Orient (29 page)

Luz Wilson exploited Orient the way all new settlers do, making it hers by reframing its past to her liking. She tracked down surviving descendants of old Orient families who no longer owned their estates—field farmers, mostly, and a few roughnecks who vivisected fish on the Greenport docks—and paid them one dollar more than minimum wage to come to her studio at the farmhouse to pose for her. “Don’t you love it? A child of a slave and a Commie immigrant painting the master class in one of their dispossessed ancestral houses.” Beth did not love it. Her family had been part of that master class.

Gavril and Nathan got wasted every Tuesday afternoon that summer, tanning themselves crimson in her mother’s pool. The Orient year-rounders viewed them as savages, trying to steal the land from those to whom it properly belonged. And they looked like savages—Gavril, Nathan, Luz, the others, all of them that summer. They drank top-shelf and drove erratically and wore expensive clothes and did money dances around glittering pools whose slate
basins were vacuumed by roving drones. They slicked their hair back, spread themselves across lounge chairs, and flung watermelon rinds on magazines.

And as they sat back, enjoying themselves, their reputations grew. Among Nathan Crimp’s notable recent artworks:

Luz and Nathan had used the money they made on their art to float the initial $4.1 million asking price of the old farmhouse inn and its forty-one untouched acres. Only when a second bidder emerged, tipping the price toward six million, did Nathan’s family subsidize the difference. They paid for the property in cash.

“That’s a nice dress,” Luz said to Beth, cracking open a bottle of vodka at the kitchen counter. Beth waited, bracing herself for a follow-up lecture that didn’t come. Luz, in a loose, blue, over-the-shoulder sweater, her lips painted orange, took a drag from her cigarette and acknowledged her painting that Gavril had hung an hour ago on the kitchen wall. “You put mine up, finally,” she said with a knowing smile. “What about your work? You been painting?”

“No,” Beth replied. She held out an empty glass toward the bottle. “Not too much, though. Just a sip.”

“Just a sip,” Luz repeated, laughing. “We don’t have to compensate for the overconsumption of our husbands. I see Gavril turned the hot tub on. Is that an invitation to see me in my underwear?” She didn’t wait for a response. “Tell me, how cold does it get out here in the winter?”

“Freezing,” Beth said. “And it’s only mid-October. Are you and Nathan planning on spending the entire winter in Orient?”

“It’s an experiment we’re conducting. Can we survive together in the middle of nowhere without delivery or a decent grocery store—or, in Nathan’s case, a decent drug dealer—and find we’re alive come spring?” She breathed out smoke and took a sip, pivoting an ice cube
between her teeth. “Although I heard there was a murder out here. That caretaker. I guess it’s not the peaceful dream community we were conned into believing it was when we bought the place.”

“It might not have been murder,” Beth said, trying to distance herself from the rumor.

“Poor man. Poor white men are the saddest. The burden of no excuses.”

“You knew him?”

“Yeah.” Luz crunched the ice cube and swallowed. “He came over and fixed things. You want something done, you hire local. Quite a talker, Jeff was. On and on and on.”

“Really? You spoke to him?” Beth was flummoxed: in Luz’s brief exposure to Orient, she had already made first-name headway into a community,
Beth’s
community, that had so far resisted Beth Shepherd at every turn. “What about?”

“We made a deal that he’d drive to Riverhead to pick up paints for me. I lost five hundred dollars on his death. Never showed with the goods. And I wasn’t the only artist he had that kind of arrangement with. Maybe someone robbed him. Or killed him for pocketing our hard-earned money.” She took another gulp. “So why aren’t you painting?”

“I’m not ready.”

“Who’s ready?” Her orange lips contorted. “Come on, what are you going to do with yourself if you don’t get back to work? What will you end up being, Gavril’s wife?
Tsk tsk tsk
.” She shook her head and stared at the bottom of her glass. “You’re too smart for that. A waste of talent. Wasted talent is a woman standing behind a husband thinking she’s his rock when all she really is is his step.”

“I’ve been busy, Luz. And I’ve got all winter.”

“Hmm. You’ve got hobbies, then?”

Beth thought about it. She had no hobbies. Before she quit her job copyediting for
Scientific Frontier
, she’d considered applying for an open position as a junior editor—until she saw all the résumés
that had piled up, hundreds and hundreds, from ambitious recent college graduates with journalism degrees that were as useful in the current job market as Japanese fighting swords. On many résumés, there was a line at the bottom of the page reserved for hobbies: “golf, opera, meditation, maze topiary, Sudoku, YouTube movie spoofs.” What were Beth’s hobbies? Sitting still, reading the first paragraphs in the newspaper’s art section, wasting gas. To call any of those activities hobbies was to turn the marrow of life into a pastime—which, she realized, was Luz’s point.

“Nope, uh-uh. They aren’t allowed. Tell her, Beth.” Luz crooked a finger over her glass, a paint-scabbed nail as sharp as a switchblade. “This is a party for adults. You have to leave immediately. Good-bye, Shelley. Lovely to see you.” Beth turned to find Shelley Bass with her two-month-old infant nestled against her chest in a tie-dye sling. She’d traveled all the way from her rental in Peconic to be unwelcomed in the Shepherd kitchen. Shelley was a mixed-media artist of middling talent, her graying hair wrapped in a matching tie-dye scarf. She endured Luz’s attack with a distressed smile: like the others, she was used to Luz’s theatrics and suffered her with only mild impatience.

Beth greeted Shelley with a kiss on the cheek.

“I’m sorry I had to bring the baby. I won’t stay long. Brent had business in the city, and I couldn’t find a sitter.”

“It’s not a problem,” Beth assured her. She performed the requisite ten-second examination of the infant, cooing over how cute he was. Shelley’s five-year-old daughter ran from behind her mother’s legs, hoisting an iPad over her head.

“Look what I drew!” the little girl shouted.

Luz reached for the vodka to refresh her drink. “If I’d known it was going to be this kind of party I would have stayed home.”

“I drew a person,” the girl said proudly. Every drawing was a miracle at that age. She raised the iPad to reveal a blotch of beige skin with black dots for the orifices and digital lines streaming from its crown.

“I see the art world’s bad influence is trickling down to the younger generation,” Luz said. “It looks like one of Isaiah’s canvases, tortured for no good reason. Lord, I pity the generation raised on post-abstract art.”

“Don’t tell her that. Come here, honey.” Shelley reached out for her daughter’s hand. “Go sit in the corner and draw more people for us. Mommy will find you a snack.” The girl scampered off, her tie-dye socks slipping across the wood.

“And you all match,” Luz said.

Beth and Shelley exchanged agonized glances. Shelley picked up the orange juice carton and used the mixer as her refreshment.

“You’re awful,” Shelley said, glancing at Luz as she jiggled the bundle at her chest. “It’s not exactly easy to raise two children. I haven’t had a single moment to myself since Kiki was born. No time for my work. Up at five-thirty every morning. It’s all I can do to bathe myself. I’ve learned to nap while pushing a swing. Everyone expects you to be able to live your own life
and
give everything to two needy kids. On the drive here I decided I’ve been having a nervous breakdown for the past five years, only I haven’t had the time to do anything about it.” Shelley rubbed her forehead and glanced around the kitchen, as if looking for sharp pieces of metal to protect her children from or use to slit her wrists.

“Hey, you know what?” Luz asked, crossing her ankles as she leaned against the counter. “I work hard
not
to have a child. Where I come from, you’re expected to be knocked up by fifteen. I’ve worked my ass off to be barren. And I don’t even mean contraception. I mean the social pressure not to turn my body into a human factory. And guess what? We knew from
Go
, there ain’t no break room in that factory. So spare me the agony of motherhood. You could have been a conscientious objector, but you chose to go to war in a time without a draft. So you’ll forgive me if I’m slow to salute you.”

“Luz,” Beth said. “Enough.”

Luz reached into her pocket and drew out a small Baggie of yellow-and-black pills. She shook two out in her palm. “Here,
Shelley, take these. Bumblebees will calm you right down. They’ll put some color back into your world.”

“No thanks,” Shelley replied. The infant started to wail, and the mother instinctively pushed her scoop-neck collar down to offer a long, thin nipple, chewed up like the end of a teenager’s soda straw. Luz slipped a pill into her mouth and gulped it back. “Do you know the Aristotelian model? I think it should be applied to mothers who bring their babies onto airplanes—”

Luz was interrupted midsentence by the arrival of Isaiah Goodman and his boyfriend, Vince Donnelly. Isaiah was an artist, and Vince was an environmentally conscious small-time literary publisher. A former catalog model, Vince had taken his ability to wear the preppy vestments of the leisure class to heart and brought the heretofore goth Isaiah into the jersey-cotton, equestrian-accented, whale-boned-belt fold. If they hadn’t been gay, they would have looked like assholes. And if they hadn’t been priced out of the Hamptons, they would never have made Orient their second home.

Isaiah and Vince had moved into the old Raleigh cottage, about a mile east on the Sound. They took to the soil surprisingly quickly, raising an enviable tomato garden, which they called a trial run before locating a surrogate and filling their garden with babies. At least that was Vince’s plan. Isaiah was more resistant, shaking his head behind his boyfriend’s shoulder when Vince started describing the process of double-sperm in vitro fertilization, which would prevent them from knowing which one of them was the biological father. Luz had the same patience for gay men wanting babies as she had for women wanting babies, but they had the good sense not to bring the subject up while she was in the room. Instead Vince mentioned the Orient monster.

“Did you guys read the paper today?” he asked. “They said it was all a hoax.”

“Made of stitched-together animal parts,” Isaiah reported. “So the Home Security press release said. Imagine being the PR flack for
that organization. What makes a good press launch for biowarfare agents? What’s the party like?”

“They’re probably lying,” Vince replied. “What else are they going to say? That it
was
an escaped mutant? At least that monster made everyone stop and wonder about pollutants.” Vince had used his fledgling publishing house to reprint a number of 1970s back-to-the-land essays on the fragility of Mother Earth. No one bothered to read them, and even his friends grew distracted when he started blathering on about fracking or the melting ice shelf. “Think of all the viruses draining off that island.”

“Don’t tell Nathan that creature was a fake,” Luz warned them. “He’ll be jealous he didn’t think of it himself. He’s been looking for a project out here to inflict on the locals.”

“Oh, good luck,” Vince said, whisking his blond bangs back and selecting a bottle of tequila. “My dream is to fill the empty chair on the Orient Historical Board. But they hate us, because we’re new or because we drive nicer cars or because we can’t tell stories about a record-breaking fish that was caught in 1983.”

“Right,” Isaiah added. “Whose dick do you have to suck in the backseat of a Subaru to even get a meeting with those people?” Vince rolled his eyes. “I’m joking,” Isaiah said.

Vince had something of the owner of a vicious dog in him. He seemed to like when Isaiah misbehaved so he could demonstrate his ability to put him in his place. Isaiah hadn’t fallen as deeply in love with Orient as his boyfriend had. When they bought their house four months ago, Isaiah had mistakenly taken the bay as an extension of the Atlantic Ocean, and quickly realized on his first swim out that it offered none of the tumbling, surfer-dotted waves that crashed thirty miles south on the beaches of Montauk. He referred to Orient seawater as “the used bathwater of the East End.” His resentment hadn’t eased over time. “I could sit in a lawn chair anywhere,” he suddenly said to Vince, continuing an argument they must have started on the drive over. “Luz, I will ask you one more time. Can I please borrow your speedboat?”