East is East

by Boyle T Coraghessan

  Under full steam, it would take the ship nearly two miles and three and a half minutes to come to a full stop. She would come back for him, Hiro knew that, as he knew that even now all hands were scrambling across the decks shouting “Man overboard!,” but he also knew that the tightest turn she could make was almost a mile across. He stroked hard, his feet churning in the brine, arms hammering at the chop. He had no thought of heading west toward the distant shore—they’d expect that of him—but instead he watched the sun and pushed himself due south, the way they’d come.

  The water was warm, tropical, gleaming with a thousand jewels. He watched the birds overhead, watched the clouds. He clung to the life ring and kicked his legs. And the sea sustained him, embraced him, wrapped him up like the arms of a long-lost father.

  Thanatopsis House

  Ruth had watched the storm gather all morning. It was so dark at 6:30 she nearly slept through her wake-up call, and she pulled on her shorts and top in the gloom. She came down for breakfast at 7:00, taking her place as usual at the silent table, and even then it seemed as if the night had never ended. Owen Birks-head, the colony’s director, had lit the lamps in the corners, but everything beyond the windows was flat and without definition. Inside, it was muggy and close, the air so thick you could almost pat it into place like a down comforter. There was no rumble of thunder, no flash of lightning or streak of rain, but she could feel the storm coming with a deep physical intuition that connected her with the newt beneath the rock and the spider drawn up in the funnel of its web. Of course, she couldn’t mention it to anyone, couldn’t say, “It feels like rain” or “We’re really in for it now.” No. She was, by choice, sitting at the silent table.

  When Saxby’s mother, Septima, now in her early seventies and snoring raucously from the master suite behind the breakfast parlor, had set up the trust for Thanatopsis House on the death of her husband some twenty years earlier, she’d followed the lead of other, more established artists’ colonies like Yaddo, MacDowell and Cum-mington. One of the traditions she’d adopted—and particularly adhered to—was that of the silent table. At breakfast, it was thought, artists of a certain temperament required an absolute and meditative silence, broken only perhaps by the discreet tap of a demitasse spoon on the rim of a saucer—in order to make a fruitful transition from the realm of dreams to that exalted state in which the deep stuff of aesthetic response rises to the surface. Others, of course, needed just the opposite—conviviality, uproar, crippling gossip, lame jokes and a whiff of the sour morning breath of their fellow artists—to settle brains fevered by dreams of grandeur, conquest and the utter annihilation of their enemies. For them, Septima had provided the convivial table, located in a second parlor separated from the first by a paneled corridor and two swinging doors of dark and heavy oak.

  Even on this morning, when the turmoil of the storm was building inside her, when she felt light, almost weightless, when she felt giddy and excited for no good reason, Ruth chose the silent table. She’d been at the colony two weeks now—fourteen mornings—and in that space of time she’d never, even for an instant, thought of sitting anywhere else. Aside from Irving Thalamus, whose trade-in-stock—urban Jewish angst—throve on confusion, the name artists, the serious ones, all chose the silent table. Laura Grobian sat here, and Peter Anserine, and a celebrated punk sculptress with staved-in eyes and skin so pale she looked three days dead. Ruth reveled in it. She pretended to read the Savannah paper—delivered on the previous afternoon’s ferry and always a day out of date—while she watched Laura Grobian, with her concave cheeks and haunted eyes—her famous haunted eyes—to see how she spooned up her cold cereal and how the unflagging hours of the night had treated her. Or she’d study Peter Anserine, recently divorced, with his long nose and prominent nostrils, as he hacked and snorted surreptitiously over his food and the book—always European, and never in translation—that seemed attached to him like some sort of growth. And, too, she got to see who was breakfasting with whom at the convivial table, as they had to pass through the silent room on their way. Ruth watched and brooded and plotted, and when it got to be too much, when the table was deserted and she could put it off no longer, she pushed herself up from her chair and walked the quarter mile to her studio in the woods. Saxby, of course, slept till twelve.

  It hadn’t yet started to rain when Ruth gathered up her things—the satchel with her notebooks, breath mints, her compact and hairbrush and one of the fat pulp romances she devoured in secret—folded the day-old newspaper under her arm, plucked an umbrella from the stand in the front hall and sallied out the door. This was her favorite part of the day. The path, set with flagstones and planted in some bygone era with jonquils and geraniums, took her through a stand of bearded oak and pine and within a good sniff of the marsh. The misery of writing was at hand, it was true, but the smell of the mudflats and the open ocean that drove in twice a day to swallow them stirred memories of her girlhood in Santa Monica—her simple, ingenuous and carefree girlhood, uncomplicated by the mania for fame (and its unfortunate concomitant, work) that had set in when she reached sixteen. And though at this time of year the heat and humidity were unrelenting—the entire state, as she often said, was like a shower stall in a dormitory—and she knew that the mosquitoes and deerflies lay in wait for her beneath the trees, she couldn’t help feeling exhilarated. Here she was, at Thanatopsis, writing—or trying to write; the colleague of Laura Grobian, Peter Anserine and Irving Thalamus—and yes, of the walleyed composer too, who, despite appearances, was the most famous of all the twenty-six artists now in residence.

  Ruth, known to her intimates as La Dershowitz, was thirty-four, though she admitted only to twenty-nine. She’d been writing since her junior year in high school, when John Beard, her English teacher, as interested perhaps in her triumphant breasts and pouting smirk as in her adolescent poems and stories, encouraged her during the long hours of their late-night tutoring sessions. She’d put in time at most of the better summer workshops, courtesy of her father, and she held a shaky B.A. in anthropology from Sonoma State. She spent a year at Iowa and another at Irvine without managing to come away with a degree from either, and she’d published four intense and gloomy stories in the little magazines (two in Dichondra, the editor of which she’d met at Bread Loaf, and one each in Firefly and Precious Buttons). Money had become a problem, waitressing a terminal disease. When she met Saxby, who was flunking out of the oceanography program at Scripps, she fell in love with his dimples, his laugh, his shoulders and the idea of the big house on Tupelo Island. And now she was here. For good. Or at least for a good long while.

  She came up the densely shaded path, already wet under the arms, the satchel jogging at her shoulder, and saw that she’d left the windows of her studio open. (Each of the artists at Thanatopsis ate, slept, bathed and relieved him- or herself in the big house, but was assigned workspace in one of the thirty studio-cottages scattered about the property, and each was strictly enjoined from visiting any of the other cottages during the hours of the workday—that is, from breakfast at 7:00 till cocktails at 5:00. The cottages ranged in size from Laura Grobian’s five-room Craftsman-style bungalow to the single-room structures afforded to lesser lights, and Septima had named each of them after a famous suicide in remembrance of her own husband’s untimely demise.) Ruth was in Hart Crane. It was a one-room affair, very rustic, with an old stone fireplace, a wicker loveseat, two bent-cane rockers and a single capricious electrical outlet. It was also the farthest from the main house of any of the colony’s studios. And that was all right with Ruth. In fact, she preferred it that way.

  At first the open windows took her by surprise—she’d always been careful to lock up behind her, not only for fear of an overnight deluge, but out of respect for the depredations of raccoons, snakes, squirrels and adolescents. For an instant she imagined her typewriter stolen, manuscript gutted, graffiti on the walls. But then she remembered the previous afternoon and how utterly disgusted and sick at heart s
he was over the whole business—typewriters, manuscripts, art, work, love, pride, accomplishment, even the prospective adulation of the masses—and how she’d left the windows open to taunt the Fates. Go ahead, she’d said, impaled on the stake of a wasted afternoon and her own despair, tear it up, ransack the place, liberate me. Go ahead, I dare you.

  Now she felt differently. Now the work fit was on her. Now it was morning and now she had to sit down to her desk like everybody else in America. She mounted the three time-worn steps to the porch, pushed through the unfastened door, dropped her satchel on the loveseat and confronted the ancient Olivetti portable that seemed to stare accusingly at her from the desk beneath the open window. It was still there. So too the page she’d been working on, still jammed in the machine and curled up like a wood shaving with the humidity. For a moment she fussed over the greedy, deep-throated pitcher plants she’d dug up in the swamp—they loved flies, the fat bluebottles that sizzled against the rusty grid of the screen and drove her to distraction—then heated herself a cup of coffee on the hot plate, stepped outside half a dozen times to check on the progress of the storm, and finally, when the boredom threatened to shut down her mind, she settled down to work.

  She tried. She did. But she just couldn’t seem to concentrate. The story she was working on was a multiple point of view thing about a Japanese housewife who’d tried to drown herself and her two young children in Santa Monica Bay after her husband deserted her. It had been in all the papers. The children had drowned, while the woman, her lungs heavy, her throat raw and her eyes stung with salt, was pulled from the water and resuscitated by a seventeen-year-old surfer. Ruth had the surfer’s point of view down, no problem. But the children’s, that was harder. And the mother’s—what had been going through her head?

  Ruth worked for an hour, or what seemed like an hour—she had no way of marking time and she was glad of it—retyping the first paragraph over and over till she could barely make sense of it. Her heart just wasn’t in it. She kept thinking of Saxby. The night before they’d taken the ferry to the mainland and driven into Darien for drinks and dinner. On the way back he’d pulled off the road and they’d made love on the hood of the car. He lay back against the windshield, hard all the way, in his cock, his thighs, the washboard muscles of his abdomen, and she’d climbed atop him, soft and flowering. And then she thought of the storm. And then of the big house, thirty-seven rooms and servants’ quarters, once the centerpiece of a cotton plantation, slaves beading sweat in the fields, mules and factors and all the rest, Saxby’s forefathers astride their buggies, whips in hand. She thought of Gone With the Wind, Roots, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and then she went back to her story, straining to focus on her character, the distraught woman cut off from her culture, her heavy-lidded eyes, fine hands and fingers, and all at once the face of Hiro Tanaka—frozen with fear in the cold crepuscular light of Peagler Sound—rose up before her.

  Chinese. She’d thought he was Chinese. But then she’d never traveled any farther east than the sushi bars of Little Japan or the chop suey houses of Chinatown, and to this point in her life she’d never had any need to differentiate one nationality from another. If the sign outside said Vietnamese, then they were Vietnamese; if it said Thai, then they were Thai. She knew Asians only as people who served dishes with rice. Chinese. How stupid of her. Here she was, trying to conjure up a Japanese housewife from a newspaper account, and a real living breathing Japanese—a desperado, a ship jumper and fugitive—practically throws himself in her naked lap and she thinks he’s a waiter from Chow Foo Luck.

  It was strange. She couldn’t get the image of him out of her head. Where was he? What was he eating? What was he thinking? He’d been ashore a week now and he was still at large, hiding out, buried somewhere in the weeds. There were reports of him everywhere—Saxby swore he’d seen him running for the bushes out back of Cribbs’ Handi-Mart—but where was he? The whole island was in an uproar, from the blacks at Hog Hammock to the veiny retirees of Tupelo Shores Estates. The newspaper account had made him out to be something of a desperate character, a violent and reckless sort who’d broken out of the ship’s brig, assaulted several of his shipmates and taken a suicidal plunge over the side. The Coast Guard had given up its search after two eyewitnesses from the artists’ colony—Ruth couldn’t help feeling a little stab of disappointment when she wasn’t mentioned by name—had seen him come ashore on the southeast tip of Tupelo Island. The authorities were pursuing the matter. He was believed to be armed and dangerous.

  Ruth had had to fight for the paper—this was the biggest thing to hit Tupelo Island since the swine flu epidemic, and everybody wanted to be in on the action. The paper arrived, a day late as usual, two mornings after the encounter on the bay. In the interim she and Saxby had spoken by phone with reporters from the Atlanta Constitution, the Savannah Star and the bi-monthly Tupelo Island Breeze; a special agent of the INS from Savannah who identified himself as Detlef Abercorn; the county sheriff (or “shurf,” as the locals had it); and a Mr. Shikuma, president of the Japan-America Society in New York. Mr. Shikuma, in a flurry of thank-yous and apologies, had wanted to congratulate them on identifying Seaman Tanaka and to assure them that the young sailor, though mentally deranged, would cause no one any irreparable harm.

  Actually, Ruth liked the attention. She hadn’t been herself since she and Saxby had arrived at Thanatopsis House. Perhaps she’d felt intimidated by the Peter Anserines and Laura Grobians, perhaps she’d felt threatened by her contemporaries, as she had at Iowa and Irvine. Certainly she felt awkward about her special relationship with Saxby and the sort of gossip and backbiting it was sure to provoke: Ruth Dershowitz? Who is she anyway? I mean, what has she written? Or does she even have to write—isn’t she the son’s latest squeeze, isn’t that it? In any case, she’d held her peace with the others—she hadn’t said much of anything to anyone. Oh, she’d exchanged banalities over cocktails or dinner with whoever sat to her left or right, but she hadn’t committed herself at all—the ground was shaky yet and she was still learning to walk. But on the night they came in off the bay, she couldn’t help herself.

  It was late, past two, and the only light in the big house came from the billiard room on the second floor. They took the stairs two at a time, Ruth struggling to match Saxby’s long strides. She was out of breath when he flung open the door and tugged her into the room. She saw wainscoting, a chandelier, lamps in the corners. It took her a moment, blinking like someone roused from a sound sleep, to identify the usual crowd of insomniacs.

  Irving Thalamus was there, sitting at the card table, his fingers fidgeting as he tried to fight down the impulse to look up and give away his hand. A poet named Bob sat across from him. Bob had a book out from Wesleyan and he was very serious, though he looked more like a beer distributor than an assistant professor at Emory, which he was. Next to Bob, hunched over a Diet Coke and scratching herself unconsciously, was Ina Soderbord, a square-faced, big-shouldered blonde from Minnesota who wrote as if she were in the throes of delirium tremens. In the corner, enfolded in her metronomic silence, the walleyed composer nodded over a book, while the punk sculptress, in leather shorts and a T-shirt the size of a pup tent, leaned over the billiard table in a blaze of light.

  Before anyone could greet them, before anyone could glance up with a casual “hello” or “what’s up?,” Saxby was spewing out the story in his usual hyperbolic style, the encounter on the bay no less stupefying than an encounter with outerspace aliens. But they all loved Saxby. Loved him for his wit and the square of his shoulders and his utter lack of interest in things artistic. Ruth clung to his arm.

  “No, I swear it,” he was saying, “ the guy looked like Elmer Fudd, except with hair, and Ruth and I were getting romantic—or we’d already got romantic and were thinking about getting romantic again—I mean, I’m naked, for Christ’s sake—don’t blush, Ruth; is she blushing? Anyway, it’s a little disconcerting. We’re out there on the water, and if it was a seal
or a tuna or even a whale, I could understand it, but a Chinese Elmer Fudd? And with hair?”

  Ruth stepped aside, two steps back and one to the left, and watched their faces as Saxby waved his arms and mugged and ran his voice up and down the register. They were spellbound. When Sax was finished, when he’d left the frightened interloper thrashing through the Spartina grass like a spooked buffalo, Irving Thalamus set down his cards and looked up. “You want to take order now?” he said in falsetto, his face expressionless. “You like egg loal or Chinese wegetable?”

  “Maybe he was trying out for the Olympics or something,” Bob said, and he was about to expand on this notion when the punk sculptress cut him off. “You people are really fucked,” she snarled, slamming down the cue stick. She stood glaring at them from the center of the room. “You’re as bad as the crackers. Worse.” She drew herself up, as if to spit on the floor, and stalked out of the room.

  “What’s with her?” Saxby said, helping himself to a handful of peanuts from the bowl in the middle of the card table. “I mean, it’s not like we’re in the East Village here or something. This is Georgia”—and he thickened his accent—“the sweet ol’ downhome Peach State, and I’d say finding a Chinaman in the middle of Peagler Sound is pretty damned incredible—I’d say, for a fact, that the Chinese population of the Sea Islands just soared from zero to one.”