Orient Read online

  Gail smiled triumphantly, glints of bleached, celestial teeth. The bee clung to the glass and wiped its antennae. She could see the circular plates of its abdomen curled like pencil shavings. The bee probably did belong to Magdalena Kiefer, the Shepherds’ nearest neighbor. Magdalena had owned the cottage next door for as long as Beth had been alive; she had been a radical lesbian (and, rumor had it, a splinter member of the Weather Underground) long before Beth had come to know her as plump, arthritic Lena, cloaked in yarn throws. Whatever passion Magdalena once had to change the forecast of American society was now reserved for the rearing of bees. Her summer apiary consisted of three buzzing boxes on her lawn, which she dragged into her garage just before the autumn frost. It was not uncommon on hot August days to find Magdalena bent over in her backyard, supported by her nurse, both women covered neck to toe in white jumpsuits, wearing giant mesh helmets, as if they were residents of a retirement home on the moon.

  Gail couldn’t stand Magdalena. She had been one of the principal figures in the local junta against Gail’s decade-long transformation of the Shepherd house. When Beth moved in, she had expected to inherit Magdalena’s hostility, but the eighty-three-year-old spinster had been nothing but kind, sending over a jar of honey with a handwritten card that read “It’s nice to have you back.”

  “I don’t mind the bees,” Beth said, trying to figure out a method of freeing the insect without opening the pane that would let it into the house.

  “Is that so?” Gail replied. She spread her hands across the table, hands that did belong to a woman of fifty-eight, with purple veins constricting around bone. As long as plastic surgeons weren’t out there pushing hand rejuvenation surgery, Beth knew that some reassuring presence of her mother remained intact.

  Beth poured a cup of coffee and drank it down before she could reconsider. Gavril’s art notebook lay open on the counter. “Whatever you say I am, I will be that for you, over and over,” he’d written in his looping hand. Beth decided not to attempt decoding what it meant. Like the stock market ticker at the bottom of the news, her husband’s scribblings served as ciphers to a system she didn’t understand or trust. But suddenly she was feeling slightly sick. She lurched toward the table and pulled out a chair.

  “You didn’t tell me why you’re here.”

  “Can’t I visit?” her mother wheezed. “Am I violating your personal space in my own house? Is it so wrong that I stop by for an hour to see my daughter and ask if she needs anything from town?”

  “Of course not,” Beth said with a sigh. “It’s just that I’m trying to create some kind of routine here. I wanted to set up a painting studio in the second bedroom and bring in my old desk from—”

  “I thought you’d given that up.” Gail reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind Beth’s ear. “Honey, you do look a little sick. Are you taking the supplements I brought you? You know they’re good for”—Gail clawed at her sternum, like she was describing how to clear an obstructing object from her windpipe—“raising your hormone levels. For fertility”—her clawing hand rotated into an open-palm stop sign—“and not just that, for general health. You take one every morning and one again at night. They’re not over-the-counter, Beth. A Chinese holistic doctor prescribed them, a friend of mine. They’re medical, so they work.”

  On her way down the stairs, Beth had steeled her nerves, deciding on this supposedly blessed first morning of pregnancy to start a brand-new coalition with her mother, a temperate confederacy marked by patience and warmth. But two minutes into Gail’s visit, Beth had already regressed into the moody, matricidal teenager, sitting here in the same toffee-colored kitchen with the same crooked shelves her father had never gotten around to fixing before he died. Right then and there, she decided not to share the results of the pregnancy test with her mother. Some leftover teenage piece of her was even tempted to deliver the baby before ever telling her mother she was pregnant. “There, I did it without you,” she could say. “I didn’t need your help.” But that was a fantasy for faraway Manhattan; it could never work on the incredibly shrinking North Fork. Beth felt ashamed by her sudden anger even as she toyed with it.

  “Sweet potatoes are good for irregular menstrual cycles, and plenty of peas. Misty O’Donnell is not only an interior decorator but she also found the time to be trained as a doula. That on top of having six grandkids! She says orgasms last a little longer in pregnant women because the uterus—”

  “Please, Mom. Stop talking.”

  “. . . gets engorged with blood. Misty says that now doctors can even run scans in the first trimester to check for Down syndrome or other chromosomal disorders, and—”

  “Mom, enough.”

  “. . . there are exercises, these stretches and yoga positions, that actually help take pressure off the cervix. They also help prevent obesity and allow the body to adjust to the shock of—”

  “I’m not pregnant!” Beth shouted, rising from the table. “And I may never be. So please shut up.”

  It was the destiny of Gail’s face to look most like her old self—most like the woman she didn’t want to be—when she was hurt. Her eyes welled, her bottom lip distended, and she avoided Beth’s gaze, cordoning her vision to the floor. Beth bent over her in guilt, collecting her mother’s hand from the table and rubbing it in her own.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want to be bullied into anything. It will happen when it’s time and until then I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “I just want you to be happy,” her mother said with a show of perplexity that required her to remove her hand from Beth’s palms and wave it through the air. “Why should I have to defend myself against that? I think I’ve been pretty lenient in my demands on you. You want this house, I give you this house. You want me not to go upstairs, I sit alone in the kitchen until you feel like coming down. You tell me you’re ready to have a baby, I go out of my way to ask my own friends for advice that might . . .”

  Magdalena, Beth thought. That could be a pretty name if the baby were a girl.

  She hadn’t gotten too far into the thought when Gavril appeared at the screened window of the back door, staring in like he needed permission to enter.

  “Everything all right?” he asked. Gavril hadn’t shaved in days. The pattern of the screen against his face deepened the crosshatch of black whiskers over his cheeks. He opened the door reluctantly, as if he were barging in on a private matter, as if Gavril didn’t know that his presence was the only antidote to the brawls between mother and daughter. Gail adored him. Her shoulders relaxed, and her eyes widened in joy.

  “Yes, yes,” Gail assured him. “We were just discussing the picnic.”

  “What picnic?” Gavril asked.

  “The Muldoons’,” she replied, glancing over at Beth with a wink, as if to say, don’t worry, I’m covering for you, we won’t tell Gavril what you were raving on about. “The one they throw every year. Beth didn’t tell you about it?”

  Beth knew the picnic her mother was referring to. She had gone her last two years of high school and had heard that it had continued on as some punitive local tradition. Who knew why? The Muldoons weren’t the friendliest of neighbors, just the most visible. And Beth knew one thing: they also hated her mother.

  “A picnic,” Gavril repeated with a smile. Beth could see his mind working, doubtlessly entranced with the kind of clichéd Americana that fascinated him. He had dragged Beth to the Fourth of July parade in Greenport, marveling at the flimsy pomp of the baton twirlers and marching bands. “I love this country—so medieval,” he said over and over as the procession of Vietnam and Iraq veterans passed, until Beth finally told him to be quiet.

  “Oh, but not the Muldoons,” he howled now.

  “Yes,” her mother said, laughing.

  “Then I can’t go. They don’t like artists.”

  “I’m sure they’d like you if they met you,” Beth said, though she knew Gavril was right. Apparently Pam had gotten it into her head tha
t artists were to blame for the recent wave of New Yorkers buying up local property to turn into weekend retreats. Pam perceived artists the way poor minority groups in the outer boroughs perceived artists: as garish, warning canaries sent down defenseless mine shafts, paving the way for gentrification, displacing families and prepping abandoned storefronts for coffeehouses and Swedish design boutiques. Last June, when an enterprising ceramist tried to turn the old fishing-tackle store on Village Lane into an art gallery, Pam ran to the historical board—her husband, Bryan, was a key member—and created so much red tape that the woman gave up in aggravation. All this time later, the storefront still stood empty and black, to Pam’s enormous satisfaction.

  “They don’t like me either,” Gail confided. “Bryan and Pam were so nice once, so . . .” She struggled for the word. “Simple. But I’ll never forgive them for the way they treated me after Beth’s father died. This town isn’t a museum. What’s the matter with doing a little renovation on a house that’s a hundred and twenty years old?”

  “It’s a free country, right?” Gavril said, laughing.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Gavril and Gail had bonded over the summer, not exactly against Beth’s wishes but despite her complaints that Gail needed to learn to give them space. If Beth were honest with herself, she might admit an annoyance with how much her mother liked Gavril, the very opposite in body and temperament from her cautious, yardstick-thin father. The way Gail expressed her affection—hugging, touching, giggling—felt like a betrayal to the memory of the man who had taken Beth out on the Sound on weekends to fish, who coaxed her into memorizing every country on every continent and the moons and planets circling the sun.

  Truth be told, there might have been some lingering rebellion in Beth’s choice of mate. Gail wasn’t supposed to swoon over a bulky Eastern European artist who ate his breakfast in his underwear. On their first date, two years ago, Gavril had made her watch a video of the 1989 execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian president, and his wife, Elena. He played the grainy, yellowed footage on his laptop. Sitting knee to knee on his bed, they watched the elderly couple bundled in thick wool coats argue as soldiers bound their hands and led them out to a concrete wall. After rounds of gunfire and a cloud of cement dust, the screen glimpsed the dead, bloodied bodies of a couple who could have passed for two mildly irritated immigrant grandparents on a winter walk in Queens.

  Only this wasn’t just any couple, not to Gavril. They were the reason that Gavril’s early childhood memories involved lining up for hours for flour and milk or pawning ancestral silverware for Duracell batteries, ham radios, or even just ham. They were the leaders who forced Gavril’s parents, two soap factory workers, to perform ridiculous (although admittedly beautiful) choreographed dance routines in colorful unitards for nationalistic amusement. Beth didn’t know a single thing about Romania other than the prune-colored gymnasts she had watched during summer Olympic broadcasts in her childhood. After the execution footage ended, Gavril slapped down his computer top with pride. “That is how we deal with dictators in my country,” he boasted. “This is what a people’s revolution looks like.”

  It might not have been very promising, as first dates go, but Gavril Catargi proved shockingly earnest, so quick to profess his love for her and so soft with his large, meaty hands. She couldn’t believe that a man who had survived the starvations of communism, and who was already being hailed in the art world for his macho destructive tendencies—marble statues smashed with a baseball bat on gallery floors; paint poured over expensive furniture; mounds of dirt and lead pipes excavated from walls and left for collectors to walk around admiringly in their once pristine penthouses—could be capable of sobbing in her arms when she finally answered his “I love you” with her own.

  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 whe
n 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.