Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Her stomach fluttered. She fought the urge to rush to the sink. She tried not to think of the mass inside her, now much larger than a chestnut, growing limbs and eyes—maybe two spinal cords, twisting and forking like a road. Surely the ultrasound would have captured any disfiguration. Surely the doctor would have warned her if it weren’t developing right.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

  Mills tapped his toe on the floor.

  “Okay,” he said. “It was just horrib—”

  “Please.” She tried to smile. “Come upstairs. I don’t have much time this afternoon. I have to go to”—she steered away from the word dinner, repelled by any associations with food—“a party tonight.” She assumed the mutant creature on the beach wouldn’t cause the Wilson-Crimps to cancel. Nathan probably loved the mutant spectacle, she thought. She turned around at the top of the stairs and by some miracle of trust or obligation she found Mills trailing behind, eyes like diamonds in the coal-darkness between floors.

  She sat before the white canvas, legs spread on either side. Her thigh muscles would have to readjust to the position, after all the months she’d stayed away from painting. She had posed Mills in a chair by the door, one shoulder up and one down to stagger his neckline, a painterly trick for irregular lines. He sat impressively still, concentrating on a snag in the window netting, only his eyes moving occasionally from the window to her, in approval or doubt, the rest of him petrified. She dabbed the thin brush into the ocher on her palette, focusing first on the eyes, and from those twin axis points she’d map out the rest of his face and body. It took two points to create the perception of space. One eye could suggest any number of possibilities: up, down, a speck in a void. Two eyes and the image was fixed.

  She held the brush an inch from the canvas and for a moment she hesitated, distracted by the familiar doubts: bad reviews, unsellable show, returned works stacked in her own apartment facing the wall; no passion, not enough talent, not as defiant as Gavril, not as clever as Luz; critics like mailmen delivering unwanted news. But then she looked over at Mills, his horse eyes rounding in their sockets, and her wrist bent. She brushed a half circle on the linen, and the pure whiteness, the glacial nothing, was gone.

  From the first sentence the next followed. She added crimson and deepened it with Prussian blue. The joints of her fingers steadied. Already, she couldn’t start over. Like all paintings, the portrait was ruined at the first stroke of paint; it would never be exactly as she had imagined it, and that failure was what allowed her to continue. The acceptance of failure produced astonishing results. The painting was made of its mistakes, the sum of him and how she saw him and something entirely separate, something more. It wasn’t a description or a duplication, it breathed or died on its own. Black dragged across the oval, a slash of the eyelid, a planet half dark. She was trying to get under her own skin, to the blood that moved, to the nerves that jumped, so deep it was the farthest thing from her, just as the fingertip is farthest from the stomach and the toe the farthest from the heart. A flex of muscles brought shade to the iris, an eye staring from the white. She began the second eye with ocher. A person was arriving through a blizzard with news.

  Why had she assumed she couldn’t do it?

  Why had she been so scared?

  She looked closely at Mills’s right eye, lighter than the left and flecked. She added olive, following the curve, splitting it with a fast horizontal of azure, blue skin encasing a liquid ball. She could do this if she wanted to—paint the portrait, have the baby, bring something different than herself out of herself, and trust that it would find its way. It would have its own flaws entirely separate, a thing to love because it was imperfect. It seemed so obvious to her right now, as her back muscles ached and her thighs fatigued from straddling the easel: the answer to life must be found in the flaws, in mutation, in the discordant, incompatible facts. Life begins at misconception, she thought.

  Mills had been right, that night in her bedroom during the party. Art didn’t have to provide answers. It only had to ask questions. The mass inside her was asking a question and she was answering yes. The ocean tries to flood a boat, fire wants to eat the wood, the mind wills to regret, and silence shapes a landscape more deftly than sound—all of that was true. But still boats kept out the water, and the wood held, and a voice cut through the quiet, and the mind went forward anyway, swimming through its doubts. A ripe peach with a sliver of blue shine, Mills’s cheek, she’d paint the blue of that shine first, more solid than the skin, painting was about decisions, and she’d carry this baby to term, perhaps she knew she would all along, because her decision hadn’t arrived as a revelation, it hadn’t arrived at all, it was still moving and she was moving with it.

  She had painted his eyes, and half a cheek. She dipped her brush in ruby. The scratch on his cheek broke the shine.

  It would be an April delivery, in the first warm days after winter. She would turn this room into a nursery. She was saying yes.

  Mills noticed the ruby on her brush. “You aren’t painting my zits, are you?”

  “Not yet.”

  He huffed. “Well, did you tell Detective Gilburn about Lisa?”

  “No,” she said. “I will tomorrow. I promise. And I’m going to give him the journal as well. But I still don’t understand why Lisa and Adam would have killed Magdalena, even if Jeff had told her that Lisa was back in town.”

  “Don’t you see, Magdalena would have realized what her being here meant after the fire killed her family,” Mills reasoned. “That’s why they had to get rid of her first.”

  “But there’s no mention of Lisa and Adam in Jeff’s book. Why was the book so important? And we still don’t know why Jeff Trader warned Magdalena about OHB. None of it makes any sense.”

  “I still think the police deserve to know,” he mumbled, doing his best to hold still. “I talked to Lisa this morning. She stopped by her house again, and I overheard her making plans to meet someone. That’s why I went to the beach by Bug Light, only those guys chased me before I could see who it was. Lisa says the L pendant doesn’t belong to her, because her real name is Elizabeth, but I don’t buy it.”

  Beth told him about her visit at the Herrigs, how she’d tried in vain to defuse their hostility. “And I guess I can’t blame them. They don’t know you. Of course you seem like a suspect. Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”

  He stretched his neck and returned to his pose. “You don’t have to look out for me.”

  She gave him an exasperated stare. “I want to. And I want you to stay in Orient if you’re happy here.” He altered the polish of his cheek by smiling. She mixed purple with cobalt to execute the sharp peak of his nose. The confidence sprung from the quickness of the brushstroke. The force of the personality lay in the speed of the line. She could be more hesitant around his lips, which were hesitant themselves, pink speed bumps that held back as many thoughts as they shared.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You’re a good friend.” Inside, she was fighting back her last doubts: not too late to make an appointment, not too late to drive into the city tomorrow, no good, no passion, just dead lines knotted together.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said, heard herself saying it. “I haven’t told anybody, not even Gavril, so please keep it between us.” He half-nodded, unsure whether to break his pose or keep it. “I found out a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Or maybe I was always sure but I’ve been so stuck, like an unwilling participant in my own life. I’m pregnant. I’m three months pregnant, and I’m going to have a baby.”

  He opened his mouth. She hadn’t expected him to congratulate her, but in those seconds after she told him the news—how easy it had been for her to say it, not as a confession but as a simple fact—she couldn’t gauge his reaction. His eyelids closed and blood rushed to his cheeks, destroying the blue shine, although it didn’t matter, she had already gotten it down. He pulled the cross at his earlobe. His tongue
flicked against his gray front tooth. She’d need to paint that tooth, the asphalt gray of a summer sidewalk, hose water drying in the sun. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “It is good, isn’t it? I remember you saying you didn’t think you wanted kids.”

  She closed her left eye and Mills sprung to the left. She closed her right eye and Mills sprung to the right. Every subject was a moving target. Both eyes brought him in between in forced agreement.

  “I know. I honestly didn’t think I was going to keep it when I told you that. But I am going to keep it. And we’re going to stay out here, and this room will be the nursery.” It occurred to her that Mills might have personal objections to abortion, that he might think less of her for considering a route his own mother might well have considered. “I’m sorry if that sounds selfish. But it didn’t seem that way to me.”

  “No,” he said, lifting from his seat to step toward her. When he realized he couldn’t fully reach her, across the easel and the tray of paints, he made the gesture of an older man: he placed his hand against her cheek and held it there, a teenager in dirty jeans and a grass-stained shirt, warming her cheek with his palm. “Don’t be sorry. I get it. But you’re going to be a great mother. And the kid is going to be so lucky because you’re going to love him. I think even Pam Muldoon was probably a great mother, that she loved her children like that.”

  She took his wrist. “Sit down,” she said. “We aren’t done yet. And don’t look.” He ducked his head and returned to the chair. “And I don’t know if it’s a him yet. Maybe if it is a boy, Mills can be his name.” She tested it. “Mills.”

  He broke from his pose, staring at her, his hands rubbing his legs.

  “That’s not my name,” he said slowly. “I took that name when I came to New York. I didn’t want my old one anymore and I figured Mills Chevern was good as any to start over.”

  She dipped her brush in the cobalt to define the sockets below the brows. She would ease the darkness with gypsum, like skin surfacing from ocean water.

  “It’s Leonard,” he said. “My name is Leonard Thorp. Even Paul doesn’t know.”

  Leonard, she said to herself. Mills had always seemed too smooth for him. Leonard fit better, the way a tight school sweater fits, bringing the awkwardness into his shoulders and the deflection into his eyes. A Leonard, not a Mills, stood alone.

  “Leonard’s a good name. A real name.” The eyes on the canvas belonged to a Leonard.

  He pursed his lips. Shadows pooled in the indentation of his cheeks.

  “I told you I met my mother. Just before I left California. It was the last thing I did. I found out where she worked, at a jewelry store in Sacramento, and I visited her there. Walked in like an ordinary customer.” The skin of his neck goose-bumped; she saw a bead of sweat collect above his eyebrow. In the overcast afternoon light of Orient, he made the sound of the bell as the shop door opened.

  “Can I help you?” the woman with dark hair said from behind the counter.

  She still had her sunglasses on, large black lenses hiding her eyes. He wondered if she might be blind, although she hadn’t used a cane, and a blind woman was probably a liability in a jewelry store. The slanting Sacramento light, strong through the window, whitened the glass counter and brought a gleam to the rings and chains inside. Sweat dripped down his neck and his fingers trembled—a novice shoplifter’s nerves, she might have thought, if she could see him at all behind her glasses. Her nose was sharp and the dent at the tip deepened as she smiled. Her teeth were white—small, capped, and stained by lipstick. She had no way of knowing that she was speaking to her son.

  “I’m just looking,” he said, leaning over the counter and pretending to study the merchandise. She fixed the strap of her leopard-print dress, a black bra peeking from the seam below her armpit. Her skin, under her clothes, was as pale as his.

  “If you want to see anything, I can take the tray out for you. It’s all fourteen, eighteen, or twenty-two karat, we guarantee. Whoever said ‘Buy land, they aren’t making any more of it’ could have said the same about gold.” The air-conditioning was refrigerating his sweat, making it impossible not to shiver. In the back of the store, through a bulletproof-glass divider, an old man in a fedora drilled inscriptions with an electric needle. The old man with black teeth looked up at him, distrustfully or out of boredom.

  He asked to see a tray of gold chains, thick cables and ropes. When she brought the tray to rest on the counter, he noticed a gold band on her left ring finger. Was she married to his father? Had his parents ever been married? Did she know where the man was, the man she’d been with nineteen years ago?

  “I like your ring,” he said.

  She studied it, spreading her fingers on the counter. “I’ve had this on for fifteen years,” she said. “And it has yet to turn my finger green. Twenty-two karat.” Her laugh was deep and spoke of cigarettes, though she smelled of garlic and rosewater. “But you aren’t looking for a ring like this, are you? You’re too young to get married.”

  “I’m not that young,” he replied, touching a chain and glancing up. “Maybe I look younger through your glasses.” He wanted her to take them off so he could see her eyes. Were her eyes brown like his? If he told her he was her son, would she take them off? Or would she call for the old man to remove him from the store?

  “I have very sensitive eyes,” she said. “I get migraines. It runs in my family.” She watched him examine the chains, holding herself up on the counter, as if tired from her lunch break. He did not get migraines. That hadn’t been inherited. He wondered if she had other children. When she exhaled, her leopard-print stomach made contact with the glass. “Are you looking for something for yourself or maybe for a girlfriend?” It was a mother’s tactic to pry personal details out of a secretive child. He breathed through his mouth and wondered: if he stopped breathing altogether, would she apply her lips to his to induce CPR? When he came around, would she be cushioning his head in her lap?

  “Yes, for my girlfriend,” he lied. She would be pleased to know that her son had a girlfriend, though he wasn’t interested in girls.

  “Oooh, okay. This is a romantic mission. Those chains are too thick for a young lady. How about earrings? Let me see.” She moved along the counter to unlock a case and pulled out a velvet tray. “How about these gold bows,” she suggested, tapping her red nail on a pair or earrings. Her nails had grown a millimeter away from the cuticle since she painted them. The bows she was pointing out were for a child, with fake emerald hearts glued to their centers. “Forty-seven dollars.”

  “I don’t know. Do you have a daughter who would like these?” He stared at her with every ounce of force he had; he wasn’t sure he had ever looked at another human being so intently. Did all human beings have so many craters and lines across their faces, like satellite elevation maps? She had two moles under her chin, the second sprouting a hair that whitened in the sunlight.

  “Um, yeah, I have two little girls.” She seemed uncertain of how much she wanted to share with a customer. Or maybe she had worn out her patience on such a small sale. She rubbed the back of her neck and stared out the window, thinking of her two little girls, maybe worrying about some problem—a fight before school, an unpaid orthodontia bill, a father who wasn’t around.

  “Sure is hot outside,” he said dumbly.

  “What?”

  “Sure is hot outside.” He smiled and cocked his head, turning his eyes into sunsets. Could she know how often he had inflicted this look of innocence on other parents just so he could stay in their houses for a few months? Did she ever wonder what happened to the infant she had left with social services, an hour and a half’s drive down the I-5 eighteen years ago? When she gave birth to her two difficult daughters, did she ever think to reclaim her son?

  “Sacramento is hot,” he said. “I’m from Modesto, just up here for the day.” She nodded. “Modesto,” he said again.

  “It’s hot there too, I bet.”

  “Have you ever b
een?”

  She cleared her throat and returned the tray of chains to the case. “Of course I have. I’ve been all over the valley. In fact I lived there a long time ago. Dirty town.” She caught herself. “I mean, I didn’t have good luck there. Wasn’t the right place for me. Water, wealth, contentment, health.” She quoted the lightbulb-studded motto on the arch that curved over Ninth Street, just before the train tracks. He knew those train tracks like his tongue knew the back of his teeth.

  “No luck,” he said.

  She rubbed her neck again and looked at the door, hoping for other customers to enter. “So do you see anything you like?”

  “My name’s Leonard,” he said. He couldn’t see her eyes, so he focused all his attention on her lips. They contorted briefly and sunk back into plainness.

  “I had an uncle named Leonard, crazy Italian. He drank too much and got into the rodeo. The rodeo, of all things. Never saw him after the age of fifteen.” He was Italian, part Italian. He had two half-sisters and he was of partial Italian heritage, and he had a great-uncle in the rodeo. They got headaches. “Well, Leonard, I’m Grace.” He already knew her name. “So how about you pick out something for your girlfriend and I’ll give you a good price?”

  He could say it right now. I’m your son. I’m the thing you left in Modesto with your bad luck. Maybe I am your bad luck. I’ve been there my whole life. You never once came looking for me so I came to find you. He wanted to fill the silence between them with that news. He looked at her and saw himself in the reflection of her twin black lenses, two sons leaning fish-eyed over the counter. He’d been through a dozen houses of Modesto, had made beds in them, found food in them, to grow up and become this man at the Central Gold counter.

  “I’ll take these,” he said, drawing his hand randomly over a pair of earrings.