Orient (61 page)

“Today in history, the Soviet Union solidified plans to drop a hydrogen bomb from an airplane over remote Siberia. Today in history, suicide bombers carried out simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in Jordan, killing sixty and wounding hundreds. Today in history . . .”

If Beth’s theory was right—that someone had impersonated Jeff Trader on that last visit—the one person who couldn’t have posed as an old white man was Luz. When Beth squinted, Luz became a black shape, the color of her skin the one element unhidden by poor vision or distance. A figure moved across the tarp on the opposite side of the house. It raced and melted into a corner, Caucasian green. The sound of footsteps on brick brought Luz to open her eyes. She scanned the room, stopping on Beth’s silhouette behind the plastic. “Hello?”

“Today in history, astronomer Carl Sagan, actor Lou Ferrigno, and singer Nick Lachey were born.”

“It’s me,” Beth said. She stepped through the open seam in the plastic and into the house. Luz drew her legs together and turned the radio off.

“The radio was just reminding me that people have been blowing themselves up since the beginning of time. We’re not living in a particularly inventive age.” Luz offered a smile, then wiped it dry with a towel.

“How’s Gavril?” she asked. “He told me he’s nearly finished his work for the show.
An installation of suburban regress
. Isn’t it curious that it’s always the male artists who try to make The Last Painting, The Last Sculpture, the Last Black Fuck-Off-and-Good-bye? Men always want the last word—they want to take the ball and go home. If you look at women artists, even you and me, we’re
on the side of life. We’re the ones pushing humanity a little farther against the darkness.” She glanced at Beth’s stomach. “How’s the baby?” She reached out and clapped her hands, inviting Beth to step forward and let her touch it. Beth stood still.

“I thought about you this morning when I was clearing a spider nest from the ceiling in the upstairs bathroom,” Luz continued, oblivious. “For a week there’s been a big spitball hanging in the web, and today there were a dozen little spiders climbing all over it, freshly hatched. They scurried so fast when I tried to squash them. And it struck me, standing on the upside-down trash can, that a spider is a spider when it’s born. It knows exactly what it needs to do. But a human has zero instincts at birth. All of its instincts come later. Think of all the work you’ve got ahead to make that thing inside you into an efficient, functioning being. Please make it a good being. We need more of them.”

Beth pulled the crumpled card out of her pocket and held it in front of Luz. “What is this?”

Luz’s mouth stiffened. She tipped her head to the side. It took effort for her to return Beth’s gaze.

“Oh, that,” she said coolly. “Well, you know my project. I’ve been painting all the old-timers out here. I thought your neighbor would make the perfect subject for my series.” She glanced in the direction of her phone, as if it were communicating with her telepathically. “She wasn’t interested.”

“The note seems more urgent than that. It mentions talking to Magdalena before she could say something. Don’t lie to me.”

Luz rubbed her lips together to quicken her smile. It was the kind of smile of someone stuck, the kind of expression used to blanket desperation, as if nothing terrible could ever strike Luz Wilson as long as she had that smile on her lips.

“I don’t care if you believe me or not. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“Tell me the truth. Did you go over there? Talk to her? Maybe fight with her? Were you over there on the day she died? Luz, tell me—”

“Oh my God,” Luz wailed, slapping her knuckles on the floor. “You’re completely crazy.”

“You tried to shut her up about something. Was it to stop her from talking about Jeff Trader’s death? Tell me what she was going to say.”

Luz was panicking, rotating her head, as if searching for a bystander who was listening to this ludicrous accusation. She tried laughing but it didn’t seem to help.

“Tell me,” Beth demanded. “Were you involved in any way—”

“You’re so fucking blind,” Luz shouted, covering her ears. “Can you please for once stop trying to play detective and see what’s happening in your own fucking life? Can’t you see that I’ve been protecting you?” Beth took a step back; the paper crumpled in her fist. Luz stared at her, her dark face flushing red. “That we’ve all been protecting you from the truth? Because the truth doesn’t matter now. It stopped mattering to me the minute I knew you were going to keep the baby. And it stopped mattering to Gavril the minute he found out you were pregnant. I could have killed him for taking so long to realize. Men are so slow. But I wasn’t going to tell him, in case you decided otherwise.” Luz’s tongue wrestled in her mouth, purple and tea-stained. The tongue seemed to find her mouth no longer inhabitable, caught with such little room amid her teeth to move. “It doesn’t matter now. And it doesn’t matter what I was going to explain to Magdalena. Because it’s over. You and Gavril are going to have a child.”

It’s the females you have to be careful about
. Beth remembered Magdalena warning her about Gavril, that Alvara had seen him in and out of the garage, bringing in friends, “playing around.” Alvara must have spotted Luz going into the garage too often. Maybe she noticed the way they spoke, or interacted, or kissed, behind the garage, hidden from the house but not from the windows of the cottage next door. This beautiful woman sitting on the floor below her, with a philosophy for every situation, had been carrying on an affair with her husband, for weeks or months
or maybe longer. They’d been meeting at night for walks through Orient when Beth was asleep in their bed. That must have been the cause of the fight on the night of Gavril’s party—even drugged-out Nathan had been able to see what was going on. Even Alvara, slipping nervously in and out of the room serving drinks, had known what was happening. Maybe everyone in Orient knew what was happening. Maybe only Beth was blind.

“So that’s what’s been going on. You and Gavril.” Beth was surprised to find that, at the moment of comprehension, she didn’t cry. The tears weren’t there to wipe away. She’d been so wrapped up in the murders and the baby that she’d missed the plain facts right in front of her, her marriage burning up like paper in her own backyard. “You were hoping to speak to Magdalena before she could tell me the truth.”

Luz took a controlled breath, neither confirming nor denying. On the coffee table, a glass Murano orchid sat on top of the Oysterponds Inn sign. On Luz’s feet were black leather slippers hand-sewn by Italian cobblers. Marble tiles were stacked in a corner, to be installed or returned to their manufacturer upon her whim. The beauty in the room was not fragile. It would survive the lives that rotted around it. It would gain value by biding its time, awaiting new hands for future appraisal. Luz had built such a gorgeous life with her taste and Nathan’s money. And yet she’d been willing to risk it all for Gavril, and Gavril had been willing to do the same—risk their life, their house, every part of them except the child. Her anger at Gavril was nuclear, an admixture of love and love erased.

“You were going to get a divorce from Nathan. And you assumed Gavril would divorce me. All of it, so the two of you could be together. Just like that.”

Luz balked, tamping back the arrogance that had fueled her entire career.

“I was never going to divorce Nathan. That was never my plan. I love Nathan deeply. And I like it out here. I like what we’ve found in this place.”

“But you went to Cole Drake to ask about a divorce.”

Luz shook her head. “No. I was asking him about divorce, but not on my behalf.” It was a punch from which Beth took a minute to recover. So Gavril had been considering a split. In his peculiar brand of morality, he felt obliged to end their marriage whether or not he could have Luz. “It was simply to determine who had rights to an artwork made on a property the artist didn’t own. But that was weeks ago. You have to know, I went back yesterday and told Cole to forget the whole matter. I didn’t want you hearing about it because it doesn’t
apply
anymore. Gavril loves you. He wants to make it work.”

Luz reached up toward Beth again, not to fondle her stomach but to take her hands. It was as if Luz were trying to catch her. “Beth, it happens. People fall in and out, and they make mistakes. It was an intellectual relationship far more than it was ever sexual.” Luz must have thought she would find that distinction comforting. “Don’t be a romantic martyr,” she hissed. “Don’t live by some ossified code of husband and wife from the broom closet of the last century. You don’t marry a person just so you can hang a ‘no trespassing’ sign around their neck. We’re artists, not Puritans. We’re free. And we’ve all been protecting you from the truth, like you were a little girl who couldn’t handle what real adults actually look like.” Luz’s eyes glistened, and she battled to keep them open under the weight of the water. “We’ve earned the right to live however we want. And it doesn’t matter anymore, because you’re going to have the baby. And one day you’re going to forgive me. One day you might even thank me for showing you the truth.”

Luz looked ugly when she cried, her face knotted, her eyes bulging, a moment of gracelessness from someone so unpracticed in remorse. She buried her face in the sofa cushion. The tarps bellowed all around them, rattled by sea squalls. “I don’t care if you think your life is ruined. You can think whatever the fuck you want. I just don’t want to mess up the future for your kid.”

Beth turned around, without ever once touching Luz Wilson,
and let herself out through the seam in the plastic. She walked along the concrete path toward the driveway—amazing in such moments that she still respected the twisting path of the walkway—and found Nathan leaning against her car. He wore dirty work clothes and a beaten-up brown leather jacket. He nodded at her as she approached.

“Well,” he said in a slurred baritone, freshly stoned. “I guess that makes us the two fools.”

“I hope you’ll be happy with her,” she said as she bypassed him and circled around her car. She felt sorry for Nathan, sorrier for him than she did for herself. Nathan would stay with his wife no matter how many times she changed the rules of their supposed freedom. He would have to play along with her constant shifts until he found himself the last barrier in Luz Wilson’s campaign to conquer all restrictions. Until that time, they could hide behind their money and taste. They could disappear into their accomplishments, and drift into Manhattan whenever they were bored of Orient or each other. Beth was certain they would see themselves as happy, and maybe they were. They could break whatever they wanted.

“You know, I blamed you at first,” Nathan said, tapping his fingers on the roof of the car. “But then I decided: it’s Orient’s fault. All this phony peace and quiet, like it can never quite wake itself up. Of course they came together here. They set the trap so they could be caught in it.”

“It wasn’t your idea to get a house out here, was it?” she said over the roof.

He shook his head. “No, it was Luz’s. But I’ve come to love Orient. No one knows what to do with our kind. But maybe we can wake them up. Maybe we can only make things really new and upsetting if we have a place that still resists us, a place that hasn’t already been touched.”

“Good luck with that,” she said. She opened her door, then paused. “But, Nathan, don’t you want anything more?”

“I love her,” he swore, stepping back. “She’s the only one who’s ever called me out on my bullshit. She’s the only person who can be honest. That’s important, isn’t it?”

She drove west on Main Road, passing the neighborhood of her childhood, the brick red slab of her high school and the entrances to summer swimming coves, the cemetery that held her father, the war obelisk, and the church. She kept her arm over her stomach like a second seat belt, driving below the speed limit, with all of Orient pitching and lurching around her wheels. This morning she and Gavril had promised to make a fresh start, the past behind them, the future expanding, a baby waiting on the other side of winter. She loved Gavril, and she forgave him—forgave him his betrayal, forgave him the doubts and uncertainties that had led him to Luz. She loved him for coming out here and for persevering for as long as he could. In his notebook he had written, “Pretend to live the ultimate suburban American dream with wife and child.” She loved Gavril for thinking he could live that charade. She would ask for a divorce and not take a single cent from the sale of his work. She would leave tonight, with Mills hidden in the trunk, and then after she’d driven him to the city she would return to the North Fork and stay with her mother in Southold for as long as it took Gavril to realize that she wasn’t coming back to him. And when she did come home, maybe by then the locks would be changed. The baby would arrive in April, and she’d let Gavril be the father, on weekends or whenever he was willing to make the drive from the city to Orient.

She parked in her driveway and entered the kitchen, calling for Gavril, thankful to get no response. She climbed the steps to the second floor and pulled a suitcase from the closet. From the window, she saw the garage door, still closed, a single light just visible inside, Mills waiting, with no sign of the police nearby. She packed the bag, watching herself fold clothes in the full-length mirror. The action seemed natural, inevitable, a daily chore to get through, her only incentive being the second after this one, and the
second beyond that, and all the other seconds that swum around her like dust in a room.

She heard a car pull in from the street. It was probably Gail—another untimely visit. It was only a minor complication. She wouldn’t inform Gail of her pregnancy until she was back at the condo, and surely the news of a grandchild would be enough to convince her not to sell the house. Could Beth afford to buy it from her? She reconsidered taking some of the Russian oligarch’s money. Maybe that was the final value of her husband’s art: it would provide the security to keep this house in her family for another generation.