Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  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 Digests. 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 him
self 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.

  In another life, with all of his heroic pointing, Paul Benchley could have been a valiant sea captain. In this life, at this hour of night, he was just a beleaguered home owner standing knee-deep in waste. “None of this has been settled,” Paul said tiredly. To Mills, some of it looked as settled as bedrock. Still, Paul kept pointing, kept opening doors, until finally history became garbage, literal garbage, the last room a tar pit of bloated black trash bags. “This is what I’ve already managed to throw out,” he said. “I told you to be prepared.”

  What could Mills say? “Jesus, you weren’t kidding.” Yet he was strangely relieved by the junk—Paul really did need help, and no overnight job either, no afternoon sawing branches or sweeping a porch. They trudged back into the epicenter of the back rooms, where floral paper peeled from the walls, and broken plaster exposed buttery swabs of insulation. The cold here was finger numbing, and Mills fought back a shiver.

  “Is this your mom and dad’s stuff?” Mills asked, glancing around for one of the picture frames, a way to put faces to belongings.

  Paul nodded. “And believe me, I’m not a pack rat. I just never got around to dealing with their things. My father died seven years ago and my mother went in June. I pushed it all back into these rooms, and since I only come up on weekends I never found the time. Well, now you’ve seen the worst of it.” Guessing what Mills was looking for, he grabbed a stack of photographs from an open drawer, sifted quickly through them, and handed one over.

  They looked happy, this old couple, engineers of their own stake in the twentieth-century suburban own-everything dream. His mother sat in a wooden foldout chair, her curly hair a premature gray, her hand poised on her shoulder to cup her husband’s fingers. The husband stood behind her, belt around his kidneys, a captain’s hat shadowing his eyes. His father was skinny, skin sunken but very tan, his smile coming less naturally than that of his wife. All this stuff had been theirs: the Birds of Long Island guides, the laundry basket of beige bras and silk dresses, three wise men and a donkey placed on a sheet of antacid medication. It was the fate of most household items to linger on after their owners, offering accidental clues to their hopes and distractions. Paul’s parents, it seemed, had been perfectly normal: they liked birds and religious tokens and wore unisex snow boots and battled indigestion. And now they were dead, survived by a legacy of by-product, an avalanche of junk that never stopped rolling.

  Paul took the photograph from Mills’s hands and returned it to the stack. “Honestly, I almost feel like I should burn these,” he said. “I think that might be the kindest form of death for family photographs. I’ve never seen anything more depressing than a box of old photos for sale in a Salvation Army. Those were all people who mattered. I guess that’s the advantage of our digital age. You can just press delete at the end of your life and no one can touch you.” Paul wiped his forehead. Sweat clouded his glasses.

  “Do you miss them?” Mills asked. “Your parents, I mean.”

  Paul blinked at the question.

  “Yes. They were very good people. Orient people. My father owned a bait shop in Greenport, owned a few boats too, rented them out for bluefish season. And my mother ran a hotel for a while. Well, a bed-and-breakfast–type place on the tip that had been in her family for almost a century. It wasn’t very successful. Tourists stopped coming to Orient once the Hamptons took off. She had to let go of it to pay for my schooling, which was just as well. As a kid, I was put to work nights and weekends to keep up those rooms, which no one ever rented.” Paul blew a channel of air; it whitened before it faded. He dropped the stack of pictures in the drawer and jiggled it shut.

  “What about this house?” Mills asked. “How long has it been in your family?”

  Paul glanced up at the ceiling’s low, splintered crossbeams.

  “My mother’s family had it for generations. If you walk outside, all the property as far as you can see along the Sound belonged to them. My grandfather was forced to sell most of it when he got married, parceled it up, and that was the end of the potato farms. But my parents stayed on here, making ends meet. I suppose that’s why I kept it when they died. I just can’t bring myself to let go of something that’s been in my family for so long. As you can see.” Paul nodded to the junk piles and laughed feebly. Mills noticed a mouse darting behind the phone books. Animals had made their homes back here.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “Maybe I’ll just feel lonelier in this house after we clean all this out, with all these empty rooms. I think my parents always thought they’d have more kids . . .” He waved his arms like a Realtor, as if trying to fill the dead rooms with a flurry of life.

  “Were you with your parents when they died? Did you”—Mills tried to find subtle roads—“take care of them?” Now that he’d seen their picture, he was curious to know how they had died. Why was a person’s exact cause of death so often more fascinating than what they did with their life? Because it explained how they suffered, Mills thought, because it was a reminder that everyone suffers in the end.

  “I was with my mom. I came up for her last month. Cancer got her. And the treatments got her worse, so she stopped attending the chemo sessions I set up. I did all the stupid things a child does when a parent is on her deathbed.”

  Mills didn’t know what all those stupid things were. “Like?” he risked asking.

  Paul cleared his throat. “Like I bought a digit
al camera to record her recollections. I thought it would be a kind of show of respect, to have those Benchley stories chronicled on film. She was so sick, all I managed to get was a dying woman repeating my questions back to me and then going quiet, staring up at the ceiling like the answers to the past were all written there. She had dementia in the end.”

  “You should have showed her the old photos. That might have helped remind her.”

  Paul dipped his head. He wasn’t crying; Mills would have been able to see the tears behind his lenses. Grown men crying were like deep-water fish against aquarium glass, their mouths curved downward, drifting away from the light.

  “I did try that,” Paul admitted. “I carted in the albums, spread them on her lap. Finally, and this was one thing I did get on camera, she brought her arm up and knocked the albums off the bed. ‘I’m sick of those times,’ she said. ‘Get them out of here and give me peace.’” Paul winced and forced a smile. “I realized how selfish it was, asking her to spend her last days entertaining me with memories. It’s hard to lose a parent—especially losing them that way, before they die, till they have nothing left to say to you even while they still can.” He paused. “Maybe the past stopped mattering to her. Maybe she was giving me permission to throw it all out.” His eyes looked vacant now, like a newborn’s, sliding around without absorbing details. Mills got the sense that Paul didn’t bring him out here only for his extra set of hands. He didn’t seem to have anyone else to talk to. Paul snapped awake, his cheeks flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go on like that. About parents.”

  Mills lifted his hands to reassure him. It didn’t bother him to talk about other people’s parents, to know that children liked and sometimes missed their own.