Tom Boyle - East is East

“Now, Saxby, I’m warnin’ you—if you get one drop of water on that furniture …”

The aquarium had been in place for less than an hour, and already Saxby was filling it from the green plastic garden hose that snaked in through the open window. The tank was too long by half a foot, and when he and Owen hadn’t been able to negotiate the tricky corner in the hallway outside his bedroom, they’d set it up on the window seat in his mother’s sitting room. He’d covered the seat itself with a double sheet of visquine, but Septima was concerned for the Hepplewhite highboy that stood to its immediate left and the three-hundred-year-old mahogany sideboard that loomed up out of the grip of the wallpaper on the right. “Hush now,” he said, reassuring her, “I wouldn’t harm one little thing in this house, you know that,” and he manipulated the hose with one hand while with the other he arranged his aquatic furniture—the rocks he’d plucked from the Carruthers’ seawall and boiled for hours in the colony’s big stewpots to discourage unwanted algal and bacterial blooms, and the long wet strands of water lily, pickerel weed, bladderwort and redroot he’d brought back with him from the Okefenokee. “Hell, I’d be throwing away my own inheritance if I did.”

“Saxby, you stop that now,” she shot back with a grin that exposed the long fossilized roots of her teeth. She loved to hear him go on about his inheritance, even if he made a joke of it—what she wanted above all, what she planned to make him swear to on her deathbed, was that he would stay on in the house after her, overseeing the colony’s operations in her stead and living a long and fruitful life in the brilliant company that would call Thanatopsis home on into the limitless future.

“Seriously, though, Mama—it’ll be beautiful when I’m done. You’ll see.”

Septima was sunk in the vastness of a chintz-covered easy chair, her feet propped up on a matching ottoman, and her book—a bookclub selection on the history of rice-paper manufacture in Wu Chan Province during the twelfth century—spread face-down in her lap. “I know it will, honey,” she said, a faint distracted quaver working its way into her voice, as if, just for a moment, age and infirmity had caught up with her, “but that highboy is priceless, simply priceless, and I remember your grandmother Lights saying—”

He turned to her in that moment, water dribbling from his fingertips, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and gave her a smile so rich it stopped her in midsentence.

“What?” she said, grinning. “What is it?”

“You,” he said. “Look at you: you’re treating me like I was six years old again—and believe me, I wouldn’t complain if you’d only go back to making me corn muffins and drizzled honey in the mornings and tucking me in at night.”

His mother said nothing, but he knew she was enjoying it, this vision of her hulking big sinewy twenty-nine-year-old son as a breathless pigeon-toed little boy who couldn’t stop eating corn muffins, who looked up into her eyes as if they contained all the answers to all the questions in the universe and followed her, step for step, through the days and weeks and months of her younger and less complicated life. After a moment he turned back to the tank, shifted the hose, adjusted the filter intake, patted a mound of gravel over the roots of the pickerelweed he’d planted in the near corner. There was the murmur of the water, the soft play of the fronds on his skin, the slow soothing pleasure of doing something, making something, of building a world with his own hands. A period of time was erased—five minutes? ten?—before he spoke again. “So how’s Ruth been keeping?” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

Septima set down her book and peered up at him over the wings of her reading glasses. Little ripples of surprise crested on the brittle white beach of her hairline. “You haven’t seen her yet?”

“Just for a second. I was bringing the tank in with Owen and she was on her way out the door—said she was going back out to the studio …”

“At this hour?”

Saxby shrugged. The water felt suddenly cold on his hands.

“She missed dinner? And cocktails?”

“I guess.” The tank was three-quarters full now, and its water seemed as gray as a field of stones. “I could always have Rico fix her something—or we could get a loaf of bread and a package of Swiss down at the Handi-Mart.”

His mother’s eyes had a faraway look. He imagined she was summoning up the hundreds of artists who’d passed through Thanatopsis House in her time—from the minor to the major, from the unknown and unknowable to the celebrated and great—and calculating just how many had ever missed cocktails. He lifted his hands from the cold tank and buried them in a towel. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “I was just—”

“You don’t have to worry about Ruth,” she said suddenly.

“Oh, I wasn’t worried”—he gestured with the towel—“it’s just that she’s new here and she feels a little out of her league, I guess—a little overawed, maybe—and I feel bad about it. I told her I was only going to be gone two days, but then two stretched into four and …” he trailed off.

“Saxby, honey,” she said, and her voice was cloudy again, shivered with age, “stop foolin’ with that thing and come on over here and sit with your mother a minute.”

The outside of the glass was beaded with condensation, the hose running liquid ice up out of the deep roots of the earth, and he realized it would be three or four days at least until the water warmed up enough to put the fish in. The thought was mildly depressing—the excitement was in the completion, six days of labor and one to kick back and see that it was good—and he took a step toward his mother and hesitated, giving the tank one last critical appraisal. He watched the plants nod and bow in the current generated by the hose and the big humming filtration system, saw the secret caves and hollows and piscine apartments he’d sculpted of rock, ever so briefly admired the scope and magnitude of the thing—six feet long and two hundred gallons!—and then sidled across the room to ease himself down at the foot of his mother’s chair. Immediately he felt her hand on his shoulder, the maternal fingers tugging gently at his ear.

“I want to tell you somethin’,” she said, her voice trembling still, but infused now with a bright contralto hint of playfulness, “and I want you to listen to me. We don’t ever disturb our artists at work, no matter what the hour or how anxious we are to”—she paused—“to show them how much we’ve missed them. Now do we, honey?”

He didn’t answer. He was listening to the slow, steady heartbeat of the pump circulating the dense atmosphere of the little world he’d brought to life behind a wall of glass, and all of a sudden he felt sleepy.

“Workin’ through dinner,” Septima sighed, and her cool lineal hand massaged the nape of his neck, “that girl must really be on to somethin’.”

It was late—past one—by the time he finally did get ruth to bed, and he was a little miffed—just a little; he’d been around too, after all—that she wasn’t a whole lot more anxious to leave the billiard room and fall into his arms. They’d had an omelet and a bottle of wine together in the kitchen about nine, and she’d been coy and sexy and he’d tugged at her blouse and pinned her up against the meat locker to rotate his hips against hers and feel his blood surge. “Let’s go fool around,” he said, and she said sure, but led him instead up the stairs to the billiard room.

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.