Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “I don’t believe all the talk about Paul being gay anyway,” Gail went on. “When he was young, he used to date a lot of the girls out here. I guess people do change in the city. Although I’m sure Pam started that rumor just so she could brag about how tolerant she is.”

  “Well, we’re going. Right, Gavril? You love picnics. There’ll probably be a barbecue and a lot of American flags.”

  Gavril shook his head, even as he kept his loving smile.

  “I’m sorry, Beth. But they don’t welcome me. And I have too much work to do today.”

  “Traitor,” she whispered and went upstairs to change.

  Beth drove the five minutes to the Muldoons’ house by herself. Parked cars lined the curb, and she decided, as a newly pregnant woman, that it was her right to block the driveway of the empty, for-sale Tudor five houses down. Maybe the first person to hear the news of her pregnancy would be a ticketing police officer.

  The afternoon had grown cold as she approached the lawn, already busy and white with guests. She knew many of them, had known, had gone to school with or taken sailing lessons with them or seen them last at her father’s funeral. But there was really no one with whom she could sustain a conversation, no one to play that essential life-support role a friend fills at a party. Beth occupied herself spooning single servings of potato salad on a plastic plate, eating it, and helping herself to more. She chatted with her old third grade teacher, Ina Jenkins, and with Adam Pruitt, a guy two years older who had nearly taken her virginity one summer night in the late 1990s and still carried the traces of his childhood good looks on a slender face falling to ruin with cigarettes and beer. But they spoke only of the past, twenty years behind them, and when the memories failed to find a foothold in the present she excused herself. If Gavril had come along, at least he could have lent the scene a sense of currency. Beth was relieved when Magdalena Kiefer, nestled beneath a shawl in a lawn chair, beckoned her over with a wave.

  “How are the bees?” Beth asked as she knelt at the old woman’s side.

  Magdalena’s short, white hair and splotched cheeks gave her a wise, matronly aura, that of a woman who had braced hard winds and, with squinted, cataract-blighted eyes, braced them still. She was like a season that was trying to hold on as fresher weather swept in to erase her. She placed a fingertip against Beth’s cheek, as if she were feeling for familiarity.

  “They come back now, better, not dying like they were a few seasons ago from that mysterious disease. It’s a strong colony this year. I’ll have to bring them into the garage this week. The queens are angry . . . September frost.”

  “One was caught in my kitchen window today,” Beth said. Magdalena’s filmy eyes brightened, and Beth remembered that she’d forgotten to free it by opening the outside pane. “I let it go,” she lied.

  “Must have been attracted to fruit,” she whispered. Beth cupped her ears to hear her better, over the sound of Pam Muldoon shouting across the lawn for her son. “I’m so glad you and your husband are living next door. It’s a breath of fresh air . . . because your mother’s swimming pool and the terrible construction.”

  Beth laughed to indicate that she’d heard Magdalena, when in truth she’d caught only snippets of her speech, faint shapes of fish beneath the surface of the ocean. Kneeling there on the grass, she was distracted by the sudden churn of her stomach. She stood up quickly and swept her hand along the arm of the chair.

  “Well, I’ll have to stop by for a visit.”

  Magdalena caught her hand and grasped it as hard as her muscles allowed.

  “I’d like you to come by,” she said. “Tell you what might happen.” Beth was back on her feet now and had an even harder time hearing her. “Could happen. And they are planning it . . .” Her mouth moved silently, as if air and voice were logjammed in her throat. Beth caught another few words: “ . . . to be afraid. How could it be like that?”

  “Okay,” Beth said, turning the stillness of their hands into a departing shake. “This week. I’ll knock on your door.”

  Beth hurried across the lawn toward the Muldoons’ house and entered through a sliding door into the laundry room. Bicycles and skateboards were piled there erratically; a clothes dryer quaked against the concrete floor, its windowed stomach swirling with red socks and flesh-toned towels. Pressing her palm against her mouth, she sprinted into the kitchen. She tried the first closed door she could locate—mercifully, it was the bathroom. In a single motion, she managed to close the door with one hand, lift the toilet lid with the other, and vomit a surge of yellow liquid into the bowl. Was it the potato salad? Was it the baby? Beth had no idea.

  After the heaving subsided, she hung her head over the toilet a minute longer, staring at a dish of dried rose petals on top of the tank. Then she flushed the toilet, ran the tap, and splashed cold water into her mouth. In the gray light of the bathroom, she studied her face, skeletal, cheekbones protruding like a child’s kneecaps. The boyish indent of her chin fit Gavril’s pinkie finger. It had been their little love gesture in Manhattan: Gavril stretching out his pinkie and pressing it into the divot like key to lock. She took a few deep breaths and smoothed her white dress. Someone knocked at the door, and when she opened it, Adam Pruitt stood in front of her grinning, as if it wasn’t the bathroom he’d been looking for but her. But he was seventeen years too late to take her virginity, and she swept by him into the kitchen. The oven reeked of gas.

  Outside, the ground warped below her, and Beth found herself looping far wide of the oak tree rather than walking toward it. She saw Pam’s youngest son, Theo, his hands dished together, in his palms a baby bird. The poor creature was shivering, desperate, all bulging eyes, and the sight of it released another bout of queasiness. Beth feigned curiosity, hoping to liberate the bird from his clutches and at least let it die in peace in the crook of a tree. It should be illegal for boys under fourteen to touch an animal that doesn’t have teeth, she thought.

  “Ohhh,” she cooed as she bent forward, pushing her hair behind her ear, preparing to snatch it up if she had to. Theo must have sensed her intentions, because he scooped one hand over the other and blocked access with his back. Pam stood three feet away, face pale and lips agitated, clearly in no mood to tolerate outside parenting. Beth quickly gave up on the mission. Maybe some organisms are born to withstand torture, she thought as she walked toward the drinks table. Some things are meant to bear the pain and die. She searched for something carbonated to calm her stomach.

  Beth knew she should leave the picnic in case her sickness worsened. But returning home too early would only have confirmed what Gavril and her mother believed: that they weren’t missing anything by skipping a party they weren’t invited to in the first place. She forced herself to linger at the drinks table, scooping ice from the bucket to hydrate her tongue. As the sun sank over the rooftops and silvered the Sound through the oak branches, she realized that she’d forgotten to call her doctor to schedule an appointment. The office must already be closed. She would have to wait for days now for confirmation. When Paul Benchley tapped her on the shoulder, Beth wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there, holding a cube of ice against her lip.

  “Were you stung?” Paul asked. “Is your lip okay?”

  “No. Yes. No.” She threw the cube on the ground. “I was just in a daze.”

  Paul’s face softened, and his mustache grew like an accordion under his wire-rimmed glasses. Beth liked Paul Benchley, as much as she knew him. She remembered him as a teenager when she was a child, being put to work by his tyrannical parents, taking out customers on the fishing excursions his father advertised from his Greenport bait shop, fixing every window and board of the Benchleys’ dilapidated mansion—they even forced Paul to spend his summers running the old inn on the tip, which had been in his mother’s family for generations. Paul had earned an Ivy League degree in architecture, and, as his career took off and his parents grew older, he paid their bills so they could remain in the mansion until their deat
hs. Beth remembered Paul’s mother distinctly, a heavyset woman with speed-walking legs who ambled the coast in the afternoons, ignoring all property markers. Paul was long gone by then, working away in the city. A few years ago Gail had tried to hire Paul to oversee the latest remodeling of her house, hoping a local architect might alleviate the growing rancor, but he had gently declined. Beth realized now that her mother must have taken his refusal as just another snub against her.

  Beth peered around Paul, looking for the so-called con artist he’d brought with him. Paul followed her gaze, then waved toward a young man lingering near the driveway. “Over here,” he shouted. “Have you met Beth?”

  So this was the con artist. His lips flickered the semblance of a smile, but he remained frozen on the driveway, digging his foot into the gravel. He looked younger than she had expected and lonelier than someone from New York, too unsure of himself to last long in that state of teenage indecision. His black hair swooped around his forehead, much like Gavril’s when he didn’t comb it before it dried. His face was angular and his skin newt white, his features so sharp they seemed engineered to cut through wind. In a few years, she thought, when his shoulders filled out he would be rather handsome. He didn’t seem capable of a con.

  “He’s from New York?” she said.

  “Only briefly. I’ve asked him to come out here to help me on the house. The truth is, he ran into a little trouble in Manhattan. Nothing criminal,” Paul quickly clarified. “He’s really a sweet kid that just got a bit misdirected in the city. I thought Orient might give him some stability.”

  “I get it. Instead of scaring him straight, you’re hoping to bore him straight.” It wasn’t funny, and even Beth didn’t try to save the joke by laughing. “Well, let me know if he needs anything. Even if you want someone to show him around for an afternoon—I’d be happy for the distraction.”

  “Would you?” Paul grabbed at the offer, as if she might retract it. “That would be very kind of you. I’m sure he’d love that.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling.

  “By the way, congratulations. I hear you’re married. Your husband’s also an artist—did I get that right?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “Another goddamned city artist, I’m sure some of the neighbors are thinking.”

  Paul just nodded, as if to convey, That’s how these Orient people are.

  “You know,” Beth said, “the couple that bought your mother’s old inn—they’re friends of mine. Friends of my husband’s really. Luz Wilson and Nathan Crimp. They’re artists too.”

  “Well, they’ve got their work cut out for them,” Paul said, shaking his head. “I heard it was bought, but I haven’t been there in years. I don’t know if the previous owners managed to make much headway, but that old shell was one bad hurricane from falling into the sea.”

  Beth decided not to tell him that Luz and Nathan had gutted the place, knocking down every wall and bulldozing every inch of lawn. The old inn was buffered by enough acres of land that their renovations hadn’t caught the wrath of neighbors, the way her mother’s had. Even though Paul was a city person, Beth saw no reason to sway the local tide against her friends. Luz and Nathan were such volatile personalities, they’d have no trouble doing that on their own.

  Paul’s guest was still standing on the sidelines. “So if you want to meet Mills, it looks like we’re going to have to go to him.”

  Beth turned to collect her purse from the table as Paul headed off toward the driveway. Suddenly Pam Muldoon cut in front of her, breathing hard.

  “Do you want to take plates home?” she asked Beth.

  “Plates?”

  Pam blinked in confusion. “Plates of food for your husband. We can wrap up some of the burgers. It’s such a shame he couldn’t join you. Don’t you think he’d like that?” Pam nodded yes to her own question. “Come with me to the kitchen and I’ll make a nice spread for . . . Gavin, isn’t it? We’ve got too much to finish ourselves.”

  Pam tugged at her wrist, leading her toward the house. Beth wanted to flag down Paul but he was already too far away, disappearing across the yard. She tried to explain that food wasn’t necessary, that her husband had probably already eaten, that his name was Gavril, that it would all go to waste in her refrigerator just as fast.

  Fifteen minutes later, she carried a grocery bag of scraps out the front door. Night had settled on the lawn and cleared most of the picnic. Paul and the young man were gone. Sarakit Herrig was wrapping her three children in coats. Adam Pruitt winked at her, and she continued walking down the slope of the grass toward her car. She looked for a garbage can where she could toss Pam’s food, but a Pearl Farms Realty sign was the only thing in sight.

  Beth threw the bag in the backseat and started the ignition. She turned on the heat and felt safe inside the cramped cavern of the Nissan. It hummed, it moved at her command, it played her favorite songs and smelled of her perfume. The car was one of the few exotic pleasures of non-Manhattan life—indeed, it was a kind of proxy Manhattan, a compact space with everything in easy reach.

  She drove down Youngs Road until she reached Main, one way east, the other west. One way offered a promise of family life with Gavril at her house, the other the charades of the city: a quiet studio apartment with jars of paint waiting to be used, windows with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and beetle-black cars sliding across it, meaningless bathroom fucks with men not so different from Adam Pruitt. Which way would she go? Why did she even have to pick a direction? She tried to merge both arrows into one in her mind, but they bounced back into place as if on springs.

  She turned onto Main Road, trying to picture not the arrows but herself, a pregnant woman in her early thirties. Beth had once painted faces so carefully that every fold and fissure of skin was scarred onto the canvas. All she could muster now of her own face was a faint white circle awaiting definition. Beth had no vision of herself. If she’d been forced to describe herself to a police sketch artist, the result would be a drawing of her at twenty different ages, none of them today, none of them right.

  As she swiveled the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of herself, a streak of light appeared out of the corner of her eye. She slammed on the brake, rocking forward against the steering wheel. Her headlights homed in on a fluorescent orange square retreating into the night, with black shapes around it rotating, vibrating—a floating, fleeing danger sign. Beth stepped on the gas and passed a woman in a reflector vest running on the side of the road. Her shoes crunched the blond tufts of moonlit grass, her eyes staring forward in numb determination. House lights shined against the water, the top floors burning as night drew residents to higher ground.

  On the road, the joggers were out. And somewhere in the darkness, so were the hunters.

  CHAPTER 3

  As Paul searched his pockets for his keys, he told Mills to “be prepared.” The warning might have alarmed most first-time houseguests, but Mills had been prepared for the last two hours. He was sick of standing still.

  The art of hitchhiking relied on constant motion. That meant not only walking along the road while trying to flag a ride, but also moving through towns and cities, never sleeping anywhere twice. It had taken Mills seventeen days to get from California to New York, and in that time he never once overstayed his welcome—whether at a diner or on a park bench or in the stone-scrubbed bus terminals where all the pay phones had lost their receivers. In theory hitchhiking seemed dangerous, but in reality the rhythm of hours and loose small talk fit his sense of purpose: jump in, cover some distance, and thank them for their kindness. He had encountered no nightmare scenarios, no serial killers scouring the desert, no meth labs burning holes in the atmosphere, no crooked cops or grandfathers with tampered passenger-door locks or gas-station ex-cons with makeshift dungeons. America, for Mills, had almost been one long, amicable disappointment. He hadn’t stopped moving until he reached Manhattan.

  The drive from the city with Paul had brought back the memory of travel. A
nd once they arrived in Orient, Mills found the stillness difficult to take. As he loitered near the picnic, never quite joining in, Mills could tell already that the squint-mouthed hostess, Pam Muldoon, didn’t like him. Paul seemed oblivious, beckoning him over: “Come here. Have you met Beth?” Soon Pam called Tommy away on the excuse of needing paper towels (“Tommy, can you get some paper towels out of the kitchen cupboard?” “Tommy, the paper towels!”), and Mills lingered in the driveway, pushing his shoes through the gravel. It was Paul’s house that interested him, anyway.

  Mills had agreed to help Paul fix up his house without understanding exactly what that meant. He’d pictured pipes bursting, tiles popping from bathroom walls, glinting figurines in need of a polish. Mills told Paul straight out that he wouldn’t stay in Orient only out of Paul’s sympathy. Sympathy was a necessary tool for hitchhiking, but Mills couldn’t stand it beyond a one-hour window. “Are you sure you have something for me to do?” he had asked. Paul nodded in assurance, his Adam’s apple bobbing under whiskered skin, his hands raised in oath. “Believe me, there’s plenty,” he said.

  As the picnic wore on, Mills studied the white clapboard farmhouse with its manicured bushes and paint-scabbed porch, searching for clues to the disorder that awaited him inside. Thanks to the foster homes of his childhood, Mills had developed a keen eye for predicting what state of emergency existed inside a house by the travesty of its front yard: mud plots resistant to grass but wild with Coors Light cans; duct-taped satellite dishes spiking off storm drains; plastic lounge chairs compressed by the weight of their owners, set facing the street like California thrones. Judged on these terms, Paul Benchley’s house was peculiarly vacant of character. Maybe in the East, homes were too old and worn by years of salt water to bear the imprint of their owners. Except, that is, for the Muldoons’, where the yanked-open screen doors and an upstairs window emblazoned with anarchy stickers carried the mark of fleeing children.