East is East by T. C. Boyle Page A

first to trot off to work, up before Abercorn could pin her down with any more questions. The woods were still, the morning fragrant with the previous night’s rain. The sun had risen golden and glorious from the chop of the cold Atlantic, and as she walked the path to her studio it seemed to melt into the hard unyielding posts of the slash pines. She walked slowly, breathing it all in, but still she arrived at her studio nearly an hour and a half earlier than usual. It was just past seven, and as she sat down at her desk and stared numbly at the curling page in the typewriter, she could think of nothing but lunch. Would he show up? And if he did, what would she do and what would it lead to? She envisioned her Japanese in bed, envisioned herself in Japan, a country of office buildings, claustrophobic streets and tiny feet, and then finally, to pass the time, she settled down to work.
    Hiro didn’t show up that day. Perversely. It was almost as if he knew she wanted to reach out to him but that he had some kind of cultural thing—some kind of weird Japanese machismo or whatever—that kept him from her. And that evening, since Saxby was still in Savannah and she was just beginning to flex her wings in the billiard room, and because she was bored too and felt like it—the secret,
her
secret making it all the more delicious—she sat down in the parlor over cocktails and chatted with Abercorn. He’d spent a fruitless day interviewing the blacks at Hog Hammock—“I couldn’t understand a word they said, I mean not a single word,” he said, “and after a while it was embarrassing”—while his assistant had snooped around in the woods with a boom box. She shared a good laugh with him over that, over Turco’s boom box. “Yes,” she said—she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help fooling around with him, just a little bit, just for practice—“I thought I heard Donna Summer out there somewhere today.”
    And where was Turco that evening? Was he tracking down the criminal even as they spoke? “Oh, no,” Abercorn had said, “he’s not that fanatical. No, he just doesn’t like roofs.” “Roofs?” she echoed, her lips drawn tight in an incipient smile. “You’re not goingto believe this,” he said, and he lifted a can of warm Coke to his mouth and then put it down again, “but last night, when it was raining?” She nodded. “He takes off out of the room with his backpack and pitches his tent out there in the bushes someplace.” And then they had a good laugh over that one, and Ruth looked into Abercorn’s pink eyes and thought he was kind of cute in a way.
    Two days passed. Abercorn mooned around Thanatopsis House and some of the artists—Regina Mclntyre, in particular—began to grumble. Turco was invisible, out there in his tent, creeping through the marsh, putting his loathsome all into deracinating Ruth’s secret before it had a chance to bear fruit. In the lull of the afternoon, she heard disco music, distant, faint, deadly. The lunch bucket remained on its hook.
    And then, on the third day, Hiro appeared again. It must have been an hour at least after Owen had crept up to the porch and hung the aluminum container on its hook—she’d heard him, heard the groan of the second step, the loose one, but she hadn’t turned, hadn’t moved, and she covered herself with a furious burst of typing. A line of
x’s
marched across the page, and then another, before she glanced over her shoulder to catch the back of Owen’s bristling head receding down the trail to Diane Arbus, where the precocious Sandy was hard at work on his second novel. Ruth lost track of the time, though her stomach grumbled and she got Hiro’s face confused with that of her failed and hopeless heroine, and she was in another world, the cries of the doomed children echoing around her, the