Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

  “Tell me the truth. Did you go over there? Talk to her? Maybe fight with her? Were you over there on the day she died? Luz, tell me—”

  “Oh my God,” Luz wailed, slapping her knuckles on the floor. “You’re completely crazy.”

  “You tried to shut her up about something. Was it to stop her from talking about Jeff Trader’s death? Tell me what she was going to say.”

  Luz was panicking, rotating her head, as if searching for a bystander who was listening to this ludicrous accusation. She tried laughing but it didn’t seem to help.

  “Tell me,” Beth demanded. “Were you involved in any way—”

  “You’re so fucking blind,” Luz shouted, covering her ears. “Can you please for once stop trying to play detective and see what’s happening in your own fucking life? Can’t you see that I’ve been protecting you?” Beth took a step back; the paper crumpled in her fist. Luz stared at her, her dark face flushing red. “That we’ve all been protecting you from the truth? Because the truth doesn’t matter now. It stopped mattering to me the minute I knew you were going to keep the baby. And it stopped mattering to Gavril the minute he found out you were pregnant. I could have killed him for taking so long to realize. Men are so slow. But I wasn’t going to tell him, in case you decided otherwise.” Luz’s tongue wrestled in her mouth, purple and tea-stained. The tongue seemed to find her mouth no longer inhabitable, caught with such little room amid her teeth to move. “It doesn’t matter now. And it doesn’t matter what I was going to explain to Magdalena. Because it’s over. You and Gavril are going to have a child.”

  It’s the females you have to be careful about. Beth remembered Magdalena warning her about Gavril, that Alvara had seen him in and out of the garage, bringing in friends, “playing around.” Alvara must have spotted Luz going into the garage too often. Maybe she noticed the way they spoke, or interacted, or kissed, behind the garage, hidden from the house but not from the windows of the cottage next door. This beautiful woman sitting on the floor below her, with a philosophy for every situation, had been carrying on an affair with her husband, for weeks or months or maybe longer. They’d been meeting at night for walks through Orient when Beth was asleep in their bed. That must have been the cause of the fight on the night of Gavril’s party—even drugged-out Nathan had been able to see what was going on. Even Alvara, slipping nervously in and out of the room serving drinks, had known what was happening. Maybe everyone in Orient knew what was happening. Maybe only Beth was blind.

  “So that’s what’s been going on. You and Gavril.” Beth was surprised to find that, at the moment of comprehension, she didn’t cry. The tears weren’t there to wipe away. She’d been so wrapped up in the murders and the baby that she’d missed the plain facts right in front of her, her marriage burning up like paper in her own backyard. “You were hoping to speak to Magdalena before she could tell me the truth.”

  Luz took a controlled breath, neither confirming nor denying. On the coffee table, a glass Murano orchid sat on top of the Oysterponds Inn sign. On Luz’s feet were black leather slippers hand-sewn by Italian cobblers. Marble tiles were stacked in a corner, to be installed or returned to their manufacturer upon her whim. The beauty in the room was not fragile. It would survive the lives that rotted around it. It would gain value by biding its time, awaiting new hands for future appraisal. Luz had built such a gorgeous life with her taste and Nathan’s money. And yet she’d been willing to risk it all for Gavril, and Gavril had been willing to do the same—risk their life, their house, every part of them except the child. Her anger at Gavril was nuclear, an admixture of love and love erased.

  “You were going to get a divorce from Nathan. And you assumed Gavril would divorce me. All of it, so the two of you could be together. Just like that.”

  Luz balked, tamping back the arrogance that had fueled her entire career.

  “I was never going to divorce Nathan. That was never my plan. I love Nathan deeply. And I like it out here. I like what we’ve found in this place.”

  “But you went to Cole Drake to ask about a divorce.”

  Luz shook her head. “No. I was asking him about divorce, but not on my behalf.” It was a punch from which Beth took a minute to recover. So Gavril had been considering a split. In his peculiar brand of morality, he felt obliged to end their marriage whether or not he could have Luz. “It was simply to determine who had rights to an artwork made on a property the artist didn’t own. But that was weeks ago. You have to know, I went back yesterday and told Cole to forget the whole matter. I didn’t want you hearing about it because it doesn’t apply anymore. Gavril loves you. He wants to make it work.”

  Luz reached up toward Beth again, not to fondle her stomach but to take her hands. It was as if Luz were trying to catch her. “Beth, it happens. People fall in and out, and they make mistakes. It was an intellectual relationship far more than it was ever sexual.” Luz must have thought she would find that distinction comforting. “Don’t be a romantic martyr,” she hissed. “Don’t live by some ossified code of husband and wife from the broom closet of the last century. You don’t marry a person just so you can hang a ‘no trespassing’ sign around their neck. We’re artists, not Puritans. We’re free. And we’ve all been protecting you from the truth, like you were a little girl who couldn’t handle what real adults actually look like.” Luz’s eyes glistened, and she battled to keep them open under the weight of the water. “We’ve earned the right to live however we want. And it doesn’t matter anymore, because you’re going to have the baby. And one day you’re going to forgive me. One day you might even thank me for showing you the truth.”

  Luz looked ugly when she cried, her face knotted, her eyes bulging, a moment of gracelessness from someone so unpracticed in remorse. She buried her face in the sofa cushion. The tarps bellowed all around them, rattled by sea squalls. “I don’t care if you think your life is ruined. You can think whatever the fuck you want. I just don’t want to mess up the future for your kid.”

  Beth turned around, without ever once touching Luz Wilson, and let herself out through the seam in the plastic. She walked along the concrete path toward the driveway—amazing in such moments that she still respected the twisting path of the walkway—and found Nathan leaning against her car. He wore dirty work clothes and a beaten-up brown leather jacket. He nodded at her as she approached.

  “Well,” he said in a slurred baritone, freshly stoned. “I guess that makes us the two fools.”

  “I hope you’ll be happy with her,” she said as she bypassed him and circled around her car. She felt sorry for Nathan, sorrier for him than she did for herself. Nathan would stay with his wife no matter how many times she changed the rules of their supposed freedom. He would have to play along with her constant shifts until he found himself the last barrier in Luz Wilson’s campaign to conquer all restrictions. Until that time, they could hide behind their money and taste. They could disappear into their accomplishments, and drift into Manhattan whenever they were bored of Orient or each other. Beth was certain they would see themselves as happy, and maybe they were. They could break whatever they wanted.

  “You know, I blamed you at first,” Nathan said, tapping his fingers on the roof of the car. “But then I decided: it’s Orient’s fault. All this phony peace and quiet, like it can never quite wake itself up. Of course they came together here. They set the trap so they could be caught in it.”

  “It wasn’t your idea to get a house out here, was it?” she said over the roof.

  He shook his head. “No, it was Luz’s. But I’ve come to love Orient. No one knows what to do with our kind. But maybe we can wake them up. Maybe we can only make things really new and upsetting if we have a place that still resists us, a place that hasn’t already been touched.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said. She opened her door, then paused. “But, Nathan, don’t you want anything more?” />
  “I love her,” he swore, stepping back. “She’s the only one who’s ever called me out on my bullshit. She’s the only person who can be honest. That’s important, isn’t it?”

  She drove west on Main Road, passing the neighborhood of her childhood, the brick red slab of her high school and the entrances to summer swimming coves, the cemetery that held her father, the war obelisk, and the church. She kept her arm over her stomach like a second seat belt, driving below the speed limit, with all of Orient pitching and lurching around her wheels. This morning she and Gavril had promised to make a fresh start, the past behind them, the future expanding, a baby waiting on the other side of winter. She loved Gavril, and she forgave him—forgave him his betrayal, forgave him the doubts and uncertainties that had led him to Luz. She loved him for coming out here and for persevering for as long as he could. In his notebook he had written, “Pretend to live the ultimate suburban American dream with wife and child.” She loved Gavril for thinking he could live that charade. She would ask for a divorce and not take a single cent from the sale of his work. She would leave tonight, with Mills hidden in the trunk, and then after she’d driven him to the city she would return to the North Fork and stay with her mother in Southold for as long as it took Gavril to realize that she wasn’t coming back to him. And when she did come home, maybe by then the locks would be changed. The baby would arrive in April, and she’d let Gavril be the father, on weekends or whenever he was willing to make the drive from the city to Orient.

  She parked in her driveway and entered the kitchen, calling for Gavril, thankful to get no response. She climbed the steps to the second floor and pulled a suitcase from the closet. From the window, she saw the garage door, still closed, a single light just visible inside, Mills waiting, with no sign of the police nearby. She packed the bag, watching herself fold clothes in the full-length mirror. The action seemed natural, inevitable, a daily chore to get through, her only incentive being the second after this one, and the second beyond that, and all the other seconds that swum around her like dust in a room.

  She heard a car pull in from the street. It was probably Gail—another untimely visit. It was only a minor complication. She wouldn’t inform Gail of her pregnancy until she was back at the condo, and surely the news of a grandchild would be enough to convince her not to sell the house. Could Beth afford to buy it from her? She reconsidered taking some of the Russian oligarch’s money. Maybe that was the final value of her husband’s art: it would provide the security to keep this house in her family for another generation.

  She thought she heard the front door open downstairs, but Gail’s shoes were still crunching on the gravel. She dropped a shirt in the suitcase. The beam on the second floor squeaked. “Hello?” she called. “Gavril? Mom?” The legs of the easel skidded in the nursery. Beth walked into the hallway. “Mom?” Her foot hit the same squeak in the hall, and when she crossed into the nursery, she was blinded by the glare of the clock’s tin face. The painting of Mills had fallen on the floor, and as she moved to pick it up, she caught something out of the corner of her eye, a blurred shape springing toward her. Beth lunged toward the hallway, her hands grabbing the doorframe. An arm swept across her chest, yanking her back into the nursery. She clung to the doorway, her fingers slipping on the wood, until her heart took over, rising up her throat, and she managed to say, “No, stop, please” before a voice whispered into her ear, “I’m sorry,” and the effort of her heart was released as a knife cut across her throat.

  CHAPTER 33

  He first saw her on a vaporetto in Venice. He was standing on the cobblestones in front of the Accademia as a boat crammed with tourists lurched toward the dock. The afternoon sun was streaming off the water, lightening the hair of passengers until they looked like candles on a wobbly cake. All except for one: a young black woman with iron-straight hair, wearing a black fitted suit. It was the year of the black fitted suit, le smoking, but he didn’t know that. He had hardly been out of Bucharest before, and at the age of twenty-six, this trip seven hundred miles from home counted as acute international travel. He lost sight of her among the tourists fighting for a foothold on the waterbus, but her face remained with him; she reminded him of the sour, stone-faced Madonnas in the Titians and Tintorettos. He reminded himself of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, a stockier and hairier rendition, but his legs and arms stretching into wide circles.

  He saw her again two nights later, leaving a party on a former army-barrack island. The black suit had become her uniform, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Mousse sparkled like snow at her temples. She was worm-limb drunk on the free wine that glowed amid the candles at the bar. That was when he first heard her voice, American, screaming like plucked piano wire as she climbed into a water taxi. Before that, she could have been from anywhere. It was unlikely he’d ever see her again. The art world had brought so many beautiful women to Venice that week, exotic birds collecting on the bridges and squares, stirred easily when he ran across them.

  He was in Venice to work at the Biennale, assisting an artist whom no one in his home country respected but who had been chosen to represent Romania with a suite of portraits of Communist leaders made from candy-bar wrappers. The Romanian Pavilion was not so much a pavilion as a two-floor brick hut that shared a wall with a youth hostel run by wrathful hippies. Worse, it was located in Giudecca, a forty-minute boat ride from the art world epicenter. Few bothered to visit. Gavril stacked the brochures on the welcome desk and waited. “After decades of a conciliatory transition toward an ‘enlightened’ western democracy, the neoliberal paradigm has sprouted an agitated counter-paradigm in Eastern European art that questions the very legitimacy of the project of modernity . . .” He refused to read on, embarrassed by the language of art. When tourists stepped in the doorway to ask where they could catch a boat to the glassblowers in Murano, he deflected his eyes.

  On the last day of the show, fifteen minutes before he locked the door, a woman in a black suit entered and took a brochure. “I’ve seen you before,” she said as she squinted at him. She introduced herself as Luz Wilson and fanned herself with the press release. He asked in his best English, “Why have you come?”

  “Oh, I never go to the big countries. A bunch of token names who show their better, less pretentious stuff in the galleries in Chelsea.” Realizing she was speaking to a humble desk-sitter representing Eastern Europe, she clarified. “New York. That’s where I live.”

  He should have guessed. Her perfume smelled expensive, like New York. She paced languidly through the exhibit, returned to the desk after four minutes, and shrugged. “We have better artists,” he swore. “But this is for rich collectors and reporters with no knowledge of the history of my country.” She asked if he was an artist. “Yes,” he said, but because of the garish litter portraits he didn’t mention his own work, the pile of smashed beer-bottle glass he was sweeping into lines and stars.

  “I paint,” she volunteered. “I was in a few group shows in the spring. Fuck if I know if I’ll be painting the next time you see me. The whole thing’s got little to do with talent. Sometimes, when collectors want to buy a work, I think they just want to take a picture of me looking desperate to show to their friends. Do you ever come to New York?”

  “Sometimes,” he lied. “I want to. Soon.”

  She wrote her number down on the press release. “If you ever get there, call me. I’ll show you around.” And then Luz Wilson walked out into Giudecca and presumably onto a plane.

  He returned to Bucharest, where the cobblestones lacked the golden thread of Italian light. He worked days doing construction on a new block of condominiums. The materials were cheap and black market shoddy and he mixed concrete with sawdust. At night he returned to his tiny apartment off fountain-laced Alexandru Ioan Cuza Park to work on his art in his bedroom. He covered his mattress with a tarp and often fell asleep on the plastic the same way his mother sat for hours on her plastic-wrapped sofa, never once stripping it off for company. He co
ntinued his bottle-glass experiments and created abstract sculptures out of metal sheets he stole from the construction site. He showed his glass-bottle lines in small illegal galleries that never sold anything and closed permanently when the electricity was shut off.

  That first taste of the art world in Venice had disgusted him. It made him feel complicit in a carnival of fast, expensive merchandise purchased by men who parked their yachts off San Marco like great white whales of pleasure and crude. But he kept the image of the black American girl in his heart the way a drunk keeps a picture of a lost woman in his coat pocket. He thought of her when he fucked his girlfriend on his tarp-covered bed, or when she whined about her job selling ornate wooden clocks at the train station. He dreamed of the black-suited American visiting his first show in New York. It was time for Gavril to up the ante.

  One rainy day in April, he hid a crowbar in his jacket and went to Ceauşescu’s House, or the Palace of Parliament as it was known to the rest of the world. When one of the magenta-blazered guards fell asleep on his stool, his mouth a cave of metal deposits and echoes, Gavril popped ten tiles from the mosaic marble floor and loaded them in his pockets. Three weeks later, before a young, inebriated crowd in an abandoned shipment station on the east side of the city, he held his first serious show, smashing the tiles with a sledgehammer and leaving the pulverized marble to collect like stardust on the cement floor.

  A reporter from the Bucharest Herald wrote an article on the performance, attacking him with typically misplaced nationalist outrage at his vandalism of the palace. The story ran on the back page of the Tuesday paper. Gavril waited to be arrested, waited for the security brigade to break through his walls, behind which he had always imagined them lurking. He was stunned when they failed to appear. Perhaps the surest sign of change in his country was its careless tolerance of petty crimes. Instead of an arrest, he was rewarded with a call from a gallerist in London whose Romanian husband had shown her the article over breakfast. “I love it, I bloody love it,” Laura Lucas yelled into the phone, her English so crisp she sounded as if she were having a series of small strokes. “I have a tiny upstairs space for emerging talent. I want you to do the same thing here. We’ll call it ‘Unquiet on the Eastern Front.’”