East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  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.

  But what was this?—there was someone in his boat. Someone long, lanky, the build of a basketball player, L.A. Dodgers cap, acid-washed face: Abercorn. His jubilation was gone, switched off like a light. “Hello,” he said, feeling the mud between his toes, feeling foolish, as if this weren’t his boat, his water, his trees, as if this weren’t the ground
on which his ancestors had been born and breathed their last for two centuries and more.

  Abercorn was hunched over a yellow notepad and writing furiously, oblivious to Saxby, the day, the drift and tug of the boat on its painter. He was wearing headphones. Saxby followed the connection past Abercorn’s blotched ears, spattered neck and wrinkled collar to the Walkman in his shirt pocket, and figured he was either writing a novel dictated by spirit guides or transcribing the tapes of his interviews with the various boneheads who populated the island. “Hello,” Saxby repeated, raising his voice.

  When there was no reaction, he tossed his flippers into the boat, and that was all it took: Abercorn jumped as if he’d been attacked from within, betrayed by his own body. He gaped up—damn, if his eyes weren’t pink, like a bunny’s—and then flipped the ’phones from his ears with a confused wheeze of greeting. “Oh, hey,” he sputtered, looking as if he’d just come back from a long way off, “I’m just, uh—I hope you don’t mind the boat and all, I was just, it was such a nice day, I—” and then, as if the air had run out of his balloon, he fell silent.

  “Sure,” Saxby said, hardly less embarrassed than the pink-eyed wonder before him, “no problem. I was just going to take the boat out. For a little swim. That’s all.”

  Abercorn made no effort to rise. Instead, he fixed, his suddenly shrewd eyes on Saxby and said, “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  Saxby sighed. The sun was like syrup and everything was drowning in it. “I’ve only got a minute,” he said, stepping into the water, gripping the boat to steady it and then swinging himself nimbly over the side.

  Abercorn wanted to hear about the incident at the store—and he wanted more too on that first night on Peagler Sound: What did the Nip look like? how tall was he? did he attack without provocation?—and Saxby obliged him, all the while tinkering with the engine, checking the starter plug, the spare gas tank and the coil of the starter cord. Right in the middle of the store incident, just as Saxby was getting to the good part—how the Japanese guy bundled up his junk food and lowered his shoulder like a fullback and shot past him out the door—Abercorn interrupted him. “You know—could I ask you something?” he said.

  Ask him something? Wasn’t that what he was doing?

  “Something personal, I mean.”

  Saxby fiddled with the engine. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s your accent. I mean, I’m from L.A., and everybody down here sounds like they just stepped out of Dogpatch or something—no offense—but you don’t have it. You are from around here, right?”

  It was a question he’d been asked a thousand times, and the answer was equivocal: he was and he wasn’t. He’d been born in Savannah, yes, and he was heir to half the island, even if he did talk like a Yankee. But the reason he talked like a Yankee was that he’d spent half his life—the formative half—in New York and Massachusetts. That was his father’s doing. Grandfather Saxby wasn’t even cold yet in the grave when Marion Lights uprooted Septima and her year-old son and moved them up to Ossining, New York, on the Hudson River. The family had from time immemorial owned a controlling interest in a big antiquated factory there that produced yeast, margarine, gin, vodka and the callowest whiskey known to man. Till Marion came along, the family had been content to manage the place from afar, but he had different ideas. He gave over the administration of the Tupelo Island estate (which was then called Cardross, after Cardross Lights, founder of the original plantation that had managed to survive intact through six generations of Lights, drought, flood, capricious cotton prices, carpetbaggers, boll weevils and a host of ravenous developers from the mainland) to a wily old former overseer by the name of Crawford Sheepwater, and moved north to become a Captain of Industry.

  Saxby was staring at Abercorn, who’d paused to glance up from his notebook and frame the question, but he was seeing his father, that willful and supremely depressed man. Or at least he became depressed as the years of his exile wore on and he didn’t exactly unseat the Rockefellers, Morgans and Harrimans. In the beginning he was almost manic with enthusiasm—when Saxby was six, seven, eight, he saw his father as a whirlwind, larger than life, a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan. He was a flushed face over dinner, a set of tweed shoulders to ride on, a lover of trains and odd jokes. Saxby, he would say, in his rich deep Southern Gentleman’s tones, you see that dog out there?, and he’d point to a shepherd or beagle cavorting across the lawn and Saxby would nod. That dog’s from Ohio, Saxby, he would say, and no matter how many times he’d heard the joke—and he never got it, not till his father was long dead and gone—Saxby would say, How do you know?, and his father, in the tone of a professor addressing a room of veterinary students, would reply, Why, because he has an O under his tail.

  And then later, just before he locked himself in the back pantry of the big gray-and-white Victorian overlooking the Hudson, he would wander in and out of rooms, an antic gleam in his eye, and announce, no matter the situation or the company or how many times he’d announced it already, that “cunt was cunt.” That was his formula. He’d look up from his soup, glance cannily round at the guests and clap his hands together. You know what I say, he’d announce, pausing to look Septima in the eye, cunt’s cunt, that’s what I say. And then he locked himself in the back pantry when Saxby and his mother were out shopping and the maid had gone home, locked himself up with a bottle of the cheap whiskey he manufactured for the cheap drunks of this great country and enough Seconal to put his board of directors to sleep for a month.

  Saxby was nine at the time. Though his mother had been born in Macon and gone to college at Marietta, she stayed on in the big empty house in Ossining rather than return to the big empty house on Tupelo Island. In her grief and bewilderment, she turned back to poetry—the poetry that had been the romantic bulwark of her youth—and she found solace in it. Six months later, she returned to Tupelo Island and founded Thanatopsis House, “that mysterious realm, where each shall take/His chamber in the silent halls … ,” a palace of art sprung up from the ashes of her husband’s death. Saxby spent three years with her there, and then, because the local educational system was “nothing but white trash and niggers,” she sent him north again, to Groton. After Groton, it was the string of colleges that entangled him for years before finally setting him loose in California, another Yankee bastion. And so, Saxby had a foreign accent. He was a Southerner, all right, no doubt about that—but only part-time.

  It was a long story. To make it short, he rolled his eyes for Abercorn and thickened his accent till it dripped: “Well, Massa Abacoan, Ah sweah Ah jest doan know—Ah’m jest folks like anybody else.”

  Abercorn responded with a startled bray of a laugh. “That’s good. That’s really good.” Then he capped his Uni-Ball pen, stuck it in his shirt pocket and gave a little speech about how he’d never been out off the Georgia coast and how he was wondering if maybe Saxby’d mind if he tagged along—since he was in the boat already and everything.

  Saxby studied him a moment—the long jaw and glistening teeth, the toneless skin and unnatural hair—and shrugged. “Why not?” he said, and fired up the engine.

  * * *

  The first week of august was as slow and silken and sweet as any Saxby could remember, and he fell into the embrace of it—of home, of Ruth, of his mother—with an inevitability that was like a force of nature. He was up late each night with Ruth—hoisting cocktails and dining with poets, painters and sculptors, letting his mind drift over the earnest declarations of the evening’s poetry or fiction reading, joining in the clubby chitchat of the billiard room till the close lingering heat gave way to something just a breath cooler coming in off the ocean. He slept late, through the relative cool of the morning, took his breakfast with Septima and contemplated the vacant perfection of his aquarium. In the afternoons, he fished, snorkeled, swam. In the evenings, there was Ruth, and the day started again.

  She was something to watch, Ruth. She worked the cocktail hour, dinner and the cea
seless ebb and flow of billiard-room dynamics like a politician—or maybe a guerrilla. There was a little joke or routine for everyone, from the unapproachable Laura Grobian to the chummy Thalamus and the lesser lights too. She was amazing. Body signals, pursed lips, an arched eyebrow or nod of the head that meant worlds: every time he looked up she was holding a dialogue with somebody. One minute she’d be having a cocktail hour tête-à-tête with Peter Anserine and two of his skinny solemn attendants, and the next she’d be across the room, laughing with Clara Kleinschmidt till they both had tears in their eyes—and all the while mugging for Sandy or Regina or Bob Penick or for him—she never forgot him, no matter how wound up she got—and she would give him a look that passed like electricity between them.

  And then she missed cocktails again one night and he stood around with a glass in his hand radiating his own brand of wit and charm, but all the while craning his neck to look for her. When she caught up with him—she slipped in beside him at the table halfway through dinner—she was out of breath and her eyes were big with excitement. “What’s up?” he’d asked, and she’d taken hold of his arm and pecked a kiss at him, all the while nodding and winking and grinning in asides to half the room. “Nothing,” she said, “just work, that’s all. This story I’m working on’s a killer. The best.” “Terrific,” he said, and meant it. She paused to slip a morsel of veal between her lips. “Listen,” she said, “can we drive into Darien tomorrow? I need to get some things.” “Sure,” he said, and she was eating, small quick bites, her teeth sharp and even. “Groceries. Crackers and cheese and whatnot—for my studio. You know,” she said, giving him a look, “a girl gets hungry out there.”

  Hungry. All right. He whispered in her ear and when they kissed he tasted the meat on her lips and everyone was watching.