Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “I love you too,” she said, chain-rolling and chain-smoking her cigarettes, a one-woman factory, her mouth a purple waste-management vent. “But I don’t want to marry you. We’re too much alike.” He had always presumed that was the reason they should marry. “We’re undependable,” she said, “victims of our moods, too egocentric. What we need are solid, stable, generous, patient partners willing to put up with us.” They had miserable sex one last time before he took off for another Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. She went to Miami for the Basel Art Fair. He stalked her in party pictures on fashion Web sites. They didn’t speak for four months.

  When Luz reappeared in New York, she was engaged, but not to the music producer. At her side now was Nathan Crimp, the partner she’d been looking for, the one whose trust fund would provide her the stability she craved. Gavril was hurt, put all of his hurt into smashing glass and concrete bricks, and made money doing it, and he drank so much that he began to forget why he smashed glass and concrete bricks in the first place. He smashed like a smash machine. The results were still gorgeous to his eye, even if that eye was freighted with a twitching hangover. At gallery dinners, he and Luz smiled and waved. Worst of all, Gavril liked Nathan—for his humor, mostly, which was rare in the otherwise bumptious activity of the art world. (Nathan’s show “that which does not kill you tries again later” consisted of adorable rescue dogs let loose in a gallery—visitors were allowed to pet them but had to promise not to adopt them—while video footage of a euthanasia facility played in the background.)

  A crisis was beating its way toward Greenpoint. He couldn’t take another studio visit with a self-serious, middle-aged woman in all-black with a pixieish haircut, trying to talk to him about relational aesthetics as if she were testifying on human rights violations at the UN. He was lonely, and the noise of Manhattan that echoed into Brooklyn made him lonelier on a cellular level. He ate his dinners in the pizza parlor on the corner, at the hour when single lonely men ate their single slices, staring into the void of grease and pepperoni. He swallowed down rich chocolate pastries for breakfast. People who ate dessert for breakfast were either reveling in their waistlines or subconsciously contemplating suicide. If Gavril hadn’t had his two assistants he might have stopped producing work altogether. Might have sat in his studio with cement bricks tied to his feet and waited for a flood or deportation officers to carry him away.

  He met Beth Shepherd at an art opening in the fall, her fine blond hair like a broom sweeping his mess into a tidy pile. He pronounced her name Beff until she patiently taught him the lisping th. She was the anti-Luz to all of his five senses: considerate, gentle, calm when an argument exceeded conversational registers, very much a woman out of her clothes. The sex was astounding, addictive to the point of despondency after the fact, a smell that lingered on his sheets and kept him there even after she left in the morning for her copyediting job at a science magazine. She was a painter too—that’s what she and his former obsession shared—except that Beth’s paintings were careful and affirmative. There was none of the reckless rancorous brushwork that infected Luz’s canvases. Hate, hate, hate, Luz’s brush sang. He celebrated Beth’s portraits, but he couldn’t convince her that she had to betray her subjects if she wanted them to speak. “Try to hurt them or hang them by their own rope,” he advised. “That’s not what I’m after,” she said.

  Gavril and Beth fell into an easy rhythm that he had never shared with another human being: dinners, and bed, and openings, and postopening dinners, and parties, and bed, and occasional phone calls when he worked in his studio until two in the morning. She never complained about how much time he spent away from her, devoted to his art. They moved into an East Village apartment together, and by then he had already confessed his total and unconditional love for her. Luz was right: it never would have worked between them. Their story would have ended in some kind of double homicide worth at least two days of coverage in the New York Post. When Beth said, “I’m using the new cutting board” in the kitchen, he didn’t have to comb his brain for a clever response. When he bought houseplants the way other residents bought toilet paper, and named each plant in turn, Beth went along without missing a beat: “Diane is dying. Let’s move her nearer the sill.” Luz would have staged a colloquium on the perils of inter-subjectivity and the capitalist tendency to humanize flora while the poor hid themselves unnamed in the doorways of East Fifth Street.

  Beth brought him out to her mother’s house on Long Island, and he marveled at the simple, silver-tinted seaside that had given birth to her, a snow globe of humble dreams trembling with giant-winged birds. The people there didn’t poop on the beaches, like they did at the Black Sea. By then it had stopped mattering what Luz would have done at every stage of their relationship. He never told Beth about her, never impressed upon the woman he loved the existence of her silent rival. Beth respected him as an artist, and so he started once again to respect himself. He smashed, he leaked. The work sold and sold and sold. Samuel Veiseler could have sold one of his drop cloths. He could have sold a lick on the wall.

  At 2:13 one afternoon, he proposed to her. They married. Luz and Nathan attended. Luz even picked the DJ for the reception. Gavril’s marriage to Beth freed him of the restrictions of his visa; he applied for his green card, and strings were pulled to rush the approval. He was building a bank account, clearing about a million dollars after his studio costs and employees were paid. He sent his parents five hundred dollars each month; he offered more, but they refused.

  Beth had cured him of loneliness, of his heartbreak for Luz, but over time his drinking increased, spurred by some last voice of self-doubt that murmured nightly in his head. He began, while drunk, to imagine the ghost of his grandfather, who had died in 1982 of pancreatic cancer, tapping on his limbic lobe and saying, “Gavril, you are a joke, where is baby, what is your family but crappy tenement apartment with beautiful fertile wife and all you make is broken garbage.” Women aren’t the only ones with clocks that tick. The clock in men may be more impervious to environmental conditions, a digital wristwatch instead of a pendulum, but it ticked for Gavril late and drunk, and ticked in the morning mildly hungover and in terrible need of a macchiato. He told Beth an edited version of his dead grandfather’s wishes (redacting the ghostly presence of the dead grandfather), and Beth, who had fallen into her own isolation chamber after a disastrous show at a middlebrow gallery, seemed to welcome the prospect of having a baby. Even if time didn’t really exist, if it were merely a human invention, Beth’s clock seemed synchronized with his.

  It was Beth’s idea to move to Orient, to her mother’s vacant home, to commence work on the Catargi clan. “You’re too young in your career to go through a romantic period,” Samuel warned him. “I can’t have you making watercolors of lighthouses. What you do in the city is really the heart of your work.” But the city had deadened his eye, and his eye was the only compass that told him where he was. He didn’t want to get stuck spilling tar on rich people’s floors, exposing their plumbing like an incompetent handyman paid outrageously for his blunders. For him, Orient was not a dislocation—New York was, a waiting platform surrounded by three international airports. Gavril had stopped referencing Bucharest in his art years ago. He needed a location, a direction, an actual place on a map.

  “Orient,” Luz said the last time they met in the city. In her Battery Park studio, large framed nudes of her hung on the walls that Nathan had shot (he titled the series “like my wife”). Gavril kept his eyes trained on Luz, uncomfortable about admiring the photographs. “I get it,” she said. “Nathan and I have been looking for a place in the country too, somewhere we can reset our brains.” She rubbed her foot on her calf. “Nathan has some crazy idea about starting his own artist colony, somewhere away from New York, where we can all live in freedom without ever feeling the slightest need to brush our hair. We’ve been touring houses out there, on the tip of Long Island.” He wanted to beg her not to buy on the North Fork. He could see her ni
pples underneath her tank top. “Are you happy, with Beth and everything?” she asked.

  “I’m very lucky, very happy. I needed someone like her. You were right.”

  “It’s amazing who you fuck in this life, isn’t it?” She turned to her view of the Hudson River, as if everyone Luz Wilson had ever slept with formed a human wall along the coast of New Jersey. But if that were the case, he would be across the river, separated from her by a safe ribbon of water. “Who you get to fuck, and who you don’t get to fuck. Who you aren’t allowed to touch, and who you touched but aren’t allowed to anymore.” He had no idea where she was going with that thought.

  “I want to start making new work,” he said to change the topic. “I’m tired of the old tricks. I’m scared my talent’s running dry. In Orient, I want to make landscapes, things with life in them, hair and bones and dirt.”

  Her mouth twitched. She wiped a speck from her eye. “Be careful,” she said. “You try to bend your ego, it will break. You try to patch a crack in your character, the hammer makes a hole. I was wrong about us. I mean, I love Nathan. I truly feel moments of joy so pure I could break out of myself. But I was wrong to let you go. Maybe I could have felt those moments with you even faster.”

  “It was a long time ago, Luz. And who you don’t get to fuck anymore, you miss less than you think.” She stepped toward him and stopped. She mentioned their first meeting in Venice, at the Romanian Pavilion, recounting details so minute that even he didn’t remember: the shirt he wore, the way his birthmark disappeared in the blush of his face. She had never been that woman he first encountered in New York, who pretended to barely remember him. She stood in front of him now in her painting studio, so still it was disorienting, as if she were a perpetual motion machine that had finally stopped moving. She waited in the Hudson River light to be touched, and he didn’t dare to, even though his penis pleaded for another dose of miserable sex. He thought of Beth and their future in Orient; he was already out there with her and the baby, somewhere in the vast cosmos of parallel nows, creating landscapes out of water and light.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he told her, opening the door to leave.

  She said, and he remembered it, “You’ll see.”

  He waited on a bench near the piers of the Hudson River. He cried cleanly, efficiently, water draining from his eyes without a single gag in his throat. An early summer wind poured off the water, disturbing the plastic in the park’s recycle bins and tilting the sailboats in the chop. The sky was a limitless blue, and somewhere on the Long Island Expressway a moving van drove their belongings east. When he heard his name being called, he turned and looked up. It hurt his eyes to look up into the sun and sky, up into the confusion of buildings, into one window where he thought he saw the faint shape of a hand. But he saw her walking toward him, her hair holding the sun, her teeth eating his name. “Gavril,” Beth said. “Are you ready? Diane died. The movers dropped her pot out the window. Are you ready? You can sleep in the car as long as you want. We’re only an hour behind.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Mills watched Beth’s car pull into the driveway. He was surprised when he saw her walk straight into the house without coming to check on him first. When a second car pulled up a few minutes later, a woman climbed out, her face shellacked in makeup, her lips bursting from bee stings. She was ageless and thus must be old. The ageless old woman in a candy-colored dress noticed the light in the garage, and Mills ducked behind one of the tar walls as she came closer. Through the window the woman’s hair looked copper, her cheeks flecked from the dirt on the glass. She peered in, looking for signs of life, but retreated when she didn’t find any. Mills watched her enter the house through the back door. The stranger worried him. All strangers did now, until he could disappear into the city and join their kind. He hoped Beth would send this strange woman away. He watched the house for five minutes, expecting the woman to return to her car and drive off.

  A scream tore through the house, a lethal, lost-hope scream. Fighting the impulse to run toward it, he shoved the photocopies of Jeff’s journal into his bag and jammed his feet into his sneakers. The ageless woman bolted from the back door, still screaming, her face now ransacked by age, blood on her fingers as red as paint. She rounded the house and suddenly stopped, screaming as she turned in circles with no direction except upright. The middle of her pink dress bloomed a dark liquid, a Rorschach butterfly, and urine dripped down her leg. Gavril sprinted toward her from the sidewalk. “Gail,” Mills heard him cry. She punched his chest until Gavril pushed her aside and ran into the house. The old woman became a zombie and walked into the street.

  Mills grabbed his bag and opened the garage door. He fled into the neighboring bushes, snapping branches, his sweater tearing in their grip. He burrowed through the shrubbery and darted across Magdalena’s lawn, slamming his body against the scabbed wood of the cottage. He heard a second scream, a mourning roar, fainter by degrees—people went into that house, screamed, and exited changed. He wanted to go back to make sure Beth was okay, but he knew he couldn’t. His fingers traced a window screen, finding a hole between the mesh and the frame, then pulled until the screen broke open enough for him to slip through.

  He climbed into Magdalena’s sunroom, quickly bending the steel mesh back into place. He smelled lemony Pledge and medicinal aerosols, the stink of a house without a resident to neutralize it. He scurried into the living room with his back bent, like a soldier or an ape or an old man, and dropped to his knees in the darkness beside the armoire. In the darkness he could see Beth’s house through the window across the room.

  It started snowing before the police cars arrived. If the snow had come earlier, he would have left footprints; if it had come later, dogs might have been able to follow his scent. Mills sat in the dark, his attention fixed on Beth’s house, praying for her to come outside. He tried to think of things to pray for: an accidental cut, even a miscarriage, anything that would explain the screams and blood and her absence.

  Finally, the flashing lights rippled across the exterior, soaking it with emergency. Several officers entered the house. Gilburn arrived in his unmarked sedan.

  Mills looked away when they carried out the bagged body on a stretcher. It slid so cleanly into the ambulance, as if the equipment had been invented just to make this one transfer as uncomplicated as possible. Yellow police tape wrapped around the lawn. He watched Gavril on the driveway, the only man without a coat, bags under his eyes so pronounced they didn’t change color in the red-and-blue lights. Gavril led Gilburn into the garage to show him where Mills had slept, a cot-shaped petri dish of fingerprints, hair, and skin. Men in lab coats followed them with tackle boxes and cameras. Gavril left the garage and stood in a corner by the porch, his back to the scene. His shoulders shook. It seemed like he stood there for days.

  Mills sat there in Magdalena’s living room, on his knees, and cried into his hands. Of all of the victims in Orient, Beth had been the only one he cared about. He had loved her, and his grief was a rat running around the cage of his brain, gnawing the bars, swallowing anything edible, fresh or rotten, chewing past reason, wanting out. News crews arrived as uniformed officers fanned out through the area, one of them passing so close to the window that Mills could make out the squawking voice on his radio: “Suspect still believed to be in vicinity. Causeway secure.” The wind moaned over the roof, and he heard equipment knocking over on the street, doors slamming, orders yelled. After several hours, Mills risked crawling toward the window. Snow had accumulated, and footprints scattered across the ground, most of them human, a few left by dogs, the falling snow trying to erase them.

  He slept that night in the cold house, balled up on the carpeting. No lights were left on in the Shepherd home, but the garage threw fiery reflections around Magdalena’s living room, brightening the picture frames on the mantel, and Mills heard the sound of Gavril’s sculptures being dismantled, a chainsaw of demolition, a one-man wrecking crew all the way until dawn.

/>   In the morning, starving, he slipped into the kitchen and discovered a chocolate bar in the butter dish. He regretted eating it as soon as he finished because the hunger had diluted his grief. He snaked up the stairs with his bag and sat in Magdalena’s bedroom, examining the house next-door from the gabled window. Beth’s car was gone from the driveway. The only human presence was an officer stationed at the front door, where a foot of snow had been shoveled into the flower bed. Snow-stained cars slowed in front of the house, paused for thirty seconds, and sped away.

  It wasn’t safe for him to leave yet. It would never be safe for him to leave. He used an old woman’s toilet, stabilizing himself on her grip bars. He took an old woman’s vitamins from the bathroom cabinet, gulping them down with handfuls of faucet water. He slept in an old woman’s bed, its side gates disengaged in case he needed to run. His mind went from murder to murder and back again. He read the photocopied journal just as Beth had asked him to, page by page.

  On the third day, the officers he’d seen stationed in the backyard, or cleaving the coast beds with a bloodhound, seemed to disappear. Gavril came back to the Shepherd home. Luz accompanied him, holding him by the arm and pulling him forward when he hesitated at the door. They left an hour later in her sports coupe, Luz carrying two suitcases, Gavril his notebook and a stack of photographs.

  Nothing moved outside except the wind. The trees were locked in ice, their branches low and fractured in painful dislocations, hung with icicles. The deep freeze had stalled the wetlands, and the Sound was burnished and still. Police cars made their rounds, a cruiser passing once every twenty minutes. He read Jeff’s journal again, and this time it was what Mills didn’t find in its pages that troubled him, that kept him awake as he flipped through its log of Orient secrets.