East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  * * *

  The reception afterward was just one of those things you had to live through. The last thing Ruth wanted was to stand around and congratulate Jane Shine, but she had no choice really. If it came right down to it she could put on a face and play the game, no problem. She loved Jane Shine. She’d been to school with her. She wished her well. Right?

  If only it was that easy.

  Someone put on a tape of old Motown hits—Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Four Tops—and Ruth almost let the beat infect her, almost let go, until she realized that the music was for Jane, who’d made a big deal of praising it in a recent issue of Interview, a copy of which had magically come to appear on one of the end tables in the parlor. Oh, yes, Jane had practically lived Motown when she was a girl—a very young girl, of course, in kindergarten—or was it first grade? It was a beat and, she didn’t know, soul, she guessed, that made it great. She tried for the same sort of thing in her writing, not that she could ever touch “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” or “My Ding-a-Ling,” but there was a rawness there, a sensuality, a je ne sais quoi that she strived for. Ruth had read the article surreptitiously. It made her gag.

  After the applause had died down, Ruth wandered into the party with Brie—Owen had taken the whole thing inside because of the bugs, but the French doors stood open to the patio and the sound system was still wired out there in case anyone wanted to liberate the carnal spell of Jane’s reading with a bout of groin-rubbing and hip-grinding. Ruth didn’t. She planned to remain relatively inconspicuous—a presence, yes, La Dershowitz after all, star of last night’s dramatic scene on the patío, reigning queen of the hive, impresario of the whole Hiro Tanaka adventure—a looming figure certainly, but not the cynosure. Not tonight. Brie began to bob her head to the music and then she had a drink and before Ruth could stop her she was gushing over the reading. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” she gasped, “I mean knock me down, blow me away, that’s the best story I’ve ever heard. The best reading I’ve ever heard. Anywhere. I mean it.”

  Brie was goggling at her, vapid, open-faced, a little mustachio of pale sweat trembling atop her upper lip. Ruth held herself perfectly still. “Bullshit,” she snapped. “Cheap theatrics, that’s all. You call that reading? You call that sharing a work in progress? I call it grandstanding. I call it an insult.”

  Brie looked stunned, lost; she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

  “And the story itself”—Ruth gave her a withering look—“it’s the cheapest kind of melodrama. Fourteen-year-old Swedes, I mean give me a break.”

  “Ruthie”—the tone was admonitory, two attenuated syllables, a punch on the first and a long trailing tongue-cluck on the second—“you can’t really mean that, can you?” Irving Thalamus had materialized at her elbow. He was wearing a chartreuse and yellow shirt, open at the neck to show off the black creeping jungle of his chest hair. Ruth realized with a jolt that this was the matching top to the shorts she’d pilfered for Hiro. Irving was smiling at her, his lips tight and sardonic, a smile that caught at the corners of his mouth and pricked her like a goad.

  Brie began to gulp for breath as if they were treading water in the deep end of a swimming pool. “That’s what I was saying, Mr. Thalamus—”

  He forestalled her with a raised palm and a tender squeeze of the elbow that managed to be both fatherly and lewd at once. “Irving,” he said, “call me Irving,” his voice rich and promiscuous.

  “That’s just what I was saying, Irving”—she gave him a smile, cute, cute—“I mean I’ve heard a lot of readings at school, and in New York, and this one just blew me away, I mean knock me down with a stick, it’s like she’s possessed or something, I mean talk about acting, talk about dramatic interpretation …” Brie was so worked up she couldn’t go on. She just stood there, bare-shouldered, wide-eyed, goggling and gasping like a goldfish.

  “And how do you feel about it, Ruthie?” Irving’s eyes were hooded. Somehow he’d managed to work an arm round Brie’s waist. He was really enjoying this.

  But Ruth wasn’t about to give him a show. And she certainly didn’t want to talk about Jane Shine, let alone get drawn into a debate over her trumped-up stories and half-witted histrionics. She was going to be cool. Olympian. Above it. “Give me a break, Irving,” she said, leveling her eyes on him. “That wasn’t a reading, it was a premenstrual breakdown.” And then she turned on her heels and left them to their flesh-squeezing and body hair.

  She went to Sandy for solace, but Sandy was as bad as Brie. He sat on the far side of the room with Bob, tapping his fingers to the music and basking in the afterglow of Jane’s reading. Ruth tried to turn him, tried to steer him away from idolatry and sow the seeds of disaffection, but it was no use. He pulled blissfully at the neck of a beer, glancing over at the little group around Jane—Seezers and Teitelbaum, Septima, Laura Grobian, Clara and Patsy and half a dozen others—as if they were disciples gathered round the Messiah himself. Or herself.

  She found Regina in the corner, scowling into a glass of rum, and she knew that at least she would have no qualms about calling shit shit and seeing Jane for the imposter she was. Regina had darkened her eye sockets with kohl and dyed her hair an interstellar black; she looked like a woman in purdah who’s had the veil snatched away from her face. “So,” Ruth said, sidling up to her, “do we bury her next to Wordsworth or what? Or maybe P.T. Barnum would be more like it.” She gave a mirthless little laugh.

  “Jane?” Regina snubbed out a cigarette in the potted palm behind her. She straightened up with a shrug, searched Ruth’s eyes for a second and then looked away. “I don’t know—she can be a real pain in the ass, a real prima donna, if you know what I mean, but I thought the thing tonight was at least dramatic.”

  “Dramatic?” Ruth echoed. She was incredulous.

  “Half of this shit puts me to sleep after about six words—at least she, like, held my interest.”

  Ruth couldn’t help herself—her voice got away from her. “Yeah, but with what? Fakery. Crap. The kind of trumped-up horseshit that hides the fact that there’s nothing there.”

  Regina attempted a smile, but it faded as quickly as it bloomed. She fumbled in her leather jacket for another cigarette.

  “Damn it,” Ruth cried, yelped—she was going too far, she knew it, but she couldn’t stop now—“can’t you see that Jane”—she tried to lower her voice, tried to contain the damage—“Jane Shine is nothing but hot air and horseshit?”

  Ruth became aware in that instant that Regina wasn’t looking at her—she was looking just over her shoulder and she was trying to do something with her mouth and blackened eyes. Ruth turned as if she were caught in taffy, tar, as if she were up to her neck in the La Brea pits.

  Septima stood there before her, her expression climbing up and down the ladder of emotion. Not ten feet away was Jane Shine, on the move, regal, her feet, hips and shoulders touched ever so gracefully by Motown funk, her face locked up like a vise beneath the towering shako of her hair. Between them, the ring of toadies and yea-sayers had opened up like a receiving line. All eyes were on Ruth.

  Jane kept coming. When she reached Septima’s side, she pulled herself up. “Yes,” she said, and you could skewer meat on the edge in her voice, “I’m sure we’re all holding our breath till you get up there, La Dershowitz”—she spat out the sobriquet as if it burned her tongue and then paused to let it gather force. “That is, if you’ve got anything to read—you do, don’t you? You must have been working on something all this time.”

  Ruth didn’t know what to do. Marvin Gaye was dancing all over her head and every face in the room was turned toward her. Her instinct was to lash out, slam the clenched white ball of her fist into those outer-space eyes, rip the lace collar from her throat, demolish the hair, call her out for the conniving leg-spreading literary whore that she was, but she hesitated and lost hold of the moment. Her face was working. Her brain was in overdrive. They were all—every one of them—waiti
ng.

  “Ruthie”—Septima had her by the hand and she began to chatter as if nothing had happened, as if the cold talentless bitch hadn’t just called her out, humiliated her, smashed open the hive and stung her to death—“Ruthie, darlin’, we was all—Orlando and Mignonette and Laura and I—we was all just sayin’ what a pleasure it would be to have you read from your work too, and you know, as everyone here does, that while we don’t require room and board from our artists, we do feel privileged to receive payment in kind …” She looked up at the ceiling as if it were transparent, a faraway smile fixed on her lips. “Some of the things we’ve heard in this very room …”

  This was the challenge. This was it. This was the slap in the face, the gauntlet at her feet. She’d wanted to be inconspicuous, let Jane have her moment, fight her with subterfuge and innuendo, but she’d blown it. Her heart was going, her eyes must have been wild, but she knew her lines, oh yes indeed. “Septima,” she said in her calmest, steadiest tones, and she looked into those milky old gray eyes as if they were the only eyes in the room, as if Jane Shine weren’t standing there twelve inches to the right, as if she didn’t exist, had never existed, as if this were a private tête-à-tête with the woman who could well be her future mother-in-law, “I’d be honored.”

  The doyenne of Thanatopsis House broadened her smile till her thin old lips were stretched taut. “Tomorrow night, then?” she said, and something flickered to life in the depths of her moribund eyes.

  Ruth nodded.

  “Same time as tonight’s?”

  Marvin Gaye: what was he singing? Ain’t no mountain high enough/Ain’t no river deep enough. Ruth took a deep breath. “Sure,” she said, “no problem.”

  * * *

  In the morning, she cursed herself. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let herself get sucked in like that? Jane Shine. She wished her an early death, wished her sagging breasts and pyorrhea, wished she’d explode like the puffed-up frog in Aesop’s fable.

  But wishes get you nowhere.

  Ruth was in her studio, working hard, before anyone in the big house had even the vaguest semiconscious presentiment that morning had arrived and that breakfast and work and the slow miraculous unveiling of the day awaited them. She was working with an ease and concentration that would have amazed her if she’d stopped to think about it, hammering away at the keyboard and wielding her Liquid Paper like a sword while a stack of clean new perfectly wrought pages mounted before her. By ten o’clock she’d substantially rewritten sections of “Two Toes,” “Of Tears and the Tide”—it wasn’t so bad, not really—and the piece that had come back from the Atlantic, which in a burst of inspiration she’d retitled “Sebastopol,” to suggest the sort of battle her main characters—two couples—were engaged in. What she thought she’d do was present fragments from each of the stories—real work in progress, the real thing, not some typeset and justified artifact—ending up with the section of “Tears” that described the very Hiro-like husband of the doomed woman. They would sit there—Irving, Laura, Septima, Seezers and Teitelbaum and E.T. herself—and they would think of her, Ruth, and her triumph over the sheriff and Abercorn and the macho little toad who’d given them a taste of real-life drama right out there on the patio before their wondering eyes. Then too, there was sure to be a certain prurient interest in the piece—what did she know about Japanese sex? Had she slept with him? Had she helped him escape? And she’d give them her enigmatic smile, the smile of La Dershowitz, regnant and unassailable, and let it rest. Yes, she’d show them what a reading was all about.

  She worked through lunch, worked through the racket of hammering and cutting and banging as Parker Putnam—or was it Putnam Parker?—did his best imitation of a working carpenter. Hunched and sinewy, burned the color of tobacco, he showed up at eleven with a toolbox the size of a small vehicle, claiming in a halting rheumy voice that “Miz Lights” had asked him to come out and clean the place up. It took him most of the afternoon to knock the shards of broken glass out of the windows and nearly an hour just to get the old screen door off the hinges, but she hardly noticed. Normally, he would have driven her crazy, but today she welcomed him—he was there to test her, to lay one more stone atop the cart to see if it would tip over. But it wouldn’t. Her concentration was complete.

  It was getting late—four? five?—when he packed up his tools (a process that in itself involved half an hour) and left for the day. The hammering ceased. The splintering of glass, the wheezing and spitting and dull reverberant booming were no more. Silence fell over the studio, and it was then that Ruth felt the first faint stirrings of uncertainty. What if—what if the work was no good, after all? What if they didn’t like it? What if she got up there and froze? She imagined the satisfaction that would give Jane Shine, and she felt her stomach clench. But no, it was hunger, that was all, and she realized in that moment that she’d skipped lunch.

  She sat at her desk and ate dutifully—cherry tomatoes fresh from the kitchen garden, salmon mousse with Dijon mustard and a sort of cracker bread Armand had devised himself—and she began to feel better. She thought of her makeup and hair and what she would wear. Nothing pretentious, that was for sure, no lace collars and Edwardian brooches. Jeans and a T-shirt. Earrings. Her aqua heels, the ones that showed off her toes and instep. She would keep it simple. Honest. Genuine. Everything the Shine extravaganza was not. And if the stories weren’t finished, weren’t yet what she wanted them to be, it wouldn’t matter one whit—she was reading sections only, and the sections were strong. The thought lifted her spirits—food, that was all it was—and she felt the strength seeping back into her.

  She rose from her desk and gathered up her papers, inserting the new crisply typed pages in an old unpretentious manila folder. The room was still. The sun held in the windows. She was aware for the first time that day of the birds slashing through the shadows, lighting in the bushes, making music for her alone. She was standing there at the window, her back to the door, having one last cigarette before heading back to get ready, when a sudden noise on the front porch startled her. Turning, expecting to see Parker Putnam fumbling around for some tool he’d forgotten, she had a shock: this wasn’t Parker Putnam. It was Septima.

  Septima. Ruth’s first thought was that she’d lost her way, an embarrassment of age, but the look in the old lady’s eye told her different. Septima stood there on the doorstep, giving the place a tight-lipped scrutiny, Owen at her side. She was wearing her gardening clothes—a straw sunbonnet, an old smock over a pair of jeans, men’s shoes. “Ruthie,” she called in a voice that sounded harsh and strained, “I hate to disturb you, but I—may I come in?”

  Ruth was so surprised she couldn’t answer—Septima made it a strict rule never to visit any of the artists’ studios, out of respect for their privacy, and Hart Crane was a long walk for a woman of her age. Ruth crossed the room wordlessly and swung open the door.

  Something was wrong. She could see it in Owen’s face, see it in the way Septima avoided her eyes as she moved past her and lowered herself into the cane rocker. “Whew!” the old woman exclaimed, “this heat! I swear I’ll never get used to it, never. Would you have a glass of water for me, please, Ruthie?”

  “Of course,” Ruth said, and she poured a glass for Owen too, who remained standing in the doorway as if he hadn’t really meant to come in. “Thanks, Ruth,” he said, draining the glass in a gulp. “Think I’ll just step outside here a minute and inspect the damage,” he said to the room in general, setting the glass down on the windowsill. He focused on Septima. “You call if you need me.”

  When Owen had gone, the screen door tapping gently behind him, Septima lifted her head to give Ruth a long slow look. The air was still, heavy with a premonition of rain. The crepitating sounds of the forest rushed in to fill the silence. “I see Parker’s been here,” Septima said finally.

  Ruth nodded. “He was banging around here all day—but it didn’t disturb me, not really. I was lost in my work.”r />
  “It’s a pity,” Septima sighed, and Ruth agreed, though she wondered just what the old woman was referring to—Parker Putnam’s dismal showing, the weather, the danger of being lost in one’s work? “A real pity the way they shot up this place, Theron Peagler and all the rest of them. You’d think they’d know better. And the way they harried that poor Japanese boy—”

  Again Ruth nodded. Again the old lady fell silent. Just outside the window a bird hit four notes in quick succession, up and down, up and down.

  “Ruthie,” Septima said after a minute, “I’m very sorry for dis-turbin’ you out here, and especially at a time when you’d be workin’ hard to prepare for your readin’, but a matter of the utmost importance has come up.”

  Ruth had been fussing round the little room in an unconsciously defensive way, a proprietary way, but now she took hold of the arms of the other rocker and settled into it as if it might come alive at any moment with the shock of 50,000 volts.

  “I want to ask you about this Japanese boy—and I want to know the whole truth of the matter. It’s become somethin’ of an embarrassment for the colony, especially since he’s gone and escaped—the phone, Ruthie, has been ringin’ off the hook all day, reporters from New York and Los Angeles, everywhere. Well, I want to know the extent of your involvement—the full extent. I think I have a right to that knowledge, don’t you?”