Orient (5 page)

Beth had been seduced by Gavril’s early art stardom, yes, but she fell in love with him because of his sensitivity; his constant need to touch and kiss her, as if she might vanish if his fondness ebbed in the slightest; his hunger to learn her favorite movies and novels; and, best of all, his sincere attention when she was upset about her paintings or her day job copyediting for a science periodical. At NYU, she’d been trained to distrust capitalistic America abstractly while appreciating its concrete comforts. But Gavril seriously loved this country, in theory and in practice. Unlike most artists, he didn’t recoil from commercial success, and he was quick, whenever a conversation drifted toward socialism, to expound on the horrors of having nothing under the banner of sharing. “Don’t complain about having food in your refrigerator,” he griped. “Or lights that don’t just work for two hours each day, or the fact that one out of every five of your neighbors isn’t an informer being paid by the state to rat you out.”

Gavril had violet, translucent skin. A small purple birthmark the shape of the Hawaiian islands stained his left cheek, as if battery acid had scalded him as a boy. His armpits were ripe Balkan forests. His fingernails were bruised mesa sunsets. His eyes were the color of bullet-scarred housing projects with deep, sunless interiors. His sweat smelled like burnt sage, the source of which she couldn’t locate no matter how often she ransacked his thighs and chest. They ransacked each other quite a bit by the time they married in a small civil ceremony last year held in the rented library of the Swiss embassy (a spot Beth had chosen not for its political neutrality, but because the library offered a baby grand piano). In New York, the bed served as their preferred weekend destination, the sex lasting longer than the movies they put on to drown out their moans.

In their first months in Orient, though, Beth had noticed a change in Gavril. Most evident was the shift in their sex life, now driven by a galvanizing sense of purpose. Gavril’s softness dissipated into a rougher, mechanical approach, often lasting only a few, frantic
minutes; Beth sometimes left her own body midway through the act and imagined herself as some industrial material on which Gavril was unloading his surge of creativity. It was as though, having deserted her own painting career, now she was abandoning her own self, becoming merely a conduit for Gavril’s ever-accruing list of
things he was making
. The bed became an arena, where he was the star performer. She knew she was being unreasonable, judging him too harshly, but she found it impossible to prevent the misgivings of the bedroom from infecting the rest of the house.

Gavril’s honeymoon with the United States had also undergone a noticeable shift outside of Manhattan. Now that he was a naturalized citizen, he had started dropping peevish comments about America, “land of the free.” He had received a citation in June for openly drinking beer on the beach at Orient State Park. He nearly doubled over in apoplexy when he was told he couldn’t remove the fence around the swimming pool because it was required by law. When two gay friends explained to him that their marriage in the state of New York would be considered invalid when they crossed over to New Jersey, Gavril hugged them both as if they would soon be rounded up in a pogrom. The phrase “It’s a free country, right?” became a staple of his Romanian-accented vernacular. Mindful that the Fourth of July parade might have reminded her husband a bit too much of Romanian dance spectaculars, she steered clear of the Labor Day fireworks on Shelter Island.

As the summer wore on, though, she noticed that Gavril started keeping an inventory of worrying anticapitalistic tactics in his art notebook. 1. “Don’t make anything that can be sold.” (Beth fretted about the future expenses of raising a child.) 2. “Undermine my own signature by claiming others have made my work.” (A recent Catargi tar smear had just sold for $400,000 at auction.) 3. “Destroy the notion of objects created for market by turning life into art.” (Beth was frightened by Gavril’s new, single-minded gusto in bed.) 4. “When an artist can no longer make, he must unmake, he must kill, neuter, destroy.”
(Umm . . .)
5. “Pretend to live the ultimate
suburban American dream with wife and child and only on deathbed reveal it had all been a charade.” (
I could deal with that
, she surprised herself by thinking.) Beth knew she had no business reading Gavril’s journal, even when he left it out on the kitchen counter. They were notes about his art, not about what they meant to each other.

She stared at him now, his thick body dark against the sunlight of the windows, and he stared back at her with lips pinched in a smile. She still loved him so much, her vain, sloppy husband with his underwear climbing out of his pants. He had trusted her enough to leave New York and move out here to be with her in this strange, new region of America. It was her turn to comfort him, to make him feel safe.

Beth was stepping forward to do just that, to kiss her husband on the Maui of his birthmark, when Gail slid from her chair and wrapped her arm around Gavril’s chest. “Then none of us will go,” Gail said happily. “We’ll protest their bad behavior by refusing our company.” (Had she been reading his notebook too?) “I hope it rains.”

“Gavril,” Beth said. “It might be nice. Why don’t we go together? I’d like to spend the day out of the house, and there are still some neighbors you haven’t met.” Beth wrapped her arms around her own stomach, holding it protectively, and tried to reach Gavril with her eyes.

“Paul Benchley’s bringing some young man out to live with him,” her mother said. “A con artist from the city. That’s what I heard. I’d like to see Pam’s face when she meets her new neighbor.”

“It’s a free country, right?”

The mention of a New Yorker coming to live in Orient roused Beth’s curiosity. Ironically, it was Gavril, not Beth, who had accumulated dozens of friends in their time here. His had all been imported—fellow artist expats on the North Fork with whom he got drunk, traded gossip about New York galleries, and hatched elaborate plots to turn Orient into a bohemian art colony. All of Beth’s childhood friends had moved away or settled deeply into their families. Once so well liked, Beth now felt herself being sidestepped
to home in on the prize of her more famous husband. She was desperate for a friend from the city—anyone, even a con artist.

“I don’t believe all the talk about Paul being gay anyway,” Gail went on. “When he was young, he used to date a lot of the girls out here. I guess people do change in the city. Although I’m sure Pam started that rumor just so she could brag about how tolerant she is.”

“Well, we’re going. Right, Gavril? You love picnics. There’ll probably be a barbecue and a lot of American flags.”

Gavril shook his head, even as he kept his loving smile.

“I’m sorry, Beth. But they don’t welcome me. And I have too much work to do today.”

“Traitor,” she whispered and went upstairs to change.

Beth drove the
five minutes to the Muldoons’ house by herself. Parked cars lined the curb, and she decided, as a newly pregnant woman, that it was her right to block the driveway of the empty, for-sale Tudor five houses down. Maybe the first person to hear the news of her pregnancy would be a ticketing police officer.

The afternoon had grown cold as she approached the lawn, already busy and white with guests. She knew many of them, had known, had gone to school with or taken sailing lessons with them or seen them last at her father’s funeral. But there was really no one with whom she could sustain a conversation, no one to play that essential life-support role a friend fills at a party. Beth occupied herself spooning single servings of potato salad on a plastic plate, eating it, and helping herself to more. She chatted with her old third grade teacher, Ina Jenkins, and with Adam Pruitt, a guy two years older who had nearly taken her virginity one summer night in the late 1990s and still carried the traces of his childhood good looks on a slender face falling to ruin with cigarettes and beer. But they spoke only of the past, twenty years behind them, and when the memories failed to find a foothold in the present she excused herself. If Gavril had come along, at least he could have lent the scene a sense
of currency. Beth was relieved when Magdalena Kiefer, nestled beneath a shawl in a lawn chair, beckoned her over with a wave.

“How are the bees?” Beth asked as she knelt at the old woman’s side.

Magdalena’s short, white hair and splotched cheeks gave her a wise, matronly aura, that of a woman who had braced hard winds and, with squinted, cataract-blighted eyes, braced them still. She was like a season that was trying to hold on as fresher weather swept in to erase her. She placed a fingertip against Beth’s cheek, as if she were feeling for familiarity.

“They come back now, better, not dying like they were a few seasons ago from that mysterious disease. It’s a strong colony this year. I’ll have to bring them into the garage this week. The queens are angry . . . September frost.”

“One was caught in my kitchen window today,” Beth said. Magdalena’s filmy eyes brightened, and Beth remembered that she’d forgotten to free it by opening the outside pane. “I let it go,” she lied.

“Must have been attracted to fruit,” she whispered. Beth cupped her ears to hear her better, over the sound of Pam Muldoon shouting across the lawn for her son. “I’m so glad you and your husband are living next door. It’s a breath of fresh air . . . because your mother’s swimming pool and the terrible construction.”

Beth laughed to indicate that she’d heard Magdalena, when in truth she’d caught only snippets of her speech, faint shapes of fish beneath the surface of the ocean. Kneeling there on the grass, she was distracted by the sudden churn of her stomach. She stood up quickly and swept her hand along the arm of the chair.

“Well, I’ll have to stop by for a visit.”

Magdalena caught her hand and grasped it as hard as her muscles allowed.

“I’d like you to come by,” she said. “Tell you what might happen.” Beth was back on her feet now and had an even harder time hearing her. “Could happen. And they are planning it . . .” Her mouth moved silently, as if air and voice were logjammed in
her throat. Beth caught another few words: “ . . . to be afraid. How could it be like that?”

“Okay,” Beth said, turning the stillness of their hands into a departing shake. “This week. I’ll knock on your door.”

Beth hurried across the lawn toward the Muldoons’ house and entered through a sliding door into the laundry room. Bicycles and skateboards were piled there erratically; a clothes dryer quaked against the concrete floor, its windowed stomach swirling with red socks and flesh-toned towels. Pressing her palm against her mouth, she sprinted into the kitchen. She tried the first closed door she could locate—mercifully, it was the bathroom. In a single motion, she managed to close the door with one hand, lift the toilet lid with the other, and vomit a surge of yellow liquid into the bowl. Was it the potato salad? Was it the baby? Beth had no idea.

After the heaving subsided, she hung her head over the toilet a minute longer, staring at a dish of dried rose petals on top of the tank. Then she flushed the toilet, ran the tap, and splashed cold water into her mouth. In the gray light of the bathroom, she studied her face, skeletal, cheekbones protruding like a child’s kneecaps. The boyish indent of her chin fit Gavril’s pinkie finger. It had been their little love gesture in Manhattan: Gavril stretching out his pinkie and pressing it into the divot like key to lock. She took a few deep breaths and smoothed her white dress. Someone knocked at the door, and when she opened it, Adam Pruitt stood in front of her grinning, as if it wasn’t the bathroom he’d been looking for but her. But he was seventeen years too late to take her virginity, and she swept by him into the kitchen. The oven reeked of gas.

Outside, the ground warped below her, and Beth found herself looping far wide of the oak tree rather than walking toward it. She saw Pam’s youngest son, Theo, his hands dished together, in his palms a baby bird. The poor creature was shivering, desperate, all bulging eyes, and the sight of it released another bout of queasiness. Beth feigned curiosity, hoping to liberate the bird from his clutches and at least let it die in peace in the crook of a tree.
It should be
illegal for boys under fourteen to touch an animal that doesn’t have teeth
, she thought.

“Ohhh,” she cooed as she bent forward, pushing her hair behind her ear, preparing to snatch it up if she had to. Theo must have sensed her intentions, because he scooped one hand over the other and blocked access with his back. Pam stood three feet away, face pale and lips agitated, clearly in no mood to tolerate outside parenting. Beth quickly gave up on the mission.
Maybe some organisms are born to withstand torture
, she thought as she walked toward the drinks table.
Some things are meant to bear the pain and die
. She searched for something carbonated to calm her stomach.

Beth knew she should leave the picnic in case her sickness worsened. But returning home too early would only have confirmed what Gavril and her mother believed: that they weren’t missing anything by skipping a party they weren’t invited to in the first place. She forced herself to linger at the drinks table, scooping ice from the bucket to hydrate her tongue. As the sun sank over the rooftops and silvered the Sound through the oak branches, she realized that she’d forgotten to call her doctor to schedule an appointment. The office must already be closed. She would have to wait for days now for confirmation. When Paul Benchley tapped her on the shoulder, Beth wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there, holding a cube of ice against her lip.

“Were you stung?” Paul asked. “Is your lip okay?”

“No. Yes. No.” She threw the cube on the ground. “I was just in a daze.”

Paul’s face softened, and his mustache grew like an accordion under his wire-rimmed glasses. Beth liked Paul Benchley, as much as she knew him. She remembered him as a teenager when she was a child, being put to work by his tyrannical parents, taking out customers on the fishing excursions his father advertised from his Greenport bait shop, fixing every window and board of the Benchleys’ dilapidated mansion—they even forced Paul to spend his summers running the old inn on the tip, which had been in his mother’s
family for generations. Paul had earned an Ivy League degree in architecture, and, as his career took off and his parents grew older, he paid their bills so they could remain in the mansion until their deaths. Beth remembered Paul’s mother distinctly, a heavyset woman with speed-walking legs who ambled the coast in the afternoons, ignoring all property markers. Paul was long gone by then, working away in the city. A few years ago Gail had tried to hire Paul to oversee the latest remodeling of her house, hoping a local architect might alleviate the growing rancor, but he had gently declined. Beth realized now that her mother must have taken his refusal as just another snub against her.