Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Beth stepped back. She tried not to connect this puddle of tar stuck with bones and fingernail clippings and her own blond hair with the fetal smudge on the printout in her hand. But as she stared down, all she could think of was the pulsing shape on the monitor.

  “It will grow,” he said. “It will keep eating away all the clean space. That will be my next work. A landscape, or the death that hides in a landscape because it is always there.” He finished his whiskey. Beth was too dazed to open the printout now, too afraid the screen shot would match the puddle at her feet and rob them both of the joy. She felt dizzy from the tar fumes and noticed that the lime green leaflet on the mutant animal had gotten tucked in the fold of the paper. She shoved the printout under her arm and, without another word, walked to the door.

  “I almost forgot,” Gavril said as she touched the knob. “That nurse stopped by while you were out, the one from next door. She said Magdalena would like you to drop by today. She probably wants to complain about me making noise. Don’t listen to her. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”

  The fresh air revived her. The tips of sailboats rocked in the Sound over the pink-tinted trees, the color of autumn turning colder, the color of baby balloons and crib liners and blankets all ready to descend on her in the coming months. Gavril’s new piece had shaken her, but she told herself she was acting stupid. It was just art. It had nothing to do with her, with them. She stopped on the lawn and tried to think rationally, but nothing came. Just the cold breeze blowing sidelong, scattering leaves.

  Beth made her visit in the late afternoon. Magdalena’s nurse, Alvara, answered the door. She was tall and lanky, with aristocratic cheekbones and yellow dish gloves stretched to her elbows. “She will be so glad you come. Messus Kiefer very anxious.” Alvara led Beth through a blue-carpeted living room furnished with a rosewood armoire and an ancient, ticking grandfather clock. They passed through a cramped galley kitchen and entered a screened-in sunroom fitted with wicker chairs and raffia stools draped in orange cushions. The screen that shut the sunroom off from the backyard was sagged and warped, distorting the green grass into gauzy waves. In the far corner, Magdalena sat with one foot propped on a stool, the table by her side covered in newspapers, medicine bottles, and a small plastic terrarium.

  The frail old woman stared blindly, deer-eyed, at the approaching figure. Only at five feet did she recognize Beth. She swatted her blistered fingers, beckoning her closer. Beth swept forward and allowed those coarse, disfigured stubs to cup her chin.

  “Take the newspapers off, sit,” she said warmly, pointing to a stool. “Thank you for coming. So good of you.” Against the wicker halo of her chair, Magdalena appeared almost stately with her shorn white hair. Her voice had also gained traction, her words sharp and forceful instead of sailing faintly from her throat. The last time Beth had seen her, on the beach when they found Jeff Trader, she had looked so close to death. Now Magdalena leaned forward to glance through an interior window and whispered, “Let’s wait until Alvara leaves. She scolds me for holding any opinions that aren’t about bed, bathroom, or bees.”

  “I was just admiring your beautiful furniture on my way in here,” she said. “The armoire and the clock. I keep telling my husband that we need to invest in some quality furniture if we decide to stay for good.”

  “Oh, that old stuff,” Magdalena said. “They’ve been here as long as I have. They belonged to Molly.” Molly was Magdalena’s longtime girlfriend, who had died of breast cancer a few years before Beth was born. From what Beth heard, they had been a loving couple, holding hands while they strolled the country fields. Even Orient’s most closed-minded citizens had accepted the two women as lovers without debate. Beth assumed that was because Magdalena had never asked for their acceptance, and thus never gave them the option of turning her away.

  Beth noticed the terrarium on the table flurrying with honeybees. A few crawled restlessly up its sides.

  “How are the bees?” she asked. It was the single topic she knew her neighbor to appreciate—the way a child who expresses a passing interest in horses finds that every family gift or conversation for years thereafter revolves around horses, until the simple pastime has turned into an unsettling obsession. “Did you bring the hives in yet for autumn?”

  “I will this week,” Magdalena replied. She grabbed the terrarium and opened the lid. Beth wanted to caution her, but before she could, Magdalena dipped her hand inside and drew out one of the insects, holding it pinched between her fingertips. “These are the males,” she said. Beth leaned in to examine it. “Any stimulation,” Magdalena said, and finished the thought by gently rubbing her fingers together. The bee’s hoary tail split open, and a thin, stamenlike organ shot out and curled. “Like all males, harmless and easily aroused.” She laughed. “It’s the females you have to be careful about.”

  Magdalena took such pleasure in her bees that for a moment Beth envied the hobby. The cataracts in the woman’s eyes seemed to clear as she stared at the insect, which crawled slowly along the notch of her finger.

  “The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. “Maybe that’s bullshit. I happen to like the beasts. But I didn’t ask you to visit just so I could bore you. I do have a point.”

  “You aren’t boring me.”

  Alvara dipped her head into the sunroom, her hands clenching her purse strap, a tattered windbreaker covering her white uniform.

  “Ma’am,” she said to announce her presence.

  “Oh, yes, Alvara, you can go for the night. Thank you.” Alvara nodded and withdrew. Magdalena’s hands reached for Beth’s arm. “If I had known at your age that I’d be taking advantage of immigrant labor . . . If I had known I would become a ma’am to a Mexican woman who crossed the border so she could cook my meals and wash my back.” She paused briefly. “Well, if I don’t hire her she’s in a far worse situation, isn’t she? So here I am at eighty-three, caught in an ethical trap set by a system I used to fight. All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.”

  “I’m not sure I ever had any convictions,” Beth replied. She felt able to be honest with Magdalena, here in her sunroom that smelled of honey and tiger balm. “Isn’t that awful to admit?”

  “Yes, your generation,” Magdalena said with a shaking head. “We fought all the battles thinking you would continue our work. Only you never did. They call today the age of individuality. My god, what were we before? Maybe we made it all too comfortable for you. But the war’s not over, Beth. It’s just harder to perceive.”

  “Where does Alvara live?” Talking with the elderly meant constantly changing the subject to prevent the conversation from falling into despair.

  “On the rough side of Greenport. In the shacks where the potato pickers used to live. Her husband and son work the vineyards, tending to the grapes. Oh, it’s a pretty idea to have wines from the North Fork. All the vineyards cropping up around us make us feel very sophisticated, like a little French tableau. But it’s still field labor for illegal Mexicans we treat like slaves. You think about that the next time you drive the back roads to Riverhead and see all of those wineries. Look closely. Who’s out in the fields collecting the harvest?” Magdalena mimed spitting into her lap. “Wine tastings. They don’t even drink it. They spit it right out.”

  Beth smiled wanly. She wondered if all people, given eighty years, eventually turned on the world. Maybe it was their way of leaving it behind. But she did wonder whether Magdalena might have ended up less bitter if she had had children of her own, if she’d had grandchildren coming to listen to her instead of Beth. Or were children just a consolation for those who hadn’t produced anything meaningful with their minds? Beth closed her eyes to vanquish the thought.

  “Ho
w is that husband of yours?” Magdalena asked.

  “Gavril? He’s fine. He’s hard at work on his next art piece.”

  “Work,” Magdalena repeated dismissively. “He’s always in that garage making noise, going in and out. I’ve watched him. Or Alvara has, and she reports back to me. Bringing friends in, drinking, playing around by the pool.” Magdalena touched Beth’s wrist. “I don’t mean to pry. But you’re so lovely, ever since you were a child. I just want to make sure he’s good to you, that he cares about you and your . . .”

  Beth smiled, a polite way of signaling a change in subject.

  “He does,” she said. “Now did you want me to do something for you?”

  Magdalena gathered herself in her chair. “Today I came from Jeff Trader’s funeral.”

  “Yes.” Beth sighed. “I didn’t know you two were friends. I hardly knew him myself.”

  “I suppose you know that the police consider it a suicide.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that indeed,” she replied. “Only it wasn’t a suicide. I’ll tell you what it was.” She shot Beth a warning look and craned her neck. “It was murder.”

  Magdalena let the word settle over the room for a minute. But it would take Beth more than a minute to make sense of it. Was Magdalena crazy, senile, or so lonely she couldn’t accept the loss of the local caretaker without blaming society?

  “I can’t believe it would be—” Beth began.

  The old woman exhaled deeply, a drone of disappointment. She reached for her aluminum canes and rearranged them against the arm of her chair. “It was murder,” she said again, louder. “I know what you’re thinking. Poor Miss Kiefer. She’s finally ready for the retirement home. But I’m certain I’m right. I knew Jeff well. He wouldn’t have taken his own life. I admit he might have been drunk when he died. But what was he doing out in the harbor on a Sunday morning?”

  Beth blinked in ignorance.

  “If he went there by himself, where was his truck? I had Alvara drive by his house on Beach Lane. It’s still there, parked in the driveway. He certainly didn’t walk the four miles. Someone drove him there. Someone took him out on the water. I’m guessing in a boat. Someone got him into the water and tied that rope around his legs, knotted it”—Magdalena clenched the folds of her pants—“knowing that he couldn’t keep his head above water for long, knowing eventually he’d drown. A person or persons. Someone killed him. Someone left him out there to die.”

  “But,” Beth said, coming to sanity’s defense, until she was stopped by Magdalena’s wagging finger.

  “Anyone who knew Jeff, really knew him, knew he didn’t like to swim. He didn’t fish either. And I’ll be damned if he decided to jump into the water on a Sunday morning and start fiddling around with a shellfish rack. Those racks are private property, and anyone who’s lived in Orient long enough knows that fishermen are willing to shoot a person who messes around with their livelihood. It’s nonsense,” she hissed. A small white bubble formed on her lips; she wiped it away with a shaky knuckle. “The whole idea is preposterous. You’d think anyone in Orient would see that immediately. But instead . . .” Magdalena dug through the newspapers on the table and located the same lime green pamphlet that had appeared on Beth’s door. “Instead, this is what concerns them. This drivel, this fear of science. We don’t care about a man who spent his entire life serving this village, but we’re willing to take to the streets over some sad animal that washed up on the shore. They’re scared all right, scared of the wrong thing.”

  Magdalena hesitated long enough for Beth to ask a question.

  “But who would want to kill Jeff Trader? Why on earth would someone—” She almost said “bother” but caught herself.

  Magdalena shifted in her chair. Her eyes blinked slowly, as if to clear the fogs of cataract or memory, and her voice grew weak from the exertion of talking.

  “We split them last spring,” she said, nodding toward the three hives spaced out on her backyard lawn. “You take a young queen and you separate her with a batch of drones, and, after a while, they accept her as their new queen or they don’t. Jeff helped me. We did everything right, but the drones wouldn’t take. The queen died, but I kept the box out there anyway, because I didn’t want Jeff to know we had failed. You can’t always build a new colony. The bees have minds of their own.” It took Beth a minute of staring into Magdalena’s eyes to realize she was crying. Beth reached for a tissue, but the old woman shook her head. “It wasn’t a likely friendship,” she said quietly. “A man who fought in a war and a woman who fought against it. But we both suffered wounds from those years, and those wounds begin to look the same after a while. I never served him a drink in my house. That was my only stipulation. But I pretended to turn away when he added a little gin to his coffee. You don’t punish someone for figuring out how to survive.”

  “He was a kind man,” Beth said reassuringly, although she had no idea if that was accurate.

  Magdalena stared at her like she had missed her point.

  “Jeff had keys to every home in Orient. He knew things—secrets. Secrets people leave out on their tables. After a few coffees, he’d brag that he had so much dirt on most of our neighbors, he could live off blackmail for the rest of his life. I’m not saying he was blackmailing anybody. I don’t believe he was that kind of man. He never told me what he knew. But in the last few months, he started to act differently. Nervous. He said something bad was going on. He said it scared him and he didn’t know if he should leave it alone or not. But he did tell me he was keeping records. He had a book, a brown leather journal, the kind sailors use to note their navigation. He hid it behind some cereal, I think, in the kitchen of his mobile home.”

  Beth could see where Magdalena’s thoughts were heading, and she wondered if she went to the bathroom and waited long enough before coming back, whether Magdalena would be sleeping when she returned.

  “I want you to go to his house and find that book for me,” she said. “I want you to bring that book back along with the jar of keys he kept in his truck. Will you do that for me, please?”

  “Oh,” Beth said quickly. “I’m not sure I can. It’s trespassing. I bet the police have already sealed his house off.”

  Magdalena’s lips puckered. She closed her eyes and opened them again, clearing them slightly.

  “It’s your town,” she stammered. “It’s more your town than it is mine at this point. I don’t see this as a favor.” Magdalena started to rise from her chair but fell back against the cushions, her arms and legs showing deep patches of purple and blue that reminded Beth of the shades of skin in her unsellable portraits. Beth bent forward to help her, which amounted to holding her shoulders steady against the wicker.

  “Don’t— But you must. You have to,” Magdalena sputtered, kicking her legs.

  Without thinking, because Beth did have a decent heart and that made it hard to refuse the elderly, she said, “Okay, all right. If it means that much to you.”

  “It’s your town,” she repeated. “It’s you who must decide what kind of place this is for your family. It’s not just a given. I hope you realize that.”

  Beth didn’t. Not really. But Magdalena was speaking with such force that she could only nod in consent. “I’ll stop by tomorrow,” Beth said. “I can look. I can’t promise I’ll find anything.” Those words seemed to soothe her more than Beth’s awkward clamp on her collarbone. “But if you really believe it was murder, don’t you think you should talk to the police?”

  Magdalena snorted. “You think they would listen to what I have to say? If Alvara doesn’t believe me, why should they? You’ll find when you get old just how much people care to listen. I’d go myself, but I can barely walk. Something bad is happening, and I think it has to do with Orient.”

  “With Orient?”

  “The last time I saw Jeff, he showed up unexpectedly and just stood there,” she said, pointing across the room at the door. “He was so upset he
refused to sit down. Something wasn’t right. He wasn’t himself. He said to me, ‘The historical board is up to something, disguising itself as good.’ He said he was worried that something bad was going to happen. Of course, I thought he was drunk. He was slurring his words, and I could smell the liquor. He was in an awful state. I told him to sit until he calmed down, but he ignored me. He left in such a hurry. Now I think he came here because he was scared.”

  “But aren’t you on the historical board?” Beth asked. “What could he have meant?”

  Magdalena swatted her away. “Please just bring me the book. That’s all I ask. I wouldn’t want to involve a pregnant woman in anything dangerous.”

  Beth let go of Magdalena’s shoulders. She stood to her full height and roped her arms over her stomach.

  “Why do you think I’m pregnant?”

  Magdalena smirked. “My dear, I’m not completely blind. I see you right in front of me. You have that glow of extra blood. It’s what makes pregnant women look so happy. Tell me I’m not wrong.”

  In the silence that followed, Beth heard the water groaning in the pipes and the beams of the house shift and settle. Through the trees in Magdalena’s backyard, she saw the lights in Gavril’s studio, yellow and spidery against the dying sun.

  CHAPTER 9

  Beth didn’t drive to Jeff Trader’s home the following day. Gavril borrowed her car for a meeting in the city with his gallerist, Samuel Veiseler, so she stayed indoors, guiltily avoiding the windows that looked out onto Magdalena’s property. She sat at her laptop, browsing baby accessories on Web sites that were as cute and convivial as New Age cults (“every safe-n-snug baby needs the Safety First Alpha Omega Elite Convertible Car Seat with a ‘Munchkin on the Move’ decal at no added delivery”). On a search engine, she typed in “when do pregnant” and the engine predicted the rest of her thought: “women start showing.” Most pregnancies became physically apparent within twelve to sixteen weeks, when the top of the uterus grew out of the pelvic cavity, which, according to Beth’s calculations and despite her sudden anatomical horror, meant she had just over a month to make some sort of announcement or decision. She didn’t intend to wait that long to tell Gavril the news, but the blank October grid on the kitchen calendar budding with opportunities and delays consoled her. She typed in “what are other signs of pregnancy.”