Orient (28 page)

“She’ll come to her senses,” Paul said, clapping Mills’s shoulder. “But maybe it’s best if you keep off their yard for a while. Were you two going somewhere?”

“Just for a drive,” Beth said. She looked at Mills. “Are you coming?”

Beth didn’t say
a word as she drove toward Main Road. She waited until she made the left turn before hazarding the obvious question.

“What did you do to get her going like that?”

Mills decided Beth could handle the answer. He decided he could handle speaking it.

“I gave her son a blow job.”

Beth doubled over against the steering wheel, laughing through the bends in the road. “Well, no wonder. And here I was defending you.” She let a minute of driving cushion the conversation. “Why didn’t you tell me you liked guys?”

“Why would you think I didn’t?”

“No reason. But I could have told you that you picked the wrong guy to get hung up on. The Muldoons aren’t nice people.”

“I’m not hung up on him,” he grumbled. “And why shouldn’t I do what I want? Don’t you?” She didn’t reply, and Mills took her silence for judgment. He hated the idea that she might feel sorry for him, like he needed her to protect him from the nastier truths of the world. “Maybe I’m not nice. Maybe I don’t have to be.”

The car sped across the empty farmland. Beth at least had driving to keep her busy. Mills picked at the rubber of the window frame. When the quiet grew too uncomfortable, he turned on the radio and searched the stations.

“We’re having a party on Friday night,” Beth said. “My husband is, actually. But you’re welcome to come. It might be good for you to see some other young people—youngish, anyway. My age. Orient has other types than just the Muldoons. There are plenty of livelier, more progressive people out here if you dig deep enough.”

“You mean gay? Just say the word if that’s what you mean.” It was the first time he’d said the word aloud to refer to himself. He took a slow breath. Miles from Youngs Road, he felt the anger leaking out of him and regretted attacking Beth when all she had been trying to do was help.

“Yes, gay people too,” she said. “What, you think that makes you special?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, you should come anyway. If you don’t like it, it’s not a long walk home. Now, where’s Jeff Trader’s book?”

“You aren’t going to be happy when I tell you. Tommy took it. It’s locked in his bedroom safe. Which wouldn’t be a huge problem if I weren’t forbidden from entering their house ever again.”

“You have to get it back,” she demanded.

“I will.”

“I mean it. I don’t care how you figure it out, but you have to.” She glanced at him. “You have to do it for me. I need that book.”

“You really think it matters? That it has something to do with those deaths?”

She stayed silent for a minute, staring ahead. The dark sky was pocked with coast lights.

“You know what I found out?” she said. “That photo we found in the book. It’s of a woman named Holly Drake. I was at her house today and saw her standing in front of her rosebushes. Red hair, yellow tracksuit.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“No. What was I supposed to say?”

“Why did Jeff Trader consider you the devil? Were you responsible for drowning a caretaker who no one seemed to care about?”

Beth was too aggravated to use her turn signal.

“You didn’t know Magdalena. So I can understand if you think I’m being ridiculous. All I’m asking is that you get that book back. She begged me to find it, and I need to respect that wish. She was killed because of something she knew about Jeff. It’s my duty to give that book to the police. Without it, I have nothing.”

Mills decided to help her, or, at the very least, to humor her. There was no harm in pushing her suspicions a little farther into the darkness. He rubbed his legs as he told her what he had already discovered on Jeff Trader’s pages. “It seems like he was writing down secrets—or upsetting things, anyway—about the homeowners he served. Maybe he was killed because of something he found out. Maybe there’s a secret in there that one of your neighbors didn’t want to get out.”

“You’ve got to get that book back,” she said.

A love song came on the radio, and Beth changed the station. A weather report predicted a nor’easter moving up the eastern coast, consolidating squalls. The forecaster estimated a 70 percent chance of snow on the eastern end of Long Island within the next five days.

“I’ve never seen snow fall,” Mills said as he watched the silver fields dissolve in the dusk.

“It can get bad out here. When it snows in Orient, it’s the quietest place on earth.”

“Are you happy living out here? Happy with your husband, with your—” He did not say
life
, because life seemed too fixed a word to describe as happy or not. Life was more like the houses they passed than the bodies inside of them.

Beth dug her nails into the steering wheel. “I moved out here thinking it would bring us closer together. Or me closer to myself. But I don’t think either of those things happened.” She quickly touched his knee. “I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me. I guess I’d just forgotten how settled everything is outside of the city. You can see the sun rise on the bay and set on the Sound, and that’s the whole day, there it is, and another and another. I wasn’t prepared to be so settled.”

Mills hadn’t grown up in a settled place. Modesto was the coin-return cup of America, valley of the spare-change people, all nickels and dimes who had tumbled like leftovers out of a country that had no use for them, with their hacking desert coughs and dirt from other places shoved under their nails. They were spinning around in the heat, waiting to be collected and counted up. Into what, he didn’t know. But Beth was right. There were no people like that in Orient.

“Are you going to start a family here? That’s what you do when you’re married at your age out here. That’s the point of it all, right?”

Beth turned to him, half-startled, and stared at his face, not unlike drivers who picked him up as a hitchhiker and proceeded to guess his worst intentions for the first few miles.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

They drove down Beach Lane in the dark and pulled into Jeff Trader’s driveway. A real estate sign hung by the curb, swinging in the wind. Beth waited in the car as Mills crept around the mobile home to the barn. The sheep were no longer in the stables. The bowls he had left for the cats had been cleared from the step and thrown away.

PART 2

The New People

CHAPTER
16

W
inter makes alterations. It shrinks windows in their frames, freezes water to stress the pipes, and attacks the joints with arthritic compression. It clears the fields of autumn buds and the houses of lingering guests. Lights shine palely in windows through the reflection of frost, and smoke issues from chimneys, blown sideways like steam from moving trains. Storm windows are latched by hook and nail over openings that once let in flies and sun.

In the village of Orient, the unsettled settle, and the deer hunters, bright as bloodstains in their jumpsuits, tag and field-dress their prizes with the speed of emergency surgery. Winter turns the sea first copper and then black, and, before the ice silences it, an anxious blue as it rubs against the shoreline. Smaller trawls and fishing boats are rare. Sails can’t hold the wind, and motors smoke from the strain of the current. The dirt is concrete, and the houses are liquid, white hides over shifting animals. Not-too-distant Greenport becomes cosmopolitan, and “out there” means over the causeway, where the lawns and beaches lie barren. Winter runs like a streak of fire, brightening all of the houses before they go dark.

It used to be that if a house wasn’t sold by October, it would sit empty until March. It used to be that in these months, Orient was most like itself, a prudent clapboard village capable of weathering ocean storms, having weathered them countless times before. It used to be that everything had already happened here; now it seemed like very little had. An early winter storm front was headed from the
south, due north toward the eastern fingers. The new people didn’t follow the weather, and so they changed what Orient was.

Gavril Catargi wouldn’t listen to the forecast and refused to cancel the party on account of snow. Gavril became practically Ceauşescuan on the matter of party preparations. Beth had known about this eccentricity ever since planning the reception of their wedding, which she assumed had been under her jurisdiction until Gavril pushed her aside, redrew the menu, and moved the entire event from a friend’s loft in Chelsea to a private garden in Sutton Place. Beth had let him take the reins, having grown so tired of parties by the time of their wedding that she barely worked up the energy to attend her own. It seemed to her that there was nothing so debilitating to productivity in New York as all the birthday parties alone.
It’s my birthday; Here are the plans for my Kubrick–themed birthday on Central Park West; MY BIRTHDAY midnight to 4:00
A.M
. at the Mop Cellar, open bar until 3:00
A.M
.!!!!
—the invitations flooded her e-mail like some cyber virus bent on crashing her sanity. Attending a birthday party in New York was a gauge of friendship, never mind that she only saw most of those friends once a year on their birthdays. Orient had offered a welcome break, a paradise of uncelebrated days; only because Gavril had yet to throw a party, in all of their months here, did she feel she owed him one now.

They had spent all of Friday cleaning the house. Sweeping, sponging, pulling out dead flowers from the mulch beds, color coordinating the bookshelves, prepping her husband’s special dish of
jumari
, which looked like mutant doughnuts and tasted like mildewed pig. Gavril would have made a marvelous labor-camp leader:
Scrub harder, Beth
, and
No, no, no, if the toilet water is coming up bubbles there is too much soap residue in the bowl
, and
Not the brown quilt, the blue one, to match the blinds and the Elizabeth Peyton
. The experience gave Beth a newfound respect for Gavril’s art assistants in the city. At noon, Gavril drove into Greenport to pick up the alcohol. His absence gave Beth a chance to confront the mailman.

“You want to stop all your mail?” He had a closely trimmed beard and teeth the yellow of a stamp’s underside.

“No,” she said. “Just the ones about babies.” She shuffled through the stack and pulled out a waxy circular for No-Bumpy-Baby Car Seats. “I didn’t sign up for these. I don’t want them.”

“Well, miss, it’s not illegal for merchants to send coupons.”

“I know it isn’t
illegal
,” she said. “But it’s harassing.”

“Miss. It’s also not illegal to throw them out.”

“Yes, but you see, I really,
really
don’t want them.”

“Want them?” The notion confused him. “I’m not sure anyone
wants
most mail. But I have to say, commercial bulk mail is what keeps the post office in business. Without it, in this day and age, the mail system wouldn’t exist.”

“But if all I’m getting is bulk mail I don’t want, what’s the point?”

His brow furrowed.

“I suppose the point is that you might get some letters or packages mixed in that you
do
want, or didn’t know you were going to receive. Miss, my advice is to stop giving out your address.”

“I didn’t give out my address,” she stammered. “These companies have targeted me without my permission. You see, I don’t have a baby. But all this baby stuff keeps arriving. Some of it even says I’m pregnant. It’s upsetting.”

“I’m a carrier. My job is to deliver, not to determine what you do or don’t want. As long as it’s sent, I have to bring it.”

“But can’t I block certain senders?”

“If everyone could block junk mail, there’d be no mail at all. For god’s sake, some people appreciate my job.”

He trudged off with his bloated shoulder bag; neither rain nor snow nor heat nor sense could stop him. Beth rested her forehead against the door, worn out by the existentialism of the postal service. She sifted through the mail, pulling all the baby reminders and putting them in a garbage bag, which she hid carefully in the hall closet behind bulky coats and unused rain boots.

When Gavril returned with the crates of liquor, he went around
the ground floor, hanging artwork he had received as gifts from fellow artists. He was certain they would expect to find their works featured prominently on the walls. “We can take them down tomorrow,” he said. Out they came, paintings and collages and grim sculptural assemblages of feathers, metal, and glue, like photos of unloved relatives displayed for the duration of a family reunion.

As Beth was arranging the bottles in the kitchen, Gavril rushed in, hurtling like a trapped sparrow around the room. He held a letter in his hand, one she had left under a candle on the first night they had moved in last April. She had written it while standing amid their unpacked boxes. It had been a warm night. The windows had let in the smell of magnolias and grass, and they had built a fire in the fireplace because it seemed a waste to wait until winter.

“Do you remember when you wrote this?” Gavril asked, waving the folded paper. His brown eyes had softened, as if that small memory from April meant more to him than all of those he had brought from Romania. “You thought lighting the candle would bring us luck.”

She took the letter. It was in her neat handwriting of six months ago, more sprightly in its cursive than she was capable of writing now.

Who was this woman from six months ago? Beth didn’t recognize her, not even as the husband she wrote about was breathing into her ear. The letter was written by a different person altogether. And the letter only spoke of what had been lost between the sending
and receiving. The woman who wrote it had not lived in Orient since high school, and had not yet lived in Orient through this past summer and fall. That woman had not telephoned Planned Parenthood, as Beth had done this morning, to schedule an appointment.

Gavril slipped his arms around her waist. As always before a shower, he smelled of sage, the herb burned in new houses to clear out ghosts. He kissed her neck from ear to collarbone. If she could write the letter now, she thought, it would read differently:
Sell it off, give it away, just go west to the city and stay there—it was a mistake to come back. There is no fresh start. All there is here is doubt
.

“Read it to me,” Gavril said.

“I don’t want to. It sounds stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. It’s perfect.”

“I sound like a child. It would have been better luck to burn it.”

“The best things are said in simple words.”

Gavril was hugging what he didn’t know they already had, and he would never know because she wasn’t going to keep it. She struggled to turn around in his arms. He pressed his palms against her back to bring her closer.

“Should we relight the candle tonight? And keep the letter there during the party?” He didn’t seem bothered when she didn’t answer. “I will be so busy soon, making the new work for my show. You will have to remind me about making a baby. But don’t let me forget. I need to be successful for him. I don’t want him to think his father is a lazy man who lived for free in his mother-in-law’s house.” Beth moved from his arms, picking up two vodka bottles so he couldn’t pin her against the counter.

“Ah, at least you can drink tonight. No drinking when you’re pregnant. And no driving around all day on the ice.” She thought of what a prison he would make this house if her stomach expanded beyond her waist. “Should we prepare the guest bedroom for Nathan? By midnight he’ll be too drunk to drive.” His birthmark relaxed to the neutrality of Hawaii. “What’s the matter? You’re giving me your unhappy look.”

“I don’t mean to,” she said.

“All is okay with us, yes? We’re good?”

“We’re good,” she said, returning the bottles to the table. “Everything’s fine. I’ll make up the room. We might have a few overnight guests tonight if the storm is as bad as they’re predicting.”

Beth wore a
dress she had inherited from her mother, a white cotton shift with eyelet lace around the hem in the shape of wildflowers. There were a few water stains on the back that the dry cleaner hadn’t been able to remove, but the front had remained unsoiled since the 1970s, and its shape concealed whatever weight she had gained in the last months. None of the guests would think to study her body for signs of pregnancy, except of course for Luz Wilson, a professional observer of other people’s weaknesses.

The name Luz was originally pronounced
looz
, but its bearer had changed it to
luhz
at the age of eighteen, when she moved into the city from Trenton, New Jersey. During her first semester at Columbia, the school had experienced a blight of
luz
graffiti tags around campus. All these years later, Luz Wilson was a successful portrait painter whose personality and opinions were as confrontational as her work. She had championed Beth’s paintings, an unsolicited endorsement for which Beth was grateful, though it came only after the negative reviews in New York had rendered her work noncompetitive. Not that there were many similarities: where Beth’s paintings were careful and precise, as if to let their subjects speak for themselves, Luz’s portraits—of prison guards, accused rapists, smug dewy children of the obscenely rich—were executed in the angry hand of their maker, as if each sitter had been soaked in formaldehyde. Luz’s
opinions
were infamous even among Gavril’s opinionated artist crowd, generally colored by whatever academic theorist she was reading at the time; Beth knew how quickly Luz could turn even a simple cotton dress into an
object lesson in Lacan, Žižek, Badiou, Butler, Althusser, or her trusted fallback, Foucault.

Beth spent a moment at the full-length mirror manufacturing the Luzian dialogue that was sure to rain down on her by the end of the night:
You’ve worn your mother’s dress to repeat her sins, not to emulate her, but to destroy her by regulating her sins as common values in the hegemony of feminine virtue. You discredit by redeeming. You parrot her to ensure her silence. The dress isn’t an inheritance, it’s warfare against the woman who gave birth to you
. The very exercise gave Beth a headache.

There was little question as to why Luz Wilson, a child of factory workers—“a screw factory and, yes, all connotations apply”—had achieved such prominence in the art world. It wasn’t simply the camera-ready beauty of her African-Chinese heritage (cheekbones like onions, eyelids like envelopes, skin like unsweetened iced tea, black hair worn short and wrenched into cornrows that made the eye water just to look at them). Luz had serious talent, and she also possessed the ability to antagonize. Even the press releases on her shows read like grad school dissertations. She posed nude, but for construction boots, in her husband’s art photographs. She boycotted museum shows that didn’t include an equal representation of women, but boycotted women-only survey shows, finding them sanctimonious. In New York, Luz hosted parties in her loft that included famous hip-hop artists, whom she alone called by their Christian names. And she seemed fluent in a wide variety of languages—among them, to Beth’s annoyance, Berlitz Romanian.

Luz’s husband, the artist Nathan Crimp, was a handsome, chalk-thin New Englander born not so much from parents as mated bank accounts. (His grandfather had invented the polymer seal for the shoelace aglet.) Nathan feigned a savant’s naïveté (“I think my favorite color really is purple,” he’d say feelingly. “It’s sad and also cheerful”), but beneath the childlike guile he was just as ambitious as Luz. They seemed happy as a couple, their temperaments balancing
each other, their hands often reaching out silently at parties, always taken instantly by the other.

Luz and Nathan were Gavril’s friends; to Beth they were neighbors. A month after she and Gavril moved to Orient, Luz and Nathan purchased the old farmhouse inn, with its prismatic views of the Sound and a private dock equipped with a Stingray speedboat. The purchase had one-upped Gavril, but Nathan hastened to defend himself against complaints of ostentation. “Richard Serra’s had a house in Orient for years. You aren’t the first one out here, my friend. And now we can visit each other constantly and get drunk.” They did get drunk that summer, Gavril and Nathan, usually in the shallow end of the backyard pool, planning art manifestos that gave Beth ulcers to overhear. One July afternoon, Luz even tried to spark a female version of their husbands’ male bonding, phoning Beth to ask if she’d like to sit for a portrait. “I thought you did portraits of people you hated,” Beth replied. “I never said that. Who said that? You’re projecting. So are you in?” Beth was not.