Tom Boyle - East is East

It hadn’t yet started to rain when Ruth gathered up her things—the satchel with her notebooks, breath mints, her compact and hairbrush and one of the fat pulp romances she devoured in secret—folded the day-old newspaper under her arm, plucked an umbrella from the stand in the front hall and sallied out the door. This was her favorite part of the day. The path, set with flagstones and planted in some bygone era with jonquils and geraniums, took her through a stand of bearded oak and pine and within a good sniff of the marsh. The misery of writing was at hand, it was true, but the smell of the mudflats and the open ocean that drove in twice a day to swallow them stirred memories of her girlhood in Santa Monica—her simple, ingenuous and carefree girlhood, uncomplicated by the mania for fame (and its unfortunate concomitant, work) that had set in when she reached sixteen. And though at this time of year the heat and humidity were unrelenting—the entire state, as she often said, was like a shower stall in a dormitory—and she knew that the mosquitoes and deerflies lay in wait for her beneath the trees, she couldn’t help feeling exhilarated. Here she was, at Thanatopsis, writing—or trying to write; the colleague of Laura Grobian, Peter Anserine and Irving Thalamus—and yes, of the walleyed composer too, who, despite appearances, was the most famous of all the twenty-six artists now in residence.

Ruth, known to her intimates as La Dershowitz, was thirty-four, though she admitted only to twenty-nine. She’d been writing since her junior year in high school, when John Beard, her English teacher, as interested perhaps in her triumphant breasts and pouting smirk as in her adolescent poems and stories, encouraged her during the long hours of their late-night tutoring sessions. She’d put in time at most of the better summer workshops, courtesy of her father, and she held a shaky B.A. in anthropology from Sonoma State. She spent a year at Iowa and another at Irvine without managing to come away with a degree from either, and she’d published four intense and gloomy stories in the little magazines (two in Dichondra, the editor of which she’d met at Bread Loaf, and one each in Firefly and Precious Buttons). Money had become a problem, waitressing a terminal disease. When she met Saxby, who was flunking out of the oceanography program at Scripps, she fell in love with his dimples, his laugh, his shoulders and the idea of the big house on Tupelo Island. And now she was here. For good. Or at least for a good long while.

She came up the densely shaded path, already wet under the arms, the satchel jogging at her shoulder, and saw that she’d left the windows of her studio open. (Each of the artists at Thanatopsis ate, slept, bathed and relieved him- or herself in the big house, but was assigned workspace in one of the thirty studio-cottages scattered about the property, and each was strictly enjoined from visiting any of the other cottages during the hours of the workday—that is, from breakfast at 7:00 till cocktails at 5:00. The cottages ranged in size from Laura Grobian’s five-room Craftsman-style bungalow to the single-room structures afforded to lesser lights, and Septima had named each of them after a famous suicide in remembrance of her own husband’s untimely demise.) Ruth was in Hart Crane. It was a one-room affair, very rustic, with an old stone fireplace, a wicker loveseat, two bent-cane rockers and a single capricious electrical outlet. It was also the farthest from the main house of any of the colony’s studios. And that was all right with Ruth. In fact, she preferred it that way.

At first the open windows took her by surprise—she’d always been careful to lock up behind her, not only for fear of an overnight deluge, but out of respect for the depredations of raccoons, snakes, squirrels and adolescents. For an instant she imagined her typewriter stolen, manuscript gutted, graffiti on the walls. But then she remembered the previous afternoon and how utterly disgusted and sick at heart she was over the whole business—typewriters, manuscripts, art, work, love, pride, accomplishment, even the prospective adulation of the masses—and how she’d left the windows open to taunt the Fates. Go ahead, she’d said, impaled on the stake of a wasted afternoon and her own despair, tear it up, ransack the place, liberate me. Go ahead, I dare you.

Now she felt differently. Now the work fit was on her. Now it was morning and now she had to sit down to her desk like everybody else in America. She mounted the three time-worn steps to the porch, pushed through the unfastened door, dropped her satchel on the loveseat and confronted the ancient Olivetti portable that seemed to stare accusingly at her from the desk beneath the open window. It was still there. So too the page she’d been working on, still jammed in the machine and curled up like a wood shaving with the humidity. For a moment she fussed over the greedy, deep-throated pitcher plants she’d dug up in the swamp—they loved flies, the fat bluebottles that sizzled against the rusty grid of the screen and drove her to distraction—then heated herself a cup of coffee on the hot plate, stepped outside half a dozen times to check on the progress of the storm, and finally, when the boredom threatened to shut down her mind, she settled down to work.

She tried. She did. But she just couldn’t seem to concentrate. The story she was working on was a multiple point of view thing about a Japanese housewife who’d tried to drown herself and her two young children in Santa Monica Bay after her husband deserted her. It had been in all the papers. The children had drowned, while the woman, her lungs heavy, her throat raw and her eyes stung with salt, was pulled from the water and resuscitated by a seventeen-year-old surfer. Ruth had the surfer’s point of view down, no problem. But the children’s, that was harder. And the mother’s—what had been going through her head?

Ruth worked for an hour, or what seemed like an hour—she had no way of marking time and she was glad of it—retyping the first paragraph over and over till she could barely make sense of it. Her heart just wasn’t in it. She kept thinking of Saxby. The night before they’d taken the ferry to the mainland and driven into Darien for drinks and dinner. On the way back he’d pulled off the road and they’d made love on the hood of the car. He lay back against the windshield, hard all the way, in his cock, his thighs, the washboard muscles of his abdomen, and she’d climbed atop him, soft and flowering. And then she thought of the storm. And then of the big house, thirty-seven rooms and servants’ quarters, once the centerpiece of a cotton plantation, slaves beading sweat in the fields, mules and factors and all the rest, Saxby’s forefathers astride their buggies, whips in hand. She thought of Gone With the Wind, Roots, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and then she went back to her story, straining to focus on her character, the distraught woman cut off from her culture, her heavy-lidded eyes, fine hands and fingers, and all at once the face of Hiro Tanaka—frozen with fear in the cold crepuscular light of Peagler Sound—rose up before her.

Chinese. She’d thought he was Chinese. But then she’d never traveled any farther east than the sushi bars of Little Japan or the chop suey houses of Chinatown, and to this point in her life she’d never had any need to differentiate one nationality from another. If the sign outside said Vietnamese, then they were Vietnamese; if it said Thai, then they were Thai. She knew Asians only as people who served dishes with rice. Chinese. How stupid of her. Here she was, trying to conjure up a Japanese housewife from a newspaper account, and a real living breathing Japanese—a desperado, a ship jumper and fugitive—practically throws himself in her naked lap and she thinks he’s a waiter from Chow Foo Luck.