Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Gavril Catargi wouldn’t listen to the forecast and refused to cancel the party on account of snow. Gavril became practically Ceauşescuan on the matter of party preparations. Beth had known about this eccentricity ever since planning the reception of their wedding, which she assumed had been under her jurisdiction until Gavril pushed her aside, redrew the menu, and moved the entire event from a friend’s loft in Chelsea to a private garden in Sutton Place. Beth had let him take the reins, having grown so tired of parties by the time of their wedding that she barely worked up the energy to attend her own. It seemed to her that there was nothing so debilitating to productivity in New York as all the birthday parties alone. It’s my birthday; Here are the plans for my Kubrick–themed birthday on Central Park West; MY BIRTHDAY midnight to 4:00 A.M. at the Mop Cellar, open bar until 3:00 A.M.!!!!—the invitations flooded her e-mail like some cyber virus bent on crashing her sanity. Attending a birthday party in New York was a gauge of friendship, never mind that she only saw most of those friends once a year on their birthdays. Orient had offered a welcome break, a paradise of uncelebrated days; only because Gavril had yet to throw a party, in all of their months here, did she feel she owed him one now.

  They had spent all of Friday cleaning the house. Sweeping, sponging, pulling out dead flowers from the mulch beds, color coordinating the bookshelves, prepping her husband’s special dish of jumari, which looked like mutant doughnuts and tasted like mildewed pig. Gavril would have made a marvelous labor-camp leader: Scrub harder, Beth, and No, no, no, if the toilet water is coming up bubbles there is too much soap residue in the bowl, and Not the brown quilt, the blue one, to match the blinds and the Elizabeth Peyton. The experience gave Beth a newfound respect for Gavril’s art assistants in the city. At noon, Gavril drove into Greenport to pick up the alcohol. His absence gave Beth a chance to confront the mailman.

  “You want to stop all your mail?” He had a closely trimmed beard and teeth the yellow of a stamp’s underside.

  “No,” she said. “Just the ones about babies.” She shuffled through the stack and pulled out a waxy circular for No-Bumpy-Baby Car Seats. “I didn’t sign up for these. I don’t want them.”

  “Well, miss, it’s not illegal for merchants to send coupons.”

  “I know it isn’t illegal,” she said. “But it’s harassing.”

  “Miss. It’s also not illegal to throw them out.”

  “Yes, but you see, I really, really don’t want them.”

  “Want them?” The notion confused him. “I’m not sure anyone wants most mail. But I have to say, commercial bulk mail is what keeps the post office in business. Without it, in this day and age, the mail system wouldn’t exist.”

  “But if all I’m getting is bulk mail I don’t want, what’s the point?”

  His brow furrowed.

  “I suppose the point is that you might get some letters or packages mixed in that you do want, or didn’t know you were going to receive. Miss, my advice is to stop giving out your address.”

  “I didn’t give out my address,” she stammered. “These companies have targeted me without my permission. You see, I don’t have a baby. But all this baby stuff keeps arriving. Some of it even says I’m pregnant. It’s upsetting.”

  “I’m a carrier. My job is to deliver, not to determine what you do or don’t want. As long as it’s sent, I have to bring it.”

  “But can’t I block certain senders?”

  “If everyone could block junk mail, there’d be no mail at all. For god’s sake, some people appreciate my job.”

  He trudged off with his bloated shoulder bag; neither rain nor snow nor heat nor sense could stop him. Beth rested her forehead against the door, worn out by the existentialism of the postal service. She sifted through the mail, pulling all the baby reminders and putting them in a garbage bag, which she hid carefully in the hall closet behind bulky coats and unused rain boots.

  When Gavril returned with the crates of liquor, he went around the ground floor, hanging artwork he had received as gifts from fellow artists. He was certain they would expect to find their works featured prominently on the walls. “We can take them down tomorrow,” he said. Out they came, paintings and collages and grim sculptural assemblages of feathers, metal, and glue, like photos of unloved relatives displayed for the duration of a family reunion.

  As Beth was arranging the bottles in the kitchen, Gavril rushed in, hurtling like a trapped sparrow around the room. He held a letter in his hand, one she had left under a candle on the first night they had moved in last April. She had written it while standing amid their unpacked boxes. It had been a warm night. The windows had let in the smell of magnolias and grass, and they had built a fire in the fireplace because it seemed a waste to wait until winter.

  “Do you remember when you wrote this?” Gavril asked, waving the folded paper. His brown eyes had softened, as if that small memory from April meant more to him than all of those he had brought from Romania. “You thought lighting the candle would bring us luck.”

  She took the letter. It was in her neat handwriting of six months ago, more sprightly in its cursive than she was capable of writing now.

  On the first night in our new house (and my old one) I hope this fresh start brings us happiness and peace. I hope we can start a family here, and that our child (the first of two, Gavril says five) will be as lucky as I was to grow up in a safe, warm pocket of the world with every direction open to her or him (Gavril says him). We are fortunate people. We need only this roof and each other. The rest can be sold or stolen or lost.

  Who was this woman from six months ago? Beth didn’t recognize her, not even as the husband she wrote about was breathing into her ear. The letter was written by a different person altogether. And the letter only spoke of what had been lost between the sending and receiving. The woman who wrote it had not lived in Orient since high school, and had not yet lived in Orient through this past summer and fall. That woman had not telephoned Planned Parenthood, as Beth had done this morning, to schedule an appointment.

  Gavril slipped his arms around her waist. As always before a shower, he smelled of sage, the herb burned in new houses to clear out ghosts. He kissed her neck from ear to collarbone. If she could write the letter now, she thought, it would read differently: Sell it off, give it away, just go west to the city and stay there—it was a mistake to come back. There is no fresh start. All there is here is doubt.

  “Read it to me,” Gavril said.

  “I don’t want to. It sounds stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s perfect.”

  “I sound like a child. It would have been better luck to burn it.”

  “The best things are said in simple words.”

  Gavril was hugging what he didn’t know they already had, and he would never know because she wasn’t going to keep it. She struggled to turn around in his arms. He pressed his palms against her back to bring her closer.

  “Should we relight the candle tonight? And keep the letter there during the party?” He didn’t seem bothered when she didn’t answer. “I will be so busy soon, making the new work for my show. You will have to remind me about making a baby. But don’t let me forget. I need to be successful for him. I don’t want him to think his father is a lazy man who lived for free in his mother-in-law’s house.” Beth moved from his arms, picking up two vodka bottles so he couldn’t pin her against the counter.

  “Ah, at least you can drink tonight. No drinking when you’re pregnant. And no driving around all day on the ice.” She thought of what a prison he would make this house if her stomach expanded beyond her waist. “Should we prepare the guest bedroom for Nathan? By midnight he’ll be too drunk to drive.” His birthmark relaxed to the neutrality of Hawaii. “What’s the matter? You’re giving me your unhappy look.”

  “I don’t mean to,” she said.

  “All is okay with us, yes? We’re good?”

  “We’re good,” she said, returning the bottles to the table. “Everyt
hing’s fine. I’ll make up the room. We might have a few overnight guests tonight if the storm is as bad as they’re predicting.”

  Beth wore a dress she had inherited from her mother, a white cotton shift with eyelet lace around the hem in the shape of wildflowers. There were a few water stains on the back that the dry cleaner hadn’t been able to remove, but the front had remained unsoiled since the 1970s, and its shape concealed whatever weight she had gained in the last months. None of the guests would think to study her body for signs of pregnancy, except of course for Luz Wilson, a professional observer of other people’s weaknesses.

  The name Luz was originally pronounced looz, but its bearer had changed it to luhz at the age of eighteen, when she moved into the city from Trenton, New Jersey. During her first semester at Columbia, the school had experienced a blight of luz graffiti tags around campus. All these years later, Luz Wilson was a successful portrait painter whose personality and opinions were as confrontational as her work. She had championed Beth’s paintings, an unsolicited endorsement for which Beth was grateful, though it came only after the negative reviews in New York had rendered her work noncompetitive. Not that there were many similarities: where Beth’s paintings were careful and precise, as if to let their subjects speak for themselves, Luz’s portraits—of prison guards, accused rapists, smug dewy children of the obscenely rich—were executed in the angry hand of their maker, as if each sitter had been soaked in formaldehyde. Luz’s opinions were infamous even among Gavril’s opinionated artist crowd, generally colored by whatever academic theorist she was reading at the time; Beth knew how quickly Luz could turn even a simple cotton dress into an object lesson in Lacan, Žižek, Badiou, Butler, Althusser, or her trusted fallback, Foucault.

  Beth spent a moment at the full-length mirror manufacturing the Luzian dialogue that was sure to rain down on her by the end of the night: You’ve worn your mother’s dress to repeat her sins, not to emulate her, but to destroy her by regulating her sins as common values in the hegemony of feminine virtue. You discredit by redeeming. You parrot her to ensure her silence. The dress isn’t an inheritance, it’s warfare against the woman who gave birth to you. The very exercise gave Beth a headache.

  There was little question as to why Luz Wilson, a child of factory workers—“a screw factory and, yes, all connotations apply”—had achieved such prominence in the art world. It wasn’t simply the camera-ready beauty of her African-Chinese heritage (cheekbones like onions, eyelids like envelopes, skin like unsweetened iced tea, black hair worn short and wrenched into cornrows that made the eye water just to look at them). Luz had serious talent, and she also possessed the ability to antagonize. Even the press releases on her shows read like grad school dissertations. She posed nude, but for construction boots, in her husband’s art photographs. She boycotted museum shows that didn’t include an equal representation of women, but boycotted women-only survey shows, finding them sanctimonious. In New York, Luz hosted parties in her loft that included famous hip-hop artists, whom she alone called by their Christian names. And she seemed fluent in a wide variety of languages—among them, to Beth’s annoyance, Berlitz Romanian.

  Luz’s husband, the artist Nathan Crimp, was a handsome, chalk-thin New Englander born not so much from parents as mated bank accounts. (His grandfather had invented the polymer seal for the shoelace aglet.) Nathan feigned a savant’s naïveté (“I think my favorite color really is purple,” he’d say feelingly. “It’s sad and also cheerful”), but beneath the childlike guile he was just as ambitious as Luz. They seemed happy as a couple, their temperaments balancing each other, their hands often reaching out silently at parties, always taken instantly by the other.

  Luz and Nathan were Gavril’s friends; to Beth they were neighbors. A month after she and Gavril moved to Orient, Luz and Nathan purchased the old farmhouse inn, with its prismatic views of the Sound and a private dock equipped with a Stingray speedboat. The purchase had one-upped Gavril, but Nathan hastened to defend himself against complaints of ostentation. “Richard Serra’s had a house in Orient for years. You aren’t the first one out here, my friend. And now we can visit each other constantly and get drunk.” They did get drunk that summer, Gavril and Nathan, usually in the shallow end of the backyard pool, planning art manifestos that gave Beth ulcers to overhear. One July afternoon, Luz even tried to spark a female version of their husbands’ male bonding, phoning Beth to ask if she’d like to sit for a portrait. “I thought you did portraits of people you hated,” Beth replied. “I never said that. Who said that? You’re projecting. So are you in?” Beth was not.

  Luz Wilson exploited Orient the way all new settlers do, making it hers by reframing its past to her liking. She tracked down surviving descendants of old Orient families who no longer owned their estates—field farmers, mostly, and a few roughnecks who vivisected fish on the Greenport docks—and paid them one dollar more than minimum wage to come to her studio at the farmhouse to pose for her. “Don’t you love it? A child of a slave and a Commie immigrant painting the master class in one of their dispossessed ancestral houses.” Beth did not love it. Her family had been part of that master class.

  Gavril and Nathan got wasted every Tuesday afternoon that summer, tanning themselves crimson in her mother’s pool. The Orient year-rounders viewed them as savages, trying to steal the land from those to whom it properly belonged. And they looked like savages—Gavril, Nathan, Luz, the others, all of them that summer. They drank top-shelf and drove erratically and wore expensive clothes and did money dances around glittering pools whose slate basins were vacuumed by roving drones. They slicked their hair back, spread themselves across lounge chairs, and flung watermelon rinds on magazines.

  And as they sat back, enjoying themselves, their reputations grew. Among Nathan Crimp’s notable recent artworks:

  “The Boiler Spoiler” (2011). A white canvas boiler jumpsuit, on which Crimp stenciled plot summaries revealing the endings of popular books, films, and TV shows such as “Harry Potter does not die” and “The creepy Martin son is the killer in Dragon Tattoo.” Crimp described the work as “cultural anthrax” in a society “satisfied with controlled narratives.” After wearing the jumpsuit around New York, he was repeatedly assaulted by passersby for ruining the plots. (ref. Artforum, December 2011).

  “I’ll Help You Get Your Green Card” (2012). Since green card candidates are forced to accumulate “press” to prove their value in the United States, Crimp created a monthly newspaper called “I’ll Help You Get Your Green Card,” profiling New York–area immigrants complete with hyperbolic texts on their acute societal importance (“The country will turn to anarchy without chef Sven Laggerholm’s meatballs”), which they could then use in their citizenship applications. (Gavril Catargi was one of thirty participants.) (ref. Art in America, May 2012).

  “This Sentence Is Negative” (2013). Using a mold of an AK-47 assault weapon, Crimp created a series of sculptures—some of them made of 14-karat gold, some of worthless pyrite. Collectors would not be told whether they were buying a work of massive monetary value or of fool’s gold. “Bad taste or bad collecting strategy?” (ref. The New York Times, Roberta Smith, April 13, 2013).

  “Dreams from My Grandfather” (2013–ongoing). In this performative work, Crimp trips over his own untied shoelaces at gallery openings and files a police report against the gallery for negligence. Lawsuits pending. “Are the supposedly free bastions of art galleries obliged to follow strict city zoning and fire codes? Can someone be made rich by the accident of a shoelace?” (ref. New York online, Jerry Saltz).

  Luz and Nathan had used the money they made on their art to float the initial $4.1 million asking price of the old farmhouse inn and its forty-one untouched acres. Only when a second bidder emerged, tipping the price toward six million, did Nathan’s family subsidize the difference. They paid for the property in cash.

  “That’s a nice dress,” Luz said to Beth, cracking open a bottle of vodka at the kitchen counter. Beth waite
d, bracing herself for a follow-up lecture that didn’t come. Luz, in a loose, blue, over-the-shoulder sweater, her lips painted orange, took a drag from her cigarette and acknowledged her painting that Gavril had hung an hour ago on the kitchen wall. “You put mine up, finally,” she said with a knowing smile. “What about your work? You been painting?”

  “No,” Beth replied. She held out an empty glass toward the bottle. “Not too much, though. Just a sip.”

  “Just a sip,” Luz repeated, laughing. “We don’t have to compensate for the overconsumption of our husbands. I see Gavril turned the hot tub on. Is that an invitation to see me in my underwear?” She didn’t wait for a response. “Tell me, how cold does it get out here in the winter?”

  “Freezing,” Beth said. “And it’s only mid-October. Are you and Nathan planning on spending the entire winter in Orient?”

  “It’s an experiment we’re conducting. Can we survive together in the middle of nowhere without delivery or a decent grocery store—or, in Nathan’s case, a decent drug dealer—and find we’re alive come spring?” She breathed out smoke and took a sip, pivoting an ice cube between her teeth. “Although I heard there was a murder out here. That caretaker. I guess it’s not the peaceful dream community we were conned into believing it was when we bought the place.”

  “It might not have been murder,” Beth said, trying to distance herself from the rumor.

  “Poor man. Poor white men are the saddest. The burden of no excuses.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Yeah.” Luz crunched the ice cube and swallowed. “He came over and fixed things. You want something done, you hire local. Quite a talker, Jeff was. On and on and on.”

  “Really? You spoke to him?” Beth was flummoxed: in Luz’s brief exposure to Orient, she had already made first-name headway into a community, Beth’s community, that had so far resisted Beth Shepherd at every turn. “What about?”