Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Maybe you should write them a note.”

  Paul grunted. “I’m already giving them a hotel sign. And I guess we are technically trespassing. They really are making the place their own, aren’t they?” He scanned the perimeter of the lawn, his eyes stopping on a patch of overgrown weeds not far from a row of tree stumps. He headed toward it, and Mills jogged to catch up.

  “Right here was the first building I ever built.” Paul tucked the board under his arm and used both hands to push aside a clump of yellow briars. A large circular slab of crumbling concrete, swathed in moss and bird shit, protruded an inch from the ground. A wreath of uncut grass covered its sides. To Mills it didn’t seem a very impressive start for a career in architecture.

  “You built this?”

  “No,” Paul said, laughing. “This was just the base. I must have been six or seven. It was long after the first Bug Light burned down. But Bug was my mom’s favorite lighthouse, and she missed it so much that my father and I poured this slab of cement and assembled our own model out of wood and mesh. It was eight feet high, a cheap little replica, but it withstood the wind and snow before my mother sold the place. We used to light the top with candles, and at night I’d pretend to be a boat, guiding toward it, the whole horizon black but for that little star of yellow. There were so few guests, we spent our evenings here without anyone else around.”

  “You were an architect even as a kid,” Mills said. He felt as long as Paul didn’t look back at the obliterated house he could drift in recollections without being reminded of their expiration date. The sea was still the sea, a blue field swirling with foaming tongues.

  “Yeah, I think that little lighthouse started my interest in architecture.” Paul gazed at him with a sorrow so clean it seemed inviting.

  “Do you wish your mom hadn’t sold this place?”

  “No,” he replied, letting the weeds fall back over the slab. “It was a money trap, a dust hotel, and we couldn’t afford to keep it up. Houses are for people to live in, and these new owners are at least taking the trouble to remodel it. They could have torn it down.” Paul examined the old inn again, rattling like a plastic bag caught on a rock. “Part of the reason my mother sold it was to pay for the last years of my boarding school. St. Peter’s, all-boys, in Westchester. From the age of seven on, I only came home during the summer, when they put me to work here or on my father’s fishing boats. I spent most of the summer out at sea as a kid.” He pointed far out in the water. “Jesus, I got sunburned.”

  “Why didn’t you just go to school here?” Mills asked.

  “My mom worried I might flounder in the local school system and end up a fisherman like my father, a deckhand with the stink of brine on my neck. Some of the people in Orient thought she was a snob for that, but she saw it as an investment. Worth more to her than this place. And it was an investment. Because, in the end, she couldn’t have kept the house on Youngs Road without the checks I wrote to pay for it. But that’s what they expected of me, and it was my turn to give back.” Paul stared at him, gathering a speech about the sterling benefits of a top-notch education, but he let the subject drift. It occurred to Mills that children were retirement packages for their parents, a way to ensure their own survival. The Benchleys had raised their son like a racehorse, betting their livelihoods on a winning pedigree. Now his success was all he had. Paul might not have ended up such a smart, lonely man if his parents hadn’t sent him away so young. Of course, Mills realized, the same could be said of him.

  “It’s a good thing the historical board never came out here.” Paul nodded at the house. “I’m surprised they haven’t raised a stink about the renovations. Maybe they couldn’t see it from the road. Or, at this point, maybe they’re just glad it wasn’t sold to a development company. I bet Bryan will be paying a visit about selling their development rights. He should. I’d hate to see this land parceled up.”

  Over the ridge, Mills noticed a wooden dock stretching into the water. A blue speedboat was tied to the end, snapping in the current against its taut ropes.

  “Did you have a boat like that?” Mills asked.

  Paul shook his head, hardly glancing at the craft. He was still envisioning his tiny ersatz lighthouse on the lawn, as if it were guiding him back to his parents, blinking moth-winged, lit with candles, far away even close up.

  “No. The dock must have been another addition after we left. A boat like that can get you around Orient much faster than the roads. That’s one way to beat traffic.” Paul shook his head and started toward the house. He pulled the wood sign from under his arm. “I’ll leave this at the door. Let them figure out if they want to keep it or not.”

  On their walk to the car, Mills looked back at the house. One of the tarps had come unfastened, curling in the air like hardened smoke, exposing a collection of paint supplies, canisters, and canvases. In the upstairs window, Mills saw the faint, dark face of a woman in the glass, watching their departure. Before he could smile at her, two white arms wrapped around her and pulled her into the shadows.

  Paul drove home carefully, his hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. “Orient sure is changing,” he said. They didn’t speak any more about the future. For Paul, it had already arrived.

  Paul’s porch steps had a wobbly second beam. It didn’t wobble for him, but it did for every less-accustomed foot. Mills performed a jumping sidestep to avoid it, knowing that if Paul heard the creak he’d be the one to spend the afternoon trying to fix it with a hammer. The leaves in the front lawn were already looking like a postparty cleanup job—a joy to watch falling, a backache once they reached the ground. Paul carried the farm-stand bags into the kitchen, promising a lunch of oysters if he could find his special gloves. Mills, having lost his appetite somewhere between the dogs and the Pruitt signs of the creature, resigned himself to his duties in handling the vanishing empire of Benchley belongings.

  They had established an unthinking rhythm in the past weeks, coming together for occasional sparks of conversation between their exiles in separate parts of the house, as if days were vast, placid lakes in which their boats occasionally met. Often Mills had to remind himself that the house wasn’t his and would never be, no matter how much effort he put into its upkeep. But he couldn’t help feeling he was discovering the secret routine of adult life, a bargain with time and space, a way to squeeze through its compressions with the least amount of resistance. Homes all over America must be riddled with the same quiet acts of cabinet opening and garbage dragging, the silent human orchestra of getting by. So different from Manhattan, Mills thought, with its loud acoustics of getting on and ahead.

  He walked through the back rooms, taking a moment to appreciate the results of his work. A majority of the rooms were navigable now. Couches had regained their legs and arms; they were no longer couch-shaped piles of magazines and festering winter coats. Books were stacked against the walls, photo albums and frames arranged in keepsake piles.

  In the first days of cleaning, no item had seemed worth more consideration than the time it took to put it in a trash bag. But as the junk diminished, objects began to take on added dimension. They told stories of the people who owned them: the arms on a pair of red sunglasses, bent to adjust to uneven ears. The sleep button on an alarm clock, worn more deeply than the other buttons. A brass horse head ashtray, property of a smoker who extinguished butts only on the stallion’s ears. Paul’s parents might have been gone, but they lasted, in the ground and throughout these rooms. Mills wondered what future archaeologists could learn about him by examining his belongings. He’d been alive for nineteen years, but he worried he would forever remain an incidental set of fingerprints in the lives of others.

  There was once a family called the Fosters. That was the first line of a joke Mills and his foster-care friends often told while waiting in the blue bowl seats of the social services offices. The Fosters decided to take in a foster kid, even though they had two children of their own. The father got c
aught up in some shady dealings with a criminal organization. One night, when the foster kid was out, a hit man came to the Foster home and murdered the entire family in retaliation. Shot the father and the mother and the two children on the spot. Just as the hit man was about to leave, the foster kid walked through the door. The hit man pointed his gun and yelled, “Are you a Foster kid?” The foster kid looked around, appraising the family’s television set and video game console and snack cabinet and, after a moment, said, “Maybe. But before I go with you, how big is your TV?” For a long time that was the only joke Mills knew by heart.

  He sat on his knees and started sorting through a stack of shoe boxes, taking his time. In a few weeks, he’d be finished clearing the rooms, and when that job ended, the need for him would end as well. Would Paul ask him to stay on, taking him in like an adopted son? Or would he drive him back to the city, dropping him off in Chinatown with a few dollars in his pocket and a grateful, stay-in-touch wave? And when he got to the city, would the same old vices be there to welcome him back? As long as Mills remained with Paul, dry and quiet in Orient, he felt that he was safe.

  He tossed a shoe box lid on the floor and leafed through a sheaf of mildewed papers. A copper bullet rolled against the cardboard; Mills shook it out and set it on the floor. He found a copy of Paul’s birth certificate inside an envelope: Paul Andrew Benchley, born at Eastern Long Island Hospital, on November 3, 1966. Mills made a note of the birthday, less than two weeks away. Maybe he’d surprise Paul with a cake. Beth could drive him to a bakery in Greenport and he could have Paul’s name inscribed on the frosting. But just as Mills imagined adding candles and darkening the lights in the dining room, an uninvited question interrupted the festivities. Was the cake an honest gesture? Or was it a means of worming his way deeper into Paul Benchley’s heart?

  No foster kid was naïve to the art of manipulation. There was an art to Polaroid day at social services, rehearsed by children and encouraged by the counselors. A blank face. Eyes wide and vaguely watery. An open smile, with the least amount of twist at the creases. Chin up and eyes staring down. Never chin down and eyes up—that was the face of trouble, and no foster parent wanted trouble sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. On starving black kids in Africa, that expression read as defenseless, wronged, a plea to please send money. On unwanted white kids in America, it read as purse raider, fire starter, mutilator of pets. Even now, when Mills posed for a photograph, he tilted his chin up and dropped his eyes into brimming sunsets. At nineteen, his entire life had been recorded in that same pose, over and over, and collected in his case file.

  A small batch of photos was stuck to the bottom of the shoe box. Mills carefully peeled them from the cardboard. One was a shot of Paul at his prom, next to a bony date with streaked and feathered hair. HAPPY ORIENT BUCKS read the taxonomic banner over their heads. Paul looked thinner and more vulnerable, with an eruption of pimples on his chin. His date was waxy and romantically sun-damaged. It was the only evidence of Paul’s romantic life that Mills had discovered in his weeks in Orient, besides the Eleanor matchbook. It had surprised Mills how few pictures of Paul as an adult had turned up in his parents’ possessions. There were plenty of photos of him as a child, working out at sea on his father’s boats. But after the age of thirty, there were only four or five pictures to mark his years. It seemed as if he had spent the past two decades avoiding his parents’ camera, or their camera avoiding him, perhaps for his inability to bring home a decent date. Parents did not like to take pictures of their children, year after year, standing alone.

  There were three other photographs at the bottom of the box, black-and-white portraits of two dark-haired boys sitting on the porch of the farmhouse inn. The squat boy in overalls with a strong chin and an easy smile was clearly Paul. He was the center of each photograph. On the sidelines was another boy, scrawny, with crooked arms. Paul looked like the picture of health by comparison. The other boy’s lip was split with a cleft, and he had morose, empty eyes that suggested mental impairment.

  Mills opened a second shoe box and discovered a supply of safety flares. He considered taking one, in case he and Tommy ever made another walk to the beach at night. He noticed a glimmer of black metal at the bottom of the box and reached in to pull it out. He found a gun, an old service revolver that must have belonged to Paul’s father. The bullet on the floor must match it. Mills had never held a gun before. His fingers gripped the handle like a confident handshake. Guns were designed to feel natural in the hand, as if the gun were reaching out to greet the open palm. But once gripped, it possessed the dead weight of its purpose, heavy, blunt, and compact. Mills checked that the gun was unloaded and aimed it at the wall. He pulled the trigger, and the cylinder clicked.

  Footsteps moved through the back rooms. Mills dropped the gun and bullet into the box of flares and shut the lid. He gathered the photos from the floor.

  “Mills?” Paul called as he neared the tiny room, five rooms from the front door and four rooms from the back. It was the appendix of the house, useless except for its need to take up space.

  Paul leaned against the doorframe, his hands wedged into his armpits. A smile cut across his face, and it was that smile—unadorned with a mustache—that caused Paul to look naked and strange.

  “It’s gone,” Mills said, lifting up from his crouch. “You shaved it.” Mills had never seen Paul without his mustache, and it struck him how different a man could look with one minor revision. Absent his facial hair, Paul was younger, more handsome, more immediate, his round face offering no branch for the eye to settle, no shelter for his expression to hide. Paul had dimples lurking around his mouth, bent shyly at his lips like the legs of a fawn.

  “I told you I was old. And it was starting to go gray. I only grew it to look older in the first place. And now that the rest of me caught up, it really wasn’t doing me any favors. I decided after our talk in the car. Do I look like a different person? Less nineteenth century? More twenty-first?”

  “Completely,” Mills said. “And you’re right. You do look younger.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s the only change. Although I knew a colleague who shaved his beard off and two months later he divorced his wife and started climbing every mountain in Tibet. He blamed his unhappiness on his facial hair. Said it was holding him back, like a muzzle on a dog.” Paul noticed the photographs in Mills’s hand and nodded at them. “What are those, more photos? They never end, do they? They’re like weeds back here.”

  Mills considered making an excuse to avoid handing them over. The visit to the inn had been enough of a trip into the past, and too many memories in too short a time could turn a little wayward water into a flood zone. Mills couldn’t think of a way to hide the photos without drawing more attention to them, so he held up one of the snapshots of the two boys. Paul’s face whitened except for the razor marks above his lip.

  “My god,” he said as he reached for it. “Where did you find this?” He took the picture and studied it. “Patrick. My brother. I didn’t know any of these survived.”

  “You have a brother?”

  Paul took off his glasses and used his wrist to wipe his eyes. His fingers trembled as he returned the frames to his nose.

  “Had. One year younger. He died when I was six. He was very sickly, right from the start. Scoliosis, anemia, you name it. And he was born with a blockage in his intestines. Surgeries couldn’t fix it. He threw up everything he ate. And that was the end of him, starving and weak, no matter how much food my parents pushed down his throat.” Paul took the other photos and kept shuffling through them, as if there were more than three. “His death destroyed my parents. It got to where they couldn’t bear to see a picture of him. Every time they did, it broke their hearts. I thought they’d thrown them all away. I can’t believe you found these.” Paul stared at him, his teeth making crunching noises in his mouth. “It’s like seeing a ghost.”

  Mills placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  “Sorry,”
Paul said, trying to blink away his tears. “I don’t know why it’s hit me like it has.”

  “I’ll leave you—”

  “No. No need for that. It was so long ago.” Paul closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “I haven’t seen a picture of Patrick in more than thirty years.” Paul stacked the photos in his palm. “Life would have been less lonely if he had lived. I used to carry him onto the porch just so he could be out in the sun. He was such a sweet kid. I sometimes think that if he had survived, the burden on me would have been lighter, you know? Like there would have been someone else to share the family with.” Mills handed Paul the snapshot of him at his prom.

  “This isn’t a joke,” Paul said, laughing. He seemed relieved for the change of subject. “This is a crime against my better judgment. Look at that tuxedo. All those ruffles. Fashion’s supposed to make you feel good but, looking back, it just makes you feel stupid. I came back from boarding school just to go to her prom.” He sighed. “We’ve all been too many different people in our lives.”

  “We were bound to find a few sad reminders back here. Maybe I should have put them in a box and—”

  “No,” Paul said. He loosened his shoulders by rowing them back. “It’s just been quite a day. This is why I used to keep my visits to Orient short. You never know when the past is hiding behind a bush, waiting to jump out and bite. No, I’m glad you found them. And I can handle whatever else is back here. It would be a disappointment if it were all so easy to throw away.” He held his stomach and leaned against the wall.

  Mills slung his arm around Paul’s shoulder and hugged him, pressing his chin into the pillow of Paul’s neck. Paul stiffened before relaxing in the embrace. “I’m going to finish getting the stuff out of the car,” Mills whispered. He left the room before Paul could call him back.