Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Paul Benchley’s family had never called their house a mansion. They didn’t have to; most of Orient did that for them. But it wasn’t a mansion in the traditional sense. In other eastern enclaves studded with extravagant baronial estates, the Benchley house would have looked more like a sprawling servants’ quarters marooned on a large parcel of grass. It wasn’t particularly ornate or even well constructed. The only thing grand about the white clapboard farmhouse was the sheer space it contained, as if its early-nineteenth-century builders had taken perverse delight in adding small, impractical rooms that served only to cause future owners grief about walls too cramped for couches and ceilings too low for tall men. Still, it had sharp, ivy-framed eaves and a wraparound porch, and it managed to make the Muldoons’ residence, just forty feet away, seem both dull and like it was trying too hard. (Pam’s husband, Bryan, was color-blind when it came to house paint.)

  Paul Benchley had grown up in that house. He had moved away for boarding school and college, and then settled in New York, but he still returned for holidays and summer weekends. He had spent a month in Orient last spring when his mother, a callous, overbearing woman smoothed of her harsher personality traits by dementia, was dying of cancer. Technically Paul Benchley was the weekender type that Pam despised, but he was a native Orient son. He hadn’t sold the mansion when it was passed down to him and, to his credit, he didn’t fix up his house to show it off. Best of all for the Muldoons, he stayed away for long periods; this allowed them to adopt his backyard as an extension of their own, strolling down to his tract of marshland on the Sound to watch the gulls swoop for crab at dusk. And Paul Benchley was nice. Still unmarried at forty-six, which was a little strange, but he was an ideal neighbor, invisible but dependable, a bird that found its way home at the right time of year.

  Paul had called Bryan himself the evening before the picnic, explaining that he was bringing a teenager from the city to stay with him. Pam’s husband responded with neighborly restraint, asking only a few minor questions. When Pam interrogated Bryan about the conversation at dinner, all he could muster was “Some kind of foster kid he met in New York who’s having a hard time. Paul thinks Orient will be good for him.” Pam believed in charity; she considered herself a firm practitioner of “live and let live.” But such beliefs evaporated when it came to the stability of her own neighborhood. “What kind of hard time?” she asked her husband. “What do you think that could mean?” Bryan retreated to the basement after dinner to do twenty minutes on his rowing machine, but Pam’s anxious brain refused to turn off. If Paul liked children so much, why hadn’t he had his own or ever once offered to babysit? And how could he board a minor in a house he visited only two or three weekends a month? And, more to the point, what kind of “hard time” was this city kid bringing to the house next door?

  Of course, Paul was nice. Pam couldn’t deny that. But now Pam wondered if his outward friendliness was perhaps a little too friendly, a convenient smoke screen hiding a man she only assumed she knew. All she really knew for certain about Paul Benchley was that he had a successful career as an architect and a reputation as a decent amateur seascape painter on the North Fork. Some year-rounders occasionally murmured questions about Paul’s sexuality, but Pam had never felt it was her business, not until news of this wayward teenager came to light.

  Concerned that the pressures of the picnic might be unfairly darkening her judgment, she texted her friend Sarakit Herrig for reassurance. “Am I overreacting?” Within two minutes, Sarakit wrote back: “You have every right to be unnerved. It’s called being a vigilant mother!” Pam took an extra sleeping pill that night, but her worries continued to mount.

  The next morning, Pam spread linen tablecloths over the long cherrywood table that occupied a permanent spot beneath the oak tree and the three smaller plastic tables her boys had assembled before disappearing to their bedrooms. A curling wind blew from the Sound that morning, carrying a wet, creasing chill, more beginning-of-fall than end-of-summer. Pam had pushed back the date of the picnic twice, hoping to entice Lisa down from college for the occasion, but all her overtures had been met with reluctant maybes. Earlier that morning, Lisa had called to say she wouldn’t be waiting at the train station in Greenport.

  The wind gathered force, stripping the plastic liners from the tables. Pam used coffee mugs and fistfuls of silverware to paperweight the corners. There was potato salad in the mixer, three-bean chili on the stove, and in just two short hours the Muldoon yard would be swarming with guests. Pam pushed her fingers through her coarse brown hair to give it more body and considered a bit of lipstick to enliven the pewter pallor of her skin. She had put on as many pounds as Lisa had lost over the summer with her manic pre-college exercise regimen. The breeze caught a tablecloth and yanked it tumbling across the lawn. As Pam ran after it, a mug in each hand, she glanced at her watch and realized she wouldn’t have time to change before the guests started arriving. She would have to greet them in her madras shirt and gray gingham slacks; this was the outfit that would appear in the family’s photo album and Facebook page for the Orient End of Summer Picnic.

  An hour later, a few neighbors arrived to help with the final preparations. The Muldoon house opened at every sliding and screen door, and food, balloons, and folding chairs appeared as if a benign hurricane had come in through the windows and spilled the contents of the living room onto the lawn. One of the helpers was Karen Norgen, whom Pam spotted padding slowly across the grass in her rain slicker.

  Karen was a retired nurse in the silver-haired halo of her midsixties. She was Christmas bulb–shaped and forever out of breath, but she had sharp eyes and nimble hands that were always quick to intercede without waiting to be asked. Karen carried a crystal punch bowl filled with slapping red liquid, and over this glass heirloom she gave Pam the latest update: the “kid” Paul Benchley was bringing to Orient was no child at all. He was eighteen or nineteen, an adult by any standard—and, worse, he wasn’t even from New York, neither the city nor the state. “Terra incognita,” Karen mused. “A total stranger. Go figure.”

  Pam took the heavy bowl from Karen’s hands. She looked over at the Benchleys’ mansion with fresh resentment. “Who did you hear that from?”

  Karen had heard it directly from old Jeff Trader, a dependable source. Jeff was the never-out-of-work drunk who served as caretaker for dozens of year-rounder and weekender houses in Orient—including the Muldoons. He kept a jar of keys in his truck, making routine visits from house to house, ensuring that windows were locked, pipes drained of water in winter, smoke detectors stocked with fresh batteries, and that the food in refrigerators was eaten before it rotted. Jeff looked after Paul Benchley’s house when he was away, and Paul had called him yesterday to ask him to air out the second bedroom.

  “Paul told Bryan that this young man had been having a hard time,” Pam confided.

  “Well, if that’s not a euphemism for drugs or crime, I’m not sure what is,” Karen said, searching the table for a spoon.

  Pam shook her head and let out a moan. Pam had been throwing this picnic for fourteen years, but she was not a hostess by nature. Just e-mailing out the invitations, let alone all the orchestrated prep work she had to finish before mustering the cheery exhilaration required for a successful event, put her in an aggravated mood. She channeled her worries into a chorus of rapid-fire questions for Karen, posed without pause or upturn. “If I started taking in stray teenagers no one knows, don’t you think I’d have the decency to ask my neighbors first? Why does Paul Benchley feel the need to bring his goings-on in the city here? Wouldn’t his Manhattan apartment be a more convenient place to house a stranger with problems? When did Orient decide that it was okay to turn the house next-door to mine into a youth hostel?”

  “Just what we need,” Karen said, shaking her head as she stirred the punch. “More incidents.”

  Holly Drake, who owned an upscale textile shop on Little Bay Road, stopped tying balloons to the branch of an oak and turne
d toward Pam. Holly, although not born or raised in Orient, had lived in these parts since her marriage seven years ago and prided herself on being the voice of liberal reason whenever close-mindedness threatened to choke the village off from the twenty-first century. Holly bragged about her political causes, but Pam hadn’t forgotten that she had refused to contribute to her car-window fund-raiser that summer.

  “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 She
pherd 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.