Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Only Nathan was tilting west. He was having trouble with his balance.

  Luz walked slowly around the vases to hug Beth. “Please shut my husband up,” she whispered.

  “It had two backbones. And claws. Right on our property.”

  Over Luz’s shoulder, Beth stared at the elderly Mexican woman holding the tray of wine. Her face was familiar. It took Beth a minute before she recognized the woman serving drinks as Magdalena’s nurse.

  A toilet flushed somewhere beyond the kitchen, in one of the many rooms that had accommodated city vacationers decades ago when the farmhouse had served as an inn for summer migrations. A man in his midfifties appeared, short and fit in an unassuming blue sweater with dark hair parted down the center. Yakov Dombrovski was not unattractive for an oligarch who had built his underground smuggling operation at the peak of perestroika and then watched the legitimate government follow his lead. Yakov shook hands with Gavril, the back of his head shaped like a bullet, the front like an understuffed teddy bear. Luz hurried over to formalize their introductions.

  “Yakov should just buy the mutant creature and call it a day,” Nathan joked. His pupils were glass ashtrays. He brushed invisible lint off his lapel.

  “Thanks for the oysters,” Beth said. “You didn’t have to apologize.”

  He tipped his head. “What oysters?” He sighed. “That must have been Luz’s doing, playing peacekeeper. Well, I am sorry if I ruined your party.”

  “The note was on your stationery and signed with an N—”

  “Oh, the shell? Yeah, Luz and I had that made for the house out here. We chose the oyster because this place used to be called Oysterponds Inn. And you know what? Someone in Orient is furious that we had the audacity to do any renovations on it. That cheese plate”—Nathan pointed to the coffee table—“showed up on our front door like some sort of threat. We should be allowed to do whatever we want to this place, after what we paid.”

  Beth watched Gavril explaining his new sculptures to the Russian.

  “What were you two fighting about, anyway?” she asked quietly.

  Nathan’s face lost its arrogance. He staggered in place. “He didn’t tell you? Well, don’t ask me. I was past the point of memory record. I’m sure it was nothing. Professional suspicions. A difference of opinion about what we meant to each other.”

  Nathan glanced at Gavril and Luz, who were waylaying Yakov with conversation. Luz said something so hilarious that she bent over, clutching her knees in laughter.

  “They’re really going for it, aren’t they? You know, it disgusts me how we all have to act like court jesters the minute a man with a lot of cash starts poking around in galleries. We’re like flowers, something for him to pick.”

  The young woman remained on the sofa, indifferent to the conversation around her. She seemed to be posing for an invisible voyeur, as if some divine entity were staring down at the world the way a reader flips through a lifestyle magazine.

  “I almost wish I hadn’t invited them,” Nathan murmured. “I don’t want to make art if it all comes down to a popularity contest. I figure, either I need to make something so explosive that people won’t forgive me, or I should just give up.”

  When Beth looked at Alvara again, the nurse recognized her and dipped her eyes. The wine in the glasses trembled.

  “Are the Russians staying with you?” she asked. She couldn’t picture Yakov and his wife sleeping in a half-completed plastic-wrapped bedroom.

  “They’re friends with Arthur Cleaver. They’re sleeping on his fancy steamboat for the next two nights. You know what Yakov said to me when he showed up tonight? He took one look at all the acres belonging to that farmer next door and asked me how much he could buy it for. I thought, there goes the neighborhood. We have this beautiful artist community in Orient, and now men like Dombrovski are about to roll in with their billions and turn it into the Hamptons. He should just buy Gardiners Island with Cleaver when it comes up for sale and leave us alone.”

  Beth smiled at Nathan’s latter-day Orient protectionism. Not so long ago, locals were making the same argument against his type.

  “I saw the backhoe in the yard,” she said. “And all the dirt mounds.”

  Nathan smirked, a watery twinge of his lips.

  “We’re building a soundproof, contamination-proof, nuclear-wave-proof bomb shelter.”

  Luz’s ears picked up “bomb shelter,” and she spun around.

  “We are not building a bomb shelter,” she shouted. “We’re digging a pool. I just keep changing my mind about where I want to put it. Close to the house. Overlooking the sea. Now we have to wait until spring, when the ground softens. I like to keep my options open.”

  Nathan shrugged. “We’ll see if we make it to spring.”

  Beth took a sip from her glass.

  “So what’s this explosive new work that no one’s going to forgive you for?”

  Nathan stared past her as new guests arrived: Isaiah and Vince carrying roses, which paled against the hothouse maze of lilies.

  “You won’t know it when you see it. It’ll be that good.”

  After Beth was introduced to Yakov and his wife, Klara—she was Polish, not Russian—and Nathan rotated his laptop to exhibit a slide show of mutant-animal parts on the beach, Beth went into the kitchen for a glass of water. A roast was turning in the oven, juice dripping from its skin.

  She turned on the faucet. The tap hiccupped, pipes clamored, and brown liquid streamed. She had always drunk the local water, but now that she was committed to the baby, she decided not to risk whatever chemicals had seeped from the soil into the supply. Maybe Adam Pruitt had been right about the need for private testing. Maybe, however foolish the paranoia about the Orient Monsters was, there was reason to be alarmed. She remembered the sick dog on Roe diCorcia’s property, the corn reduced to sorghum, the animal parts flashing on the computer screen.

  Alvara carried in empty glasses and gathered clean ones from the open kitchen cabinets. Marble tile samples were spread across the counter.

  “Alvara,” Beth said, touching her shoulder. “It’s Beth. Do you remember me?”

  Alvara blinked and took Beth’s hands.

  “I thought it was you, Lizbeth.” The nurse’s face hadn’t brightened in the weeks since Magdalena’s death. Her cheeks were leaner, her cracked lips obscured by a layer of Vaseline. Beth felt somehow responsible for her, as if she had conspired to rob Alvara of her nursing duties and had forced her to take the odd catering job that required her not to speak, not to nurse, to stand still and refill wine.

  “What are you doing here?” Beth asked.

  Alvara scanned the doorway. “My cousin clean house for Crimps. I get this job through her. I need the money.”

  “But what about the money Magdalena left your son?” Alvara stared at her blankly. “Did her lawyer Cole Drake ever track you down?”

  She shook her head and, with money on her mind, filled the glasses with wine.

  “No, no one come. And I am thankful. I was so afraid they deport me. I never go back to the house. Even little plastic bag of clothes I keep under the sink I leave.”

  Beth was furious at Cole for cheating this woman out of her small inheritance. She grabbed a pen from the counter and ripped a corner from a magazine that was stacked by a hive of phone chargers.

  “Write down your number. I’ll make sure the lawyer contacts you. There’s money that’s owed to you and your son.” Alvara took the pen and wrote ten numbers so reluctantly that Beth knew even before she read the area code—974?—that she had invented them on the spot. The woman was too frightened of lawyers even to allow one promising money to find out where she lived.

  “You’re a sweet girl,” Alvara said. “Magdalena dislike your mother but she always care for you. I miss her so much.” She wiped the bases of each glass with her apron and arranged them on the tray.

  “One last thing,” Beth said. Alvara was begging her to let her get back to work, almost as if sh
e were frightened to be caught speaking to her. “Did Magdalena ever mention to you, just before she died, any doubts she had about OHB?”

  Alvara searched her brain for a familiar chord. “No, I never hear her speak badly about the board. She was a proud member. She want to preserve Orient.”

  “What about Jeff Trader?” Beth asked, pressing two fingers on her arm to keep her from lifting the tray. Why was Alvara acting so nervous? “He visited her about a week before he died. Did you hear what they were talking about?”

  “Oh, yes, Meester Trader come all the time, once a week to visit Meesus Kiefer. They were friends. Do hives together. He drank too much.”

  “But the last time he came, do you remember that visit? He said something that caused her to worry.”

  Alvara sucked her cheeks and looked up at the overhead lights.

  “Yes, that last visit was strange. Meester Trader always visit on Sunday and I let him in. But that last time he come on Monday when I do the shopping. Meesus Kiefer, she was upset about it when I return. She say Meester Trader not act like himself. She says he was scared, scared that someone in Orient was going to hurt him, someone who is bad in Orient, and that the board, OHB, a threat. And then he die and she talk about murder. She was an old woman. Medicine make her not right in the head.”

  “The board is a threat? Someone on the board is a threat? Or someone bad in Orient is a threat?”

  Alvara shook her head. She didn’t know, and her English, when corrected and recited back to her, sounded even more confusing.

  “Please, Lizbeth, I must get back to work. I need the money. Mees Wilson is a nice rich lady, good to my cousin. Good to me. I can’t say anything against her.”

  Alvara picked up the tray and walked so carefully she almost knocked into Isaiah, who swooped into the kitchen just in time to help himself to a glass. He swilled white wine around his gums.

  “Did your orphan friend tell you that I drove him to the beach?” Isaiah asked.

  “You drove him?” Beth replied. “I wish you had waited around. He almost got beaten up by some of those assholes who work for Adam Pruitt.”

  Isaiah narrowed his eyes in concern. “Is he okay?”

  “Barely, but yes.”

  “Adam Pruitt was scheduled to come by our place this afternoon to do an alarm-system estimate. He never showed. I didn’t realize his work crew was too busy trying to kick the shit out of a teenager that I happened to be chauffeuring on his errands. It’s too bad too. Ever since the fire, Vince has been scared to death.” Isaiah grabbed one of the loose tiles from the counter and waved it. “Want to bet that Luz and Nathan never finish construction on this house? I think they enjoy living in a constant state of chaos. It makes them feel stable by comparison.”

  Beth returned to the living room. Nathan stood with his foot resting on one of the space heaters, tilting it enough to expose its orange grille. Yakov and Gavril were seated in separate white leather chairs, and Luz had reclaimed her position on the sofa next to Klara. For all of his professed distaste for luring in the Russian collector, Nathan was giving it his all: swiveling his hips and spreading his arms, failed rock star, important artist, swelling like a tick on the fresh blood of his audience. Having upended all other conversations, he was in full command of the room. It was his house, after all. If they got tired of pretending to admire him, they could leave.

  “That’s what I like about the future,” Nathan exclaimed. “No one’s gotten their hands on it yet.”

  Beth could see that Gavril was now on drink number three in a night of sworn moderation, downing each more quickly than the last.

  “Maybe boats are the future,” Nathan said. “Always in transit, like the ocean itself. And most of the time it’s the same scenery, a seamless sheet of blue. The water is just information, a reminder that you’re nowhere and safe.”

  “We are always safe,” Yakov replied. He wasn’t bragging; he had no need to. “I have a private security force on board. No pirate would try, because pirates don’t want to die any more than you do. And if anyone does try anything—” Yakov rotated his arms to indicate a body being dumped over the side.

  It was not always easy to make small talk with a man who had his own militia. Yakov’s pronouncements shed a new light on Klara’s affectless silence. She wondered how Klara carried on her daily life while machine gun–strapped bodyguards haunted her periphery. What were the phone calls to her mother like?

  Nathan continued his efforts to draw Dombrovski out on the subject of his wealth, like an amateur comedian leaning too hard on his audience for material. “So where do you park that four-hundred-foot yacht of yours?” Everyone shifted uncomfortably.

  Luz looked over as Beth crouched against the sofa. “Am I having fun?” she asked wearily, as if worn out by her husband’s theatrics. “Come upstairs. I need a break.”

  Beth followed Luz up the floating redwood steps, their edges licked by candlelight. Luz’s hips stretched the silk of her Chinese dress. The walls on the second floor were largely intact, though scarred and chipped. A few of Luz’s latest paintings lined the hall. Beth recognized several of the sitters: Karen Norgen, August and Helen Floyd, a few anemic dockhands with ancestral names. They smiled proudly through the artist’s frenzied, rage-filled brushstrokes. They had no idea of Luz’s intentions for her series: to prove that she owned them, that she had beaten them on their home turf. The last canvas was still wet, a painting of stitched body parts that looked only vaguely human.

  Luz led Beth into the bedroom at the end of the hall, where her books blended with her husband’s clothes. A painting with the scrawled tourist-map message YOU ARE HERE took up the entire wall across from the bed. Luz sat down on the stool in front of her vanity table. Its circular mirror reflected her irritation.

  “He’s making mistakes, being careless,” she muttered.

  Beth stood behind Luz, watching as she pulled the band from her hair. “You mean Nathan?” she asked. “I think he might be on something.”

  “Oh, he definitely is. On a few doses of MDMA, I’d guess. He doesn’t have the restraint it takes to be a druggie.” She wiped her face with a cotton pad. “Still, I was hoping he’d have the decorum not to embarrass himself until after dinner, but Nathan freely admits to having control issues,” Luz said, with air quotes. “He thinks admitting that frees him of any blame. For Nathan, decorum means not vomiting in public. I’m the only one who gets the privilege of witnessing that. His hangovers are what passes as intimacy between us these days. Oh, marriage.” She sighed, as if it were a game she was no longer interested in playing.

  Luz took a brush from the table and glided it through her hair. She clicked open a gold compact and rubbed her skin in dark powder. “Do you know what his favorite song is? Do you know what I was forced to dance to at our wedding? ‘We Built This City.’ We built this city on rock and roll,” Luz sang. “And every time I hear that stupid song I have to stop myself from saying, ‘No, dear, you did not build this city. Eighteenth-century immigrants and slaves built this city.’ On rock and roll? I really think he might believe that.” She shut the compact. “Did Nathan tell you he wants to buy the property next door from that farmer?”

  “No, he said Yakov wanted to.”

  She laughed. “Yes, and that’s one speculator he can’t outbid. I think he keeps mentioning the mutant animal just to frighten Yakov away. It’s probably working too. Would you want Nathan as your nearest neighbor? Anyway, Nathan only wants it because Yakov does. Yesterday he wanted to move out altogether. That’s how desire operates. At least two people need to want something in order for it to have any worth.” She licked her lips and noticed Beth’s stained hands in the mirror. “Ah! You’ve started painting again. That makes me happy. You’ve got a lot of talent. When Yakov comes to Gavril’s studio tomorrow, you should show him what you’re working on. I think of all of us he might appreciate your stuff the most.”

  “You’re lying, but thanks for the compliment.”


  “I’m not lying. Now, will you braid the back of my hair and tie it up?” Luz held the band to her shoulder for Beth to take.

  One’s own hair might be the single matter on which a person can be considered an expert. Everyone has the right of connoisseurship on that matter, earned through decades of battle in the bathroom mirror. Beth reluctantly dug her fingers into Luz’s thick, bristling roots, trying to cleave three groupings to form a braid. Luz watched her in the mirror as if she were studying her competence.

  “Yakov’s wife seems nice,” Beth said to break the silence.

  “You’re kidding, right? Poor girl. You can actually tell what she’s thinking. Can I get pregnant before he loses interest and I become ex-wife number three? It’s a fertility race against time.” Luz pursed her lips. “What about you? How far along?”

  Beth pulled tightly on Luz’s hair. Her head whiplashed back, but she didn’t flinch. “How long have you known?” Beth asked.

  Luz smiled in the mirror. “I’ve watched two sisters before me get pregnant, and one after. I can spot the early signs a mile off. First it was Jarissa, when she was sixteen. Then Gaddie at fifteen. Then all eyes went to me, waiting for the first symptoms of the Wilson epidemic. I swear my teenage years were defined by my mother’s worried stares. Is it her turn? When’s she going to get sick? Luckily, I was spared. But my younger sister wasn’t. Twins her junior year of high school. And it wasn’t liquid-gold Dombrovski semen, I’ll tell you that. I’ve got more nieces and nephews in Trenton than I have friends in New York, but I don’t have a single brother-in-law. Anyway, I started thinking you might be pregnant on the night of your party.” She picked up an eyeliner pencil and leaned toward the mirror, pulling a twist of the braid from Beth’s hands. “You keeping it?”