Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Paul got out first and waved over the roof of his car. His glasses glinted white in the sun, his brown mustache offsetting a smile. As he walked around the car, the passenger door opened and two black sneakers touched the ground. A pair of worn blue jeans pivoted at the knee, and up rose a nest of black hair—of course his hair was black—followed by a thin white face with chapped lips and brown eyes, greasy-haired and pharmaceutical-eyed, skinny and agile and drained of expression, like a kid accustomed to emerging from the backseat of patrol cars.

  “I want you to meet Mills,” Paul called out, patting the young man on the back to lead him toward the picnic. “He’s coming out to help me with the house for a few weeks.”

  “Ouch,” Tommy cried, twisting out from under his mother’s grasp. “Jesus, Mom.”

  Pam reached for her son, but Mills misinterpreted her gesture, lurching forward to shake her outstretched hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Pam said flatly. The young man smiled, and she noticed his right front tooth was a lifeless shade of gray, the color of a dead bulb in her upstairs vanity mirror.

  Pam turned away in defeat. “Well, everyone back to the picnic,” she said. Only Paul and Theo followed her.

  The two teenagers stood on the edge of the lawn, regarding each other. All was silent for a moment until Bryan opened a bottle of Prosecco and the party regained its nearsighted enthusiasm, circling the food on the tables and chewing over the latest local controversies: the government’s imminent closure of Plum Island, the apocryphal sighting of an oil rig off the coast of Mastic Beach, the curse of the Sycamore girls’ varsity soccer team. Theo laid his baby bird on a quilt Magdalena Kiefer had left on a chair; it died there, undiscovered, until Magdalena’s nurse picked off its sticky remains.

  Pam Muldoon took refuge in the midst of her neighbors, throwing furious, unnoticed glances at Paul Benchley. Tommy and the foster kid continued to stand on the far perimeter, away from parental ears. When it came time to take pictures, the evening light had waned and a defect in the Muldoons’ digital camera caused orbs of light to appear as snow falling across every image.

  Most of the guests would catch glimpses of Pam, or Bryan, or one of the boys the next day or the next week, but some would not. A few would remember the end-of-summer picnic as the last time the Muldoons were seen together and alive.

  CHAPTER 2

  Beth Shepherd woke on the morning of the picnic with two hearts beating inside her. She climbed out of bed, releasing the sheets knotted around her ankles, and stood in front of her full-length mirror. Behind her she saw the white, lunar walls that had once been her parents’ bedroom. Even with three applications of paint, a faint haze of rose chiffon exuded from the nacreous coats of Cosmic Ricotta that Beth had specifically chosen to excise all trace of her mother’s favorite color. The pinkish glow served as an unwelcome reminder of two recent failures: her fizzled career as a painter in New York and her inability to eliminate Gail Sheely Shepherd Kendrick Laurito from her daily life in Orient. In fact, the chain saw drone of coffee beans being ground in the kitchen downstairs might well be the handiwork of Gail Sheely Shepherd Kendrick Laurito, slumped over the counter, trying to rouse her daughter out of bed with the most excusable assault available to a woman who had been told that the upstairs was no longer in her jurisdiction.

  Beth glanced out the bedroom window and saw her husband, Gavril, marching across the backyard toward his studio, confirming that the sounds coming from the kitchen must be from her mother. She waited resignedly for what she knew would soon come wafting through the air vents, and, yep, there it was: My life has been a tapestry . . . at cloying, soft-rock, white-divorcée volume.

  Beth lifted her T-shirt and stared at the oval doughnut of her stomach, the skin downy with fine blond hairs, the indent between her abdominal muscles showing no swelling, not yet. She spread her palm over her belly button, feeling for internal tremors. Her eyes ascended to her breasts, two small suction cups, and up to her face, still puffy and railroad-tracked with the imprint of a pillow seam, unsmiling. She should be happy. The pregnancy test she took secretly last night in the bathroom promised 90 percent accuracy. She had succeeded in her one sworn goal for moving out of the city and back into the house where she’d grown up. But the fact that Beth had to remind herself that she should be happy seemed to verify the self-diagnosis she’d reached while conducting research on the Internet last week in lieu of looking up pool covers. “Neurasthenia,” the WebMD entry read, “a psycho-pathological term to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia, and depressed mood.” Check, check, check, check, and with the help of an online dictionary to define neuralgia, check. At the bottom of the entry, a dooming footnote: “Americans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname ‘Americanitis.’”

  Throughout her childhood in Orient, Beth had always believed herself to be special. She was an eager artist, a patient listener, an aggressive adolescent feminist in her Sycamore classroom; she excelled at math and sports, and was highly attuned to the emotional states of adults who hovered over her like the trees on Village Lane. Popularity just came to her, like sweaty palms or twenty-twenty vision. The Orient love fest around Beth had been so convincing that it propelled her to move to Manhattan, flush with confidence, to start college and a career in the arts. And now, after thirteen years in the city, she had returned to her hometown, replacing the futile dream of artist with the more realistic one of mother and wife of an artist. And it was here, in the very house where she’d begun, that she had come to understand herself as a lowly sufferer of a disease called Americanitis. What does an Americanitis survivor look like? Surely not Beth Shepherd, in the pink glimmer of her mother’s bedroom, testing her urine for signs of new human life, hoping it might help her make sense of her own.

  Beth scooped up her long blond hair and twisted it over her shoulder. She practiced rubbing her stomach in concentric circles, a habit she noticed expectant women performing, warming their hands on their own fecundity. She forced an exaggerated smile, the kind that at age thirty-two still came without a hint of the wrinkles her mother paid ungodly sums of money to remove from her own face. Every time Beth visited Orient over the last few years, her mother appeared less like the woman she had known since birth and more like a coquettish alien, a Mylar-balloon rendition whose trick for eternal youth was to confuse people so thoroughly about which parts of her face were real that they gave up guessing her age in frustration (it was fifty-eight). Beth found her mother’s surgery addiction unhealthy and had told her so, swearing that she would allow herself to age naturally, proud of her laugh lines and serrated forehead. Gail had listened to her daughter’s rant, rolling her eyes in signature fashion. “You’ll see,” Gail had laughed almost giddily. “You’ll wake up one day and realize it’s easier to ignore a few nasty comments than it is to watch your face fail before your eyes. Enjoy it while you have it, dear.” Gail was like a broken machine that wouldn’t stop dispensing advice.

  When Beth moved back to Orient last April, she had promised to be nicer to her mother. After all, Gail had graciously offered Beth and Gavril the house, deciding it had become too difficult, after three marriages, to maintain alone. “Either you take it over or I sell it,” Gail told her, announcing that she’d put a down payment on a condominium in Southold. That would put her twenty minutes away by car, and Beth had mistakenly hoped that was far enough to ensure that she’d call before visiting. Plus, after years in the city, Beth had forgotten how much the presence of her mother weighed on her nerves. It was easier to forgive a parent’s shortfalls when the relationship was conducted primarily by phone.

  Beth’s father, an insurance salesman, had died in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike eleven years ago. After two months of mourning, Gail had surprised her daughter by transforming into a woman completely different from the quiet, cautious one who had raised her. She channeled her energy into her appearance, and then proceeded to t
urn marriage into a late-seeded form of social climbing through the Suffolk County ranks. Gail Sheely Shepherd became a Kendrick in a two-year union with a local real estate attorney who had handled the infamous sale of an old neighborhood mansion to a celebrity couple. Gail took her newfound cash reserves and funneled them into the Shepherd house, launching the first of two stunning renovations, adding a sunroom and remodeling the detached garage into a remote-controlled, soundproof “fun den.” The Kendrick romance faded, but the divorce money went toward the first of two face-lifts, and soon she was presenting her reengineered façade to Mario Laurito, an Italian chef who had opened a tragically hip Italian bistro in Greenport. That marriage lasted long enough for a saltwater pool and a hot tub to replace her father’s lavender garden. After that, Gail had soured on the house, complaining to Beth that it held too many ghosts, and began a subtle campaign to convince Beth and Gavril to see it as the perfect backdrop for whatever their lives had in store. Only after they moved in did Beth realize that the neighborhood had soured on Gail. Ten years of construction work had turned the widely admired Gail Sheely Shepherd into the widely reviled Gail Kendrick Laurito. In Beth’s suspicious moments, she wondered if her mother’s eagerness in having them take over the house was merely an attempt to restore the Shepherd name in Orient while managing to hold on to the escalating property value.

  Beth pulled her shirt down. She walked into the bathroom, carefully testing the wetness of the floor with her toe before stepping on the tiles. Wasn’t that the role of the soon-to-be mother, for the next seven months (assuming she was two months pregnant, assuming she was pregnant at all), to treat her body as delicately as if she were made of eggshells, a delivery system for fragile cargo? Another mirror awaited her on the medicine cabinet, but Beth opened its door to avoid catching her reflection. Why wasn’t she spinning around in prepartum mania? She wanted to feel different, inside and out. There were two heartbeats within her now, a new body leaching nutrients from her blood, oxygenating with each inhaled breath, growing, gulping, solidifying.

  Beth had failed as an artist. Her single gallery show, a series of portraits, had garnered nasty reviews from influential critics and anonymous bloggers alike—“Alice Neel on horse tranquilizers”; “Elizabeth Shepherd’s brushstrokes lack confidence, like she’s aiming to please rather than revolt against the institutional deadlock of genre painting. Her talent is evident but her passion is not”—and the portraits, returned unsold, haunted her East Village apartment for months like disappointed relatives.

  In a fit of rage one whiskey-fueled evening, Beth had taken a kitchen knife and stabbed holes through the canvases. When Gavril returned home drunk from a dinner, he saw the scary violence that she had executed on her work and commended her on the improvement. “Ahh, Beth, they look so strong with wounds in them,” he slurred. “You should take them back to the gallery and hang them again, like your own critique on the critique given to you.” She knew it was only his wine-purpled attempt to be supportive. Was it true that she’d lost her confidence, that at some point in the city her passion had run dry? Maybe, but Beth couldn’t help sensing another force at work: there was an ironic calculus that increasingly seemed to drive the art world, the game where one-upping or undermining every sincere gesture was the only pathway to artistic credibility. The secret she dared not admit in Gavril’s intellectual art circles was this: she loved the beauty of paint applied by brush. Beauty was her embarrassing motivation that refused to mock itself. Beth remembered one Saturday afternoon, just before she decided to give up on New York, when she bumped into one of Gavril’s artist friends after a day spent touring the Chelsea galleries. Luz Wilson, who now owned a huge weekend house on the tip of Orient, asked Beth what shows she had seen. With each new exhibit she mentioned, Luz asked Beth if she liked it. Each time, Beth responded, “Yes, very much.” Luz finally threw her hands up in despair. “My God, Beth, is there anything you don’t like?”

  After her career-killing show, the city seemed different to her, drained of color somehow, phony and cynical and very young. Beth had not been raised particularly religious—lapsed Presbyterian on both sides—but she could believe in a hell that involved getting this close to success, only to have her passion dismissed as second-rate. The ironic calculus that Beth couldn’t apply to art suddenly seemed weirdly relevant to her life: Why not be exactly what you said you would never be? Why not embrace the idea of motherhood, move back to the country and concentrate on what was really important?

  Gavril, a Romanian five years in America and unable to attend any dinner without drinking his weight in alcohol, loved the idea. Specifically, he loved the idea of having a child. And so did she. Yes, motherhood was a creative act too, she thought, pushing her hips against the sink’s cold porcelain, more vital and affirming than anything she could fashion from paint. Why had she always assumed wanting a baby to be a mark of weakness? Why had she joked in her twenties about sending “get well” cards to girlfriends who had just announced their pregnancies? She scraped sleep from her eyelids with a tissue. Tossing it into the wastebasket, she noticed a corner of the pregnancy-test box peeking out from the trash where she had buried it last night. She pushed it back under the tissues, reluctant to give Gavril any false hope until she knew for certain. Today she would make an appointment with her doctor.

  Beth had driven to Greenport yesterday to buy the test at Dooley’s Pharmacy, the same place where she had bought her first pregnancy test at fifteen, naively charging the kit to the family account without realizing that her parents received a monthly itemized list of expenses. Her mother had knocked on her door, receipt in hand, to demand an explanation, a month—which felt like a lifetime—after the results had read negative. Her mother was still her mother then, clumsy with her words, anticipatorily wounded. Beth had lied. She told her mother that it was for her best friend, Alison, that it had just been a scare, and she’d bought the test for her as a friend. Beth had spent the next three years of high school dealing with the aftermath, noting her mother’s anxious silence every time she went for a sleepover at Alison’s, as if Beth had stuffed her backpack with coat hangers and was going over to her friend’s house to perform an abortion.

  As she brushed her teeth, Beth considered the fact that she could have an abortion now—that even if she were 100 percent pregnant, she didn’t have to have this child, this undetected heartbeat below her rib cage. At twenty-four, Beth had gotten an abortion at the clinic on Bleecker Street, and she was so overcome with gratitude for her constitutional rights over her own body that she donated one hundred dollars to Planned Parenthood every year at Christmas. All these years later, she could make an excuse, take the car into the city on Monday, and have the procedure again without Gavril ever knowing. But their entire idea in moving out to Orient had been to start a family. That’s what Beth said she wanted. That’s what Gavril said he wanted. He had agreed to transport his whole studio operation out into the backyard garage at the height of his success, turning the den, with its imported terrazzo floors, into a home for his erratic junk pile of multimedia art supplies. No, it would be selfish of her not to want this baby now.

  As she swung the mirror back to its original position, it occurred to her that her recent bout of depression was just as self-centered as her mother’s chemical peels and five-hundred-dollar Botox treatments. Beth knew what was causing her Americanitis. She missed Manhattan. It took her five months away from the city to admit that. She had blamed Manhattan for her failures, not realizing that living there had become one of her defining characteristics.

  Beth descended the staircase slowly, like a scuba diver leaving the warm sunlight of the second floor for the darkness underneath. Be nice to Gail, she told herself. Set the relationship on a new and brighter course.

  Smackwater Jack, he bought a shotgun . . .

  Beth walked into the kitchen and went straight to the CD player on the counter, pressing stop on Carole King. Her mother sat at the table in a sleeveless yellow
dress, her fingers ribbed around a coffee mug. Her hair, once an auburn gray, now managed a copper shine not unlike the hair on young male swimmers who didn’t wash the chlorine out. Instinctively, Beth searched the table for evidence of liquor that Gail might have added to her coffee, but when she bent over to kiss her mother’s cheek, she purposely held her breath to avoid smelling any hint of alcohol.

  “You slept late,” her mother said, accepting the peck without returning one. “What’s wrong? Are you not feeling well?”

  It was no secret that Gail, obsessed though she was with defying the aging process, wanted a grandchild. Beth caught herself rolling her eyes, but forced herself to stop. That tic belonged to her mother.

  “I always sleep late when the mornings get colder. I guess summer is finally over.” She reached for a mug in the cabinet but wondered if she would have to stop drinking coffee now. She filled the cup under the faucet and watered the houseplants that Gavril kept adding to the kitchen: a fern, a rubber tree, a dinosaur cactus. It was a New York apartment trick that made no sense with an entire arboretum right outside the back door. “So, Mom, tell me. Why the early visit?”

  “It’s nearly ten,” her mother said, shaking her arm to bring her watch face flat against her wrist. “And summer’s not over. Look.” She pointed to the window above the sink. Beth peered outside, where swabs of gray clouds hid the sunlight. Below the clouds was their pool, foregrounded against the slate blue Sound and the long gray stalks of wild grass.

  “It’s too cold for swimming,” Beth said. “Do we drain the pool or just cover it over for the winter? Gavril is going to miss his afternoon laps.”

  Her mother was still staring at the window. “No, look,” she said. “Not out the window, inside it. See that? A bee trapped in the glass.” Beth refocused her eyes and noticed the tiny insect between two panes, crawling and falling, searching for a way out. “Summer can’t be over if bees are still around. It’s probably one of Magdalena’s specimens. Of course I was too nice to ever complain about her hives. But you don’t have to be.”