Hungry. All right. He whispered in her ear and when they kissed he tasted the meat on her lips and everyone was watching.
And then, at the end of the week—he couldn’t put it off any longer, didn’t want to—he had to make another collecting trip, this one in the hope of getting his project off the ground. He was going to collect the fish—the rare, almost legendary fish—that would make him his fortune—or rather, carve him his niche in the annals of the great aquarists: fortune he already had. Ruth didn’t want to come with him. Not this time. She was working too well, going with the flow, and she couldn’t risk it. She’d miss him—even if he’d only be gone overnight—and she’d come along with him next time. She promised.
He spent a full blazing bug-infested afternoon and the succeeding morning on the Okefenokee, casting nets, drawing seines, setting minnow traps, and he came up with a writhing grab bag of fascinating things—pirate perch, golden top minnow, needle-nosed gar, swamp darter and brook silverside—but not what he was looking for. It was a disappointment, but not a crushing one—certainly not a defeat. He’d hoped to get lucky, yes, but knew realistically that he might have to comb the swamp a hundred times before he scored. After all, Ahab hadn’t found the white whale in a day, either. Still, he enjoyed the drive, enjoyed the day out in the wilderness, even enjoyed his solitary night in a motel in Ciceroville, where he watched the Atlanta Braves on a color TV bolted to the wall. At noon on the second day he brought his rented boat in and dumped his catch over the side. (He was tempted, especially by the shimmering silver gar, to bring something back for the lifeless aquarium, but he resisted; he didn’t want his little world defiled by just any tawdry thing that happened to catch his eye.) Then he headed back for Tupelo Island, hoping to make the afternoon ferry and cocktail hour.
It was early evening when he rounded the bend of the long sweeping drive and the big house came into view. There was movement on the south lawn, and Saxby saw that the colonists had gathered there for a picnic supper, the women’s white summer dresses and men’s light jackets like so many pale flowers in a field of saturate green. He caught a glimpse of his mother, straw bonnet with a chiffon veil, erect and regal in a wooden lawnchair, and he waved. Ruth would be there somewhere, and he slowed the pickup ever so briefly, but didn’t see her, and then he was rumbling into the garage, a faint pink cloud of dust catching up with him as he killed the engine and swung open the driver’s door.
He hadn’t had a chance to clean up—his hands stank of perch and darter and of the rich fecal muck of the Okefenokee, and the thighs and backside of his jeans were stiff with the residue of his fish-handling—and Ruth took him by surprise. No sooner had he swung open the door and set his feet on the ground, than she was there, rushing into his arms in a strapless cocktail dress that showed off the flashing lines and tawny hollows of her throat and shoulders. “Sax,” she moaned, holding him, kissing him, fish-stink and all, “I’m so glad you’re back.”
He held her, pressed her to him, hot already, hot instantly, a gas grill gone from pilot to high at the merest touch, and he wondered if he should gently push her away, for the sake of her dress, and he was embarrassed and he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t speak either—just held him—and that was odd: she was never at a loss for words. And then he felt it, a tremor running through her, seismic, an emotional quake: she was crying. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
She wouldn’t lift her face.
“Is something wrong? Did something happen while I was away? What is it, babe?”
Her voice was buried, it was doleful and hoarse. “Oh, Sax,” she said, and she paused, and she squeezed him and he squeezed her back. “You’ve got to talk to your mother, you’ve got to—for me.”
Talk to his mother?
“It’s Jane Shine,” she said. She looked up at him now—lifted her head from his shoulder and showed him the tears on her face and the cold fierce glare in her eyes. “She can’t come here. She can’t. She’s a bitch. A snob. She’s—all her talent’s between her legs, Sax, that’s all. She’s not worth it, she isn’t.”
He said something, anything, a rumble of disconnected words to comfort her, but she wouldn’t be comforted.
Her hands tightened on his biceps and her eyes were hard. “No, Sax, I mean it,” she said. “She can’t come here.”
There was a sudden shout of laughter from across the lawn and Ruth didn’t flinch, didn’t hear it, didn’t care. “It would ruin everything,” she said.
Rusu
It was a steamy oppressive tropical day, flies everywhere, the reek of low tide settling in the nostrils like a kind of death, a day on which Ruth didn’t bother with breakfast at the convivial table. She didn’t feel even faintly convivial, and after greeting Owen with a stony face and wordlessly appropriating two hot buttered rolls from Rico, she started up the path for Hart Crane, though she didn’t feel much like working either. What she felt like doing was getting off the island, getting out of there altogether—she felt like dressing for two hours and lingering over an eight-course meal at the best French restaurant in New York and then insulting the waiter, the chef, the sommelier and the maître d’. She felt like kicking dogs, pulling teeth, stepping into one of the endless workshops she’d suffered through as a student and annihilating some starry-eyed fool with scarifying and hurtful words.
Gnats darted at her face. Her feet hurt. It was a rotten day. A cataclysmic day. A stinking deadly washed-out low-tide sort of day, the day on which Jane Shine, in all her cheap and overblown glory, was set to descend on Thanatopsis House.
Ruth worked through the morning on her Japanese story—she called it “Of Tears and the Tide”—though what she wrote wasn’t very good and she kept getting bogged down on individual phrases and the sorts of choices that are second nature when you’re working well and impossible when you’re not. At lunchtime, she was up from her desk the moment Owen stole away, and she lifted the bucket off the hook and ate greedily, hungrily, without a thought for Hiro. She hadn’t seen him in a week now, and there was no sign he’d been back. The fruit and cheeses she’d left for him were rotting, the canned goods were untouched, the crackers going soft with mold. And that rankled her too: he’d deserted her. He was a living story, a fiction come to life—she’d imagined him and there he was—and she needed him. Didn’t he realize that?
She was worried about him too, of course—that was part of it. He could have drowned, fallen into a bog, could have been treed and peppered with shot by one of the fired-up redneck coon hunters who haunted the porch out front of the VFW post. But no, if he’d been shot she would have heard about it before the gun was cool, no secrets on Tupelo Island. Maybe he’d got away altogether—maybe he’d swum to the mainland or stowed away on the ferry. Or—and the thought depressed her—maybe he’d taken up with someone else, some altruistic soul who even now was feeding him a hot bowl of steamed rice and chopped vegetables with a splash of Kikkoman soy sauce and a handful of crunchy noodles. Sure, that was it: he’d found a soft touch someplace else. Richer food. A better deal. Some old blue-nosed widow with trembling hands who fussed over him as if he were a wandering tomcat. Yes, that was it. For a moment the thought arrested her: he was a tomcat, a mercenary, and he didn’t give a damn for all the risk she’d taken to get him a clean change of clothes or the sacrifice of forgoing her lunch all this time. Suddenly she saw him in a new light: he’d been using her, that’s all, and he had no intention of coming back to her. She’d been fooling herself—there was no cross-cultural attraction there, no communication, no seduction. Damn him, she thought, and she went at her lunch as if she hadn’t eaten in a week.
Later, when her mind fell numb and she couldn’t stand it any longer, when she figured she’d given Jane Shine all the time in the world to settle in and clear out of her way, Ruth pushed herself up from the desk, glanced bitterly round the room—the blackened bananas, spotty pears, the dusty tins of sardines, anchovies and tuna—and slumped out the door. She was plannin
g to skip cocktails and then have Saxby take her out to dinner on the mainland, putting off the inevitable—she just couldn’t face that hypocrite Jane Shine, not now, not today. But when she got to the big house and tried to duck up the stairs, Irving Thalamus shot out of the parlor, drink in hand, and caught her by the elbow. He wheeled her into his arms and dragged a quick kiss across her lips, and then he beamed at her, a little drunkenly, while she strained to look over his shoulder and scan the cocktail crowd for that ski-jump nose, that mass of dark iridescent flamenco-dancer’s hair, the extraterrestrial eyes and prim bosom, for that ethereal freak, Jane Shine.
Irving Thalamus squeezed her, smiling blearily and exhaling vodka fumes in her face. “Hey,” he said, his smile dissolving momentarily, “no Jane. She never showed.”
Ruth felt a surge of hope. She pictured the wreckage of the plane scattered across a rocky slope, twisted shards of steaming metal, flesh for the crows to pluck, the auto crushed like an accordion, the train flung from the rails. I’m sorry, Ruthie, very sorry, Septima had told her, but once the board has made its decision, I don’t presume to challenge it. If they feel Miss Shine is qualified—and I must say her reputation precedes her—then I can only welcome her and make her feel at borne, as I do hope I do with all our artists.
“I thought she was supposed to be here this morning?”
Thalamus shrugged.
“Has she called? Has anybody heard anything?”
“You know Jane,” he said.
Yes, she knew her. They’d been at Iowa together, the first year, before Ruth dropped out and tried her luck at Irvine. From the moment she walked into the classroom with her downcast eyes and bloodless pale skin beneath a bonnet of pinned-up hair, Jane was royalty—anointed and blessed—and Ruth was shit. She wrote about sex—nothing but—in a showy over-refined prose Ruth found affected, but which the faculty—the exclusively male faculty—discovered to be the true and scintillating voice of genius. Ruth fought it. She did. This was her arena, after all, and she did manage to captivate one of the instructors, a skinny bearded hyperkinetic visiting poet from Burundi. But he didn’t speak English very well, and perhaps for that reason—or perhaps because he was temporary and wore tribal tattoos on his lips and ears—he didn’t carry much weight. At the end of the year, when the second-year fellowships were announced, Jane Shine swept all before her.
In anger and frustration, Ruth had quit Iowa and gone home to California and Irvine, where she managed to produce the story that won her her first acceptance in Dichondra. But even that small triumph was soured for her—ruined, squashed, throttled in the cradle—when she came home after a modest celebration with two of her classmates to find that month’s Atlantic in the mailbox and Jane Shine’s story—the very same overwrought sexual saga she’d presented in class at Iowa—nestled there in that familiar hieratic print between a Very Important Article and a Very Important Poem. And then, in quick succession, Jane’s stories appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker and the Partisan Review, and then she had a collection out and her picture was everywhere and the critics—the exclusively male critics—fell over dead with the highest, most exquisite praise of their careers on their dying lips. Yes, Ruth knew her.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“She likes to make an entrance, is what I mean. Stir up a little drama, make us stew a bit. She’s a killer, she really is. One of the heavyweights.”
It was an awkward moment. Worse: it was a moment of grinding despair, of defeat and desolation. She couldn’t tear at the edifice of Jane Shine directly—Jane and Irving Thalamus had been at a writers’ conference in Puerto Vallarta together and they were soulmates and eternal buddies, if not something even more intimate than that—and to hear her praised, let alone even mentioned, was like having fishhooks jerked through her flesh. Ruth was racking her brain to think of how to say something devastating under the guise of being positive, supportive, unhateful and unjealous, as if she wished anything for Jane Shine but loss of hair, teeth, good looks and whatever trickle of talent she’d ever had, when someone shouted, “Hey, there’s a car coming up the drive!”
Ruth froze, a named and very specific dread rising inside her till she felt like the heroine of some cheap horror film being dragged down through a sudden rent in the earth. There, framed in the beveled oblong pane of the foyer window, was a silver Jaguar sports car, gliding to a graceful halt at the curb. The top was down. The wire wheels chopped at the light. There was a man in the driver’s seat—square-jawed, Nordic, a flash of blond hair, the fluorescent gleam of teeth—and beside him, glittering like a Christmas tree ornament, was Jane Shine, in a flaming silk scarf and oversized sunglasses. The miniature U-Haul trailer, symbol of all that was grubby and gauche, of hurried moves and tacky furniture, would have given Ruth universes of satisfaction in another context, but attached as it was to that gleaming low silver-flanked wonder of a car, it almost managed to look chic.
“It’s Jane!” Thalamus cried, and his voice was a sort of astonished yelp, as if he’d expected anyone else, and then his arm fell away from Ruth’s shoulder and he was jerking open the door and careening out onto the porch. At the same time, the square-jawed young man bounced athletically out of the car to swing open the door for Jane. In that moment, Ruth noticed with sinking resignation that the man, Jane’s man, was as tall and leanly muscled as a Viking conqueror, and that Jane, far from having sunk into the fat she was rumored to have succumbed to, was as trim and stunning and fresh-faced as a high-school twirler surprised by the miracle of her own flesh. “Welcome, welcome,” Thalamus boomed, striding down the steps with his arms spread wide as if he’d personally laid every stone of the big house, as if he’d been born and bred in it, the gentleman planter steeped in juleps and horseflesh, Colonel Thalamus himself. “Welcome to the heart of Dixie!”
Ruth didn’t wait to see the great swooping lewd Thalamus/Shine embrace, nor did she wait to see the Nordic slave bend to the U-Haul and unload more luggage than Queen Victoria took with her on her tour of the Empire, nor was she standing demurely in the foyer to greet her former workshop colleague and congratulate her on her success when Jane Shine, locked in the sweaty embrace of one of the legends of Jewish-American letters, swept up the steps in triumph. No. Not Ruth. The instant Thalamus passed through the door, she turned and fled up the stairs, down the corridor and into her room, where she flung herself face down on the bed as if someone had planted an arrow between her shoulder blades. And there she lay, as the shadows deepened and the cocktail chatter from below gave way to the merry clink of cutlery on china; there she lay, listening with hypersensitive ears and pounding heart to the furtive thump and rush of the Nordic slave as he installed Jane Shine in the very room next to hers—the spacious, sunny, antique-infested double room that had languished unoccupied during the whole of Ruth’s stay. She listened like a child playing at hide-and-seek—a child hidden so well that the others have begun to lose interest, to forget her, though they still creep by her hiding place—listened till the sounds of dinner faded away and the sports car coughed to life and rumbled off into oblivion.
She must have dozed. It was nearly eight when saxby came for her, and she had to dress in a hurry if they were going to catch the ferry to the mainland. On weekends in the summer there was a twelve o’clock ferry back, and that would give them two hours or so, after the ride out and the drive to the restaurant, to have a few cocktails, eat and unwind. Ruth felt she needed it. Through the first cocktail—a perfect Manhattan with a twist—she even thought of cajoling Saxby into booking a motel room along the coast somewhere, but then she shook off the notion. She’d have to face Jane Shine sooner or later, and it might as well be tonight, in the billiard room, where the footing was sure.
She had a second cocktail and half a dozen oysters, and her mood began to improve. The restaurant helped. It was a soothing, elegant, beautifully appointed place in a two-hundred-year-old building on Sea Island, very tony, three stars Michelin, with a wine list the size
of a Russian novel. And Saxby—Saxby was a gem. He was sly and steady and good-looking, the candlelight playing softly off the golden nimbus of his hair, his eyes locked on hers; he was solicitous, sweet, sexy, worth any ten Nordic types in their Jaguars. The image of Jane Shine would rise before her over her soup, a crust of French bread or a morsel of écrevisse, and he would banish it with a joke, a kiss, a squeeze in just the right place. And then, midway through the meal, he proposed a toast.
Ruth was savoring the cleansing frisson of a glace of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, when a waiter appeared at her side with a bottle of champagne. She looked up at Saxby. He was beaming at her. She felt a flush of pleasure as they touched glasses—he was such a sentimentalist, forever reprising these ceremonial gestures, reminding her that they’d been together for eighteen weeks or twenty-two or whatever it was—but this time he took her by surprise. “To Elassoma okefenokee,” he said.
“To who?”
“Drink,” he said.
She drank.
“Elassoma okefenokee,” he repeated, “the Okefenokee pygmy sun-fish.” He refilled her glass. His grin was wild, alarming, the grin of a man who at any moment might bound up from the table and waltz with one of the waiters. “Not to be confused with Elassoma evergladei,” he added, dropping his voice in confidentiality.
An elderly gentleman seated at the next table blew his nose with authority. Ruth was aware in that moment of the gentle smack of mastication, the patter of muted laughter. She didn’t know what to say.
“My new project, Ruth,” Saxby said, elevating the tapered green neck of the bottle over her glass. “The pygmy sunfish. It’s rare enough as it is, the whole range occurring between the Altamaha and Choctowhatchee rivers, but I’m looking for something even rarer.” He paused, groped for her hand. His eyes sprang at her. His grin was demented. “The albino phase.”