East is East (5 page)

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.”

Irving Thalamus broke open a peanut with an authoritative crack, and everyone turned to watch him as he bent over it to extract the dicotyledonous kernel from the shell. “No sense of humor,” he observed in his smoker's rasp, and Bob began to snicker.

It was then that Ruth felt herself letting go. She was overwrought, desolate, flooded with conflicting emotions: How could they be so blasé? There'd been a shipwreck. She'd watched an exhausted, half-hysterical survivor flounder to shore and flail through the bushes in a panic. And all they could do was make Chinese jokes. How many others were out there even now, crying out for help, the black unforgiving waters closing over them? “We've got to call the police,” she said suddenly. “And the Coast Guard. A ship went down, I know it, it's obvious. Did anyone listen to the radio tonight?”

They were all watching her—even the walleyed composer, who jolted awake with a snort at the mention of radio. “Radio?” she
echoed, and then they were all talking at once. “Did anyone?” Ruth repeated.

Peter Anserine had. Ina Soderbord, who had the room next to his, had heard him listening to some news program around eight. But he'd been asleep for hours now, and who wanted to wake him?

Suddenly Ruth was furious, the whole thing—Thanatopsis House, the cynicism, the pressure, the backbiting—too much for her. In an instant, the carefully constructed edifice of her reserve fell to pieces. She was part of it now, centerstage. “I don't believe it,” she blurted, and she felt light-headed with the intensity of her emotion. Saxby was there, his arm around her shoulder. “It's okay,” he said, but she wasn't through yet. “People could be drowning out there and you, you—you make jokes!”

Tears had started up in her eyes, but she fought them down. She was angry, hurt, confused—she really was—and yet, in some unassailable pocket of her psyche, she was play-acting too, and she knew it.
If they'd only listen,
she thought,
if they only knew …
Standing there at Saxby's side, her legs tanned and long and slim, her whole body trembling with her daring and anger and hurt over the way they'd ignored her as if she were nobody, as if she were nothing, she knew she had them. She'd got their attention now, oh yes indeed. The smirk was gone from Bob's face, the walleyed composer looked freshly slapped, and even Irving Thalamus, he of the poker face and deadpan eyes, had changed his expression. If he'd been catty before, now he was an old tom catching a whiff—faint and distant, a molecule on the breeze—of sexual advertisement. “Do something,” she demanded. “Will
somebody please do
something?”

The next thing she knew she was sitting at the card table, hunched beside Thalamus, spent, while Saxby and Bob went off to phone the Coast Guard, the sheriff, the local VFW post and the volunteer fire department. “Hey, it's all right,” he said, and she gazed at the lizard's flesh that sank his eyes, watched him brush back the black morass of his pompadour. He was fifty-two. He was
an institution. His lips were dry and hard, his teeth compact, sharp, white. “You did the right thing. Sometimes we all need a swift kick in the ass, right?”

She looked up at him, miserable, but not so miserable, and he took her hand and shook it, his face composed again in its mask of irony.

But now she was in Hart Crane, writing, or trying to write, and all at once the Japanese woman came back to her, the sad doomed heroine drinking in death, the surf yellow in the sick light, her babies lost and gone forever. She had it, the whole scene, and the words were on her lips, at her fingertips, when the first flash of lightning snatched at the trees. At the same moment she became aware of the breeze. Pregnant and cool, it shook the screens and toyed with the papers on her desk. Ruth couldn't resist it. She pushed back the typewriter and got up to stand at the window and watch the sky deepen overhead. For a long moment she stood there, watching the branches heave and the leaves fan from green to gray and back again, and then something stirred in the deepest recess of her stomach and she thought of lunch.

That stirring was her internal clock. Each day between twelve and one, Owen Birkshead, the inveterate Boy Scout, would slip up on each of the cottages, his tread as light as a Mohican's, a cat's, a ghost's, and hang a lunch pail on the hook beside the door. He played a little game, striving for silence and invisibility so as not to disturb the artists at work, and Ruth played her own little game with him. She waited till her stomach informed her of the hour and then she sat frozen over her typewriter, her ears perked, waiting for the telltale creak of the lunch bucket on its hook or the odd crunch of leaf or twig. And then she would turn, smiling radiantly, and call out “Hello, Owen!” with all the forced cheer of a sitcom housewife. Sometimes she caught him, sometimes she didn't.

Yesterday had been odd. Not only hadn't she caught him, but there was no lunch. From the first warning rumble of her digestive tract to its increasingly outraged burbles and yelps, she got up every ten minutes throughout the long afternoon to check the hook,
only to find it hanging empty and forlorn. At dinner Owen insisted he'd delivered her lunch—and where was the insulated container, he wanted to know. Had an animal taken it perhaps? Had she looked in the bushes round the place? She'd wagged a finger at him, conscious that Peter Anserine, nose in book, book in hand, was listening. “Don't give me that, Owen,” she'd said, teasing him, “you screwed up. Admit it. In twenty years no artist has gone hungry at Thanatopsis House—and now
this!”
She held a good long hiss on the final syllable and then laughed.

Owen reddened. He was forty, looked like Samuel Beckett, right down to the combative nose and stiff brush cut, and he was as meticulous as a drill sergeant—a gay drill sergeant, if such a combination exists. “I delivered it,” he insisted. “I distinctly remember it.
Distinctly.”

It was no big deal. But she ordered her day around that lunch—and it was a good lunch too, pâté, crab salad, sandwiches of smoked turkey or provolone with roasted peppers, homegrown tomatoes, fruit, a Thermos of iced tea, real silver and a linen napkin. Before it was the Calvary of the morning; after, the naked cross of the afternoon, winding down to the resurrection and ascension of cocktail hour. Now she wondered, with a sharp pang, if the storm would keep him away, if there was some arcane and venerable rule that forbade cottage lunches during electrical storms, and she had a vision of her fellow artists gathered over a sumptuous spread in the big house and lifting their glasses to the storm that crashed romantically at the windows.

It was at that moment, the moment in which she saw the lifted glasses and glowing faces, that the storm broke. Lightning lit the room; the ground shifted beneath her feet. And then the rain came, combing through the treetops with a whoosh, a sharp smell of the earth and wet rank vegetation running before it, the roof and eaves and screens suddenly alive with it. A second concussion shook the cottage, then a third, and her papers were tumbled to the floor. She rushed for the windows, first the one before the desk, then the one in the corner by the fireplace, and then—she stopped dead.

There was someone on the porch.

A shadow flew across the screen door, there was the dull glint of a lunch bucket, and she cried out. He stopped then and she saw him as he was that night on Peagler Sound, his face splotched with welts and scratches, the red clay of his wet hair, his eyes startled and rinsed out. He saw her. Their eyes met. And then he started back, the lunch bucket cradled in his arms, as slick and wet and glistening as a newborn baby.

On day after he'd jumped ship and contemplated the small matter of his own extinction on the breast of the black heaving Atlantic, Hiro Tanaka awoke in a matted tangle of marsh grass. The sun was high, and while he'd slept, exhausted, it had burned his face and hands and the soles of his feet. He was lying on his back in several inches of salt water, suspended above the muck by a pale white tapestry of roots. These were the roots of the marsh grass,
Spartina alterniflora.
If he had cut through them with the penknife he'd thought to shove back in his pocket prior to taking the plunge from the wingdeck of the
Tokachi-maru,
he would have found himself up to his neck in the ooze. But he wasn't thinking about the roots or the ooze or the penknife or the myriad thin seamless cuts the razor-edged blades of the grass had inflicted on him as he staggered ashore in the night. His thoughts, after the initial surprise of waking to birdsong and mudstink instead of rolling decks and Bunker C fumes, focused solely on his alimentary needs.

First off, he was thirsty. Or not merely thirsty, but maddened with the kind of implacable thirst that shrivels Joshua trees and lays waste to whole villages in Africa. He hadn't had so much as a sip of sweet water since old Kuroda had brought him the tin cup and his balls of rice two days earlier. Salt clung to the hairs of his
nostrils and eyelashes, encrusted his tonsils and adenoids, choked off his throat like a pair of strangling hands. He felt as if he were gagging, choking to death, and a wave of panic broke over him. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees, the water cool on his wrists, the sun burning, and he was bringing up stomach acid and bile. The taste of it, astringent and sour, set his throat afire, and though he knew he shouldn't do it—he'd seen the movies, seen
Lifeboat
and
Mutiny on the Bounty,
knew that sea water made you go stark raving mad and was a prelude to cannibalism and auto-phagia and worse—he bent to the water and drank, drank till he felt bloated and sick. Then he flopped over on his back and lay flat and volitionless on his bed of roots, as the stirrings of his second vital need began to gnaw at him.

He'd been in the brig a week, and in that time he'd lost twenty pounds or more. The turtleneck swam on him, his wrists were like the knucklebones of a pig, his eyes had sunk into his head and his jowls had evaporated. Two balls of rice a day. It was inhuman, medieval, barbaric. And it had been, what—two days?—since he'd got even that. Lying there in the stinking grass beneath the alien sun of a wild and alien country, wet and exhausted and starving, he felt his consciousness pull apart like a piece of taffy, till he was thinking with his brain and his stomach both. While his brain took note of the vacancy of the sky and squared off the boundaries of his distress, his stomach spoke to him in the terms of sharpest denunciation. Cavernous and hollow, rumbling, gurgling and raging, it accused him with each futile contraction. He was a fool, an idiot, a shit-for-brains. Why, even at that moment he could be tucking in his napkin on the Japan Air flight to Narita, asking the flight attendant for a bit more rice, another morsel of Norwegian salmon, just a drop more
sake,
courtesy of the Japanese embassy. Of course, they'd be waiting for him at the airport with a set of handcuffs, half a dozen charges ranging from assault and battery to dereliction of duty, and a humiliation that knew no bounds—but could it be worse than this? His stomach spoke to him: What joy in dignity, in life even, without food?

Like most Japanese, Hiro regarded his stomach—his
hara
—as the center of his being, the source of all his physical and spiritual strength. If a westerner were to talk of people who are kindhearted or coldhearted, of heartbreak or heartease, a Japanese would modify the conceit to feature the stomach—in his eyes, a far more vital organ. A heart-to-heart talk would be conducted stomach to stomach,
hara o awaseru,
while a blackhearted cad would be blackstomached, a
hara ga Kuroi hito.
Two inches beneath the navel lies the
kikai tanden,
the spiritual center of one's body. To release the
ki
or spirit in the act of
hara-kiri
is to release it from the belly, the guts, the only organ that counts.