Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Shelley’s stoned and she’s breast-feeding like crazy,” she said. “Or maybe I’m stoned, and watching Shelley breast-feed is crazy. Are we going in or not?” She looked at them. “The hot tub.”

  Gavril told her that he had to show Samuel his studio first and to go ahead without him.

  “Do you want to borrow a swimsuit?” Beth asked her.

  “No need,” Luz said. “Everyone here has seen me naked. After that, modesty is just a construct. Where’s Nathan?”

  Nathan tapped the kitchen window with his wedding band and circled around to the door. He opened it halfway, beckoning them outside. His cheeks were red from the cold, and the skin around his eyebrows was as white as clay. As Beth stepped out onto the porch, the wind ripped through her dress, kiting it to the side. The temperature must have dipped near zero by now. The hot tub steamed at full boil, and several bodies jumped and resettled in the mist.

  “That house,” Nathan said, pointing across the lawn toward Magdalena’s cottage. “That little house with the little old dead woman inside.”

  “I see it,” Luz said. “It’s adorable.”

  Isaiah joined them, toweling off as he walked across the patio, his footsteps creating ice prints across the concrete. The hair on his arms swirled like the grain in split wood. He followed their gaze across the property line. “Whose place is that?” he asked. “There are no lights on.”

  “It’s the woman you were talking about,” Nathan said to his wife. “The one who keeled over into her bees.”

  “I didn’t know her,” Luz replied. “I’ve never been in there before.” She rubbed her arms and threw them around Beth for warmth, her forearm pressing against Beth’s breasts. Beth felt a surprise sensation at Luz’s touch, a stirring of blood like a lamp in a cave. If things had been different, if they were younger or still unmarried, she wondered if they might have been lovers. Maybe it would have been Luz she fell in love with, like Magdalena and her girlfriend, Molly. For a single freezing moment Beth wished she were still young enough to experiment, that she still possessed the capacity to explore. They shivered against each other, and Beth placed her hand on Luz’s fingers to keep her close.

  “Is that house for sale?” Luz asked.

  “Beth, you know more than me,” Gavril said. “Is it on the market?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, Nathan, we should buy it.”

  Nathan frowned. “We just bought a house. We already have more land than we need. Our backyard is full of holes. We spent millions of dollars to live in a construction site. We literally don’t have walls.”

  “I could use it as my studio,” Luz said, squeezing Beth tightly, as if to enlist her support. “I’d paint it black. I’m sure we could afford it. It’s just a speck of a place. How much could it really go for?”

  “That’s not the point,” Nathan said, shaking his head in a rare show of restraint.

  Luz grunted. “The privileged must be circumspect when it comes to money because they’re conditioned to consider affluence a measure of their intelligence. People like me, people from nothing, we don’t have that hang-up. We just like to spend. There’s nothing I love more than when someone poor wins the lottery and five years later they’ve run through it and have to go back to waiting tables. Why does that shock anyone? That’s exactly what we were told to do—to treat money as something we weren’t meant to have.”

  “Luz considers bankruptcy an aspiration. But let’s ask her when she gets there,” Nathan replied.

  “I’ll never be bankrupt as long as I have you,” Luz sang deviously.

  “Maybe we should buy it,” Gavril ventured.

  “Gavril,” Beth snapped. “We don’t need it either.”

  “What? It is next to our property. It is a smart investment to add to our land.”

  Beth didn’t mention the faulty logic in Gavril’s premise—that the house they lived in didn’t belong to them. It belonged to Gail. This was her mother’s property, and she and Gavril were living on it, rent free, only temporarily. Did he actually think this house and its Sound-front acres were going to end up in his name? Even if they did stay out here permanently, it would be decades before Beth inherited the place.

  “If you guys aren’t interested, I have a friend who’s been looking for a house just about that size.” Isaiah stepped onto the lawn with his cell phone to take a photograph. Beth felt a wave of protection for Magdalena’s tiny home, which had resisted as much as a fresh coat of paint for as long as she could remember. She fought the urge to grab Isaiah’s phone before it flashed. “The bigger houses are so overvalued this year. Vince and I had to bid way over price just to get ours.”

  “We did too. Practically broke us,” Nathan said, as if it were a secret that his family bankrolled whatever he couldn’t afford on his own.

  “This one’s perfect, because it looks like nothing,” Isaiah said.

  “I want it,” Luz insisted.

  “Are you drunk?” Nathan asked her.

  “Maybe we all buy it together,” Gavril said, “and add it to our colony.”

  The dark shape of an animal wavered across Magdalena’s porch, a cat or possum. The wind whistled in the gutters. These artists had fought so hard to leave the bland sinkholes of their beginnings, throwing their childhoods away to escape to the city, and now here they were, desperate to return to the suburbs, paying obscene amounts for the kinds of houses and neighborhoods that had trapped them in their youths. Beth imagined a perverse nightmare future: artists pushing lawn mowers, clogging supermarket aisles, running PTA bake-offs, bullying their boys and girls for low-batting-averages in Little League, attending church, singing in the choir. It was as if the whole system had finally caved in on itself, a picture inside a picture of what was supposed to be the way out.

  Luz slipped her arms down Beth’s stomach, then let go with a start, as if she’d touched a burning pot.

  “What?” Beth asked.

  “Nothing,” Luz said. “Never mind.”

  “I’m going in. Don’t any of you get near that house,” Beth said, hurrying with a blushed face to escape the cold.

  In the kitchen, at midnight, Mills stood by the doorway, watching as Beth told Gavril to shut up.

  “I only ask,” he said, sitting on the counter.

  “Can I get you a drink?” she asked Mills. He shook his head.

  “In Bucharest, so many orphans. So many dirty children huffing paint. They beg for change to sniff it”—Gavril mimed a bag over his mouth and inhaled. “Paint covers their mouths in subway stations. They sleep on the ground with paint like silver drool running down their chins. All unwanted. This is why I ask, because I don’t understand it in America. Ceauşescu outlawed abortion”—Beth’s ears reddened and her molasses feet knocked into a chair leg—“because he wanted to supply more workers for the factories. He wanted a bigger population of slaves. But here in America, you already have bad unemployment, and you have no factories in need of more bodies. Instead you let your government be filled with religious fanatics saying the same thing as my dictator. No abortion. No contraception. But the same party complains about the poor. Too many of them. Too useless. A weight on the system. I do not understand this.”

  “We have iced tea,” Beth said to Mills, with an apologetic smile.

  “So I only ask your friend if he thinks his parents were religious.”

  “I don’t know who they were,” Mills said, rubbing his legs and glancing into the living room. He looked everywhere but at Gavril, crouched on the counter, kicking his heels against the cabinet door, creating a drumbeat of metronomic bangs.

  “He said he doesn’t know, so stop asking,” Beth said, pouring a last sip of vodka. The microwave clock read 12:06. Out the window, snow flurries danced in the wind. “Mills didn’t come over to be interrogated.”

  “It’s okay,” Mills said. “I’m not offended. I just don’t know the answer.” His eyes finally made their way to Gavril. “Sorry.” Beth clutched
Mills’s arm.

  When Mills left the kitchen, Beth put her hands on her hips. “Jesus,” she said. “Show some respect.”

  “I am respecting,” Gavril said lightly. “I show interest by asking questions. He is not a child. He can ask me anything he likes, I wouldn’t be upset. Why are you so sensitive tonight?”

  “Yes, I’m being sensitive. I wish you could be the same.”

  Gavril jumped from the counter. He whispered something in Romanian as he opened the refrigerator door.

  “What did you say?” she asked. Gavril busied himself adding a lemon to his cup of tequila, pretending not to hear her. “What did you just call me?”

  Gavril tried to reach for her but she stepped back, a retaliation that registered in her husband’s eyes.

  “You coddle that kid, and you don’t let me touch you. It is you who is acting wrong tonight.” Beth sipped her drink to give her mouth both a task and a blockade. “Can you be nice to the man you married? It’s an important night, and these are my colleagues. I do everything to make a nice party and you walk around like my personal censor, telling me everything I say is wrong.”

  “What if everything you’re saying is wrong? That bullshit about buying Magdalena’s house.”

  “Ah, of course you will be the sober villain. It is just fun. You take everything too seriously. You hate before you love. What will you do when we have a child? He will not be a dark fool like that one.”

  “Yes, Gavril, every word you say is wrong—”

  Samuel Veiseler walked into the kitchen, pausing at the doorway as if to test whether he had interrupted a domestic dispute or a moment of marital bliss. Beth gathered the empty paper plates off the counter and shoved them into the trash.

  “I have to go soon,” Samuel announced. “The roads are getting bad and I have to get back to Manhattan. It’s too uncertain out here. Shall we?”

  “Yes, yes,” Gavril said. “Wait until you see my new studio, best flooring and soundproof. Perfect conditions for work.” He led him out the back door as Shelley called to Beth from the living room.

  “I can’t find my coat.” Beth went to retrieve Shelley’s coat from the closet. Orange vomit clung to Shelley’s shoulder, the baby’s or her own.

  A half hour later, Beth searched for Mills on the ground floor, where lingering guests swayed and mined the toppings of Gavril’s hors d’oeuvres. Their cups were clutched as if they contained the best chance of happiness. Frivolity had reached its moment of paranoia: would the liquor outlast the remaining guests? It was after midnight, and a storm was coming, but the electricity could last forever, and only the old and the obligated felt the burden of the hour. Gavril’s art assistants kissed by the front door. It was pretty to watch two young people kiss, their mouths elastic, their histories briefer and needier of consequences. Luz Wilson’s clothes hung on the railing.

  Beth climbed the steps. If it hadn’t been her house, if the door hadn’t led to her childhood bedroom, she might have knocked. When she opened it, smoke rolled through the trapped air. She waved a hand through the haze, which hung like thread, obscuring several bodies seated in a circle, as if warming themselves at an indoor campfire: Carson, his boys, and Mills, off in the corner.

  “When we finally left the bedroom at seven in the morning,” she heard Carson telling his band of young men, “the rest of the apartment had been robbed. They took the furniture, all my camera equipment, they even took Cookie’s clothes. The only thing they left was the cat, which they had brushed and fed.” Noticing Beth at the door, Carson asked belatedly if they could smoke inside.

  She smiled at him, and then at Mills, who quickly stood up, clambered over the other young men, and shuffled into the hallway. Before Beth closed the door, she smelled a sweetness to the burning, a substance more acrid than tobacco in the smoke.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t partake,” he said. “I wanted to. But I didn’t.”

  She was glad to hear it. She’d forgotten about his problems in the city and didn’t want to be responsible for his time beyond Paul Benchley’s watch.

  “You haven’t gotten the full tour,” she said, leading him down the hall and opening the door of the master bedroom. When she pulled the chain to the ceiling light, she was relieved to find the room empty. Moths rippled toward the overhead fixture. Mills scanned the pinkish walls. He walked toward a painting that Gavril had hung earlier, a canvas with bedsprings stapled on its stretched linen. Mills pressed his finger on a spring and let it pop back out.

  “Did you make this?” he asked.

  “Oh, God, no,” she said, sitting on the corner of the bed. “It’s really ugly, isn’t it? No, I did figurative paintings. Portraits. In fact, some of them are packed up in the bedroom you were just in. If they haven’t already gone yellow, Carson’s lungs will finish the job.”

  “Did?” Mills asked, nervously toying with his earring. “You don’t paint anymore?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, I might start again. I just haven’t found much inspiration. But I want to, I hope to. Oh, who knows?” A vein was constricting at her right temple. The pain went away when she closed her eye.

  “I can’t believe all your friends make a living on this stuff.” He pressed another spring and watched it bob. “What is something like this worth?”

  She considered it, a muddled logarithm of prominence versus prospect versus previous sales versus popularity of medium. “I don’t know. That’s by a pretty successful artist. Maybe fifty or sixty grand at auction.”

  “No way,” Mills wailed. “Sixty thousand dollars for this? You’ve got to be kidding.” He quickly stopped the spring. “Who would be that, that—”

  “Insane?” She smiled, leaning back on the mattress. “There’s a market out there.”

  Beth smoothed her dress against her stomach. She had no clue what Luz had felt around her belly, a slight cushion of fat at most. She couldn’t have sensed any movement. Beth prayed that she’d misunderstood Luz’s reaction and considered asking Mills to touch her stomach to tell her if he noticed anything out of place. Out of place—yes, that’s all it was, a body that had become disorganized, a scrambled body she was forced to hide under an inherited dress.

  “But it’s hideous,” Mills said. “I don’t mean to disrespect what your friends do, but I’m confused how these pieces of art could be worth that much. And you have a hundred of them all over your house. Face it, Beth, you’re a millionaire. What an arrangement all your friends have. You can mint each other thousands of dollars. Here, I made this in twenty minutes. Now you’re rich!”

  She laughed, and so, finally, did he. It was as if the real Mills, a softer set of eyes, were suddenly visible through the weeds where he hid himself. She wanted very much to touch him.

  “Maybe I should start making art,” he said, almost seriously. “I know I sound dumb, but what does it do for people? If I knew that, maybe I could make it too.”

  “Well,” she said. She once had a speech reserved for this occasion: a benediction against philistinism, a well-oiled sales pitch in favor of taste. It had been a long time since anyone had asked her the question. These days, everyone seemed like an expert. Mills stepped closer to the painting, standing on tiptoe in his sneakers. His finger twisted a curl of his hair.

  “I mean, it’s ugly but it’s hardly shocking. It’s easy to make, so it doesn’t require a special skill. It isn’t nice to look at. At best, it’s a creepy sort of decoration. Like a deer head over a fireplace, but one that doesn’t match the rest of the room.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “So?” He watched her intently, expecting an answer.

  “It’s internal,” she said, flailing her hands. Her manifesto had escaped her. Why was it worth so much? Instead, another truth came rushing in to fill its place. “It’s an internal economy, with its own forms of regulation. It starts with the work and the hype that surrounds it. Those two things move through the system. And as they do, the product gathers value, through
interest and attention and critique and speculation. But at all times the work itself must remain”—she thought of the precise word—“ineffable, indeterminate, between. It doesn’t point this way or that way, or it points different places depending upon where you are.”

  “Like a compass,” Mills offered.

  “No, a compass has a function. The work cannot have a function.” She drew herself up, intent on expressing this clearly, as if her own sanity rested on the answer. “It doesn’t make any sense. None of it does. It’s just a bubble that won’t burst. I used to understand it, but I don’t anymore. Now I just accept it and play along, and as long as I play along it keeps expanding. Maybe that’s what it is, a place for the world to put its confusion.” Her eyes stung. “Now maybe you understand why I can’t paint. I’ve lost the point of it. Frankly, I can’t stand all of the intellectual doubletalk. I mean, you’re right. It’s a bunch of springs on fabric.” She wiped her eyes. “I shouldn’t say this, but when I met Gavril and he showed me his work, I knew it was good because it looked so wrong. It looked like the ruins of something right. And I knew when I saw it that he’d be brilliant. And I was right. I’ve been right. Gavril is a brilliant man.”

  Why were her eyes watering? Why was the color draining from the room, making all the furniture—the dresser, the bed, the full-length mirror in which she looked every morning to find herself sleeping next to her husband—seem as demented as the springs on the painting? She blamed the vodka for her tears, for an already weakened body that was convulsing and driving her hands against her face, for her failure to make sense of any of it—the art, this house, Gavril and his gallerist standing over a puddle of tar, the man who brought mail to her door. “I guess it’s an education.”

  Mills sat down next to her, placing his hand on her back. He didn’t tell her to stop crying. He simply held her back and let her finish.