herself of any vestige of the sweaty film that had clung to her earlier that afternoon, clogging her pores and making her feel dirty and vulnerable while Abercorn hung over her with his unfinished face and chummy questions. She was wearing a white Guatemalan peasant blouse embroidered with bright blue flowers and matching full skirt, and she descended the steps and crossed the front hallway feeling light, airy, lustral, feeling unconquerable all over again.

When she entered the front parlor, Sandy was at the piano, stroking the petrosal keys as if they were flower petals, dripping
his way through one syrupy Beatles tune after another. The melodies were perfect reconstructions of a thousand memories, syrupy or not, and with the help of their third or fourth cocktails, the colonists were in a mellow mood. Ruth stepped through the door and recognized them all, her friends and fellow artists, her community, her family, poised on sofas and ottomans, hovering over the bar, each and every one of them a joy and a solace.

Irving Thalamus was the first to call out her name, as usual—it was his way, chutzpah thrown up like a screen, the legend crowing—and then a murmur went through the room and they converged on her as if she'd just broken the tape in the marathon.

“You fox,” Thalamus said, shaking his legendary head, “you sly fox.” And then, turning to the others, “Can she keep a secret or what?” He was beaming at her, embracing her, squeezing her as if she were exotic fruit. “This,” he pronounced, “is a
writer.”

Ruth hugged him back, giving them all a knowing but self-deprecatory grin, and reddening, if ever so slightly. Ina was staring at her in wonder. Bob's eyes were glowing. Regina, in a chartreuse leather halter, looked up from a game of solitaire and one of the cigars she was now affecting, and Sandy broke off in the middle of “Fool on the Hill” to leap a barstool and pour Ruth a conspicuous martini—a whiff of vermouth and three olives, just the way she liked it. Clara and Patsy were there too, hovering at the edge of the press and looking like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in matching pantsuits.

“Hey, La D.: you're just in time,” Sandy hollered, elbowing his way toward her with the drink held high, “—we just sent out for sushi.”

And oh, they laughed at that, her fellow colonists, mellow and proud, an excess of moisture in their eyes, warming up for the evening, the week, the month to come, with its string of Japanese jokes, its cops and robbers routines, and the audacious, awe-inspiring theme that would underlie it all:
What La Dershowitz won't do for a story, huh?
And all the while the delectable questions—how
long, how much, had she slept with him and what did the sheriff say?—hung in the air, awaiting fulfillment.

During the soup course, Ruth managed tête-à-têtes with Irving, Sandy, a myopic poet in a strapless gown with whom she'd never before exchanged a word, and a vacuous, wide-eyed Ina Soderbord. Over salad, Clara and Patsy pressed her for details, and while she tore into the main course—she found that she was ravenous after all the day's excitement—Septima herself wanted clarification of some of the statements she'd made earlier. It wasn't a dinner—it was musical chairs. By the time Rico brought out dessert and the big gleaming coffee urn, Ruth was the center of a group that wheeled out from her like planetary bodies, circling, tangential, held fast by the irresistible force of gossip.

After-dinner drinks were served on the patio.

Ruth was chatting with Bob and Sandy, enjoying the relative cool of the evening, feeling reborn, when she felt a hand slip into her own and looked up into the depthless haunted eyes of Laura Grobian. At fifty, Laura Grobian was the doyenne of the dark-eyed semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former-bohemian school of WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209-page trilogy set in 1967 San Francisco. She'd published a few slim volumes since (each phrase chiseled like sculpture—or dental plaster, depending on your point of view) and she'd been photographed by Karsh, Avedon and Leibowitz, her sunken cheeks, black bangs and haunted eyes as fixed an image in the public consciousness as Truman Capote's hat or Hemingway's beard. She dismissed Bob and Sandy with a neurasthenic bob of her head and drew Ruth aside.

“Oh, Ruth,” she gasped, fanning herself while bats careened overhead and mosquitoes hovered, “I heard, I heard all about it. How terrified you must have been—”

Ruth gazed on her with wonder. If Irving Thalamus was a legend in his own time, Laura Grobian was supernal, divine, and here she stood in the flesh, not merely acknowledging Ruth's existence, but seeking her out, conferring with her, pumping her! Ruth leaned
toward her and dropped her voice to a stagey whisper: “I've never been so afraid in my life, Laura.” She paused a beat to see how the haunted-eyed Laura Grobian was taking this little familiarity, and then went on. “Well, the sheriff—he was the worst. He's got those Southern manners, yes, but when he gets you in that room and starts grilling you, let me tell you he's the most powerful and intimidating man I've ever been this close to in my life. You know what he does?”

Laura Grobian's spectral eyes were canny and fixed. She was all ears.

It was at this moment that a vaguely familiar automotive cough and rumble insinuated itself between the buzz of conversation and the shrilling of the insects, and the colonists looked up briefly from their Grand Marnier and Rémy-Martin to the fleeting wash of a pair of headlights. A gleam of silver flitted beneath the lights of the drive, there was the rise and fall of the car's engine shutting down and the elegant thump of first one door and then the other closing on perfection: Jane Shine was back.

Ruth could feel them, the whole group, the whole colony, abuzz as they were with excitement over
her
exploits,
her
daring,
her
immaculate bedeviling of the powers that be, hesitate in the breach of that moment. The chatter died round her and her heart sank. But then Laura Grobian's ruined but exquisite tones floated out to fill the vacuum—“But tell me, Ruth, honestly: you
were
hiding that desperate man all along, weren't you?”—and it was over. As one, the colony turned back to the conversation, to the drink at hand and the company present. Jane Shine was back. So what else was new?

It couldn't have gone any better for Ruth, queen of the hive once again—she was even readying herself to grant the inevitable and gracious billiard-room audience to Jane Shine later that night, or maybe she'd snub her, maybe she would—it couldn't have gone any better, till there came a single wild shout from out beyond John Berryman that grew immediately into a chorus of cries and lamentation and gave rise in the next moment to a parade of footsteps
storming the patio. “What is it?” someone cried, and Ruth saw the sheriff's face, wild and white, Abercorn's, Turco's, their mouths drawn tight and eyes rabid, and then the sheriff seized on her, Ruth, as the first face he recognized. “The phone,” he barked, “where's the phone?”

She was frozen. They were at her again, at her like hounds. Everything broke down in that instant, faces flapping round her like sheets in the wind. “Phone?” she repeated, stupid, dazed.

“Goddamn it, yes,” he snarled, looking on her with hatred, real hatred, before turning away in disgust and seizing on Laura Grobian. And then he was turning wildly away from her too, flailing his arms at the crowd gathered there on the patio with their sweet drinks and snifters of swirling dark cognac. “I need your help, all of you,” he cried, and then his voice dropped down to nothing and he finished the thought as if he were talking to himself, “—the son of a bitch is gone and got himself loose again.”

They'd caught him. run him down. overwhelmed him with their guns and their dogs and their Negroes. They'd caught him, yes. Oh, yes. Slapped him, handcuffed him, jerked their elbows into his ribs, his gut, the small of his back. They shoved him, abused him, humiliated him, made him walk the gauntlet of them as if they were red Indians in the forest, jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a Chinaman. Yes. But they weren't red Indians. They were white-faced and black-faced, blue-eyed, kinky-haired, they stank of butter and whiskey and the loam that blackened their fingernails, and it was they who'd exterminated the red Indians with a ferocity so pitiless and primeval it made the savages seem civilized. Yes. Oh, yes. And they hated him. Hated him so deeply and automatically it froze his heart: this was American violence, bred in the bone. This was the mob, the riot, this was dog eat dog.

The hate. It took him aback, it did. He was like them—that was the whole point, couldn't they see that? He was a mutt too. But they didn't see it, didn't care. They cuffed him and shoved him and spat their curses at him and he saw the hate in their cold rinsed-out
hakujin
eyes, saw it in the black stony glare of the Negroes: he was an insect, a snake, something to be stepped on and ground into
the dirt, eliminated. The face of the Negro boy had been almost ecstatic with hate as he crouched there in the path, consumed in his passion, implacable, worse even than the dogs. (They were there too—right there, right in Hiro's face—choking back snarls and drool and breath that stank of meat gone bad, trembling all over with the urge to fall on him and tear him to pieces.)
Uncle!
the boy kept shouting, as if it were some sort of war cry,
Uncle! Uncle!,
his fists clenched, his eyes hard, tongue swollen, his very blood turned to acid with the ferocity of his hate.

And then there was the puffed-up little man in fatigues who pulled the boy off him and forced his wrists into the handcuffs, and the other Negro who called off the dogs, and the spatterface from the INS and the sheriff too: there was no glimmer of humanity in any of them. They'd never smiled, laughed, enjoyed a meal, friendship, love or affection, never petted a dog, stroked a cat or walked a child to school. They were hunters. Killers. And Hiro was their quarry, foreign and strange and worth no more time or thought than a cockroach dropped from the ceiling into their morning grits.

Their hands were on him, firm hands, iron hands, and the cuffs bit into his wrists. The sheriff hauled him to his feet and walked him back down the path, grim and purposeful, jerking impatiently at his manacled forearm while a deputy prodded him from behind. Hiro could hear them hooting and cursing and shooting off their weapons somewhere up ahead, but then the sheriff called out to them in a fiery hoarse shout and the noise of the guns abruptly ceased, lingering for a moment as echo and then fading away to stillness. A hush fell over the morning and all at once Hiro was afraid. He held the fear in a lump inside him, a tumor of fear, and he bowed his head and concentrated on his feet.

The man in fatigues and the boy with the dogs had fallen into step behind Hiro and the sheriff—they were quiet now, the dogs, whining and panting like housepets out for a stroll in the park—and behind them were the agency man and the spidery Negro boy whose towering unquenchable
Amerikajin
hate had brought Hiro
down. It was a parade, that's what it was. Grim, silent, angry, a parade in celebration of hate. But Hiro had no time to get philosophical about it—already they were emerging on the clearing at Ruth's place and a murmur went up around him. He kept his eyes on the ground, but he could feel the presence of them, black and white, a mob of them, and he could smell the gunsmoke on the air. No one spoke. No one cursed or abused him. And then suddenly a man dried up like a stick of firewood stepped in front of him—“You Jap bastards kilt my brother Jimmy,” he snarled—and Hiro felt a stitch in his side, the elbow to the kidney, and then all the rest of them were spewing it at him—hate—until the sheriff got him in the car and out of there, out of the jungle and down the black macadam road to the cell that awaited him.

And now, here he was, in a
gaijin
cell, fulfilling his destiny.

From the storage room of the
Tokachi-maru
to the big bedroom at Ambly Wooster's to the cramped loveseat at Ruth's to this joyless cubicle of rotten mortar and stone, he was a prisoner in perpetuity, hopeless and defeated. The City of Brotherly Love was an illusion, a fairy tale—he saw that now. And then he thought of J
ō
ch
ō
and Mishima. In defeat, there was only one path to honor, and that was death. Mishima had addressed the soldiers of the Self-Defense Forces on the day he died, exhorting them to join him in rising up to purify Japan, and when they didn't join him, when they laughed and jeered, he'd turned a sword in his own guts and made a mockery of them all. Alone in his cell with the stirrings of his guilt and shame, Hiro fell back on J
ō
ch
ō
. He didn't have the battered and stained little volume—the sheriff had taken it from him, along with the picture of Doggo and the few odd little coins he'd got back from the girl in the Coca-Cola store—but he knew the formula, knew it by heart. The more they hated him, the more Japanese he became.