Orient (25 page)

“Can’t fight the future, right?” Mills couldn’t resist saying as he unfastened his seat belt. Paul winced, forcing the kind of smile that came over those who had been justly punched. They followed a trail of white paving stones up to what must have once been the porch. A U of grassless dirt indicated its former site. If they drove to a landfill fifty miles away, Paul could have surely found the rotting beams and hung his sign on its original pegs. Instead, he pretended to set it swinging in midair.

“Well, they have the right, after what they paid,” Paul said with a sigh, his eyes squinting under his glasses. “The door is still here, so they didn’t scrap everything.” He pointed to the slab of ocher wood with a brass eyehole staring from between two pillars. The door was there, but the walls around it weren’t. The entire house was wrapped in plastic tarps, like a contamination site; Mills expected men in Hazmat suits to emerge, warning them to keep away. The wind jittered the plastic seams, revealing flashes of the interior: glimpses of sharp, minimalist furniture, a fur coat slung over an ivory end table, a Persian carpet that swept under a liquor cabinet stocked with vast bleached bottles. Mills pushed his face between the tarp edges and noticed a roll of twenties lying within reach, amid a pile of keys and matchbooks. Everything inside the house
winked with an odorless prosperity, a headachy shine engineered to reflect the current owners.

“These poor people,” Paul said, “having to live in a construction site.”

“These rich people, you mean,” Mills whispered.

Paul tapped softly on the front door, as if he feared he might knock it over. “They have to be rich,” he said. “This house and its forty acres cost well over six million. It was quite a controversy to see an old house like this go so far beyond the asking price.” Paul waited patiently at the door, but no wealthy artist opened it to greet him.

“No one’s home,” Mills said. “Who did you say these artists were?” Paul stepped back to take in the upper floor, searching for signs of life.

“They’re from the city. Beth said the man’s name is Nathan. And his wife is Liz or Luz or something like that.” Mills turned from the tarps and stared at him. The sports car in the driveway belonged to the black woman who had visited Paul’s house on the day Magdalena died.

“She came around to see you,” Mills told him. “But you were out. She said she wanted to paint your portrait.”

“Paint me?” Paul’s lips tightened in confusion. “Why would she want to do that? I’ve never met either of them. But they should have told me they were doing this kind of construction. I could have dug up the floor plans and saved them on the contractor bill.”

Mills walked to the front door and tried the handle. Paul grabbed his arm.

“We can’t just walk in.”

“She invited herself into your house. So we get to do the same.” The handle didn’t budge. Mills could have easily stepped through a gap in the tarps and unlocked the door from the inside, but that seemed a more sinister form of intrusion, as if even invisible walls were not allowed to be breached. For a minute they both stood awkwardly in front of the only obstacle that prevented Paul from his trip through memory’s bed-and-breakfast.

“Oh, well,” Paul said in resignation, as if to bluff the house into opening its door to him. “I can at least show you the grounds.” He pointed toward the Sound, then followed his own finger, a divining rod to locate the past. The blue water curved around giant, jagged rocks, pushed against the coastline in the last Ice Age. Any farther push would have saved them the burden of the trip. Gulls skimmed the water like descending planes. The black-and-white thimble of a lighthouse rose from an island of stones. “Coffeepot,” Paul told him. “There used to be lounge chairs just on the edge of this cliff. And over there a gazebo that slid onto the beach during the hurricane of ’71.” They hiked across the lawn, Mills snaking his arms around his stomach to keep warm. Seven half-dug rectangles were engraved in the grass, as if the backhoe had furiously attacked the earth and now stood shamefully on the perimeter, deflecting blame. Paul shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck, agitated the way any previous homeowner is who disapproves of their successor’s renovations. Mills could see that all of the construction work rattled him, like a memory being ripped apart. He let Paul walk a few feet across the lawn by himself.

“Why all of the digging?” Mills asked.

Paul spun around and attempted a weak smile. “I think they’re trying to build a pool. Or several pools. Or maybe they keep changing their mind about where they want to put it.” He pushed his heel into the frozen dirt. “They should have asked a local for advice first. This land used to be a salt farm before my mother’s family took it over. It was flooded with water from the Sound and baked by the sun into salt crystals. My family had to build up the cliff and harden the ground with clay to keep it stable. It’s too risky and expensive to dig a pool here. The previous residents knew that.” Paul finally threw his hand up, releasing himself of blame. “Well, it’s not my problem. Anyway, they’ll have to wait for spring now to continue. The ground’s frozen.”

“Maybe you should write them a note.”

Paul grunted. “I’m already giving them a hotel sign. And I guess
we
are
technically trespassing. They really are making the place their own, aren’t they?” He scanned the perimeter of the lawn, his eyes stopping on a patch of overgrown weeds not far from a row of tree stumps. He headed toward it, and Mills jogged to catch up.

“Right here was the first building I ever built.” Paul tucked the board under his arm and used both hands to push aside a clump of yellow briars. A large circular slab of crumbling concrete, swathed in moss and bird shit, protruded an inch from the ground. A wreath of uncut grass covered its sides. To Mills it didn’t seem a very impressive start for a career in architecture.

“You built this?”

“No,” Paul said, laughing. “This was just the base. I must have been six or seven. It was long after the first Bug Light burned down. But Bug was my mom’s favorite lighthouse, and she missed it so much that my father and I poured this slab of cement and assembled our own model out of wood and mesh. It was eight feet high, a cheap little replica, but it withstood the wind and snow before my mother sold the place. We used to light the top with candles, and at night I’d pretend to be a boat, guiding toward it, the whole horizon black but for that little star of yellow. There were so few guests, we spent our evenings here without anyone else around.”

“You were an architect even as a kid,” Mills said. He felt as long as Paul didn’t look back at the obliterated house he could drift in recollections without being reminded of their expiration date. The sea was still the sea, a blue field swirling with foaming tongues.

“Yeah, I think that little lighthouse started my interest in architecture.” Paul gazed at him with a sorrow so clean it seemed inviting.

“Do you wish your mom hadn’t sold this place?”

“No,” he replied, letting the weeds fall back over the slab. “It was a money trap, a dust hotel, and we couldn’t afford to keep it up. Houses are for people to live in, and these new owners are at least taking the trouble to remodel it. They could have torn it down.” Paul examined the old inn again, rattling like a plastic bag caught
on a rock. “Part of the reason my mother sold it was to pay for the last years of my boarding school. St. Peter’s, all-boys, in Westchester. From the age of seven on, I only came home during the summer, when they put me to work here or on my father’s fishing boats. I spent most of the summer out at sea as a kid.” He pointed far out in the water. “Jesus, I got sunburned.”

“Why didn’t you just go to school here?” Mills asked.

“My mom worried I might flounder in the local school system and end up a fisherman like my father, a deckhand with the stink of brine on my neck. Some of the people in Orient thought she was a snob for that, but she saw it as an investment. Worth more to her than this place. And it
was
an investment. Because, in the end, she couldn’t have kept the house on Youngs Road without the checks I wrote to pay for it. But that’s what they expected of me, and it was my turn to give back.” Paul stared at him, gathering a speech about the sterling benefits of a top-notch education, but he let the subject drift. It occurred to Mills that children were retirement packages for their parents, a way to ensure their own survival. The Benchleys had raised their son like a racehorse, betting their livelihoods on a winning pedigree. Now his success was all he had. Paul might not have ended up such a smart, lonely man if his parents hadn’t sent him away so young. Of course, Mills realized, the same could be said of him.

“It’s a good thing the historical board never came out here.” Paul nodded at the house. “I’m surprised they haven’t raised a stink about the renovations. Maybe they couldn’t see it from the road. Or, at this point, maybe they’re just glad it wasn’t sold to a development company. I bet Bryan will be paying a visit about selling their development rights. He should. I’d hate to see this land parceled up.”

Over the ridge, Mills noticed a wooden dock stretching into the water. A blue speedboat was tied to the end, snapping in the current against its taut ropes.

“Did you have a boat like that?” Mills asked.

Paul shook his head, hardly glancing at the craft. He was still envisioning his tiny ersatz lighthouse on the lawn, as if it were guiding
him back to his parents, blinking moth-winged, lit with candles, far away even close up.

“No. The dock must have been another addition after we left. A boat like that can get you around Orient much faster than the roads. That’s one way to beat traffic.” Paul shook his head and started toward the house. He pulled the wood sign from under his arm. “I’ll leave this at the door. Let them figure out if they want to keep it or not.”

On their walk to the car, Mills looked back at the house. One of the tarps had come unfastened, curling in the air like hardened smoke, exposing a collection of paint supplies, canisters, and canvases. In the upstairs window, Mills saw the faint, dark face of a woman in the glass, watching their departure. Before he could smile at her, two white arms wrapped around her and pulled her into the shadows.

Paul drove home carefully, his hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. “Orient sure is changing,” he said. They didn’t speak any more about the future. For Paul, it had already arrived.

Paul’s porch steps
had a wobbly second beam. It didn’t wobble for him, but it did for every less-accustomed foot. Mills performed a jumping sidestep to avoid it, knowing that if Paul heard the creak he’d be the one to spend the afternoon trying to fix it with a hammer. The leaves in the front lawn were already looking like a postparty cleanup job—a joy to watch falling, a backache once they reached the ground. Paul carried the farm-stand bags into the kitchen, promising a lunch of oysters if he could find his special gloves. Mills, having lost his appetite somewhere between the dogs and the Pruitt signs of the creature, resigned himself to his duties in handling the vanishing empire of Benchley belongings.

They had established an unthinking rhythm in the past weeks, coming together for occasional sparks of conversation between their exiles in separate parts of the house, as if days were vast, placid lakes
in which their boats occasionally met. Often Mills had to remind himself that the house wasn’t his and would never be, no matter how much effort he put into its upkeep. But he couldn’t help feeling he was discovering the secret routine of adult life, a bargain with time and space, a way to squeeze through its compressions with the least amount of resistance. Homes all over America must be riddled with the same quiet acts of cabinet opening and garbage dragging, the silent human orchestra of getting by. So different from Manhattan, Mills thought, with its loud acoustics of getting on and ahead.

He walked through the back rooms, taking a moment to appreciate the results of his work. A majority of the rooms were navigable now. Couches had regained their legs and arms; they were no longer couch-shaped piles of magazines and festering winter coats. Books were stacked against the walls, photo albums and frames arranged in keepsake piles.

In the first days of cleaning, no item had seemed worth more consideration than the time it took to put it in a trash bag. But as the junk diminished, objects began to take on added dimension. They told stories of the people who owned them: the arms on a pair of red sunglasses, bent to adjust to uneven ears. The sleep button on an alarm clock, worn more deeply than the other buttons. A brass horse head ashtray, property of a smoker who extinguished butts only on the stallion’s ears. Paul’s parents might have been gone, but they lasted, in the ground and throughout these rooms. Mills wondered what future archaeologists could learn about him by examining his belongings. He’d been alive for nineteen years, but he worried he would forever remain an incidental set of fingerprints in the lives of others.

There was once a family called the Fosters
. That was the first line of a joke Mills and his foster-care friends often told while waiting in the blue bowl seats of the social services offices. The Fosters decided to take in a foster kid, even though they had two children of their own. The father got caught up in some shady dealings with a criminal organization. One night, when the foster kid was out, a hit man came
to the Foster home and murdered the entire family in retaliation. Shot the father and the mother and the two children on the spot. Just as the hit man was about to leave, the foster kid walked through the door. The hit man pointed his gun and yelled, “Are you a Foster kid?” The foster kid looked around, appraising the family’s television set and video game console and snack cabinet and, after a moment, said, “Maybe. But before I go with you, how big is your TV?” For a long time that was the only joke Mills knew by heart.

He sat on his knees and started sorting through a stack of shoe boxes, taking his time. In a few weeks, he’d be finished clearing the rooms, and when that job ended, the need for him would end as well. Would Paul ask him to stay on, taking him in like an adopted son? Or would he drive him back to the city, dropping him off in Chinatown with a few dollars in his pocket and a grateful, stay-in-touch wave? And when he got to the city, would the same old vices be there to welcome him back? As long as Mills remained with Paul, dry and quiet in Orient, he felt that he was safe.