Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Crosses?” She found his choice distasteful. “Well, if she’s religious she might like them. I’m not religious myself, not that I’m against those things. Those are eighteen karat, so they’re sixty-five, no sixty-seven dollars, and that’s ten percent off their sticker price, just because I like you.” His mother liked him. His unreligious and unlucky mother liked him. Before he could change his mind, she collected the earrings on their cardboard backing and placed them in a yellow box. “Is it cash or charge? If it’s charge I’ll need to see some ID.”

  He didn’t have a credit card. He did have ID, but if he showed it to her, she’d see his name and birthdate and know who he was and why he was here. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, fumbling with it over the glass counter. He was shaking violently by now, and his mother glanced at the old man in the back—was it for help? Or just to make sure he was finishing the engraving he’d been working on?

  “Do you like surprises?” he asked.

  She turned to him and positioned her sunglasses higher on her nose.

  “Do I like surprises,” she repeated. “No. Not especially. Actually I hate them. But I’m sure your girlfriend will love a surprise gift of earrings. Who doesn’t like good surprises? Expensive, beautiful surprises. Surprises you secretly wish for. It’s the bad surprises that don’t help my migraines.”

  He handed her four twenty-dollar bills, almost the last of the money he had saved. She gave him his change. He hoped their hands might touch, but she spread the dollars lengthwise over his palm. She put the yellow box in a yellow paper bag and pushed it across the counter.

  “Thank you. Please come again.”

  “Thank you,” he said. On the yellow bag in gold lettering were printed these words: thank you please come again. “Thank you for your time and patience with me.”

  She yawned slightly, bit down on the yawn, and only after completing its warp did she ball her fingers over her lips.

  “It’s our specialty. Good-bye.”

  He went outside, into the heat of hot Sacramento, and walked five blocks without thinking of anything but the temperature, and only in the last two blocks was he crying, and when he passed a strip mall with an ear-piercing shop he used the change from the sale to have his ear pierced, and he was crying so much he didn’t even feel the puncture, just enough to remind him he had pain receptors, enough to wake him, and he asked the woman to put the cross in, and when he opened the box and unclipped the earring from the cardboard he saw that she’d forgotten to peel off the sticker on the back that read $45, 14 karat, and he waited until the woman fit the cross through the hole before throwing the second earring in the trash, and he took a different street to the bus station so he wouldn’t pass by the shop window again, and he bought another one-way ticket at full price, and, along the scored, aerosol greens of the central valley, he thought of the city in the east, the one with buildings crowded together like soldiers marshaled against the invading Atlantic, and that’s where he headed five days later with his duffel bag.

  “I guess my mother ripped me off.” Beth dropped her brush on the tray. She didn’t try to console him. He wasn’t crying. He had told most of the story sitting perfectly still. “But I don’t blame her. What did I expect?”

  “I think we’re done for the day,” she said, tucking her lips together. She had no right to pass judgment on his mother. Was she a bad mother for letting go of him, or was she not a mother at all? Some categorizations could only be claimed through time. All Beth could do was listen. But even if Mills said that the memory of his mother was garbage, the gold cross still hung in his ear. “We’ll let the oil dry and I’ll do more the next time you sit for me.” Mills stretched his back.

  “Can I see what you’ve done so far?”

  She stood up, and he slid in front of her, the neck of his T-shirt exposing the rise of his collarbone, and she had to stop herself from putting her lips to his neck. He was so thin, and he had come all this way from the desert, and she was sure his mother would have been pleased that he had found people on the other side of the country who cared for him.

  “I’m glad you’re staying here,” she said as he examined the portrait. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  She couldn’t tell if he liked what he saw: two eyes and most of a cheek that bled into a circle of chin, the pink hole of a mouth jeweled with a square of wet gray, his forehead swaths of olive that she’d break on his next visit with curls of black. He looked at the canvas as she screwed the caps on the paint tubes. “I’m glad too,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for the police to figure out who killed the Muldoons. I want to be here, with you and Paul, a while longer.” He grabbed his chin and pulled it down, as if imitating the face in the painting. “I thought I was lifting my head,” he said. Then he put his fingers over his eyes and pushed on his eyelids. “Do my eyes really squint like that?” he asked. “You made me look Asian.”

  She inspected the eyes on the canvas. “They aren’t Asian,” she said. “Maybe the lines are a little hard. I can soften them next time. But you do tend to squint.”

  Beth watched Mills push his eyelids to the sides like the punch line of a racist joke, the kind she and her friends told regularly in grade school—“We’re from Orient”—and she thought of the Herrig children, who must suffer that same joke today. “Beth,” he said quickly. “Do you remember what Eleanor did when we asked about the other woman Bryan brought there? The one who owned the pendant?”

  Beth remembered the Seaview bartender holding her fingers against her eyes to suggest blindness. “She said she couldn’t say who it was because she couldn’t see.”

  “No.” He turned to face her. “She just went like this,” and again he pulled on his eyelids, like a child trying to act Chinese. “Eleanor was racist as hell, so all she’d see was an Asian woman. That’s who she meant was sleeping with Bryan Muldoon—Sarakit Herrig. Who’s also on the board of OHB. Who happens to be taking over the trust. Who would love nothing more than for me to take the fall.” His smile was greedy, the smile of an only child coming down the stairs on Christmas morning.

  She tried to picture Sarakit exercising to keep off the fat so that Bryan Muldoon could run his hands along her hips. She tried to picture her lighting a match to gasoline, aware that two children slept in the darkness upstairs.

  “But Sarakit doesn’t start with an L. Neither does Herrig. Anyway, she has an alibi for the fire.”

  “What about her husband, who owed Bryan money? Wouldn’t he have been pissed to find out that his best friend was sleeping with his wife?”

  She sighed. Mills had blamed Adam Pruitt for the fire after Adam screamed at him for being on his property. Now he was accusing Sarakit because she’d blamed him at the church. He was scrambling to implicate anyone who had crossed him. “Ted is her alibi,” she said, “which means she’s his. They were together in bed when they heard the alarms.”

  “One of them could be protecting the other. Or they could have done it as a team. Maybe Jeff Trader knew what they were planning. Maybe Magdalena figured it out. That’s why she changed her will. With Bryan dead, her house would have gone to OHB, with Sarakit and Ted making the decisions.”

  Beth wiped the brushes. “I thought you were so sure it was Lisa and Adam.”

  “They all had a motive. So did Roe diCorcia. And the Drakes. But what if it’s Ted or Sarakit?” He stared out the window, as if he expected to find any one of them standing on the lawn with gasoline-soaked hands. “How can that detective suspect me when all these people had a motive?”

  Beth heard something creak in the hallway downstairs and raced to the door. “Who’s there?” she called. She felt safer with Mills in the room, but the sound of footsteps passing through the house quickened her fear.

  “It’s me, and I’m not moving furniture,” Gavril yelled. “We have to leave in twenty minutes. Are you ready?” He climbed the steps, and a look of dread crossed his face when he saw Mills standing in her old bedroom, as if h
e had come upon his wife with an old boyfriend. “We need to go,” he said as he stomped down the hall.

  “You haven’t told him, have you?” Mills whispered, glancing at her stomach. “I hope he’ll appreciate you more once he finds out.”

  She ignored the remark. “I’ll call the detective tomorrow. And I have Paul’s cake for you in my car. Thanks for sitting for me today.” He nodded. “So what do I call you, Leonard or Mills?”

  “Mills,” he said smiling. “Some decisions you can’t take back.”

  It pleased her to think he was right.

  PART 3

  Him

  CHAPTER 27

  Beth decided not to tell Gavril the good news until after the party. He spent the drive over shifting in the passenger seat, yanking the collar of his sport coat, and picking lint off his pants. He had never been comfortable in the constraints of finer clothes. At their wedding, he had complained so much about the starch in his shirt and the knot in his tie that she expected to find him half-unraveled by the time she joined him at the altar. Seeing him there, withstanding the straitjacket of a Brooks Brothers suit, his maroon eyes wild with claustrophobia, she took his commitment to formality as a commitment to her. Gavril was most at home in the relaxed fit of his studio uniform. He liked to think of himself as a worker like his parents, dressing up only to appear before the occasional dictator. She let him have his fantasies, mostly because he let Beth have hers.

  She could have told him the good news right then in the car, driving down Main Road, but Gavril was in an insolent mood. He kept carrying on about the Russian collectors traveling from their huge, new, twenty-seven-million-dollar house in Sagaponack to slum it for two days in Orient with the young artists they collected—“and like desperate girls in bars we giggle and wink and suffer his bad insights,” Gavril groused. He hadn’t said a word about the fact that Beth had begun painting again. She wasn’t sure he’d noticed.

  “They could buy all the sculptures in the garage tomorrow,” he said, in awe or disgust. Awe and disgust in the face of wealth—those emotions were entwined as tightly as lust and loathing in the face of sex. “So even before my show opens, they already have the work in their collection. That saves me from being poor, far from poor if they decide to buy all of it. But Yakov Dombrovski began making his fortune in the Soviet army, stealing gasoline from his unit and selling it secretly on the private market. It could be the same strategy with my art. He acts tricky and underpays now, announces he has bought my work, which increases its value, and then sells it off at auction for his own profit.” Gavril wiped the sweat from his hairline. “What does that make me? A pawn in making a rich man richer. That is not why I invested my blood and muscle and all my waking hours away from my bed. Why do I even show it in a gallery? I might as well hang a sign on the door: sold to man ranked forty-eight on Forbes list of richest in world.”

  Beth tried to interrupt, reminding him that all art acquisitions were tainted with the financial, that it wasn’t any more ethical to sell to a poorer rich collector than to the richest rich collector, and that there were certain advantages in joining a top-tier collection—that Dombrovski could afford to keep the work and that he presumably had plenty of room in Sagaponack to display it. But she eventually gave up against Gavril’s gale-force rhetoric. “Consumption is conspicuous. But when an artist is implicated from the start, he is not an outlier but a manufacturer of merchandise. And the worth of that merchandise derives from the man who owns it. It is his name, not mine, that gives it value. He’s the real artist of today.” Beth stopped listening. A few Orient home owners had already strung their roofs in Christmas lights. Reds and blues and starburst whites blinked cheerfully and out of rhythm. Flakes of snow drifted through the headlight beams. The baby would have to wait until next winter for its first snowfall.

  Gavril droned on. “Dombrovski keeps much of his collection on his yacht, hundreds of millions of dollars of art, sailing around the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Aden with his regulation basketball court and three submarine—”

  She interrupted him. “I spoke to Sarakit Herrig today. She told me that a neighbor saw you walking around in the middle of the night with somebody. Is that true?”

  Gavril glanced at her. His forehead glowed from the dashboard lights. “I haven’t been walking. I’ve been in my studio working.”

  “That’s not what she says. Is that what you’ve been doing instead of sleeping in the house?” She tried to remember when exactly Gavril had started spending nights in the garage, whether it was before or after the fire.

  “I thought you were going to stop with your accusations. Please, Beth, let’s have good time tonight. I promise I’ll make more of an effort to put you ahead of my work.” He reached for her hand, but she needed control of the wheel to make the turn. On the dirt incline she searched for his hand but he had already withdrawn it.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Don’t drink too much. I want to talk to you when we get home.”

  He grunted. “It’s a party. I thought we could enjoy ourselves for once.”

  For once—there it was, confirmation that he hadn’t been happy, that neither of them was. When Gavril started hinting that it was her new young friend, that foster kid, who was putting those ridiculous murder fears into her head, she told him to shut up.

  Gavril actually enjoyed being scolded now and then. He whistled and nodded. “Fine. I promise not to drink too much. See, I will be good for you if you promise to be good for me and we can die make-believing for each other.” He was joking, and when he offered his hand again she took it, threading her fingers with his.

  The old farmhouse was brightly lit. Nathan had built a bonfire on the lawn, and the flames shot in the air, licking and twisting, casting the mud mounds into shadow. There was a thrill in driving up to a party, imagining the drinks and conversations that awaited, the warmth of the interior, the coldness of ice in a glass, the improvised congregations, the temporary solace of retreating to a corner before returning to a conversation that never resolved itself, the wine spilled and the joint passed—even the fragile seconds before climbing out of the car, when, having been so graciously invited, it was still possible to decide against it, to turn around and head home.

  “We could call tomorrow and say we had a flat tire,” she said. But it was too late. Gavril was opening the car door, and Luz was waving at them from the porch. They both had too much to gain.

  There were no walls. Plastic sheets hung in their place on the ground floor, tar-black and shivering in the wind. The rocking of the sea—the high-priced soundtrack of coastal living—was heard between hip-hop tracks shuffling on Nathan’s laptop. A wood board with OYSTERPONDS INN written across it served as an oversized cheese plate on the coffee table. Twenty crystal vases with bouquets of yellow lilies were arranged across the living room floor; between them space heaters hummed on full blast, trying to compensate for the lack of insulation. There were warm and cold spots within five feet of each other. The lilies sweetened the air and mixed with the bitter tobacco of Luz’s cigarettes, one left burning in an ashtray and another withering between her fingers.

  Luz greeted her guests in bare feet, her brown toes scrunched on the marble, her hair dry-brushed back and held at her clavicle by a simple red band. She wore a body-hugging red silk dress with hook buttons that ascended from her shoulder to her neck. After a minute, she sat down on the sofa, where she told a pretty young woman that she’d had the cheongsam made for her in Hong Kong two years ago, right before the opening of her show there. “You’re supposed to have it sewn on every time you wear it, but the dressmaker didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t blessed with a servant back in the States.” The young woman with brown hair scooted forward, posing in her dress of gray lace, as if she expected Beth to ask not her name but the designer’s.

  Gavril took a glass of wine from an aproned elderly woman holding a tray by the kitchen. Through a tarp leading to the deck, Beth saw the blurred shape
s of two giants lit by the flicker of cigarettes. She realized that they were Dombrovski’s bodyguards. Nathan threaded around the vases in a white suit coat and a pale blue shirt, his cheeks red with liquor. He grabbed a wine from the tray and danced across the Persian carpet as he held it out to Beth.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to our construction site with its priceless view of the animal disease center.” Beth took the glass. Nathan swung around to his wife. “Luz, how much did we pay for this place so we could have mutant test subjects wash up in our backyard like ship treasure?”

  “Don’t start on that again,” Luz snapped. She took a drag from her cigarette and made eye contact with Beth. “He’s been at it all day, taking pictures of the creature and serving coffee to the officers who came in their unmarked vans.”

  “And news crews,” Nathan added. “Two news crews descending on our driveway. It’s the end of the world out here. I thought this tip of the east was supposed to be the beginning of the new world, but clearly we’re all going to be the first infected citizens. Patient zeroes. You never do know how you’ll make your imprint on the world.” He lifted his glass.

  Luz clasped the knee of the impassive, brown-haired woman, a gesture Beth first took for intimacy until Luz simply used her knee to get to her feet. “Will you please stop scaring our guests? They’re already scared enough about the murders.” She looked at Beth again, and her pupils rolled behind her eyelids. “Yakov didn’t even want to come to Orient because of the arsonist on the loose. We had to promise him it was all just trouble among the locals and no maniac was targeting us.” Beth scanned the room for the billionaire Russian for whom all of this had been orchestrated, but she couldn’t spot him. She did notice that Nathan and Gavril hadn’t said hello to each other. Gavril was standing by one of the plastic tarp walls, already finishing his first drink.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” Nathan said. “I really admire its force. It’s a social art form, the ability to scare an entire community just by a single fusion of animal parts. I wish my work could be that radioactive. We saw two different families packing suitcases into their cars today. There’s a mass exodus happening out here. People are actually evacuating. Where are they going, to the city for safety? It’s like the entire island is tilting west and all the people are tumbling into Manhattan.”