Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Sarakit says okay,” Donna said, slapping her clipboard on the counter. “You can take the clock and the armoire but nothing else.”

  Beth spun around. “I just want the clock. You can keep the armoire.” Donna nodded happily and pulled a flyer off the corkboard on the kitchen wall. She handed Beth the glossy Pearl Farms flyer. It bore a photo of Donna, “certified residential and acquisition agent,” in the top right corner where a stamp would be. Beth stared at the corkboard. Thumbtacked to it was a piece of familiar stationery, with the drawing of an oyster shell in profile under the name LUZ WILSON, and a handwritten note: “Please call me. I would like to speak with you before you say anything. –L.”

  Luz had been to Magdalena’s house. On the night of Gavril’s party, she had pretended that she’d never noticed the cottage before. But she had been here, and had left Magdalena a note concerning something urgent. When Donna stepped out of the kitchen, Beth pulled the note off the board and stuffed it in her pocket.

  Back in the living room, Beth found Mills hugging the clock, his arms around its tower, slow dancing with an ancient, unwilling grandfather. “Some help,” he panted. Beth hurried to tip it upright on its base. They each took an end and carried it sideways, the weights and pendulum clanging as they walked. Donna held the front door open for them. As they crossed the driveway, Mills slipped on a pocket of ice, nearly dropping the clock on the concrete. “Fuck,” he said laughing. “It’s like a coffin.” They made it to Gail’s back door, scraping the tower against the frame, but finally got it standing in the kitchen. Mills checked the clock on the microwave, moved the hands to 1:37, and swung the pendulum. It still ticked.

  Through the window, she saw Gavril standing at the door of the garage. He must have heard them. His hands were smeared in tar, his clothes rumpled from two days without showering or changing. The dial turned, the golden ball setting and the ship rising. The long hand moved toward the shorter one.

  “Where are you going to put it?” Mills asked.

  “Upstairs,” she said. “In the nursery for now.” She smiled at him. “Why don’t you go up there and wait for me? We still have a few hours of work to do on the painting if you can spare it. But first I need to talk to Gavril.”

  Gavril was still standing by the garage as she walked outside, his face frozen, full Hawaii, his eyes staring at the ground. A younger Beth Shepherd would have been nervous, fearful that he had come to some decision that didn’t include her. But she wasn’t nervous. She was walking toward the man who had moved out to Orient to be with her, and she had given Gavril a place to live and work in peace. How lucky they’d been to have this, for as long as it lasted. A younger Beth might have felt a twinge of pity for both of them, the exhausting situation, the shyness of apologies, the silent opportunism that came between every couple when faced with each other’s bad choices. She felt only love.

  As she drew closer, Gavril stepped into the studio. It was dark inside, with only scant daylight held captive in the window gratings. A few of the tar walls glimmered with bones and glowing, beelike orbs. Several mounds had been wrapped in black bags and bound in orange nylon cords, as if they were packaged for a cargo ship. The plastic improved the tar sculptures, lent them the mystery of hidden bodies. The less you could see them, the more alive they were, wrapped with wonder in their sleek industrial shells. It looked like a house in transit.

  “I sold it all to Dombrovski,” Gavril said. “Every piece of my Orient landscape. We did the deal today when he visited.”

  “Why?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to wait until your show. I thought you didn’t want to cave to a billionaire.”

  “It’s not my job to say what happens,” he said. “It’s not my responsibility to refuse the world we live in. And we need the money. I don’t want you to ask later why I made us poor on pride.”

  “That’s your decision.” She paused. “You didn’t do it for me.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  His hand scooped around her waist. She hadn’t let him touch her in months. The stink of sage drifted from his arms, and she pushed her nose into his neck to gather as much of it as she could. “I’m sorry,” he said, like a man responsible for a small unpleasant act in a larger, more brutal conflict. When she pulled back, he pushed his forehead into her breasts, as if fending off a blow.

  They twisted down onto the crinkling tarp. Gavril lifted her sweater and kissed her from bra hook to stomach. “Should I not?” Like a kid asking to go on a ride at a carnival, like the kid who thought his parents had taken him to the carnival to keep him from the rides. Or maybe he was worried about hurting the baby. It was just like Gavril to make the wrong request. On his first flight to America, he later told her, he awoke from a nightmare and screamed toward the cockpit “Slow down!”

  “Mills is in the house,” she said but didn’t stop his hands as he unsnapped her pant buttons.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s been too long.” Too long, but not too late. If this were a search-and-rescue mission, Gavril was whirling above her, having found her in the water. Pant legs were stripped off one by one, underwear pulled down to lace her ankles. Gavril unbuckled his belt. She considered asking if they could redeploy to the cot in the corner, where Gavril had been sleeping, but he was already on top of her. “Should I use a condom?”

  “A condom? I’m already pregnant.”

  They should have spoken about their doubts, traded doubt stories, but there were other means of reparation. Her shoulders rocked against the dry, tar-smeared plastic. Gavril made his customary someone-dying-in-the-next-room moans, like an English word he’d lost control of. The walls of the ruined tar house shook, and the industrial, ninety-watt bulbs in the rafters diamonded her eyes, and his weight was making it hard for her to breathe, pregnant woman dead of erotic asphyxiation in her mother’s renovated garage, but the lack of oxygen blended with the red of her eyelids, and she came before he did, which admittedly had been one of her complaints about their entire baby-making process, she came in her fingers, which is how she experienced an orgasm, but Gavril followed closely behind, hand squeezing the tarp, sweat dripping from his nose.

  “I love you,” he said with struggling breaths as he lay next to her. “I’m sorry. I should have tried to understand you like you have understood me.”

  She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t understood him, not for the past month, that leaving him alone in the garage had not been an act of understanding but of not wanting to be understood.

  “Let’s start over from today,” he said. “I’ve decided, if it’s a girl we can name her Gail. And if it’s a boy we can name him Yakov. Very American names.”

  She hated both names. A spear of vomit flared up her windpipe, the sickness of pregnancy, the stomach flutter of resolution. She loved him too.

  CHAPTER 31

  It was only five-thirty, but night had fully enveloped the house. Distant lights glowed from the water, and when Mills peered out the back window, he heard animal movements in the weeds. It could be Adam out there, somewhere in the blackness with gasoline and matches, preparing to prey upon another Orient home. Until Adam Pruitt was captured, each house was a lamb marooned in a field, the meat of wood and pink insulation more threatening to its occupants for being so easy to consume.

  Paul had the radio tuned to classic rock at low volume, but the music was interrupted by weather forecasts tracking a storm front toward Long Island, promising a 90 percent chance of ice and snow. He and Mills hadn’t talked about Adam Pruitt, about the rumors that had saved them both from suspicion. The matter of the gas can had been swept aside by the news of Lisa and her boyfriend. Paul did, however, call the Greenport locksmith to have all the house locks changed. “Thank god we have a Muldoon system,” was all Paul said on the matter.

  With a dish towel draped on his shoulder, Paul puttered through the back rooms, nudging the remaining boxes with his foot. “Let’s take the family heirlooms down to the cellar,” he said. “And that wil
l be it. We’ve done a good job on these rooms. Or you have. I’m not sure these rooms have been this empty since the nineteenth century.”

  “What are you going to do with all this extra space?” Mills asked, straightening a row of novels against the wall. “Decorate? Maybe turn the big room into a library, and the smaller one could have a flat screen. You can hang some of your landscapes around it.”

  “Have you been trying to make room for a television all along?” Paul laughed. “That might be good. And a mudroom in the back. A place to put the coats.” He hesitated, his eyes scanning the torn wallpaper. “We’ve never talked about money. I need to pay you something for all the work you’ve put in.”

  “I don’t need any money,” Mills said. “You let me stay here. That’s enough.” The mention of payment suggested that his services were no longer needed, that Paul’s feelings about sharing the house had changed in the last few days. Mills had been sleeping in this house since September. He had claimed his own shelf in the refrigerator, his own Polynesian pillow for lounging on the parlor floor. In his mind, there were household anxieties like Thanksgiving to consider. In his mind, his name was practically on the deed.

  Paul caught the jumpiness in his voice.

  “Hey,” he said. “You can stay as long as you want. I meant what I said. But I still want to pay you. Even if you do decide to stay, you’re going to need your own money and maybe also a job. How’s a thousand for the work you’ve done?”

  “That sounds right,” he replied. He watched as Paul shuffled through the room, his injured knee giving him a graceless limp. “What if those detectives come back? What if they pursue that gas can?”

  Paul stopped hobbling and looked at him.

  “You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it, so you have nothing to be afraid of. You’re not going to be forced out of this house by a piece of circumstantial evidence. And anyway, it’s my prints on the damn thing. If they want to accuse someone, I’m the one with no alibi.” Paul spoke so confidently that Mills knew he was trying to convince himself. “In a year, this whole matter will be forgotten. They’ll catch who did it and it will be over. It’s like Bug Light. They never caught the arsonists, but soon everyone forgot about it, the village just accepted it as gone, and the longer it was gone, the more its loss became a part of the scenery. Every so often you just have to wait out the bad patch and keep your eyes on the road ahead.”

  Mills tried to imagine Paul last June, a yet-unbroken man with five drinks in him, driving straight into a tree after the last member of his family was buried. Maybe that’s why Paul was so insistent on making Mills welcome here. He didn’t trust himself alone on the roads, returning to an empty house with so little to show for his days but the junk that filled the rooms. Mills had spent enough time in cars to know how the presence of another passenger could keep a lonely driver from plowing into a tree. He often felt that drivers had picked him up simply to prevent the possibility.

  Mills lifted a box of photo albums. Paul balanced another box on top of it, one marked FAMILY, filled with grainy VHS tapes, old letters, and his video camera. Paul grabbed the shoe box of flares but returned it to the floor. “We might need these in case of emergency,” he said. “If the storm hits as hard as they’re predicting, the power lines could snap and we’ll need the flares to mark them.”

  “There’s a gun in that shoe box too,” Mills said.

  Paul kicked its corner with his toe. “Dad’s pistol. You didn’t find any bullets, did you? I never found them either. I figured they’d be somewhere in these rooms. Just as well. No bullets, no shooting.” Mills didn’t tell Paul about the single bullet he’d put in with the flares. Suicide prevention by lack of equipment.

  Paul turned the backyard light on and guided him down the steps. Mills’s muscles quivered with the heaviness of the load. Paul opened the bulkhead doors, and he sunk into the hole, step by step, a man disappearing into the ground. “Just a second while I get the light,” he called. Mills had never been down in the cellar. When a narrow light explained the cement steps, he slowly descended. Cobwebs netted his forehead, and a highway of corroded pipes ran across the low ceiling. The cellar was moist and smelled of chlorine. The ball of a dead mouse contributed a sugary odor. Makeshift shelves displayed jars of paints and the spines of magazines. Paul’s landscape paintings leaned against the gray brick, several of them half-completed, with white lighthouses leaking into waves. Mills saw a boxy 1980s television by the floor drain. “You do have one,” he said. “We could have saved a lot of time getting to know each other by watching that thing.”

  “Just stack those boxes over by the boiler,” Paul said, climbing the steps to haul down the remaining cartons. Mills noticed the antique map of Orient taped across the cellar wall. Now that he knew its geography, he could identify the position of familiar properties: Beth’s house next to Magdalena’s, Adam Pruitt’s by Jeff Trader’s, the diCorcia farm next to Arthur Cleaver’s mansion and the Wilson-Crimp compound. The bird-shaped land flew toward Plum, home to avian diseases, and toward the lone darting stingray of Gardiners Island. Another map, carbon-purple, showcased Paul’s architectural model of Bug Light for its reconstruction in 1990. On a metal desk was scattered the hopeful paperwork of the Seaview: sketched drafts of a seaside hotel, bank statements estimating personal liquid assets, a letter from Arthur Cleaver, solicitor, to Eleanor Ogalvy: “All rights to property will be tendered upon completion of sale . . .” Paul was mortgaging all he had to buy his dream. If Adam hadn’t emerged as the prime suspect, the news of Paul’s prints on the gas can would have rendered that dream meaningless. And if the police should ever return to renew their investigation into Paul, he would lose what he’d worked so hard to find—and five more drinks might bring him into contact with another tree that had grown for a hundred years just to finish the job of killing him.

  Paul dropped the boxes, dusting his hands. “You ready to go back up?”

  “That drunk-driving accident last summer,” Mills said gently. A giant shadow grew along the brick, which took him a second to recognize as his own. Paul’s eyes receded behind their lenses. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  Paul yanked at his lower lip. He inflated his chest to try to keep his breathing even. Paul had never been willing to talk about himself. He had smoke-screened himself in kindness, taking on the role of father to refuse the far tougher negotiation of friendship. Only the mention of his brother, Patrick, seemed to shake him, but Patrick had been dead for forty years, and Mills had no idea what shook Paul now. They could go on that way, knowing each other without risking anything deeper, but then Mills would always be a guest in this house. A family wasn’t forged out of steel. You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself.

  “It’s okay,” Mills said. “You can tell me.” His voice rose into a question.

  “I was drinking,” Paul said, almost pleadingly, clinging to the official report. Drunk driving was favorable to vehicular suicide. “I had too much, and I was exhausted. Please don’t bring this up now.”

  Mills thought of the bottle of Vicodin on Paul’s bedroom bureau and the pain that had been embedded in him long before the crash.

  “I saw Karen Norgen at Beth’s house today. She said she witnessed the accident. She said she saw you drive into the tree. There wasn’t a swerve.”

  Paul turned halfway to the steps but stopped. It was uncomfortably quiet, an epilogue’s dead page space.

  “What do you want me to say?” Paul whispered. “That I’ve been unhappy? I think I’ve always been unhappy. That I was lonely? Yes, there’s that too. That I watched my mother die and realized, at least she had me to hold her hand and watch her go? That’s more than I’ll have. I guess it hit me the day of the funeral, like hitting a tree. No, hitting a tree is easier, because it brings you to a halt.” His fingers reached for his mustache, but even that was gone, and instead he wiped at his lip with such sorrow it was as if he were mourning the loss of its protective covering. �
��Yes, I hit that tree. It wasn’t an accident. And for a long time the worst part was that I walked away from it. I survived it and came back home.”

  Mills took a step forward. Paul drew his hand up, either to apologize or to stop him from coming closer.

  “You still talk about a family, having kids, the hotel . . .”

  “That’s not the point of kids, is it? To make you happy? I’m forty-seven. I’m not going to have children. I’m not going to get married. I never was. Can we please not continue—”

  “But there must have been someone once.” After nearly two months, Mills still didn’t know if he should say a woman or a man. But wasn’t there always a someone once for everyone? It seemed to Mills as inevitable as the flu, that each member of the human species would eventually bear the loss of a someone once. Mills might have been asking for his own peace of mind. He wanted to believe that he wouldn’t end up as lonely as Paul.

  “A long time ago there might have been, a few. One or two I thought I loved.” Paul folded his arms over his chest. One or two: gender neutral. Was Paul being vague because he was an expert closet case, or out of some misguided respect for Mills’s orientation? “But it didn’t work out, and the years added up. Look, that accident, that car crash, whatever you want to call it, was a moment of weakness. A deliberate moment of weakness. But I am happier now.” Paul’s eyes begged Mills for affirmation, the way a patient begs a doctor for positive test results. “I’m happier. I made a decision to live close to my parents to care for them, to pay their bills. That might have prevented me from other things, but I don’t regret it. I owed it to them. They couldn’t have other children. I was all they had to depend on.”