East is East Read Online Free PDF

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 withoutmanaging 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 windowsopen 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