East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  Ruth was feeling the wine. She lifted her glass to his. “Here’s to albinos!” she whooped.

  Saxby barely noticed. He was earnest now, his hands juggling out a series of gestures, rattling on about this pygmy fish and how So-and-so had first described the albino tendency and how the field biologists from State were occasionally turning the odd one up in their nets on the St. Mary’s and how he, Saxby, was going to collect and breed them and turn the reflecting pool at the big house into a breeding pond so he could ship them out to aquarists all over the world. “They all go to Africa or South America,” he said, “but there’s a gold mine right here in the Okefenokee and the St. Mary’s River. Think of it, Ruth. Just think of it.”

  She had a hard time with that proposition. She wasn’t thinking of fish—as far as she was concerned, fish existed for the sole purpose of being broiled, poached or deep-fried—but she wasn’t thinking of Jane Shine either. Saxby’s voice was a soothing murmur, the wine good, the food even better, the sound of the waves plangent and lulling beyond the dark lacquered strips of the shutters. She drank to Saxby’s project, and gladly. When the first bottle was gone, they ordered another.

  Later, standing at the bow of the Tupelo Queen and watching the low dark hump of the island emerge from the black fastness of Peagler Sound, she felt the strength rise in her. Jane Shine. What did she care if she was surrounded by Jane Shines—she had Saxby, she had Hiro (he’d be back, of course he would), she had the big house and the billiard room and she had her work. She felt powerful, expansive, generous, ready to bury the petty jealousies that had nagged at her all these years. Art wasn’t a foot race. There were no winners or losers. You became a writer for the sake of the work, for the satisfaction of creating a world, and if someone else—if Jane Shine—stepped in and won the prizes, usurped the pages of the magazines, took the best room at Thanatopsis House, well, so much the better for her. It wasn’t a contest. It wasn’t. There was room for everybody.

  What with the wine and her revelation aboard the ferry, Ruth felt almost saintly—a Juliet of the Spirits, a Beatrice, a Mother Teresa herself—as she mounted the stairs to the billiard room, arm in arm with Saxby. The usual crew was there. Smoke hung in the air. Pool balls clattered. As they pushed through the door, laughter darted round the corners of the room and fell off to a wheeze, and then Ruth dropped Saxby’s arm and started across the floor for the card table. All eyes were on her. She was looking demure, she knew it, looking shy and sweet and gracious. “Ruthie,” Irving Thalamus said, glancing up from his cards.

  That “Ruthie” should have alerted her—there was no joy in it, no verve; it was merely an announcement, pared down as if with a knife—but Ruth wasn’t listening. She was walking, crossing the room, the corners of her mouth turned up in a wide full-lipped airline hostess’s smile of greeting, all her attention focused on Jane Shine. She was vaguely aware of Sandy, off to her left, and of Bob the poet, but the only one she saw clearly was Jane, seated at the right hand of Thalamus, seated in her own spot.

  No one said a word. Ruth’s feet were moving, her thighs brushing lightly beneath the new red tube dress she’d worn to the restaurant, but she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, the floor was a treadmill, she was in the middle of a dream gone sour. And then, suddenly, too suddenly, she was standing over the card table and Jane Shine was glancing up at her. Jane was in white, in a high-collared linen dress with a thousand perfect pleats, though the room was as hot as Devil’s Island. Her Andalusian hair, blackly glittering, teetered over her face in thick loose coils, and her eyes—her icy violet eyes—were shrunk to pinpricks.

  “Jane,” Ruth said, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears, as if she were shouting underwater, as if it were coming back at her from a tape recorder set on the wrong speed, “welcome to Thanatopsis.”

  Jane didn’t move, didn’t speak, merely held her there in the silence that roared with the clatter of insects from the void beyond the windows. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, “but have we met?”

  There was no breakfast for ruth the next morning—she couldn’t have digested anything anyway. She was up before Owen, up before the birds stirred in the trees or the night gave way to the first thin gray wash of dawn. But then, she’d barely slept. She’d lain there in her narrow bed in her cramped and chintzy room, seething, raging, her mind pounding on like a machine out of control: God, how she loathed that bitch! Saxby had tried to console her, but she wouldn’t let him touch her—it was perverse, she knew it, but she had to sleep in her own room, right there on the other side of the wall from her, had to drink in her own hurts and distill them, purify them, turn them into something she could use.

  The path to her studio, familiar in daylight, was a pit of shadow, blacker than the trees, blacker than the thicket that rose up on either side of her. She had no flashlight, and the names that came to her were the names of reptiles: cottonmouth, copperhead, diamond-back. During the drive out from Los Angeles, Saxby had fascinated her with his tales of unwitting tourists in open-toed shoes, of developers and real estate agents bitten in the lip, eyelid and ear, of moccasins thick as firehoses dropping from the trees. Each of these stories, in the most minute and horrific detail, came back to her now, but they didn’t deter her, not for a minute. She edged along that invisible path, hearing, smelling, tasting, all her taps open wide. The danger, the oddness of the hour, the thick simmering swelter of the air made her feel alive all over again.

  By the time she rounded the final loop of the S curve that gave onto the cabin, the eastern sky was half lit and Jane Shine was receding, ever so gradually, from the front hallway of her consciousness. The place was still, the air soft. The first light in the windowpanes gave back the phantasmagoric shapes of the trees behind her. A cardinal shot across the clearing. As she mounted the steps, she was thinking of her story, her novella, of the woman in Santa Monica Bay, and of Hiro and his persecution and sufferings, and of how that was her story too. Yes: the woman’s husband, that was it. He’d deserted her and they were looking for him, the police were, and he’d run off into the—

  She stopped cold. The food was gone—the blackened bananas and maculated pears, the tins of fish and moldy crackers and all the rest—and the table was a mess, and there was someone, a form, a shape, yes, huddled on the couch. A surge of pleasure shot through her—Someone’s been tasting my porridge, she thought, Someone’s been sleeping in my bed—and she eased through the door in silence, standing there with her back to the wall—just standing there—until the form on the couch became Hiro Tanaka. But he was different somehow. It took a moment before it came to her: he was clean. Free of Band-Aid flesh-colored strips, free of scratches and blotches and insect bites. And the soles of his feet, one set atop the other, were clean too—and unmarked. He was still wearing Irving Thalamus’s Bermudas, his haunches glowing in the half-light with all the inchoate colors of the tropical spectrum, but he was wearing a new shirt, a generic gray sweatshirt with what looked like a coat of arms emblazoned across the chest. She tilted her head to make out the legend: GEORGIA BULLDOGS. And then she spotted the shoes—not Thalamus’s worn-out tennies with their tears and perforations, but a gleaming new pair of Nike hightops. Ruth smiled. Tomcat, indeed.

  She didn’t want to wake him, already picturing the startled eyes, the jaw slack with horror, Goldilocks up and out the window, but she couldn’t stand there all day and she did want a cup of coffee. After a while—five minutes, ten?—she tiptoed across the room, filled the kettle and set it on the hot plate to boil. Then she began to tidy up, sweeping the crumbs from the table into a cupped palm, dropping the empty tins into an old supermarket bag she’d stuffed behind her desk, dribbling water over the stiff pink funnels of her pitcher plants. The lid of the kettle had just begun to rattle when she turned and saw that Hiro’s eyes were open. He was lying there motionless, hunched like a lost soul on a park bench, but his eyes were open now, and he was watching her. “Good morning,” she said. “Welcome back.”
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  He sat up and mumbled a greeting. He looked groggy. He dug at his eyes with the blades of his knuckles. He yawned.

  Ruth stirred a spoonful of the replenished instant coffee into a mug. “Coffee?” she offered, holding the mug out to him.

  He took it from her with an elaborate half-body bow and sipped gratefully, his eyes reduced to slits. He watched her pour herself a cup and then he stood, rising awkwardly above her. “I want to sank you so very much,” he said, and then faltered.

  Ruth held the steaming mug in both hands and looked up into his strange tan eyes. “My pleasure,” she said, and then, seeing his puzzled look, she gave him the textbook reply, enunciating each word as if she needed time to chew and digest it: “You-are-very-welcome.”

  He seemed to brighten at this, and he held out his hand, smiling hugely. His front teeth were misaligned, overlapping, and the effect was just a little, well, goofy. Was this the first time she’d seen him smile? She couldn’t remember. But she smiled back, and she couldn’t imagine what all the uproar was about—Abercorn, Turco, Sheriff Peagler, all the old biddies of the island. He was harmless, maybe even a little pitiful—if she’d ever had any doubts, she was sure of that now.

  The smile suddenly faded and he began to shift his feet and cast his gaze round the room. “I am called Hiro,” he suddenly blurted, and extended his hand. “Hiro Tanaka.”

  Ruth took his hand and bowed with him, as if they were at the very beginning of a minuet. “I’m Ruth,” she said, “Ruth Dershowitz.”

  “Yes,” he said, and the smile returned, blooming with teeth. “Rusu, I am very please to meet you.”

  The Other Half

  Seven days earlier, hiro tanaka had stood poised on the shoulder of the tar-bubbled blacktop road that promised him release, the road that would lead to the swift clean highway and all the anonymous cities beyond it. He hesitated, looking first to the right and then to the left, the road raveling out into emptiness in either direction. It looked pretty bleak, he had to admit it. The secretary and her lunchbox lay behind him now, buried in swamp and scrub, while directly across from him the waning sun pointed the way west, where a wild continent and a wilder ocean lay between him and the place he’d turned his back on forever—though he ached for it now. What he wouldn’t give for the yawning boredom of the corner noodle shop, where nothing ever happened, except to the noodles. Or the tranquillity of the tiny twenty-mat park across from his grandmother’s apartment, where nature consisted of pruned bushes and cultivated flowers, a trickle of water pumped over a glaze of cemented stones. He remembered sitting on the bench there as a boy, reading comics or the latest bēsubōru magazine, the murmur of the water lifting him out of himself for hours at a time.

  But there was no sense in thinking that way—all that was lost to him now. Now he was in America, where nature was primeval, seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where half-crazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree—now he was in America, and he had a new life ahead of him. And what he wanted was to turn right, to the north—that was where the great mongrel cities lay, that much he knew—but he’d traveled that road already, to the Coca-Cola store, with its subhuman proprietors and deranged customers, and he hadn’t thought much of the experience. And so he turned to his left, and headed south.

  This time he strode along the shoulder of the road, defiant, angry. If they came for him, he’d fight. Screw them all, the long-nosed bastards. He was wearing clean clothes for the first time in weeks—hakujin clothes—and he’d be damned if he’d plunge into the cesspool alongside the road like a scared rabbit. He’d had it. He was fed up. He was going to walk all the way to the City of Brotherly Love. On his own two feet. And god help anyone who got in his way.

  He walked, one foot in front of the other, the sun sinking, the mosquitoes massing, and the road never changed. Tree and bush, creeper and vine, stem and leaf and twig. Birds wheeled overhead; insects danced in his eyes. He looked down, and the corpses of lizards and snakes, wafer-thin and baked to leather, stained the surface of the road. He looked up, and something slithered across the pavement. Before long, the canvas of the tennis shoes began to chafe at his ankles.

  And then he heard it, behind him: the ticking smooth suck of an automobile engine, the hiss of tires. He hunched his shoulders, set his teeth. Sons of bitches. Hakujin scum. He wouldn’t turn his head, wouldn’t look. The ticking of the engine drew nearer, the tires beating at the pavement, his heart in his mouth … and then it was past him, a whoosh of air, rusted bumper, children’s faces pressed to the rear window. Good, he thought, good, though he was slick with sweat and his hands were trembling.

  He hadn’t gone a hundred yards when a second car appeared, this one hurtling out of the crotch of the horizon ahead of him. He watched his feet and the car came toward him. Dark and long, the teeth of the grille, the high wasteful whine of the Amerikajin engine, and then it too shot past him, the memory of the driver’s pale numb unblinking gaze already fading, already useless. But what the specter of that second car had done was to mask the presence of a third, and he realized with a sudden jolt that not only had another vehicle crept up behind him undetected, but that it was now braking alongside him, the huge demonic white thrust of its fender right there, right there in the corner of his eye. Be calm, he told himself, ignore it. The tires crunched gravel. The fender was undeniable, gleaming, ghostly, white, the long steel snout of the entire race, nosing at him. Every word of Jōchō shot through his head, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked up.

  What he saw was a Cadillac, an old one, with fins and glittery molding, the kind of car TV personalities and rock stars maneuvered round the streets of Tokyo. In the driver’s seat, hunched so low she could barely see over the doorframe, was a wizened old hakujin lady with deeply tanned skin and hair the color of trampled snow. She slowed to nothing, a crawl, and her eyes searched his as if she knew him. Unnerved, he looked away and picked up his pace, but the car stayed with him, the big white fender floating there beside him as if magnetized. He was puzzled, tense, angry: What was she doing? Why didn’t she just go away and leave him alone? And then he heard the hum of the electric window and he looked up again. The old lady was smiling. “Seiji,” she said, and her voice was a jolt of cheer, strong and untethered, “Seiji—is that you?”

  Astonished, Hiro stopped in his tracks. The car stopped with him. The old woman clung to the steering wheel, leaning toward him and gawking expectantly across the expanse of the passenger’s seat. He’d never laid eyes on this woman before, and he wasn’t Seiji, as far as he knew—though for the moment he couldn’t help wishing he were. He shot a quick glance up and down the road. Then he bent forward to peer in the window.

  “It’s me, Seiji,” the old lady said, “Ambly Wooster. Don’t you remember? Four years ago—or was it five?—in Atlanta. You conducted beautifully. Ives, Copland and Barber.”

  Hiro rubbed a hand over the hacked stubble of his hair.

  “Oh, those choral voices,” she sighed. “And the shadings you brought to Billy the Kid! Sublime, simply sublime.”

  Hiro studied her a moment—no more than a heartbeat, really—and then he smiled. “Yes, sure,” he said, “I remember.”

  “You’re so clever, you japanese, what with your automobile factories and your Suzuki method and that exquisite Satsuma ware—busy as a hive of bees, aren’t you? You’ve even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of course you’ve got your beers—your Kirin and your Suntory and your Sapporo—and they’re every bit as good anything our lackadaisical brewing giants have been able to produce, but sake, sake I could never understand, how do you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why, it’s the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and what have you, and all because you’re not afraid of work, back to the basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you had won the war—I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in the street, millions of homeless, A
IDS, but of course you have no crime whatsoever, do you? I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the witching hour and past it, well past it”—and here the old lady gave him an exaggerated wink—“helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy—manners, that’s what you people are all about. It’s manners that make a society. But you must think me terribly unpatriotic to say things like this, and yet still, as a Southerner, I think I can appreciate how you must feel, a defeated nation, after all. What did you’ say your name was?”

  Hiro was seated at the massive mahogany table in Ambly Wooster’s great towering barn of a house at Tupelo Shores Estates. He’d finished the soup course, cream of something or other, and he was gazing out on the gray lapping waves of the sea, nodding agreeably and praying silently that the Negro maid would emerge from the kitchen with a plate of meat or rice, something substantial, something with which he could stuff his cheeks like a squirrel before someone discovered his imposture and ran him out the door. The old woman sat across from him, talking. She’d never stopped talking, even to catch her breath, from the moment he’d slid into the passenger’s seat of her car. But now, as he watched the gathering dusk and fought down the impulse to attack the maid in the kitchen if she didn’t hurry and bring him meat, rice, vegetables, the old lady was asking his name. He panicked. The blood rushed to his eyes. What was his name—Shigeru? Shinbei? Seiji?

  But then she went on without waiting for an answer, nattering about flower arrangements, the tea ceremony, geisha and robots (“… so unfair really of these yellow journalists, and that’s what they are, no one would deny that, least of all themselves, so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as robots living in rabbit hutches, shameful, simply shameful, and it just makes my blood boil …”), and Hiro relaxed. His function was to listen. Listen and eat. And at that moment, as if in confirmation of his thoughts, the kitchen doors flew open and the maid appeared, tray in hand, two intriguing wooden bowls perched atop it.