East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  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 i
n 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.

  She came up to him at cocktail hour and laid a hand on his arm (blessedly, as the Fates would have it, he was leaning over the bar with Sandy at the time; Jane was nowhere to be seen). “Hi,” Ruth said, and that was it, the six days of silence forgotten, Jane Shine a verboten subject, the party a distant memory. And without another word she took him by the hand and led him upstairs to her room.

  In the morning, before she tripped off to breakfast in the convivial room, she woke him with a gentle rub and lubrication and told him she’d be needing a ride into Savannah that afternoon—for groceries. “Savannah?” he said. “What’s wrong with Darien?”

  “Oh”—offhand, gazing out the window—“you know, there are some things I want that you’re just not going to find at the local Winn Dixie.” She turned to him and grinned and he felt the relief again, coursing and strong, washing over him like a hot shower. “Let’s face it, Sax—Darien, Georgia, isn’t exactly gourmet heaven.”

  “Okay,” he said, shrugging, “fine,” and at four he drove her to an address on De Lesseps and had a beer in a place he knew on the waterfront while she pushed a shopping cart around. When he swung by to pick her up an hour later, she was waiting for him on the street, engulfed in brown paper bags. He was surprised by how much she’d bought—eight bags of canned goods—and even more surprised when she declined his offer to help carry the stuff out to her studio. “What do you mean?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the mountain of groceries as he put the car in gear. “You’re going to haul all this shit out to the cottage by yourself? Cans and all?”

  Ruth was examining her nails. “I’ll do it in shifts,” she said, “don’t worry about it.”

  “But it’s no problem, I mean I’d be happy—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  But Saxby did worry about it, all the way down the highway to the ferry and all the way across Peagler Sound and up the blacktop road to the house. How was she going to get eight bags of canned goods out to her studio—and what in god’s name did she need them for anyway? She had her breakfast and dinner at the house and each afternoon Owen brought her a gourmet lunch—finest lunch offered by any artists’ colony anywhere, or so his mother claimed. It was crazy. Was she expecting a siege or something?

  And then, as they were staggering through her bedroom door with the booty, one of the bags split, spilling cans all over the floor, and Ruth stopped him when he bent to pick them up. “I can do it myself,” she said, turning her back to him and crouching over the cans as if she meant to hide them. That was odd. And it was odder still when he retrieved the two cans that had escaped her.

  “Fried dace?” he said. “Bamboo shoots? What are you, going Oriental on us?”

  She spun round on him, and while she didn’t exactly snatch the cans out of his hand, she took them firmly from him and dropped them into the unrevealing depths of the bag on the table behind her. “No,” she said, smiling then, “not really. It’s just that… I like to try new things.”

  “Fried dace?” He shook his head and returned her smile, and then she fell into his arms, but the whole thing was very peculiar, very peculiar indeed.

  * * *

  On the weekend, Jane Shine went off to sea island with some clown in a silver XKE and he watched Ruth come to life again. She practically pirouetted round the room at cocktail hour, and at dinner she couldn’t sit still, flitting from table to table like a gossip columnist at a premiere. Saxby didn’t mind. He was glad to see her enjoying herself, reasserting her preeminence, shining like a supernova in the Thanatopsis firmament. And he was glad too that she seemed to have forgotten all about the party, letting him off the hook vis-à-vis the Jane Shine incident and any number of related peccadilloes he wasn’t necessarily even aware of, but condemned for all the same. While she was clowning with Thalamus at the next table, he laid his aquarium woes on Clara Kleinschmidt, talking to hear himself talk—and to pay her back, in small measure, for Arnold Schoenberg.

  After dinner, there was a recital by Patsy Arena, a squat, broad-faced woman of Cuban extraction who looked as if she’d stepped out of a Botero painting. She was new to the colony, having come just that week at the invitation of Clara Kleinschmidt, and she played the old Steinway in the front parlor as if she were tenderizing meat. In all, she was to play three compositions that evening, two of her own and one of Clara’s. Owen turned the lights down. Ruth held Saxby’s hand. The colonists cleared their throats, twisted in their seats, leaned forward in fear and expectation.

  Bang! Patsy Arena hit the piano like a boxer. Silence. One and two, one and two, she whispered, bobbing her frizzy head. Bang! Bang! she slammed at the keyboard with the ball of her fist. And then: nothing. For three full agonizing minutes she sat rigid, staring at the cheap plastic alarm clock perched atop the gleaming ebony surface before her. Finally the alarm went off—ding-ding-ding—and Bang! she hit the keyboard. The piece was called Parfait in Chrome, and it went on for forty-five minutes.

  Afterward, as a kind of dessert, there was the weekly movie (Woman in the Dunes, a nod to Owen, who was in one of his Japanese phases). Nearly everyone sat through both the recital and the film, which ultimately had more than a little in common. Life at Thanatopsis, as stimulating as it might have been to the artistic sensibility, was problematic as far as entertainment was concerned—Saxby was aware that most of the colonists found it a grinding bore—and the nightly readings, recitals and exhibitions, as well as the weekly film, were small moments of release in a bleak continuum.

  Of course, none of that stopped Ruth from spontaneously rewriting the film’s dialogue, much to the amusement of her fellow colonists, or from parodying Patsy Arena’s performance later on in the billiard room. She had the whole crew in hysterics. They were red in the face and pounding at their breastbones as she pantomimed the pianist’s clumsy assault on her instrument, but then Clara and her protégée hunkered into the room and Ruth deftly threw the ball to Abercorn, who’d been giggling innocently in his beer. “Catch anything in your snares today, Det?” she asked.

  The laughter subsided. Clara poured Patsy a drink. Everyone looked at Abercorn.

  Aber
corn had been mooning round the place off and on for the past week or so. Sometimes he had the other character with him, sometimes not. Ruth’s question had a barb in it, and Saxby swirled the ice in his drink, watching Abercorn squirm. He kind of liked the guy, actually—or maybe he just felt sorry for him. Abercorn looked up at Ruth out of his big darting rabbit’s eyes. The question seemed to sadden him. “Nothing,” he said. He tugged at his nostrils, scratched an ear. “Lewis and I think somebody else is involved.”

  Ruth looked away. Suddenly she was deeply interested in the way the bourbon in her glass caught the light. At the time, Saxby thought nothing of it—but there was a look on her face, lips pursed, eyes downcast but alert, that he was to recall later. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you mean—like somebody on the island is hiding him or something?”

  Abercorn nodded, slowly and gravely, his chin stabbing at the circle of colonists gathered round him. Everyone was listening now. “I can’t think of anything else—he’s been out there for five weeks, and aside from that business down at Tupelo Shores and the shit he’s been able to steal here and there, don’t you wonder what he’s eating?”

  Saxby hadn’t given it a thought—at this point the big awkward Japanese kid who’d lurched out of Peagler Sound that night and run from him at the market was more amusing to him than anything else. But now—just for a moment and so quickly that he dismissed it the moment the thought flashed into his head—an answer came to him: fried dace.

  * * *

  The next night—saturday—Ruth didn’t turn up for Cocktails, and Saxby sat with his mother on the veranda and watched for her. When Armand rang the dinner bell and still she hadn’t come in from the studio, he ambled into the main dining room and sat at one of the small tables in back with Septima and Owen. His mother rattled on about colony business—who was coming in the fall and how so-and-so had been turned down at Yaddo and how she wouldn’t dream of inviting her—and he closed his ears, shut down his brain and lifted the fork to his lips. After dinner he retired to the back parlor to brood over his aquarium. That morning he’d drained the tainted water, discarded the plants and gravel and rocks—he was going to give the thing a rest for a couple of days, and then he was going to start all over again. But he’d learned his lesson. This time he was going to Aquarium City and he was going to be patient. No more fooling around: he was going to breed albinos and he was going to make money. And what’s more, he was going to take his place among the great amateur aquarists of the century: William Voderwinkler, Daniel DiCoco and Paul Hahnel, father of the fancy guppy.