Read East is East for Free Online Page B

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 wasan 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