Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “We made a deal that he’d drive to Riverhead to pick up paints for me. I lost five hundred dollars on his death. Never showed with the goods. And I wasn’t the only artist he had that kind of arrangement with. Maybe someone robbed him. Or killed him for pocketing our hard-earned money.” She took another gulp. “So why aren’t you painting?”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “Who’s ready?” Her orange lips contorted. “Come on, what are you going to do with yourself if you don’t get back to work? What will you end up being, Gavril’s wife? Tsk tsk tsk.” She shook her head and stared at the bottom of her glass. “You’re too smart for that. A waste of talent. Wasted talent is a woman standing behind a husband thinking she’s his rock when all she really is is his step.”

  “I’ve been busy, Luz. And I’ve got all winter.”

  “Hmm. You’ve got hobbies, then?”

  Beth thought about it. She had no hobbies. Before she quit her job copyediting for Scientific Frontier, she’d considered applying for an open position as a junior editor—until she saw all the résumés that had piled up, hundreds and hundreds, from ambitious recent college graduates with journalism degrees that were as useful in the current job market as Japanese fighting swords. On many résumés, there was a line at the bottom of the page reserved for hobbies: “golf, opera, meditation, maze topiary, Sudoku, YouTube movie spoofs.” What were Beth’s hobbies? Sitting still, reading the first paragraphs in the newspaper’s art section, wasting gas. To call any of those activities hobbies was to turn the marrow of life into a pastime—which, she realized, was Luz’s point.

  “Nope, uh-uh. They aren’t allowed. Tell her, Beth.” Luz crooked a finger over her glass, a paint-scabbed nail as sharp as a switchblade. “This is a party for adults. You have to leave immediately. Good-bye, Shelley. Lovely to see you.” Beth turned to find Shelley Bass with her two-month-old infant nestled against her chest in a tie-dye sling. She’d traveled all the way from her rental in Peconic to be unwelcomed in the Shepherd kitchen. Shelley was a mixed-media artist of middling talent, her graying hair wrapped in a matching tie-dye scarf. She endured Luz’s attack with a distressed smile: like the others, she was used to Luz’s theatrics and suffered her with only mild impatience.

  Beth greeted Shelley with a kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry I had to bring the baby. I won’t stay long. Brent had business in the city, and I couldn’t find a sitter.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Beth assured her. She performed the requisite ten-second examination of the infant, cooing over how cute he was. Shelley’s five-year-old daughter ran from behind her mother’s legs, hoisting an iPad over her head.

  “Look what I drew!” the little girl shouted.

  Luz reached for the vodka to refresh her drink. “If I’d known it was going to be this kind of party I would have stayed home.”

  “I drew a person,” the girl said proudly. Every drawing was a miracle at that age. She raised the iPad to reveal a blotch of beige skin with black dots for the orifices and digital lines streaming from its crown.

  “I see the art world’s bad influence is trickling down to the younger generation,” Luz said. “It looks like one of Isaiah’s canvases, tortured for no good reason. Lord, I pity the generation raised on post-abstract art.”

  “Don’t tell her that. Come here, honey.” Shelley reached out for her daughter’s hand. “Go sit in the corner and draw more people for us. Mommy will find you a snack.” The girl scampered off, her tie-dye socks slipping across the wood.

  “And you all match,” Luz said.

  Beth and Shelley exchanged agonized glances. Shelley picked up the orange juice carton and used the mixer as her refreshment.

  “You’re awful,” Shelley said, glancing at Luz as she jiggled the bundle at her chest. “It’s not exactly easy to raise two children. I haven’t had a single moment to myself since Kiki was born. No time for my work. Up at five-thirty every morning. It’s all I can do to bathe myself. I’ve learned to nap while pushing a swing. Everyone expects you to be able to live your own life and give everything to two needy kids. On the drive here I decided I’ve been having a nervous breakdown for the past five years, only I haven’t had the time to do anything about it.” Shelley rubbed her forehead and glanced around the kitchen, as if looking for sharp pieces of metal to protect her children from or use to slit her wrists.

  “Hey, you know what?” Luz asked, crossing her ankles as she leaned against the counter. “I work hard not to have a child. Where I come from, you’re expected to be knocked up by fifteen. I’ve worked my ass off to be barren. And I don’t even mean contraception. I mean the social pressure not to turn my body into a human factory. And guess what? We knew from Go, there ain’t no break room in that factory. So spare me the agony of motherhood. You could have been a conscientious objector, but you chose to go to war in a time without a draft. So you’ll forgive me if I’m slow to salute you.”

  “Luz,” Beth said. “Enough.”

  Luz reached into her pocket and drew out a small Baggie of yellow-and-black pills. She shook two out in her palm. “Here, Shelley, take these. Bumblebees will calm you right down. They’ll put some color back into your world.”

  “No thanks,” Shelley replied. The infant started to wail, and the mother instinctively pushed her scoop-neck collar down to offer a long, thin nipple, chewed up like the end of a teenager’s soda straw. Luz slipped a pill into her mouth and gulped it back. “Do you know the Aristotelian model? I think it should be applied to mothers who bring their babies onto airplanes—”

  Luz was interrupted midsentence by the arrival of Isaiah Goodman and his boyfriend, Vince Donnelly. Isaiah was an artist, and Vince was an environmentally conscious small-time literary publisher. A former catalog model, Vince had taken his ability to wear the preppy vestments of the leisure class to heart and brought the heretofore goth Isaiah into the jersey-cotton, equestrian-accented, whale-boned-belt fold. If they hadn’t been gay, they would have looked like assholes. And if they hadn’t been priced out of the Hamptons, they would never have made Orient their second home.

  Isaiah and Vince had moved into the old Raleigh cottage, about a mile east on the Sound. They took to the soil surprisingly quickly, raising an enviable tomato garden, which they called a trial run before locating a surrogate and filling their garden with babies. At least that was Vince’s plan. Isaiah was more resistant, shaking his head behind his boyfriend’s shoulder when Vince started describing the process of double-sperm in vitro fertilization, which would prevent them from knowing which one of them was the biological father. Luz had the same patience for gay men wanting babies as she had for women wanting babies, but they had the good sense not to bring the subject up while she was in the room. Instead Vince mentioned the Orient monster.

  “Did you guys read the paper today?” he asked. “They said it was all a hoax.”

  “Made of stitched-together animal parts,” Isaiah reported. “So the Home Security press release said. Imagine being the PR flack for that organization. What makes a good press launch for biowarfare agents? What’s the party like?”

  “They’re probably lying,” Vince replied. “What else are they going to say? That it was an escaped mutant? At least that monster made everyone stop and wonder about pollutants.” Vince had used his fledgling publishing house to reprint a number of 1970s back-to-the-land essays on the fragility of Mother Earth. No one bothered to read them, and even his friends grew distracted when he started blathering on about fracking or the melting ice shelf. “Think of all the viruses draining off that island.”

  “Don’t tell Nathan that creature was a fake,” Luz warned them. “He’ll be jealous he didn’t think of it himself. He’s been looking for a project out here to inflict on the locals.”

  “Oh, good luck,” Vince said, whisking his blond bangs back and selecting a bottle of tequila. “My dream is to fill the empty chair on the Orient Historical Board. But they hate us, because we’re new or becau
se we drive nicer cars or because we can’t tell stories about a record-breaking fish that was caught in 1983.”

  “Right,” Isaiah added. “Whose dick do you have to suck in the backseat of a Subaru to even get a meeting with those people?” Vince rolled his eyes. “I’m joking,” Isaiah said.

  Vince had something of the owner of a vicious dog in him. He seemed to like when Isaiah misbehaved so he could demonstrate his ability to put him in his place. Isaiah hadn’t fallen as deeply in love with Orient as his boyfriend had. When they bought their house four months ago, Isaiah had mistakenly taken the bay as an extension of the Atlantic Ocean, and quickly realized on his first swim out that it offered none of the tumbling, surfer-dotted waves that crashed thirty miles south on the beaches of Montauk. He referred to Orient seawater as “the used bathwater of the East End.” His resentment hadn’t eased over time. “I could sit in a lawn chair anywhere,” he suddenly said to Vince, continuing an argument they must have started on the drive over. “Luz, I will ask you one more time. Can I please borrow your speedboat?”

  “No,” she said.

  Gavril’s art dealer, Samuel Veiseler, entered the kitchen through the back door, still miming the act of wiping his feet on the mat. His suit was wrinkled from the two-hour drive from the city, and his red eyes were strained from handling the icy turnoffs after sundown. Beth shook his hand and offered him a drink. Luz heard his order—gin and Coke—and went about preparing one. It was no secret that Nathan Crimp wanted to leave his own gallery and join Gavril at Veiseler Projects. For all of her conspicuous rebellion, Luz recognized this as an opportunity to play the dutiful wife, and to Beth it seemed like she even managed to intensify her beauty, as if she could turn on her attractiveness with a switch—eyes wider, lips parted, her sweater slipping down just enough to present the contour of a breast. Beth stepped out of her way.

  Nathan and Gavril emerged from the living room, bringing its loud voices with them. Gavril was holding a plate of figs dolloped with crab and sprigs of thyme. “I’m honored you could come,” he said to Samuel as he stumbled forward with his platter. “I’ll take you to the studio later and you can see what I’ve been working on. I’m still in the early stages, so we both have to use our imaginations.”

  “I’ll come too,” Nathan interrupted. Only Beth caught the flinch in Gavril’s shoulders.

  Nathan yanked at his tie, trying to unleash himself. Luz proceeded to straighten the knot. He kissed her forehead, and she pinched his sides. They somehow made even a simple display of affection seem holy in its intimacy and the rest of the world smaller for a moment than they were. Beth noticed that she and Nathan had the same light hair and skin color, that of a mildewed paperback novel. They were about the same height too, with the same thin bones that flared at the knuckles and joints (although Nathan suffered the lingering injuries of the rich: a bad back from horses, a bad stomach from too much foreign meat, a jittery nervous system from never having to wait in a line). For no conceivable reason, Beth imagined what her children would have looked like if Nathan had been their father: small, nonspecific humans not unlike the drawing Shelley’s daughter had created on her iPad, beige slabs of human material with openings and hair in all the right places. Finishing her vodka, Beth forced herself to leave the kitchen to tend to the fire.

  She used her father’s steel poker to flip the logs. Anthony Shepherd had known the art of keeping a fire going: Keep the logs moving. Use newsprint and kindling only at the base. Let the flames find their own way in. As she started crumpling a piece of newspaper, she discovered the Suffolk Times article on the Orient monster: “. . . elaborate hoax conducted against Plum Island, timed to its impending closure. Investigators believe the prank was orchestrated by area teenagers or environmental advocacy groups angry over the impact of the controversial animal disease center on soil, water, and wildlife.” She balled the page, along with news from farther away, which she discovered only as she prepared to burn it. Spaceship on Mars, Chinese drilling in Angola, a new species of grasshopper discovered in Laos—all of it so quick to light. There would be more tomorrow.

  Isaiah passed her en route from the bathroom, saying hello to a few of the artists lounging on the sofa or clumped around the windowsills. The downstairs toilet was already groaning under the stress of too many flushes. Beth touched Isaiah’s arm.

  “I have to ask a favor,” she said. “I have a friend coming who’s staying out here. He’s a kid.”

  “Like how old?” Isaiah asked suspiciously, as if she had confused him for a willing babysitter.

  “Like almost twenty. That’s still a kid to me.”

  “The foster kid at what’s his name’s place?”

  “Yes. At Paul Benchley’s. Can you just do me a favor and be nice to him? Not everyone here always is.”

  “Vince and I heard about him from our neighbors,” Isaiah said. His dark hair was messily parted, as if by fingers instead of a comb. “We drove by the house he’s staying at and saw him dragging out bags of trash. He’s cute.”

  “I’m just asking for you to be kind. He’s young, and I don’t want—”

  “Luz to lay into him?” Isaiah nodded. “Of course I’ll be nice. When am I ever not? But Carson is coming, and I’m sure he’s bringing his own boy gang, so he won’t be the only kid. And honestly, Beth, have you taken a good look at—”

  “Mills.”

  “He looks like the type that can handle himself. Oh, and you may want to tell Gavril that I don’t mind seeing my collage above the toilet, but it’s going to fall apart if anyone showers in there. Paper is extremely sensitive to moisture.”

  “I’m sure he’ll move it tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Isaiah smirked. “We all live the lie for each other. Better you don’t leave it up. Last month our cleaning lady spent an hour Windexing one of Anne Shore’s Plexiglas paintings. ‘Meester Isaiah, I finally clean dirt off glass.’ And sure enough, she did. How do you fire someone for doing their job?”

  Carson Fore preferred entering a house by the front door, even though Gavril had taken pains to install battery-operated lawn lights leading around to the back to emphasize the view of his studio. Carson rang the doorbell. It was his nature to make a grand entrance. After Beth opened the door, he scurried into the foyer with a skullcap over his balding head, thick black glasses perched on his nose, a moth-holed coat already swirling off his shoulders, and rubber boots tracking frozen dirt on the runner.

  “Hello, dear,” he said, hugging Beth. Carson was an urban landscape photographer beloved in the New York art community, a keeper of art world memories in more lurid, less prosperous times, and while he had no money to speak of, he did have friends, and he made himself a guest in their homes, sweeping in and overstaying and rearranging their bookcases and mementos, bringing a Victorian spirit more fitting to the houses than to their current occupants. (Even his complexion was a shade of yellow-green that recalled the row houses in certain parts of London.) At present, he was overstaying at the house of a successful art adviser on Tabor Road, whom Gavril refused to invite for fear she’d pass out business cards.

  “It’s practically Antarctic out there,” Carson said. “I thought we should all wear sleigh bells, and I worried I’d have to throw a few of the boys to the wolves like that wonderful bridal-party scene in My Ántonia.” The boys were behind him, crew cut acolytes in tight jackets who used Carson like a passport to enter the homes of artists they admired. There were four of them, and even though Carson listed their names as they entered, hovering an unsteady Parkinson’s hand over each of their heads, she hadn’t caught a single one. They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.

  Behind them appeared another visitor: Mills Chevern, holding a bottle of wine Paul must have given him. He was skinnier than Carson’s boys, less sculpted, but, for Beth, he was
the first guest she was relieved to see all night.

  “Wait, I don’t recognize this one,” Carson said, staring at him. “Maybe the wolves spit him back out.”

  “He’s with me,” Beth said. Mills handed the bottle to her and nodded his head, lifting his chin as if to speak, but no words drifted from his lips.

  “Okay, I’m shutting the door. Down the hallway,” she ordered. “Carson, please eat some of Gavril’s jumari. No one has touched it.”

  “Can you blame them? I’m trying to stay alive, not give myself dysentery.” His voice traveled through the hallway and boomed in the living room. “God, Isaiah, you and your lifetime companion were supposed to pick us up. We ran here with wolves at our heels while you two were lip-synching to NPR.”

  She turned to Mills, who was standing against the wall, a wool hat bunched over his heart. “I’m glad you decided to come,” she said.

  “I said I would.”

  “Well, there are a lot of new people here for you to meet. Don’t be scared. Come on.” She swept her arm around his shoulders and led him toward the noise.

  After her second sip of vodka, Beth decided it was unwise for guests to use the hot tub. She worried about finding towels for them, about their level of intoxication near the warm water, about the body fluids that might swirl in the jets come morning. Gavril hushed her, smoking a crumbling joint between his thumb and chubby pointer.

  “When did you start smoking pot again?” she asked.

  “Samuel rolled it. I couldn’t refuse,” he said, inhaling and straining to keep the smoke from escaping his lips. “Why don’t you join them in hot tub? Put on your swimsuit.”

  She shook her head. Shelley’s daughter raced from under the kitchen table, a lighter in her hand. The little girl ran into the living room, offering to light people’s cigarettes. Finally, Luz took her up on the service, bending down to catch the thin blue flame. Luz walked into the kitchen and touched Beth on the shoulder. She took a drag and ashed in the sink.