Orient (6 page)

Beth peered around Paul, looking for the so-called con artist he’d brought with him. Paul followed her gaze, then waved toward a young man lingering near the driveway. “Over here,” he shouted. “Have you met Beth?”

So this was the con artist. His lips flickered the semblance of a smile, but he remained frozen on the driveway, digging his foot into the gravel. He looked younger than she had expected and lonelier than someone from New York, too unsure of himself to last long in that state of teenage indecision. His black hair swooped around his forehead, much like Gavril’s when he didn’t comb it before it dried. His face was angular and his skin newt white, his features so sharp they seemed engineered to cut through wind. In a few years, she thought, when his shoulders filled out he would be rather handsome. He didn’t seem capable of a con.

“He’s from New York?” she said.

“Only briefly. I’ve asked him to come out here to help me on the house. The truth is, he ran into a little trouble in Manhattan. Nothing criminal,” Paul quickly clarified. “He’s really a sweet kid that just got a bit misdirected in the city. I thought Orient might give him some stability.”

“I get it. Instead of scaring him straight, you’re hoping to bore him straight.” It wasn’t funny, and even Beth didn’t try to save the
joke by laughing. “Well, let me know if he needs anything. Even if you want someone to show him around for an afternoon—I’d be happy for the distraction.”

“Would you?” Paul grabbed at the offer, as if she might retract it. “That would be very kind of you. I’m sure he’d love that.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling.

“By the way, congratulations. I hear you’re married. Your husband’s also an artist—did I get that right?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Another goddamned city artist, I’m sure some of the neighbors are thinking.”

Paul just nodded, as if to convey,
That’s how these Orient people are
.

“You know,” Beth said, “the couple that bought your mother’s old inn—they’re friends of mine. Friends of my husband’s really. Luz Wilson and Nathan Crimp. They’re artists too.”

“Well, they’ve got their work cut out for them,” Paul said, shaking his head. “I heard it was bought, but I haven’t been there in years. I don’t know if the previous owners managed to make much headway, but that old shell was one bad hurricane from falling into the sea.”

Beth decided not to tell him that Luz and Nathan had gutted the place, knocking down every wall and bulldozing every inch of lawn. The old inn was buffered by enough acres of land that their renovations hadn’t caught the wrath of neighbors, the way her mother’s had. Even though Paul was a city person, Beth saw no reason to sway the local tide against her friends. Luz and Nathan were such volatile personalities, they’d have no trouble doing that on their own.

Paul’s guest was still standing on the sidelines. “So if you want to meet Mills, it looks like we’re going to have to go to him.”

Beth turned to collect her purse from the table as Paul headed off toward the driveway. Suddenly Pam Muldoon cut in front of her, breathing hard.

“Do you want to take plates home?” she asked Beth.

“Plates?”

Pam blinked in confusion. “Plates of food for your husband. We can wrap up some of the burgers. It’s such a shame he couldn’t join you. Don’t you think he’d like that?” Pam nodded yes to her own question. “Come with me to the kitchen and I’ll make a nice spread for . . . Gavin, isn’t it? We’ve got too much to finish ourselves.”

Pam tugged at her wrist, leading her toward the house. Beth wanted to flag down Paul but he was already too far away, disappearing across the yard. She tried to explain that food wasn’t necessary, that her husband had probably already eaten, that his name was Gavril, that it would all go to waste in her refrigerator just as fast.

Fifteen minutes later, she carried a grocery bag of scraps out the front door. Night had settled on the lawn and cleared most of the picnic. Paul and the young man were gone. Sarakit Herrig was wrapping her three children in coats. Adam Pruitt winked at her, and she continued walking down the slope of the grass toward her car. She looked for a garbage can where she could toss Pam’s food, but a Pearl Farms Realty sign was the only thing in sight.

Beth threw the bag in the backseat and started the ignition. She turned on the heat and felt safe inside the cramped cavern of the Nissan. It hummed, it moved at her command, it played her favorite songs and smelled of her perfume. The car was one of the few exotic pleasures of non-Manhattan life—indeed, it was a kind of proxy Manhattan, a compact space with everything in easy reach.

She drove down Youngs Road until she reached Main, one way east, the other west. One way offered a promise of family life with Gavril at her house, the other the charades of the city: a quiet studio apartment with jars of paint waiting to be used, windows with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and beetle-black cars sliding across it, meaningless bathroom fucks with men not so different from Adam Pruitt. Which way would she go? Why did she even have to pick a direction? She tried to merge both arrows into one in her mind, but they bounced back into place as if on springs.

She turned onto Main Road, trying to picture not the arrows but herself, a pregnant woman in her early thirties. Beth had once painted faces so carefully that every fold and fissure of skin was scarred onto the canvas. All she could muster now of her own face was a faint white circle awaiting definition. Beth had no vision of herself. If she’d been forced to describe herself to a police sketch artist, the result would be a drawing of her at twenty different ages, none of them today, none of them right.

As she swiveled the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of herself, a streak of light appeared out of the corner of her eye. She slammed on the brake, rocking forward against the steering wheel. Her headlights homed in on a fluorescent orange square retreating into the night, with black shapes around it rotating, vibrating—a floating, fleeing danger sign. Beth stepped on the gas and passed a woman in a reflector vest running on the side of the road. Her shoes crunched the blond tufts of moonlit grass, her eyes staring forward in numb determination. House lights shined against the water, the top floors burning as night drew residents to higher ground.

On the road, the joggers were out. And somewhere in the darkness, so were the hunters.

CHAPTER
3

A
s Paul searched his pockets for his keys, he told Mills to “be prepared.” The warning might have alarmed most first-time houseguests, but Mills had been prepared for the last two hours. He was sick of standing still.

The art of hitchhiking relied on constant motion. That meant not only walking along the road while trying to flag a ride, but also moving through towns and cities, never sleeping anywhere twice. It had taken Mills seventeen days to get from California to New York, and in that time he never once overstayed his welcome—whether at a diner or on a park bench or in the stone-scrubbed bus terminals where all the pay phones had lost their receivers. In theory hitchhiking seemed dangerous, but in reality the rhythm of hours and loose small talk fit his sense of purpose: jump in, cover some distance, and thank them for their kindness. He had encountered no nightmare scenarios, no serial killers scouring the desert, no meth labs burning holes in the atmosphere, no crooked cops or grandfathers with tampered passenger-door locks or gas-station ex-cons with makeshift dungeons. America, for Mills, had almost been one long, amicable disappointment. He hadn’t stopped moving until he reached Manhattan.

The drive from the city with Paul had brought back the memory of travel. And once they arrived in Orient, Mills found the stillness difficult to take. As he loitered near the picnic, never quite joining in, Mills could tell already that the squint-mouthed hostess, Pam
Muldoon, didn’t like him. Paul seemed oblivious, beckoning him over: “Come here. Have you met Beth?” Soon Pam called Tommy away on the excuse of needing paper towels (“Tommy, can you get some paper towels out of the kitchen cupboard?” “Tommy, the paper towels!”), and Mills lingered in the driveway, pushing his shoes through the gravel. It was Paul’s house that interested him, anyway.

Mills had agreed to help Paul fix up his house without understanding exactly what that meant. He’d pictured pipes bursting, tiles popping from bathroom walls, glinting figurines in need of a polish. Mills told Paul straight out that he wouldn’t stay in Orient only out of Paul’s sympathy. Sympathy was a necessary tool for hitchhiking, but Mills couldn’t stand it beyond a one-hour window. “Are you sure you have something for me to do?” he had asked. Paul nodded in assurance, his Adam’s apple bobbing under whiskered skin, his hands raised in oath. “Believe me, there’s plenty,” he said.

As the picnic wore on, Mills studied the white clapboard farmhouse with its manicured bushes and paint-scabbed porch, searching for clues to the disorder that awaited him inside. Thanks to the foster homes of his childhood, Mills had developed a keen eye for predicting what state of emergency existed inside a house by the travesty of its front yard: mud plots resistant to grass but wild with Coors Light cans; duct-taped satellite dishes spiking off storm drains; plastic lounge chairs compressed by the weight of their owners, set facing the street like California thrones. Judged on these terms, Paul Benchley’s house was peculiarly vacant of character. Maybe in the East, homes were too old and worn by years of salt water to bear the imprint of their owners. Except, that is, for the Muldoons’, where the yanked-open screen doors and an upstairs window emblazoned with anarchy stickers carried the mark of fleeing children.

In the darkness of the porch, Paul stooped to locate the keyhole. For Mills, nights along the California beaches had possessed a feeling of limitlessness, the deep Pacific waters and glass-blown horizon a perfect dreamer’s landscape. In Orient, the thick salt air closed in with the night like a pillow held over the dreamer’s face. Paul unlocked the
door, and Mills followed him into a small tin-ceilinged vestibule. He slid his hands over a radiator that was cold and sharp with rust. The night air was already tracing their breath in contrails.

As Paul fidgeted with the inner door, Mills focused on Paul’s thinning bald spot. Mills wondered if Paul knew he was balding. Was it his duty as a friend to tell him? Or would it be taken as an insult?
Paul, I’m sorry. I feel like someone should tell you. It’s the size of a quarter on the back of your head and there’s probably still a chance you could stop it with some kind of over-the-counter lotion
. Instinctively, Mills touched the back of his own head, comforted by the clench of curls rooted to his scalp. He had no way of knowing the tide line of his own father’s hair, or his mother’s father’s.

The door finally gave, and they both fell forward into warmer blackness. Mills hunted his brain for a compliment to compensate for his standoffish behavior at the picnic. “Your place, Paul,” he said, stumbling. “It’s beautiful.”

“You haven’t seen it yet,” Paul replied, laughing. He flipped a light switch, and Mills did see it.

The front rooms were spare and neat to the point of compulsion, with little evidence of needing much more than a vacuum. But then Paul was an architect; naturally his parlor and dining room would reflect a man who drew clean lines for a living. Mills dropped his duffel bag by the door. As exhausted as he was by the drive and the unexpected hiatus of the picnic, he was also familiar with the clumsy negotiations of first nights in strange houses. “So here I am.” “So this is my bed.” “So I’ll just lie down now and you can continue watching television like I was always here or never was.” Many of his foster parents had existed primarily as hunched, aromatic shadows moving from bedroom to toilet. But Paul didn’t lead Mills up the staircase or dismiss him with a spare set of towels. Instead he busied himself turning on more lights.

Mills rubbed the front of his jeans—a nervous habit, as if he were coaxing two resistant ponies out of a barn—and followed Paul into the parlor. A brown tweed sofa sat under lace-curtained windows;
a glass coffee table held a stack of
Architectural Digest
s. In the adjacent dining room, a long table cut across a sweep of whitewashed floorboards, slender chrome legs holding a heavy marble slab, deep midnight blue with foamy white fissures.

“It’s like a flowing river,” Mills said, running his fingers along the cold surface.

Paul smiled, impressed. His glasses glittered under the ceiling fixture.

“It was from a river in Africa,” Paul said. “I’ve had it for five years and it’s still ice cold on your arms when you lean on it. It’s kept the coldness of the river and the earth. Don’t you love a material that refuses to surrender its properties? We expect everything to behave like plastic, but this marble—the memory of its origin is stored in its core.”

Mills returned the smile but removed his fingers, realizing that the table was one of many objects in the room that seemed to ask not to be touched. Some of Paul’s possessions sat under glass jars on the mantel—a pair of antique binoculars, a taxidermied oriole, a miniature silver lighthouse with a red jewel fitted in its beacon. The only other contents of the front rooms were the shelves of books, their spines calling out the wonders of architecture, art, historic homes, and historic families. Paul must have spent all of his free time reading, or perhaps collecting books was so time-consuming that there weren’t any hours left to read. Mills felt tired just surveying their titles.

As he scanned them, a sliver of panic rose in his throat. What was he doing, coming to stay here, a hundred miles away from the safety of Manhattan? This house was so pristine, it clearly needed no repair work. Mills suddenly wondered if Paul had brought him out here for reasons that weren’t entirely benign. Mills hadn’t done drugs, not heroin or even cocaine, in four days—four fingers and tomorrow would be five, an open hand—but the effects of his last weeks in New York still left him headachy and dehydrated, dulling his judgment and blunting his instincts. Only now in the quiet of
Paul’s dining room, against the blackness of the windows and the wind jittering their casings, did Mills feel vulnerable, out of screaming distance, down to one of two very different men separated by a piece of excavated stone.

“Paul,” he started. “I don’t think you need me in this house.”

Paul stared at him, his pupils so wide the blues of his eyes were reduced to coronas. But they didn’t skirt his body or calculate his distance from the door. They remained on Mills’s face, as if worried that his guest had found his home unsatisfactory, not as warm and welcoming as its owner.

“You’re probably exhausted. Of course you are. Your bedroom’s upstairs, but first let me show you what I had in mind.”

Paul was not a man Mills would describe as handsome. He was short, with bristled, brown hair that reddened and silvered under ceiling bulbs. His complexion was as white as liquid soap, but he had a strong jaw and a broom-shaped mustache, the head of a lion whose mane had been shaved, and, Mills guessed, underneath his wool sweater, a gourdlike body of muscles and chest hair. Take a decade off Paul Benchley, and he would have been a man of harder substance. He had thick wrists, a neck etched with skin lines, and the beginning of a lump at his waist. If Paul’s eyes were closed, he would have appeared old, a taker of too much space. Peering through his wire-rimmed glasses, though, his eyes were alert and pensive and mostly unwilling to see the worst. They had not seen the worst in Mills, and it was because of those eyes that Mills followed him down the hallway into the recesses of the house.

Mills had been duped before. Even two of his foster dads had seen something to like in him and tried to get what they could. They had sprung on him in his sleep, groping with reckless hands, probably not meaning to be so brutal, but then going slowly, attempting a seductive line of attack, might have triggered the standstill of fear, the same way a moment’s hesitation can stop a person from running full throttle into the ocean. Mills had thrown the right amount of punches to protect himself.

The truth was, most of his “parents” had been rather uninterested in his growing body, obsessed more by how to clean the stains he left on their blankets than by how those stains got there in the first place. Mills understood that his preferred method of masturbation—and at nineteen he had only recently felt able to control that all-consuming urge—was embarrassingly infantile. He would lie on a bed or on the floor with a blanket wedged against his erection, rubbing against the bundled fabric, effectively humping the ground, until he came, usually on the blanket or across the carpet, no matter how strategically he had placed a wad of tissue. He’d never learned the art of self-gratification while seated on a toilet. It seemed one of the many lessons that had eluded him as he passed into adulthood—like shaving or using the correct fork or catching a football with the crutch of his shoulder. Thoughts of masturbation felt unnecessary to the point of derangement right here in Paul Benchley’s house, but nevertheless the worry was there, triggering his anxiety the way thoughts of cigarettes provoke chain-smokers.

Paul turned around before opening the door at the end of the hall. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about being here,” he said, placing his hand lightly on Mills’s shoulder, as if he didn’t want to trouble it with weight. “You’ve had a hard time in New York, and you should be focusing on getting away from that. So if this seems too much for you, we don’t have to start tomorrow. Little by little. Whatever you’re okay with. Just promise me one thing. No drugs find their way into this house.”

“I promise,” he said.

Even though Paul had seen him at his absolute lowest, scrounging his last dollars for the tiniest tinfoil of powder to snort, Mills didn’t consider himself an addict. He would prove to Paul that he could accomplish any task asked of him, to pay him back for saving him. Mills could still be living another future in New York right now, slumped in a hallway, begging for change on the street, entering the apartments of strange men to perform his embarrassing floor ritual in front of them for fifty bucks. One of his first friends in the
city had bragged about earning fifty bucks sampling the food of a senile cosmetics mogul who believed that his stepchildren were poisoning him. Those were junkie jobs, requiring little more skill than basic human functioning, and they were often lucrative. His friend, a Kentucky runaway fattened on grass-fed veal and stewed plums, always told him, “There’s an economy for everything in New York. Someone will pay to cut your toenails if you’re smart enough to find them.” His friend could have been lying, covering up a darker cash source. He also could have been telling the truth.

“So what’s back there?” Mills asked. “What am I in for?”

Paul opened the door. Room by room, light switch by light switch, through pleated lamp shades and ceiling bowls that doubled as insect morgues, the messy maze of the Benchley house slowly revealed itself. The shock of the number of rooms that forked and followed in never-ending architectural freefall was tempered only by the astounding amount of junk that was piled up within them. No wonder Paul kept his hallway door shut: something had to prevent the clutter from infecting the monastery of his parlor and dining room. The first rooms, at least, were navigable, though pocked with magazines in weedy, dog-eared piles, shoe boxes of opened and unopened envelopes, shoes with misplaced sole cushions, broken easels and replacement easels with dried canvases leaning against them (“these are my very amateur paintings,” Paul said, picking up a seaside landscape bathed in yellow), canoe paddles, a portable grill asphyxiated by a long black cord, rolls of architectural blueprints, and an infestation of batteries that had crawled into wood crevices and died quietly on their expiration dates.

These first rooms, however, served only as recent storage. The deeper they went, the more they retreated into history—not Paul’s history, but a history of dead people, his parents and doubtless others before them. At each new room, and through the haze of each porcelain lamp, the two went forward into a stewy sea of costume jewelry, Suffolk County phone books, landline telephones, air-conditioning units, a ceramic arms-out Jesus missing his back support and floating
like a shipwreck victim awaiting rescue. Blackened picture frames held crooked family photographs. Paul had to shuffle sideways to carve a path, and Mills jumped to keep up, triggering clouds of dust as albums fell in his wake.