East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  Olmstead White was dead, and Ruth wondered about the legal ramifications of that. “You didn’t touch him, did you?”

  Hiro looked away. His face flushed. “I run,” he said.

  Ruth poured the wine and they drank and talked till the cabin fell into shadow and all the familiar objects of the place—her typewriter, the hot plate and coffee things, her pitcher plants and the Hockney poster she’d tacked up on the wall to brighten the place up—began to lose definition in the deepening gloom of evening. She told Hiro of her girlhood in Santa Monica—Were there Japanese there? he wanted to know; were there Negroes? Mexicans?—and he told her of his American hippie father, his mother’s disgrace, the epithets that had trailed him since he was old enough to walk. She leaned toward him as he spoke: so that was it. His hair, his eyes, the size of him—he was half an American.

  Later, she spoke of her writing—She was an author?; the idea seemed to surprise him, though he’d sat there all day watching her at work—and of Jane Shine, and how she’d come to Thanatopsis to usurp her place. He sympathized. “Very bad sitration, Rusu—don’t let her push you in a circle.” And then he told her of Chiba and Unagi and of his dream of the City of Brotherly Love.

  In summer, darkness comes quickly on the islands. The sun pales, the dense green of the vegetation washes to gray, and night drops like a curtain. They ate, they talked, and before long fireflies perforated the darkness beyond the windows and Ruth could no longer make out Hiro’s features. “I’ll help you if I can,” she said finally. “I suppose that makes me an accessory or something, but I’ll think of some way of getting you off the island and on a train or a bus going north.” She paused to light a cigarette, the match flaring briefly in the darkness. “You might not find the City of Brotherly Love, but at least in New York you can disappear—that much I know.”

  Hiro’s voice was low and troubled and it came to her out of the darkness. “I can never repay my debt to you, not in a hundred lifetimes.”

  “Forget it,” she said, “you would do the same for me—anybody would.” She didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but she could feel his embarrassment, some sort of macho Japanese thing, she supposed, and she was just talking to cover it. To change the subject, she asked him if he wanted a cigarette.

  “No, sank you too much,” he said. His voice dropped even lower. “But how, Rusu, can you get me off this island?”

  She didn’t have a clue. She didn’t have a car either, and judging from the look on Sax’s face that night on the sound, she couldn’t very well let him in on the secret. Or could she? “I don’t know,” she said, and she realized in that moment that she didn’t really want to get him to the mainland, not for a while yet, anyway. “But you can’t risk leaving here—the cabin, I mean. Do you understand? They’re after you—everybody on the island. And those two men—you remember the disco?—they’ll be back, I know they will.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when Hiro went rigid. “Shhhh, Rusu,” he said, “what was that?”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Shhhh. Listen.”

  And then she heard it: the snap of a twig, footsteps on the path. Suddenly a light played over the front of the house, and Hiro was on the floor.

  “Ruth? You in there?”

  Saxby.

  She was on her feet in an instant—“Yes, yes, I’m here,” she called, trying to sound nonchalant, though her heart was boring a hole in her—and then she was at the door, intercepting him at the threshold.

  He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and his hair had fallen across his eyes. He held the flashlight in one hand, angling the beam so it caught the side of her face. “I looked all over the place for you,” he said.

  Her circuits were jammed. She couldn’t think. “I was here,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Sitting here in the dark? Were you talking to somebody?”

  “I was working,” she said.

  “In the dark?”

  “I was thinking. Thinking out loud.”

  He said nothing, but after a moment he lowered the flashlight and let the huskiness creep into his voice: “Hey,” he said, “you’re really weird, you know that, Ruth Dershowitz?” And then he took hold of her, the screen door gaping on its hinges, the beam of the flashlight playing crazily off the ceiling. “That’s what I like about you.”

  She wrestled with him a bit, let him kiss her, held him. “Let’s go, Sax,” she said, whispering into his shoulder. “Let’s go back to the house.” Pause. “Somehow, I just don’t feel like working anymore.”

  He kissed her again, hard and urgent. “Time for play,” he said, and his hand was on her breast.

  “Not here,” she said.

  “On the couch,” he whispered, and the flashlight clicked off and dropped with a thump to the weathered planks of the porch. He was struggling with her top, trying to pin her against the doorframe, lift her off her feet and find her mouth with his tongue—all at the same time.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Out here, then. On the porch.” He had the top up around her armpits, a hand on her hip; she could feel his tongue wet on her nipples. “Out here,” she breathed, “under the stars.”

  And then she swung away from him, caught at his belt and tugged him out of the doorway. In the next moment she was down on the rough planks of the porch and he was on her, breathing hard, and she was making room for him, giddy and hot and beyond caring, the screen door slamming behind them with a sudden sharp slap of punctuation. He’s in there, she thought, moving beneath Saxby, in there listening, and then she was over the top and thinking nothing, nothing at all.

  * * *

  She brought breakfast for him the next morning, and neither of them mentioned Saxby or what had happened the night before. Not right away, at any rate. He was awake when she got there, but he seemed withdrawn, insular, wrapped up in himself like a cat, and his eyes had a dull bludgeoned look to them. The light blanket she’d given him lay balled up in one corner of the loveseat, while he was hunched at the other, dressed only in his lurid shorts—he hadn’t bothered to pull on the sweatshirt or socks. And the place smelled of him—for the first time she was aware of that, of his smell—though the odor wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. Just different. There’d been a smell of old wood about the place, of fungus and moss and earth—a smell she could only describe as “woodsy”—but he’d replaced it with his own smell. A body inhabited this place now: his body.

  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 watchin
g 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 ca
me 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.”