East is East (16 page)

The usual crowd was there—Thalamus, Bob Penick, Regina, Ina and Clara, the new guy, Sandy, and a couple of others—but there'd been a change in the interior weather since he'd been gone—that much was apparent the minute they stepped in the door. “Hey, Ruthie!” Thalamus cried, rising up out of his chair at the card table like a lizard skittering
off
a rock, and someone else shouted “La Dershowitz!” and only then did they acknowledge him, though he'd been gone four days.

Ruth poured herself a waterglass of bourbon—neat—and took a seat between Thalamus and Bob at the card table. Sandy and Ina were playing too—the usual, five-card stud—and so was a guy he'd never seen before, a gawky character with dyed hair and a splotched face who looked as if he'd been put together with spare parts. Regina was draped over the billiard table, rattling off one daunting and professional shot after another, and the two women in the far corner—he didn't recall their names—were absorbed so deeply in conversation they might as well have put a Plexiglas wall up around themselves. And where did that leave him? To sit and listen to Clara Kleinschmidt go on about Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale till his brain dissolved from boredom?

As the evening wore on, Ruth did get up and pay some attention to him—Why was he brooding? she wanted to know—but she skipped round the room like the Queen of May, and always found her place again at the poker table—beside Thalamus. Saxby drank vodka and brooded, though he denied he was brooding, and made small talk with Peter Anserine and one of his disciples, who'd paid a rare visit to the billiard room; discussed the fine points of bedding irises with Clara Kleinschmidt, who proved to him that she was more than just a composer; and finally, in desperation, challenged Regina Mclntyre to a game of eight ball, which he lost without taking a single shot. As he became progressively more inebriated, the elation he'd felt over setting up the aquarium and beginning a new project dissipated like a stain in water. And then it was late
and Ruth fluttered up to squeeze his arm and give him a kiss with a lot of tongue in it, the guy with the splotched face shook his hand and introduced himself as the INS agent he'd spoken to on the phone, and Irving Thalamus cuffed him on the shoulder and told him a lewd story about Savannah and a whore he'd once had there. Ruth won thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents.

Later, in bed, after he'd stripped her garment by garment and run his fingers the length of her and showed her how much he'd missed her in the most essential ways, he lit a cigarette and wondered aloud about the sudden shift in billiard-room relations. They were in his room, the room he'd had since he was a boy, just down the wainscoted corridor from his mother's room. The night was close, palpable, breathing in through the screen with a sharp wild whiff of the marsh and the tidal creeks and the slow wet burning death of vegetation. Ruth lay apart from him, her skin silvered with sweat in the light of the moon. And then she leaned into him, her breast flattening against his bicep as she lit a cigarette off his. Her face glowed in the flare of tobacco, she exhaled with a deep sweet luxurious breath, and told him that the billiard room was hers, no problem, and that now—finally—she was really starting to enjoy herself.

He reflected on this for a moment, leaning back against the headboard of his childhood bed, squeezed tight and sweltering against her, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. His cigarette glowed hot in the dark. “Miss me?” he murmured.

In answer, she took hold of his penis and smoothed it against her palm, a touch as soft and silken as a fluttering sail. “I'll give you three guesses,” she said in her smokiest voice and leaned over to kiss him.

He felt that touch and flexed his thighs, tasted her lips and smelled the heat of her. “What about Thalamus?” he said.

She let her hand go slack. “What about him?”

“I don't know,” he said, looking away though he knew she couldn't have seen his eyes in that light, “it's just that he seems awful friendly all of a sudden …”

Her hand started up again, proprietary, insinuating. “Jealous?” she breathed.

He set his cigarette down on the edge of the scarred night table and covered her rhythmic hand with his own. He held her there and rose up with a screech of the old bedsprings to kneel between her thighs and bring his face down to hers. Thalamus was nothing, a joke, dried up and juiceless, a string of jerky in a slick plastic wrapper. He could have run him down, could have denigrated him, but he didn't. Instead, he answered her question. Plainly. Simply. Truthfully. “Yes,” he said.

She was there beneath him, sweat-slick and venereal, salt skin, breath hot on his face, whispering close. “Don't be,” she murmured. “I'm just … playing the game. You should know that … you, Sax … you,” and she pulled him down into the place where words have no meaning.

Next morning—or rather, afternoon; it was half past twelve when he woke—Saxby took a cup of coffee, an egg sandwich and yesterday's just-delivered newspaper into his mother's sitting room. He had a vague recollection of Ruth stirring at first light and bending to kiss him as she hurried off to breakfast at the convivial table, but it was so vague as to dissolve instantly into the glow of the sitting room and the strong vertical shafts of light that penetrated the windows and made a theater of the aquarium. Overnight, the tank had been transformed. The water was clear now, absolutely limpid, filtered free of the detritus he'd stirred up in the act of creation, the plants stood tall and held a trembling virescent light, and the shelves of rock loomed against the deep matte background like reefs six fathoms down. He took a standing bite of the egg sandwich, a sip of coffee, and set his breakfast aside. He was too excited to eat. In the next moment he had his hands in the water, adjusting this rock or that, fanning out the gravel, moving a plant as a painter might adjust a still life. But what gave him the most
satisfaction, what made him forget all about the congealing egg, cooling coffee and day-old newspaper, was the expectation that his perfect microcosmic world would soon be tenanted. If he was lucky. And luck would necessarily play a major role in the project unfolding beneath his wet cold hands.

For Saxby was no scientist—a committed, even passionate amateur, perhaps, but no scientist. Academic rigor, required courses in physics, biochemistry, geology and anatomy, these were things he could do without. He'd been to several colleges—his mother admired science, and was willing to support him in anything, though she herself, having been a poet in her youth, preferred the Arts—and he'd done decreasingly well at each of them. His love was animals—aquatic vertebrates in particular—and the curricula of these fine, leafy, heavily endowed and venerable schools just didn't seem to meet his needs. Finally, in his midtwenties and after some six years of errant scholarship, he'd dropped out altogether, well short of the credits for a B.S. degree, and he'd done some traveling—Belize; the Amazon; lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika; Papua New Guinea—before settling down on the West Coast. There, drawing on his trust fund for support, he was able to work for minimum wages at Sea World and the Steinhart Aquarium and as mate on a sportfishing boat out of Marina Del Rey (his job to bait the hooks for pale bloodless jowly men in leisure suits). He'd gone back to school—at Scripps—the previous year, but not in the celebrated oceanography program, as he'd told his mother and, later, Ruth. He'd been more or less a hanger-on there, attending the odd lecture in holothurian morphology and allowing boredom and inertia to fix him in a perpetual late lingering boyhood. And then, at a party, he met Ruth, and Ruth brought him back home to Georgia.

When the sun had shifted in the sky and the egg of the egg sandwich had passed from inedible to emetic, the door behind him creaked open and his mother glided into the room. She was wearing an old painter's cap pulled down over her eyes, a pair of jeans,
sandals and an oversized blouse, and she fell into her easy chair as if she'd been shoved. “I swear I'll never get used to this heat if I live a thousand years,” she sighed.

Saxby had been wandering. He'd been reprising all the aquariums he'd had as a child, all the guppies, swordtails, mollies and oscars he'd escorted through their brief passage of life, and dreaming of this new project, his inspiration, the one that would bridge his childhood love and the sort of seriousness of purpose expected of a man in his thirtieth year. Now he looked up sharply. “You haven't been gardening again?”

There were telltale stains of earth on both the sagging knees of his mother's sagging jeans. She didn't attempt to deny it.

“Mama, in this heat? You'll kill yourself yet.”

She waved him off as she might have waved off a fly. “Be a sweet,” she said, “and fetch me a glass of iced tea.”

He crossed the room without a word—angry at her; why, if she must poke around in the garden, couldn't she do it in the evening?—and went through her bedroom to the back parlor and kitchen beyond it. This was the old core of the house, the original structure around which Saxby's great-grandfather, DeTreville Lights, had built the house as it now stood. Septima had reserved it to herself, as her private living quarters, when she'd set up the colony twenty years earlier. The kitchen had a low beam ceiling and it was long and narrow, peg and groove floors, thick fieldstone walls over which generations of plaster had been smoothed. It was cool here, the windows shaded by the huge snaking moss-hung oaks that antedated the house. Eulonia White, Wheeler's daughter, was shelling shrimp at the table. “She's been gardening again,” he said, and went straight to the refrigerator.

Eulonia White was a well-built woman, fortyish, with bad teeth and a sweet faraway look behind the flashing lenses of her wire-rim glasses. She didn't respond.

Saxby poured the iced tea from a stoneware pitcher, and as he sliced a round of lemon and the scent of it rose to his nostrils, he
suddenly realized he was famished. “That shrimp salad you're making there, Eulonia?” he asked.

She nodded, her lenses throwing fire. “She say she gone eat in here tonight.”

“How about a little sandwich for me, could you do that? Rye or wheat—check with Rico, I think he's got both in the main kitchen—with some mayo, black pepper, squeeze of lemon. Okay? I'll be in with my mother.”

Back in the sitting room, he slipped the cold glass into his mother's hand, and then picked up the dead egg sandwich—famished, absolutely famished—and gave it a tentative sniff. “I just been sittin' here watchin' that aquarium, Saxby,” his mother said, sipping at her iced tea, “and I do swear it
is
the prettiest one you've ever gone and created, but I said to myself, Where are the
fee
-ish?”

It was closing in on cocktail hour when he pushed himself up and left the room. His mother, the empty glass cradled in her hands and her head thrown back so that the painter's cap rode like a raft on the permed white swells of her hair, was snoring lightly from the depths of the chair as he eased the door shut behind him. He snatched a towel out of the bathroom, slipped into his swim trunks and dug his mask, snorkel and fins out of the closet. Then he headed out the back door and across the lawn for the boat, figuring to get some exercise in before drinks and dinner turned his limbs to dough.

The sun was so hot on his back it felt ladled on, but it felt good too. He waved to Ina Soderbord, who was sunning herself in one of the lawnchairs, caught a whiff of the ocean and a faint distant snatch of disco music, and then he was in the shadowy fastness of the trees. The smell of life was stronger here, primal, earthy. Butterflies fell like confetti through shafts of light, birds vanished and reappeared, a chameleon the color of astroturf clung to a mossy stump. He felt good. Felt connected. And he saw the remainder
of the day opening up before him in a concatenation of simple pleasures: the plunge into the Atlantic, the drifting eternal silence of the ocean floor, the first fragrant sip of vodka, Ruth, crab cakes and endive salad, brandy, billiards, love. The misery of his long vodka-drenched evening in the billiard room was behind him now. It was nothing, an aberration, a misconception: Ruth was playing the game, that was all, she was networking. When he came up on the boat slip he was jubilant, elated, so full of the moment he found himself kicking up his heels and whistling like Uncle Remus himself, his shoulders alight with corny cartoon bluebirds.