Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Mills,” he said.

  “Yeah, I heard about you. Heard you were staying here.” She glanced at him as if assessing a bad reputation. Mills felt not for the first time that his body communicated a message that was lost on him but clear to others. “You know the doorbells in these prehistoric homes—they barely burp. The door was unlocked, so I went inside to see if he was around. You can do that out here, make yourself welcome, unlike in Manhattan.” She shrugged and guttered smoke through her teeth. “Screw it.” She jumped down the steps and headed for the street with graceless, stomping feet. He quickly descended after her, shepherding her off the property like a small mutt herding an uncaring game bird. She flicked her cigarette, a speeding bullet, into the curb.

  “Do you want me to tell him you stopped by?”

  She eyed him over the roof of her black sports coupe. “No. Better not to. I’ll come by another time.” He watched her drive toward Main Road, in the direction of the death that brought the neighbors to stand on their porches, oblivious, car windows rattling with the bass of her speakers.

  Mills rounded the house and found Paul carting his wet landscape across the lawn. “I lost track of time,” Paul yelled. “I need to get our groceries before the market closes. Otherwise, it’s pizza night.”

  When Mills told him the news of Magdalena Kiefer, Paul dropped the canvas, leaving a smudge of the sea on the grass. It was clear that Paul didn’t want to cry in front of him. He made an excuse about stowing his paint supplies in the cellar, and Mills watched him open the bulkhead doors and climb down the back steps.

  Mills went up to his bedroom, sitting against the sill and flipping through the pages of Jeff Trader’s journal. There had to be something of interest in those pages. Each address had its list of tedious tasks—as if it were a warning to Mills not to get too comfortable in the role of Paul’s housecleaner. Eventually he would have to find a skill, something he was good at, something dependable—and hopefully not just a minimum-wage job where time was a tract of land parceled off until there was no acreage left. What did Mills want from his future—anything more specific than a city? For so long New York had been his only direction.

  He glanced across the lawn at the Muldoons’ house, as he had many times in the last week, hoping to catch sight of Tommy (coming home from school, taking out the garbage, flicking cigarette butts into his backyard at night). Mills had told Tommy that what he wanted out of his future was to be happy, as if happiness were a shell game no one had much chance of winning. Tommy wanted to blow the world up and be the last man standing—was that a skill that could be applied to anything but pain? Mills envisioned Tommy at his future job, a Wall Street one-percenter or cult leader or research scientist who tested brand-name products on laboratory animals. Heroic practitioners of other people’s pain. Mills also envisioned Tommy naked in the shower. He couldn’t help it. Scrubbing, dripping, water swirling, a drain with the perfect view.

  Finding the Muldoons’ windows lacking in glimpses of nudity—even the constantly naked father—Mills returned his attention to the book. Since he couldn’t identify the addresses, he had no idea what certain notes referred to. But at some point in each entry, the boring inventory of jobs shifted in tone—“unpaid,” “overdue,” “last statement,” “calls to PF Real,” “cheating with Holly,” “B. & Y. at Seaview.” Cheating, at least, seemed promising, a hint of discord beneath the mundane happiness of all the well-maintained homes. Mills remembered what Beth had said to the detective in Magdalena’s driveway—“murder,” a word she hadn’t used once during their drive. Was this book worth murder? Had the old woman been killed before she could read it? Had Jeff Trader been another victim?

  As a child, Mills had imagined that his biological parents had been murdered, Manson-like, or gunned down in a botched carjacking, or pushed to their deaths from the cliffs of Big Sur. Murdered parents seemed preferable to living ones who never showed up to reclaim him. He never wanted to imagine his real parents happy. It was better for him to be happy by imagining them dead. At least until he discovered that one of them was very much alive, not seventy miles from Modesto.

  At the bottom of every page, Jeff Trader had scrawled one of three simple words—yes, maybe, or no. Yes, yes, no, maybe, yes, no, no, yes, yes. The last page was devoted to a list of numbers, $200, $150, $500, and the last, $2,000, circled four times in black pen. The price of maintaining happiness, Mills supposed. As the sun set, he placed the book in his duffel bag for safekeeping and finally gave in to his appetite.

  “Peanut butter sandwiches will have to do,” Paul said, sighing. Mills found him standing at the open refrigerator for what might have been minutes or hours. Paul quickly reactivated, shutting the door and removing two plates from the cabinet. “I’ll go into town tomorrow. I promise to be a better cook. I feel bad feeding you such awful meals after you’ve been working hard.”

  Mills had been working hard. In the past week, he had managed to clear out an entire room of Benchley junk. At first Paul was devoutly unsentimental—out go the canoe paddles, the phone books, the 1980s Toshiba microwave, the buckets and canisters and tattered guides to deep-sea fishing. But as the room emptied out, Paul stepped away from his laptop at the dining room table and gazed somberly at his mother’s box of toiletries and his childhood croquet set. “Maybe we don’t throw it all out,” he said meekly. “No, never mind. I keep thinking I might still have children one day, but what kind of child would want this stuff? Children aren’t old women. Pitch it. Don’t let me interrupt.” In the end, the only things Paul insisted on keeping were photo albums and Orient-related bric-a-brac. When Mills discovered a rolled-up map of Orient, much like the smaller map in his bedroom, Paul pronounced it a rare specimen. “Maybe I’ll donate it to the historical museum, which I still haven’t taken you to yet. Fair warning: we were royalists in the American Revolution. That doesn’t get a lot of play during the winter fund-raisers, but it’s a fact.”

  As they sat in the flickering light of the dining room, Mills pressed his wrists against the cold African marble and considered mentioning the prospect of a murderer to Paul. Paul chewed on his triangle of sandwich, washing it down with chilled red wine from an East Marion vineyard. Pieces of damp, tugged hair jutted around his forehead like rough waves. The fireplace crackled lit balls of newspaper. Paul smiled at Mills, his teeth yellowed by the flames.

  “I’m glad Beth drove you around today,” he said gently. “You just needed a change of scenery. Soon all that business in New York will be like a bad dream.”

  “Beth took me to a bunch of cemeteries,” Mills told him. “Which one are your parents buried in?”

  Paul looked at him over the rims of his glasses.

  “Oysterponds. Did she take you there?” Mills shook his head. “That’s where my mom and dad are buried, their ashes anyway. And that’s where Magdalena will go. I suppose I should call about helping with the arrangements. Lena was so kind when my mother was dying, stopping by to check on us. Lena was always going out of her way, not just for me, for everybody. I can’t imagine Orient without her. I wonder if she left her money to the historical society. She was a longtime board member.”

  “Is that where you’re leaving your money?” Mills asked. “If you don’t have children, I mean.” Mills was embarrassed to find himself imagining a future in which Paul was childless save for one adopted son he had brought to Orient to help with his house, leaving all his money and property to the closest thing to a relative he had. It was a passing daydream, one of a dozen futures that turned to dust before it set. But Mills enjoyed pacing through the back rooms, picturing what he would do with them if they were his.

  Paul breathed heavily through his nose. “I haven’t really decided on that. I hope I don’t have to for some time.” He winked. “And where’d you get the idea I had any money?”

  Mills had found a shoe box of bank statements, the accounts an asteroid shower of zeroes. He couldn’t decipher how much was company money and how muc
h personal, but Paul clearly worked in high figures. He’d been successful as an architect, but also, Mills thought, a slave to that success. Even out here on his Orient sabbatical, Paul tinkered on his computer blueprints—“I just have to send this draft by tomorrow’s deadline”—like a kid chained to a video game.

  “Nowhere,” Mills lied. He struggled to find an excuse for the question. “You just mentioned a few days ago that you wanted to donate some of your Orient stuff to the museum. It made me think—you’re throwing out junk you don’t expect your own children will want, but you’re certain future generations will want to preserve those old maps. What if they just stop caring? At some point there’s going to be too much history for anyone to keep up with it all.” All that history, Mills thought. All that junk. It seemed so much easier to throw it away.

  If their dinner had required silverware, Paul would have set down his knife and fork. Instead he picked up his wineglass and swilled the liquid.

  “You never know, I guess. But don’t you think it’s important to preserve some traces of the past?” Paul tongued his cheek. “I agree that history isn’t worth much if it’s just a bunch of artifacts to look at. But there’s a reason people hold on to their ancestors. There has to be something in our survival instinct that compels us to remember what happened and use that information as a guide.” The point was alien to Mills. He had no ancestors. People in Modesto looked at you funny if you tried to tell them about last week. When he was younger and an arcade on H Street with a superior pinball machine suddenly closed, he went to the gas station across the road to ask if it had moved. The cashier lifted her tired, mascaraed eyes and muttered, “Never heard of it.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Mills said.

  Paul slapped his napkin on the table and left his chair, disappearing down the hallway with heavy, receding steps. Mills hadn’t thought it would be so easy to upset Paul. In the past week, no subject had seemed off-limits between them, except for love and sex, two topics Mills had learned to avoid like a tightrope walker over the Niagara Falls of messy, personal conversations. He was thankful when Paul returned with the rolled-up, camel-colored map. He spread it across the table and pointed to the tip.

  “What I always thought was telling about Orient was the two islands just off the coast.” Paul’s finger traced two competing circles of land just beyond the bird beak. “One is Plum, owned by the government, a laboratory presumably for the common good. The other is Gardiners Island, owned privately—in fact, one of the largest privately owned islands in the United States. It was bought from the Indians in the seventeenth century by an English soldier and granted by the king. Lion Gardiner’s descendants still own it, three hundred years later.” Paul took a sip of wine to let the history lesson settle over his student. “So there you have it, two opposing forces, side by side, hanging just off our coast: public-controlled property and a private estate, the rights of the individual versus the betterment of the community. If that isn’t a split personality in geographic form, I don’t know what is.”

  “A family can own a whole island?” Mills couldn’t let go of the most sensational aspect. “That same family has been around since the seventeenth century? Out there? Eating dinner right now?” Mills glanced out the window. “I wonder what they’re eating.”

  “All families have been around since the seventeenth century,” Paul said, laughing.

  “I mean, in one place.”

  “Yeah. You’ve got to hand it to the Gardiner descendants—they know how to hang on to their land.” Paul cleared his throat. “But what I’m trying to say is, those two islands are just like the minds of most people in Orient. They want conservancy, they want to preserve the natural land, they want to hold on to the history and keep Orient untouched by private development. But they also distrust the government. They don’t like laws cracking down on them, deciding what they can and can’t do with their property. Why else is every house getting swamped with these green leaflets on the horrors of mutant animals? It’s meant to scare us, to make us think the government is creating trouble behind our backs.” Paul braided his fingers together in front of his stomach. “Gardiner versus Plum, private versus public, wrestling over which will win.”

  Paul twittered his thumbs for ten seconds, and Mills actually watched to see if one thumb would pin the other. The match was called off, and Paul returned to his seat to finish his sandwich.

  “Sorry. I get pedantic after a few glasses of wine.” He stared across the table to gauge whether his sole audience member was bored.

  “Which side are you on?”

  Paul laughed and clenched his teeth. “I plead the Fifth. You know how you stay popular in Orient? You keep your mouth shut when some of these deep-rooted families get to choosing sides. That’s what’s good about doing a painting of the lighthouse. Everyone can agree on how pretty it is.” Paul took a bite and chewed. Five chews gave him time to contemplate. “Thing is, Plum is going to lose that animal disease lab soon. And the Gardiner survivors can’t afford the upkeep on their grounds much longer. Those islands are about to change, and I bet there’ll be a fight over who gets them.” Paul’s tongue churned through peanut butter, a ship in a lagoon.

  Paul should have children, Mills thought. He had never wished children on anyone, but suddenly he hoped that one day Paul would marry Eleanor or another woman whose number might be lurking on a matchbook somewhere in this house. He should populate Orient and watch his children take sides in the conflict.

  “But you’re an architect,” Mills said. “You develop property too, right?”

  “Yes, I believe in buildings. Just not crappy ones. Not the kind you see popping up like birdhouses for the elderly the closer you get to the city. And, I’m afraid, I’m still a full-time architect. I thought I was going to have time to get this place fixed up. I’ve hardly even helped you throw out all that junk.”

  Paul reached over and patted the table, a substitution for Mills’s hand. Paul had many tiny teeth inside his smile. Mills had begun to appreciate the moments it flared in his direction. Paul seemed less lonely then, grateful for the company, not just a walking encyclopedia stiff from being so rarely opened.

  “I’m sorry you saw what you did today,” Paul said. “I’m sorry for what you saw last week. I promise we don’t usually have this much dying out here. I hope you’ll stay and finish up the house with me.” He returned his hand to his plate.

  Mills decided not to mention Beth by name. He liked her too much—needed her too much, her company and car—to have her darkened in the mind of his host.

  “I heard some talk that Magdalena was murdered.”

  Paul dropped his crust on the plate and shook his head.

  “Who said that?”

  “Some people, a neighbor on the street. Just one person. I didn’t know them.”

  “Can’t they even let an old woman die in peace? Can’t they not turn everything into a conspiracy? Can’t they—”

  Mills regretted his next sentence as soon as he spoke it. But it was too enticing not to imagine that he had entered the house of a homicide victim, too lurid not to at least verbalize the possibility. What was the point of a confidant if not to speak outlandishly about the dead?

  “And Jeff Trader too. One after the other. By the same killer.”

  Paul reached for the bottle and poured a small dose of wine. He sipped thirstily.

  “Whoever is saying that is just trying to upset everyone. The year-rounders might claim to hate the summer people, but I think they’ve grown used to them—they get a little lonely in the fall when it’s just the regulars. The carnival’s gone.”

  “So you don’t believe it could be murder?”

  “No.” Paul set his glass down and stared at Mills, as if his verdict had not been heard. “Not a chance. There’s no one out here like that. And there’s no reason to kill them.”

  A noise broke from the foyer, sending Mills and Paul into separate jolts. Paul’s arm knocked his glass, and red
wine spilled into the grooves of the marble. Mills rescued the map, rolling it up to keep his fingers occupied. The doorbell rang again. Polite knocking followed. Paul rose and hurried to the door.

  Mills heard two unfamiliar voices on the porch. He crept through the living room and lingered in the shadows of the doorway to catch sight of the visitors.

  A couple in their midforties wearing matching canvas jackets stood in front of Paul. The man had wavy orange hair, thinning to a bald island of freckles at the crown. Next to him was an Asian woman with a strikingly small nose and mouth, as if forfeiting space for her eyes. Long black lashes curled from their rims. Her hair was gathered in a top bun, almost ridiculing her partner’s lack in its endless twists and tucks. They gesticulated like professional politicians, fists clenched, palms stretched out, hearts tapped.

  “So it’s essential to get home owners there,” the Asian woman was saying when Mills moved close enough to hear. “To galvanize as much support as possible. Especially from those like you, Paul, with such roots. We need to take matters into our own hands.”

  “Yes,” the man spoke up, belched up, missing a cue or two and trying to overcompensate. “Bryan wants to express that as well. He’d really like to see you there. He told me so.”

  “Because we can’t leave it up to Southold. Not the way things are going. Not after the water-main debacle.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” Paul replied, his hands balled in his pant pockets.

  Another heart tap from the woman, and Mills thought he saw her wink. With those lashes it was difficult to tell.

  “Monday at seven. Same as always. Poquatuck Hall. Magdalena would have wanted us to continue her fight. We’re dedicating the proposal to her. The Kiefer Nondevelopment Advocacy Initiative. After all, the plan was her idea.”

  “That’s awfully nice.” Paul nodded and kicked the corner of his welcome mat. The woman winked again. No, it wasn’t a wink. It was a blink, as her eyes peered around Paul and froze on Mills, half-hidden behind the doorframe. Paul followed her stare.