She took a long soak, spent half an hour on her nails. Sax and Sandy were planning to wear tuxedos—the rest would make do with skinny ties and polyester. There would be champagne—good champagne, Bollinger and Perrier-Jouët. Caviar. Lobster. Oysters from Brittany. Ruth groomed herself as if she were preparing for battle, lingering over each detail, seeking the sort of perfection that would make her impervious, invincible—and all the while she was aware that on the other side of the wall, Jane Shine was doing the same. Twice Saxby came for her and twice she turned him away. She moussed her hair, brushed on hiliter and blusher, did her eyes. When Sax knocked the third time, she told him to go on ahead without her—she’d be ready when she was ready.
The party was an hour and a half old when Ruth made her entrance. She crossed the lawn to the strains of the band playing some sort of Brazilian music—a samba or a bossa nova or something—and the crash of excited voices rose up to engulf her. The tent they’d erected over the dance floor was pitched high and it was open on all sides to the breeze, and as she came up the walk, Ruth could see constellations of Japanese lanterns slowly revolving around the big aluminum stanchions that supported it. She stepped through a bower entwined with cut roses and a black man in black tie and white gloves offered her a glass of champagne from a tray bristling with them. Tara, she thought. The Old South. It was like something out of Gone With the Wind.
In the next moment, she saw how wrong she was.
If she’d pictured herself sauntering in to applause and whistles and the flare of flashcubes, Scarlett O’Hara herself, she was disappointed. It was almost as if she were at the wrong party—she didn’t recognize anyone. She stood there a moment in the entranceway, getting her bearings, one bare elbow planted in her palm, her wrist elegantly cocked beneath the stem of the glass. Most of the women looked as if they’d bought their gowns by the yard and the men seemed to be stuffed into shirts and jackets several sizes too small for them. Red was the prevailing color for faces, bald spots and exposed shoulders and arms, and the hair color of choice was white. Ruth had expected something magical—or at least something elegant—and instead she’d wandered into the geriatric ball at the 4-H fairgrounds.
She exchanged her empty glass for a full one and moved toward the dance floor, hoping to run into some of the Thanatopsis crowd—or at least someone under sixty. Sidestepping an elderly woman with an aluminum walker and shouldering her way through a group of wispy-haired men with cloying accents and expensive suits—lawyers, she guessed—she found herself on a collision course with Clara Kleinschmidt and Peter Anserine. They were standing together, hunched forward over glasses of champagne and napkins which held some sort of canapé, taking quick hungry bites and talking at the same time. Clara’s eyes were moist. She was wearing a long-sleeved, floor-length gown with padded shoulders and a sweep of rhinestones across the breast. From the waist up, it looked like a Russian military uniform.
“Clara, Peter,” Ruth said, inserting herself between them, “wonderful party, no?”
“Oh, hello,” Peter Anserine said offhandedly, peering down the length of his nose at her. A bit of egg and caviar was stuck to his lip. He seemed glad to see her—or glad for the interruption. Ruth could think of nothing in that moment but the succulent rumor that linked the two of them—the great divorced Brahmin novelist of ideas and Clara, humble Clara—for at least one passionate night.
“Ruth,” Clara choked, miserably gobbling at the sliver of toast and fish eggs spread flat in her miserable palm. Her wild eye seemed wilder than ever. And yes, those were tears.
“Terrific,” Peter Anserine said, “absolutely. Best party I’ve been to since I left Boston last spring.”
Ruth lingered, taking advantage of the moment’s awkwardness to draw Anserine out, quiz him when his defenses were down. And did he miss Boston? He was going to be at Amherst in the fall, wasn’t he? Was it for the semester or the year? And then back to Boston, or—?
“Well, yes,” he said in answer to this last, casting a sidelong glance at the servant slicing by with a tray of eatables, “Boston is my town, after all. But then, of course, I’ll have to find bachelor digs. To be close to the children.”
Clara was absorbed in her food, hunched over still, concentrating on the tricky juggle of napkin, glass and morsel.
“Wonderful,” Ruth said, “just wonderful. We’re going to miss you here, we really are.” There was an awkward interval during which no one spoke. The band broke off and then lurched into a reedy rendition of “Nature Boy,” and Peter Anserine gave Ruth a long slow strictly noncollegial look. She shifted her feet, drained her glass and sighed. “Well, I guess I’ve got to go find Sax,” she said. “Have a good one.”
And then she was working her way toward the bar, exchanging greetings with people she knew from Darien or her trips to the Tupelo Shores beach with Saxby—looking for Sandy, Irving Thalamus, anybody. She paused to scan the dance floor and take a glass of champagne from a black servant with an immovable face and hair as uniformly white as a cup of detergent. The band had switched to something with a heavy backbeat that felt a lot like reggae, and as the dancers separated from their “Nature Boy” clinches and began to flail their limbs to the spastic beat, Ruth spotted Sandy dancing with a girl she’d never seen before—very young-looking, barely pubescent in fact, but a beauty and born to it. Ruth wondered who she was and felt a small stab of regret as Sandy moved in close, but then Abercorn’s dyed pelage and speckled face came into view, riding atop the heads of the others as if thrust up there on the end of a stick, jerking rhapsodically to the beat. And who was it he was dancing with? The crush of bodies closed in for half a beat and then fell back, and Ruth was amazed to see Ina Soderbord opposite him, wriggling her big hips and shoulders and bust as if she’d just been hosed down. And then the crowd drifted into a new pattern and Bob Penick and his wife (hair the color of chicken liver, shiny prom dress with wilted corsage) writhed into view, not ten paces from Ina. They were doing a modified frug, a dance Ruth had learned—and abandoned—in high school.
She finished her champagne—was that her third glass?—and took another from the man with the iron face. (She wanted to tease him the way people tease the guards outside Buckingham Palace—tickle him or blow in his ear or something—but she thought better of it: after all, how much latitude could you expect from an old black man in a starched tuxedo at a white people’s party in Georgia?) She was feeling a bit giddy, enjoying herself even if she had been denied her entrance. Abercorn with Ina Soderbord. It was funny: the pale with the paler still. And what if they had children? They’d be eyebrowless, hairless, white as grubs, with little pink fishy eyes, and they’d grow up to be giants upon the earth, with shoulders and tits and feet that would give shoe salesmen nightmares. The boys would buy cheap overcoats and the girls would hyphenate their names—Soderbord-Abercorn—and people would think they were an agricultural product, something to spray on the crops to prevent cutworm. Oh, yes, it was hilarious. And Ruth was giddy. But where was Sax?
It was then that the band pulled the string on the horns and rolled into a piano-thumping boogie-woogie—they were eclectic, all right—and Irving Thalamus’s dry sniggering laugh jumped out at her from the direction of the bar. She turned and elbowed her way through the crowd, following the sound as unswervingly as a cat stalking a rustle in the grass. A pair of minor poets and a clutch of old ladies in pink chiffon gave way, and there he was—Thalamus—leaning against the bar and laughing down the front of Regina Mclntyre’s dress. Regina was showing acres of dead-white shoulder and bosom, and she was wrapped in a black leather dress that gave her the look of an extra in a movie about outer space vampires. But Ruth’s eye didn’t rest long on Regina or Thalamus either, because at that moment she spotted Saxby at the far end of the bar, and in the next she felt hot and sick and panicky all at once, felt like Madama Butterfly when they come to take her child away: Saxby was with Jane Shine.
Jane Shine.
It was a blow, and
it staggered her. There she was, the woman she loathed more than anyone alive, her enemy, her nemesis, her bugaboo, and she had Saxby in her grip. Flawless, sickening, cool as a model poised on the runway, she was leaning into Saxby, one cold white hand fixed like a grappling hook to his arm. Ruth saw black silk and diamonds, hair on the attack, a roiling cloud of it enveloping Saxby in its fatal nimbus, and all at once she pictured him in the Jaguar, Jane Shine established as the doyenne of Thanatopsis House, her own stay cut mysteriously short. It was too much. She couldn’t handle it. She recoiled as if from some unthinkable horror—Saxby hadn’t seen her yet, nor Shine nor Thalamus either—and then Regina’s eyes caught hers and Regina smiled—or smirked—and Ruth was fighting her way back through the crush, Thalamus’s tentative “Ruthie?” floating somewhere behind her, the piano player up off his stool and banging the keyboard now with his feet and elbows and hams, the crowd roaring, roaring.
Stabbed in the back. Betrayed. A moment ago she’d exulted in Clara Kleinschmidt’s tears, above it all, Olympian, La Dershowitz, and now—now she felt the tears burning in her own eyes. How could he? How could he even talk to her? Ruth pushed blindly through the crowd. She felt as if she’d been slapped in the face, humiliated, and there was nothing to do but hide herself, run. She shoved past the old waiter—Out of my way, Uncle Tom, she thought bitterly—and he gave her a look, nothing more than a fractional lift of the eyelids, that said shame, and the whole group of wispyhaired lawyers did a little dance step to avoid her. She was vaguely aware of the horns ricocheting off the canvas above her as the song ended in a slamming excruciating finale, and then she saw the rosy exit looming up before her.
She was there—Just let me hold it back, she prayed, please god don’t let me break down yet—there under the bower, practically running, when Septima appeared at the other end. Made up to look twenty years younger, her hair tinted and curled, her gown alone worth more than every scrap of clothing in the place combined and her jewelry liberated from the safe deposit box, Septima was making her own grand entrance. On Owen’s arm. She seemed to stagger on her heels as Ruth came at her, and she forced her lips into a smile. “Why, Ruthie,” she gasped, stopping her with a veiny desiccated hand, a hand that felt to Ruth like the touch of death, “whatever has happened to you? You’re pale as a ghost.”
A ghost, yes: she was already gone. And what did Septima care? Or Owen—smirking at her, looming up out of the night like an executioner? They probably had her bags packed for her already—she was nothing here, insubstantial, a ghost, and Jane Shine was all and everything. “I—it’s nothing,” she stammered, her eyes full, “I’m just not … I can’t—” and then she let it go, shook off the old hag’s hand and bolted across the lawn, all the bile of her eighteen years of setback and denial rising in her throat.
Her first thought was to make for her room, slam the door behind her and freeze the world in place—but there were guests on the veranda, in the foyer and the parlor, charting and laughing, fondling drinks and gobbling their bits of flesh and cheese. She couldn’t face them. Not now. Not in this state. And then she thought of the cottage. That was her refuge, her safe house, that was where she reigned, La Dershowitz still—that was where her Hiro was.
She shied away from the house and crossed the lawn in the opposite direction, hurrying, the night moonlit, the path composing itself beneath her feet. Almost immediately the sounds of the party began to fade, soaked up in the insensate mass of foliage, and she was aware of the smaller sounds of the night, the rustling and chattering of things killing, eating, humping. There were fireflies, mosquitoes, she heard the soft breathy call of an owl. Her legs moved, her feet rose and fell. What had she gotten so upset about? So he’d talked to her, so she had her hand on his arm. It didn’t mean a thing. Or did it? In that moment the argument fell in on itself and she knew that that hand on the arm did mean something—meant everything—and that he knew it too. He did. And he should have known better. The anger came up on her all over again, burning like acid, all the hotter now that the shock of discovery was behind her. And Saxby would pay for it—oh, how he would pay.
But now, before she knew it, she was coming out of the familiar switchback in the trail and the cottage lay before her, awash in lunar light. “Hiro,” she called, and she didn’t give a damn if the whole world heard her, “Hiro, it’s me. I’m back.”
Skittish, he’d fastened the latch from the inside, and she rattled the handle of the screen door. “Hiro, wake up. It’s me.”
“Rusu?” His voice came back at her from the deeps of the room, sleep-worn and tentative, and then she saw the shadowy form of him rise from the loveseat and reach for his shorts. He was naked, the moon slanting through the windows to reveal the bow of his legs and the awkward dangle of his arms. “I’m coming,” he cried, and she watched him fall back into the shadows to lift first one leg and then the other to the dark mouth of the shorts.
“What time is it?” he said, swinging back the door to admit her. “Somesing wrong?”
“No, nothing,” she said, turning to face him.
“I should put on a light?” He was right there, right beside her. His breath was musty with sleep, his skin glowed in the moonlight.
“No,” she said, whispering now, “no, we won’t be needing it.”
Parfait in Chrome
He didn’t know what she was so upset about—really, he didn’t. She wouldn’t even look at him, let alone talk to him, for six full days following the party. Saxby understood that it had to do with Jane Shine, and with Ruth’s own insecurities, and he understood too that he had to humor her—but what she had to understand was that he was free to talk to anyone he pleased. Just because Ruth wet her pants every time somebody mentioned Jane Shine didn’t mean he had to treat the woman like a leper, did it? He liked her. She was—be thought of her hair, her eyes, her throat, the ever so faint lisp that made her sound as if she were translating from the Castilian—interesting. And besides, that’s all he’d done—talk to her—and if Ruth was going to get so worked up about it, why had she sent him on ahead of her in the first place? What did she expect—that he’d go deaf, dumb and blind? That he’d stand in a corner wearing dark glasses and holding up a sign that said PROPERTY OF R. DERSHOWITZ till she got there?
All right, it was true—he had gotten a little carried away, what with the champagne and the music and the general high-spirited roar of the festivities, and for long stretches at a time he’d forgotten Ruth altogether. He was enjoying himself—was that a crime? She was late. She was dressing. I’ll catch up with you later, she said. And so he found himself standing at the bar, all dressed up and nowhere to go, and he found Jane Shine standing there beside him. “Hi,” she said, and he returned the greeting, social animal that he was, and she took a breath and said that Irving had told her he was interested in aquaria—that’s how she put it: “interested in aquaria”—and he was hooked. She’d had several tanks as a girl, and her ex-husband had taken her up the Orinoco in a pirogue and there they’d met Herbert Axelrod himself. The patron saint of aquarists was on a collecting trip, and he took them back to his base camp for a dinner of piracuru and onions and showed them a tank crowded with a new species of characin he’d discovered just that morning.
To Saxby, it was the voice of heaven.
When it began to get late and Ruth still hadn’t appeared, he crossed the lawn to the house, went up to her room and knocked for the fourth time that evening. There was no answer. He put his head in the door and saw that she was gone. Puzzled, he checked the two upstairs bathrooms, made a quick circuit of the parlor and veranda, and cut back across the lawn to the party, figuring he’d somehow missed her in the crush. He circulated through the crowd, looking for her, and he took a glass of champagne, and when somebody put a plate of food in his hand, he ate. She wasn’t on the dance floor, and she wasn’t at the bar. He had a bourbon on the rocks, and then another. He talked with Sandy, Abercorn, Regina and Thalamus. Thalamus had seen her an hour or s
o ago, he thought, heading away from the bar—had he looked on the dance floor? Saxby assured him that he had, and then he downed another bourbon while contemplating the mystery of it all. He went back to the house and asked everyone he ran into if they’d seen her, and he checked the bathrooms again, and the kitchen. She’d vanished.
Back at the party, he had a bourbon with Wellie Peagler and washed it down with a glass of champagne. Wellie was representing a group of investors who wanted to build a golf course and resort on the island, and before he knew it, Saxby was arguing passionately for the inviolability of Tupelo and the claims of historicity, and he snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray and told Wellie he could take his investors and shove them up his ass. Wellie didn’t flinch—just gave him a paternal smile and introduced him to a big pale blustery character who said he was a venture capitalist and they had a drink to that—venture capitalism, that is—and they had a drink to nine irons and holes in one. And then, before he knew what was happening, a girl he’d had a brief thing with when he was home to visit his mother two Christmases ago took him by the arm and led him out onto the dance floor. The rest was a blur, though he did remember standing at the bar at some indeterminate hour talking to somebody he couldn’t recall about something he’d forgotten, when his mother put a hand on his arm and asked him where Ruth was.