Orient (3 page)

“Pam,” she said lightly, “don’t you think you’re overreacting? Paul’s not adopting a kid. He’s bringing a guest to stay at his house. What’s wrong with that? He doesn’t need permission. It’s his private property. I don’t think having this kid here will be an inconvenience to you—will it?”

“He’s not a kid,” Pam stammered, dredging a palm down her cheek. “I’m sorry, but there’s a reason I don’t live in the city. I like to know my neighbors. And you don’t have children, Holly. Easy for you to say when trouble isn’t lurking forty feet from their bedrooms.”

Holly continued to inflict her calm, sensible smile through the gray noon light; red and purple balloons bobbed behind her, their strings tangling around the Plexiglas bird feeder. Holly believed in giving hysteria plenty of breathing space until it echoed back cheap and frantic to testify against itself. She waited a full fifteen seconds before responding.

“We all love you, Pam, for this wonderful picnic. But, honestly, if someone hadn’t first described him as a ‘foster kid,’ would you really be that concerned? He’s just a friend of Paul’s who happens to be Lisa’s age. Maybe we should wait to meet him before we call the police.”

Pam Muldoon, realizing she was losing the argument, feigned a glance at her watch and headed across the yard toward her house. She
had never really liked Holly Drake anyway, with her gaudy Middle Eastern fabrics and her self-righteous Obama stickers plastered on every ground-floor window. Pam shifted the dispute inward, fought inside her mind against a less amiable version of Holly Drake. And she kept it up, her silent battle, all through the beginning of the picnic, a one-sided war of brilliant moral volleys that Pam felt certain she had won.

The weather could
not make up its mind. White sunlight etched a motif of leaves across the picnic tables and the grass. The sky managed a deep, summer blue, and mosquitoes skimmed across surfaces and ears as the season’s totem insect. But silver clouds banded in the west, imposing the threat of rain. The wind carried droplets of salt water off the Sound, dampening faces and clinging to arms. The smell of algae mixed with the scent of Pam’s dying roses and the earthy mulch piles the boys had raked.

The sun didn’t produce much heat or haze, but there was enough summer left in the air to justify an end-of-summer celebration. Everything was clear that afternoon, every color its own, and there were so many colors, a dense scrum of neighbors eating and laughing and struggling out of their jackets to shake hands or dab potato salad on their plates. Even without Lisa and her high school friends, there were more guests on the Muldoon lawn than ever before: the familiar and the unfamiliar, the regulars and the intermittents; ancient Magdalena Kiefer, with her aluminum walking canes and Hispanic nurse; Ted and Sarakit Herrig; the handsome gay artist couple who had recently bought the old Raleigh home (and transformed an eyesore into a charming English cottage, even Pam had to admit); Adam Pruitt, with his volunteer fire department buddies; the Griffins, and the Morgensens, and Ina Jenkins tripping over her kennel of French bulldogs-slash-hoarding problem. They were all there and more, even several of the weekenders who had not received personal invitations, and Pam felt her bitterness
ebb as she watched them eat from her plates and drink from her mugs. She labored to make them feel welcome, talking about her daughter and how sad Lisa was that she couldn’t be here to join the fun.
This is the true spirit of Orient, you weekenders
, she thought.
Taste it, butter it, scoop it from the copper-plated bowl, enjoy it while it lasts
.

“So where’s the boy?” Ina Jenkins asked her.

“Mine, you mean?”

“No.” Ina tipped her head toward the Benchleys’ mansion. “The foster kid.”

Pam stopped petting the bulldog in Ina’s arms.

“Oh, Ina, not today. Can we not mention that business at my party?”

“Paul took such care of his mother before she died. It’s like he caught the care bug. Now he thinks he can help anyone.” Ina jiggled the tiny, tapioca-colored dog against her breasts. “He just seems lonely to me. You know, I never cared much for his mother. Always such a snob about her family and their stature in the community. But Paul donated a bunch of art supplies to the elementary school last winter. And here he is, helping another needy kid.”

“Please,” Pam whispered. “Enough.”

And then it occurred to her, like a wave of stomach sickness, that so many locals had crowded her lawn partly out of curiosity about the new arrival. She glanced around and noticed Bryan near the log pile, leaning close to Holly Drake, two glasses of white wine between them. Bryan, with his graying rake of hair and his robin’s egg shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, laughed nervously at whatever Huffington Post blog Holly was reciting by heart. His years of flirting with younger women hadn’t eased, no matter how many times she called him on it, how many civilized barbecues ended in hushed fights while they loaded the dishwasher in hostile synchronicity. But now, as she watched him, she felt no flare of jealousy, only sympathy. How sad her husband looked as he chatted up that red-haired speck of a woman. Bryan had gotten old over the summer, his muscular
chest sagging, his whole body seeming to shrink into the rack of his vertebrae, his blue eyes glassier, increments of age revealing themselves as she watched him stumble every morning from bed to bathroom, as if he had lost his balance.

Poor Bryan. It must mean something to him to have this moment with Holly, to stay in the game even when there was no chance at victory, and she opted not to intervene, to let him have it. Instead she scanned the lawn for Tommy, her eldest son. She felt the tremendous urge to hug him, to drape her arms around his collarbone and draw him into her, as if to reunite him briefly with her umbilical cord. And there he was, coming around the house in a black T-shirt and jeans, his Converses caked in mud, his short, wheat-colored hair causing the hollows of his eyes to stand out, so handsome that it took all her reserve not to call to him “my baby.”

“Tommy,” Pam yelled. “Come here for a minute, sweetheart.”

His eyes rolled, but he walked toward her, wincing as she squeezed his shoulders.

“Ina, you know that Tommy has started his senior year at Sycamore,” she said proudly.

“She doesn’t care, Mom,” Tommy mumbled.

“Of course she cares.” Pam leaned over and kissed the back of his head, smelling the sweat of dank, unbathed boyhood and refusing to acknowledge a hint of what could be marijuana smoke. “Ina taught you in third grade. Of course she wants to know how you’re progressing.” Pam turned to Ina with a conspiratorial wink. “Can you believe he’ll be off to college next year, just like Lisa?”

Ina played along. It was a teacher’s burden to feign interest in the futures of every child who passed through her classroom. The two women traded opinions about colleges until Theo, Pam’s youngest, appeared from around the oak tree. Theo squealed through a smear of chocolate syrup. His hands were cupped together, hiding and flaunting a valuable treasure.

“What have you got?” Tommy asked, pulling away from his mother.

Theo opened his filthy nine-year-old hands to expose a baby bird lying on his palm. It was gray-skinned and insect-eyed, its mechanical heart beating as it shivered featherless in the sun.

“Oh, honey, put it back where you found it,” Pam ordered. “Its parents won’t claim it if it smells like you. Put it where the cats can’t get to it.”

“It’ll just die anyway,” Tommy said. “Too late in the year for a baby. How weird that it even hatched. It must be a mutant.”

“I found it on the ground,” Theo whined, as if anything on the ground was fair game for whatever torture methods he had in mind.

Beth Shepherd crossed the lawn on her way back from the bathroom. She had her arm pressed against her stomach, and her face looked so pale that Pam worried she was sick. Beth had grown up in Orient, popular and outgoing, leaving a trail of village boys lovestruck behind her. She had left for college and an art career in the city, but five months ago she had returned, presumably for good, presumably to start a family with her new, foreign husband. Pam found Beth stoically beautiful. She wondered if Tommy found her beautiful too.

Beth staggered toward them, attracted by the quivering bird in Theo’s hands. “Ohhh,” she said as she stepped closer to examine it, sweeping her blond hair behind her ear. Theo closed his hand over the bird, either to shelter it from the wind or to reclaim it as his own.

That’s when Paul Benchley’s dented blue Mercedes appeared in the distance, driving slowly up the street. Pam saw it first, squinting in the sunlight as she steadied herself on Tommy’s shoulder. As if to confirm Pam’s worst suspicions, the other guests stopped talking, stopped eating, as the car eased into the gravel driveway that traced the border between Paul’s property and the Muldoons’. It came to a halt, and the engine died. The guests waited patiently for the passenger-side door to open, and Pam realized, with sudden horror, what her annual picnic would look like: a welcome party for
Paul’s foster kid, complete with balloons and punch and the entire Orient community assembled on her lawn to greet him. She stood and watched, dazed by the reflection of her oak tree on the passenger window.

Paul got out first and waved over the roof of his car. His glasses glinted white in the sun, his brown mustache offsetting a smile. As he walked around the car, the passenger door opened and two black sneakers touched the ground. A pair of worn blue jeans pivoted at the knee, and up rose a nest of black hair—of course his hair was black—followed by a thin white face with chapped lips and brown eyes, greasy-haired and pharmaceutical-eyed, skinny and agile and drained of expression, like a kid accustomed to emerging from the backseat of patrol cars.

“I want you to meet Mills,” Paul called out, patting the young man on the back to lead him toward the picnic. “He’s coming out to help me with the house for a few weeks.”

“Ouch,” Tommy cried, twisting out from under his mother’s grasp. “Jesus, Mom.”

Pam reached for her son, but Mills misinterpreted her gesture, lurching forward to shake her outstretched hand.

“Nice to meet you,” Pam said flatly. The young man smiled, and she noticed his right front tooth was a lifeless shade of gray, the color of a dead bulb in her upstairs vanity mirror.

Pam turned away in defeat. “Well, everyone back to the picnic,” she said. Only Paul and Theo followed her.

The two teenagers stood on the edge of the lawn, regarding each other. All was silent for a moment until Bryan opened a bottle of Prosecco and the party regained its nearsighted enthusiasm, circling the food on the tables and chewing over the latest local controversies: the government’s imminent closure of Plum Island, the apocryphal sighting of an oil rig off the coast of Mastic Beach, the curse of the Sycamore girls’ varsity soccer team. Theo laid his baby bird on a quilt Magdalena Kiefer had left on a chair;
it died there, undiscovered, until Magdalena’s nurse picked off its sticky remains.

Pam Muldoon took refuge in the midst of her neighbors, throwing furious, unnoticed glances at Paul Benchley. Tommy and the foster kid continued to stand on the far perimeter, away from parental ears. When it came time to take pictures, the evening light had waned and a defect in the Muldoons’ digital camera caused orbs of light to appear as snow falling across every image.

Most of the guests would catch glimpses of Pam, or Bryan, or one of the boys the next day or the next week, but some would not. A few would remember the end-of-summer picnic as the last time the Muldoons were seen together and alive.

CHAPTER
2

B
eth Shepherd woke on the morning of the picnic with two hearts beating inside her. She climbed out of bed, releasing the sheets knotted around her ankles, and stood in front of her full-length mirror. Behind her she saw the white, lunar walls that had once been her parents’ bedroom. Even with three applications of paint, a faint haze of rose chiffon exuded from the nacreous coats of Cosmic Ricotta that Beth had specifically chosen to excise all trace of her mother’s favorite color. The pinkish glow served as an unwelcome reminder of two recent failures: her fizzled career as a painter in New York and her inability to eliminate Gail Sheely Shepherd Kendrick Laurito from her daily life in Orient. In fact, the chain saw drone of coffee beans being ground in the kitchen downstairs might well be the handiwork of Gail Sheely Shepherd Kendrick Laurito, slumped over the counter, trying to rouse her daughter out of bed with the most excusable assault available to a woman who had been told that the upstairs was no longer in her jurisdiction.

Beth glanced out the bedroom window and saw her husband, Gavril, marching across the backyard toward his studio, confirming that the sounds coming from the kitchen must be from her mother. She waited resignedly for what she knew would soon come wafting through the air vents, and, yep, there it was:
My life has been a tapestry
. . . at cloying, soft-rock, white-divorcée volume.

Beth lifted her T-shirt and stared at the oval doughnut of her stomach, the skin downy with fine blond hairs, the indent between her
abdominal muscles showing no swelling, not yet. She spread her palm over her belly button, feeling for internal tremors. Her eyes ascended to her breasts, two small suction cups, and up to her face, still puffy and railroad-tracked with the imprint of a pillow seam, unsmiling. She should be happy. The pregnancy test she took secretly last night in the bathroom promised 90 percent accuracy. She had succeeded in her one sworn goal for moving out of the city and back into the house where she’d grown up. But the fact that Beth had to remind herself that she should be happy seemed to verify the self-diagnosis she’d reached while conducting research on the Internet last week in lieu of looking up pool covers. “Neurasthenia,” the WebMD entry read, “a psycho-pathological term to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia, and depressed mood.” Check, check, check, check, and with the help of an online dictionary to define
neuralgia
, check. At the bottom of the entry, a dooming footnote: “Americans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname ‘Americanitis.’”

Throughout her childhood in Orient, Beth had always believed herself to be
special
. She was an eager artist, a patient listener, an aggressive adolescent feminist in her Sycamore classroom; she excelled at math and sports, and was highly attuned to the emotional states of adults who hovered over her like the trees on Village Lane. Popularity just came to her, like sweaty palms or twenty-twenty vision. The Orient love fest around Beth had been so convincing that it propelled her to move to Manhattan, flush with confidence, to start college and a career in the arts. And now, after thirteen years in the city, she had returned to her hometown, replacing the futile dream of artist with the more realistic one of mother and wife of an artist. And it was here, in the very house where she’d begun, that she had come to understand herself as a lowly sufferer of a disease called Americanitis. What does an Americanitis survivor look like? Surely not Beth Shepherd, in the pink glimmer of her mother’s bedroom, testing her urine for signs of new human life, hoping it might help her make sense of her own.

Beth scooped up her long blond hair and twisted it over her shoulder. She practiced rubbing her stomach in concentric circles, a habit she noticed expectant women performing, warming their hands on their own fecundity. She forced an exaggerated smile, the kind that at age thirty-two still came without a hint of the wrinkles her mother paid ungodly sums of money to remove from her own face. Every time Beth visited Orient over the last few years, her mother appeared less like the woman she had known since birth and more like a coquettish alien, a Mylar-balloon rendition whose trick for eternal youth was to confuse people so thoroughly about which parts of her face were real that they gave up guessing her age in frustration (it was fifty-eight). Beth found her mother’s surgery addiction unhealthy and had told her so, swearing that she would allow herself to age naturally, proud of her laugh lines and serrated forehead. Gail had listened to her daughter’s rant, rolling her eyes in signature fashion. “You’ll see,” Gail had laughed almost giddily. “You’ll wake up one day and realize it’s easier to ignore a few nasty comments than it is to watch your face fail before your eyes. Enjoy it while you have it, dear.” Gail was like a broken machine that wouldn’t stop dispensing advice.

When Beth moved back to Orient last April, she had promised to be nicer to her mother. After all, Gail had graciously offered Beth and Gavril the house, deciding it had become too difficult, after three marriages, to maintain alone. “Either you take it over or I sell it,” Gail told her, announcing that she’d put a down payment on a condominium in Southold. That would put her twenty minutes away by car, and Beth had mistakenly hoped that was far enough to ensure that she’d call before visiting. Plus, after years in the city, Beth had forgotten how much the presence of her mother weighed on her nerves. It was easier to forgive a parent’s shortfalls when the relationship was conducted primarily by phone.

Beth’s father, an insurance salesman, had died in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike eleven years ago. After two months of mourning, Gail had surprised her daughter by transforming into a
woman completely different from the quiet, cautious one who had raised her. She channeled her energy into her appearance, and then proceeded to turn marriage into a late-seeded form of social climbing through the Suffolk County ranks. Gail Sheely Shepherd became a Kendrick in a two-year union with a local real estate attorney who had handled the infamous sale of an old neighborhood mansion to a celebrity couple. Gail took her newfound cash reserves and funneled them into the Shepherd house, launching the first of two stunning renovations, adding a sunroom and remodeling the detached garage into a remote-controlled, soundproof “fun den.” The Kendrick romance faded, but the divorce money went toward the first of two face-lifts, and soon she was presenting her reengineered façade to Mario Laurito, an Italian chef who had opened a tragically hip Italian bistro in Greenport. That marriage lasted long enough for a saltwater pool and a hot tub to replace her father’s lavender garden. After that, Gail had soured on the house, complaining to Beth that it held too many ghosts, and began a subtle campaign to convince Beth and Gavril to see it as the perfect backdrop for whatever their lives had in store. Only after they moved in did Beth realize that the neighborhood had soured on Gail. Ten years of construction work had turned the widely admired Gail Sheely Shepherd into the widely reviled Gail Kendrick Laurito. In Beth’s suspicious moments, she wondered if her mother’s eagerness in having them take over the house was merely an attempt to restore the Shepherd name in Orient while managing to hold on to the escalating property value.

Beth pulled her shirt down. She walked into the bathroom, carefully testing the wetness of the floor with her toe before stepping on the tiles. Wasn’t that the role of the soon-to-be mother, for the next seven months (assuming she was two months pregnant, assuming she was pregnant at all), to treat her body as delicately as if she were made of eggshells, a delivery system for fragile cargo? Another mirror awaited her on the medicine cabinet, but Beth opened its door to avoid catching her reflection. Why wasn’t she spinning
around in prepartum mania? She wanted to feel different, inside and out. There were two heartbeats within her now, a new body leaching nutrients from her blood, oxygenating with each inhaled breath, growing, gulping, solidifying.

Beth had failed as an artist. Her single gallery show, a series of portraits, had garnered nasty reviews from influential critics and anonymous bloggers alike—“Alice Neel on horse tranquilizers”; “Elizabeth Shepherd’s brushstrokes lack confidence, like she’s aiming to please rather than revolt against the institutional deadlock of genre painting. Her talent is evident but her passion is not”—and the portraits, returned unsold, haunted her East Village apartment for months like disappointed relatives.

In a fit of rage one whiskey-fueled evening, Beth had taken a kitchen knife and stabbed holes through the canvases. When Gavril returned home drunk from a dinner, he saw the scary violence that she had executed on her work and commended her on the improvement. “Ahh, Beth, they look so strong with wounds in them,” he slurred. “You should take them back to the gallery and hang them again, like your own critique on the critique given to you.” She knew it was only his wine-purpled attempt to be supportive. Was it true that she’d lost her confidence, that at some point in the city her passion had run dry? Maybe, but Beth couldn’t help sensing another force at work: there was an ironic calculus that increasingly seemed to drive the art world, the game where one-upping or undermining every sincere gesture was the only pathway to artistic credibility. The secret she dared not admit in Gavril’s intellectual art circles was this: she loved the beauty of paint applied by brush. Beauty was her embarrassing motivation that refused to mock itself. Beth remembered one Saturday afternoon, just before she decided to give up on New York, when she bumped into one of Gavril’s artist friends after a day spent touring the Chelsea galleries. Luz Wilson, who now owned a huge weekend house on the tip of Orient, asked Beth what shows she had seen. With each new exhibit she mentioned,
Luz asked Beth if she liked it. Each time, Beth responded, “Yes, very much.” Luz finally threw her hands up in despair. “My God, Beth, is there anything you don’t like?”

After her career-killing show, the city seemed different to her, drained of color somehow, phony and cynical and very young. Beth had not been raised particularly religious—lapsed Presbyterian on both sides—but she could believe in a hell that involved getting
this close
to success, only to have her passion dismissed as second-rate. The ironic calculus that Beth couldn’t apply to art suddenly seemed weirdly relevant to her life: Why not be exactly what you said you would never be? Why not embrace the idea of motherhood, move back to the country and concentrate on what was really important?

Gavril, a Romanian five years in America and unable to attend any dinner without drinking his weight in alcohol, loved the idea. Specifically, he loved the idea of having a child. And so did she. Yes, motherhood was a creative act too, she thought, pushing her hips against the sink’s cold porcelain, more vital and affirming than anything she could fashion from paint. Why had she always assumed wanting a baby to be a mark of weakness? Why had she joked in her twenties about sending “get well” cards to girlfriends who had just announced their pregnancies? She scraped sleep from her eyelids with a tissue. Tossing it into the wastebasket, she noticed a corner of the pregnancy-test box peeking out from the trash where she had buried it last night. She pushed it back under the tissues, reluctant to give Gavril any false hope until she knew for certain. Today she would make an appointment with her doctor.

Beth had driven to Greenport yesterday to buy the test at Dooley’s Pharmacy, the same place where she had bought her first pregnancy test at fifteen, naively charging the kit to the family account without realizing that her parents received a monthly itemized list of expenses. Her mother had knocked on her door, receipt in hand, to demand an explanation, a month—which felt like a lifetime—after the results had read negative. Her mother was still her mother then, clumsy with her words, anticipatorily wounded. Beth had lied.
She told her mother that it was for her best friend, Alison, that it had just been a scare, and she’d bought the test for her as a friend. Beth had spent the next three years of high school dealing with the aftermath, noting her mother’s anxious silence every time she went for a sleepover at Alison’s, as if Beth had stuffed her backpack with coat hangers and was going over to her friend’s house to perform an abortion.

As she brushed her teeth, Beth considered the fact that she could have an abortion now—that even if she were 100 percent pregnant, she didn’t have to have this child, this undetected heartbeat below her rib cage. At twenty-four, Beth had gotten an abortion at the clinic on Bleecker Street, and she was so overcome with gratitude for her constitutional rights over her own body that she donated one hundred dollars to Planned Parenthood every year at Christmas. All these years later, she could make an excuse, take the car into the city on Monday, and have the procedure again without Gavril ever knowing. But their entire idea in moving out to Orient had been to start a family. That’s what Beth said she wanted. That’s what Gavril said he wanted. He had agreed to transport his whole studio operation out into the backyard garage at the height of his success, turning the den, with its imported terrazzo floors, into a home for his erratic junk pile of multimedia art supplies. No, it would be selfish of her not to want this baby now.

As she swung the mirror back to its original position, it occurred to her that her recent bout of depression was just as self-centered as her mother’s chemical peels and five-hundred-dollar Botox treatments. Beth knew what was causing her Americanitis. She missed Manhattan. It took her five months away from the city to admit that. She had blamed Manhattan for her failures, not realizing that living there had become one of her defining characteristics.

Beth descended the staircase slowly, like a scuba diver leaving the warm sunlight of the second floor for the darkness underneath. Be nice to Gail, she told herself. Set the relationship on a new and brighter course.

Smackwater Jack, he bought a shotgun
. . .