Orient (31 page)

Luz slipped her arms down Beth’s stomach, then let go with a start, as if she’d touched a burning pot.

“What?” Beth asked.

“Nothing,” Luz said. “Never mind.”

“I’m going in. Don’t any of you get near that house,” Beth said, hurrying with a blushed face to escape the cold.

In the kitchen,
at midnight, Mills stood by the doorway, watching as Beth told Gavril to shut up.

“I only ask,” he said, sitting on the counter.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked Mills. He shook his head.

“In Bucharest, so many orphans. So many dirty children huffing paint. They beg for change to sniff it”—Gavril mimed a bag
over his mouth and inhaled. “Paint covers their mouths in subway stations. They sleep on the ground with paint like silver drool running down their chins. All unwanted. This is why I ask, because I don’t understand it in America. Ceauşescu outlawed abortion”—Beth’s ears reddened and her molasses feet knocked into a chair leg—“because he wanted to supply more workers for the factories. He wanted a bigger population of slaves. But here in America, you already have bad unemployment, and you have no factories in need of more bodies. Instead you let your government be filled with religious fanatics saying the same thing as my dictator. No abortion. No contraception. But the same party complains about the poor. Too many of them. Too useless. A weight on the system. I do not understand this.”

“We have iced tea,” Beth said to Mills, with an apologetic smile.

“So I only ask your friend if he thinks his parents were religious.”

“I don’t know who they were,” Mills said, rubbing his legs and glancing into the living room. He looked everywhere but at Gavril, crouched on the counter, kicking his heels against the cabinet door, creating a drumbeat of metronomic bangs.

“He said he doesn’t know, so stop asking,” Beth said, pouring a last sip of vodka. The microwave clock read 12:06. Out the window, snow flurries danced in the wind. “Mills didn’t come over to be interrogated.”

“It’s okay,” Mills said. “I’m not offended. I just don’t know the answer.” His eyes finally made their way to Gavril. “Sorry.” Beth clutched Mills’s arm.

When Mills left the kitchen, Beth put her hands on her hips. “Jesus,” she said. “Show some respect.”

“I am respecting,” Gavril said lightly. “I show interest by asking questions. He is not a child. He can ask me anything he likes, I wouldn’t be upset. Why are you so sensitive tonight?”

“Yes, I’m being sensitive. I wish you could be the same.”

Gavril jumped from the counter. He whispered something in Romanian as he opened the refrigerator door.

“What did you say?” she asked. Gavril busied himself adding a lemon to his cup of tequila, pretending not to hear her. “What did you just call me?”

Gavril tried to reach for her but she stepped back, a retaliation that registered in her husband’s eyes.

“You coddle that kid, and you don’t let me touch you. It is you who is acting wrong tonight.” Beth sipped her drink to give her mouth both a task and a blockade. “Can you be nice to the man you married? It’s an important night, and these are my colleagues. I do everything to make a nice party and you walk around like my personal censor, telling me everything I say is wrong.”

“What if everything you’re saying
is
wrong? That bullshit about buying Magdalena’s house.”

“Ah, of course you will be the sober villain. It is just fun. You take everything too seriously. You hate before you love. What will you do when we have a child? He will not be a dark fool like that one.”

“Yes, Gavril, every word you say is wrong—”

Samuel Veiseler walked into the kitchen, pausing at the doorway as if to test whether he had interrupted a domestic dispute or a moment of marital bliss. Beth gathered the empty paper plates off the counter and shoved them into the trash.

“I have to go soon,” Samuel announced. “The roads are getting bad and I have to get back to Manhattan. It’s too uncertain out here. Shall we?”

“Yes, yes,” Gavril said. “Wait until you see my new studio, best flooring and soundproof. Perfect conditions for work.” He led him out the back door as Shelley called to Beth from the living room.

“I can’t find my coat.” Beth went to retrieve Shelley’s coat from the closet. Orange vomit clung to Shelley’s shoulder, the baby’s or her own.

A half hour
later, Beth searched for Mills on the ground floor, where lingering guests swayed and mined the toppings of Gavril’s hors d’oeuvres. Their cups were clutched as if they contained the best
chance of happiness. Frivolity had reached its moment of paranoia: would the liquor outlast the remaining guests? It was after midnight, and a storm was coming, but the electricity could last forever, and only the old and the obligated felt the burden of the hour. Gavril’s art assistants kissed by the front door. It was pretty to watch two young people kiss, their mouths elastic, their histories briefer and needier of consequences. Luz Wilson’s clothes hung on the railing.

Beth climbed the steps. If it hadn’t been her house, if the door hadn’t led to her childhood bedroom, she might have knocked. When she opened it, smoke rolled through the trapped air. She waved a hand through the haze, which hung like thread, obscuring several bodies seated in a circle, as if warming themselves at an indoor campfire: Carson, his boys, and Mills, off in the corner.

“When we finally left the bedroom at seven in the morning,” she heard Carson telling his band of young men, “the rest of the apartment had been robbed. They took the furniture, all my camera equipment, they even took Cookie’s clothes. The only thing they left was the cat, which they had brushed and fed.” Noticing Beth at the door, Carson asked belatedly if they could smoke inside.

She smiled at him, and then at Mills, who quickly stood up, clambered over the other young men, and shuffled into the hallway. Before Beth closed the door, she smelled a sweetness to the burning, a substance more acrid than tobacco in the smoke.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t partake,” he said. “I wanted to. But I didn’t.”

She was glad to hear it. She’d forgotten about his problems in the city and didn’t want to be responsible for his time beyond Paul Benchley’s watch.

“You haven’t gotten the full tour,” she said, leading him down the hall and opening the door of the master bedroom. When she pulled the chain to the ceiling light, she was relieved to find the room empty. Moths rippled toward the overhead fixture. Mills scanned the pinkish walls. He walked toward a painting that Gavril had hung earlier, a canvas with bedsprings stapled on its stretched linen. Mills pressed his finger on a spring and let it pop back out.

“Did you make this?” he asked.

“Oh, God, no,” she said, sitting on the corner of the bed. “It’s really ugly, isn’t it? No, I did figurative paintings. Portraits. In fact, some of them are packed up in the bedroom you were just in. If they haven’t already gone yellow, Carson’s lungs will finish the job.”

“
Did
?” Mills asked, nervously toying with his earring. “You don’t paint anymore?”

“No,” she said. “I mean, I might start again. I just haven’t found much inspiration. But I want to, I hope to. Oh, who knows?” A vein was constricting at her right temple. The pain went away when she closed her eye.

“I can’t believe all your friends make a living on this stuff.” He pressed another spring and watched it bob. “What is something like this worth?”

She considered it, a muddled logarithm of prominence versus prospect versus previous sales versus popularity of medium. “I don’t know. That’s by a pretty successful artist. Maybe fifty or sixty grand at auction.”

“No way,” Mills wailed. “Sixty thousand dollars for this? You’ve got to be kidding.” He quickly stopped the spring. “Who would be that, that—”

“Insane?” She smiled, leaning back on the mattress. “There’s a market out there.”

Beth smoothed her dress against her stomach. She had no clue what Luz had felt around her belly, a slight cushion of fat at most. She couldn’t have sensed any movement. Beth prayed that she’d misunderstood Luz’s reaction and considered asking Mills to touch her stomach to tell her if he noticed anything out of place.
Out of place
—yes, that’s all it was, a body that had become disorganized, a scrambled body she was forced to hide under an inherited dress.

“But it’s hideous,” Mills said. “I don’t mean to disrespect what your friends do, but I’m confused how these pieces of art could be worth that much. And you have a hundred of them all over your
house. Face it, Beth, you’re a millionaire. What an arrangement all your friends have. You can mint each other thousands of dollars.
Here, I made this in twenty minutes. Now you’re rich!
”

She laughed, and so, finally, did he. It was as if the real Mills, a softer set of eyes, were suddenly visible through the weeds where he hid himself. She wanted very much to touch him.

“Maybe I should start making art,” he said, almost seriously. “I know I sound dumb, but what does it do for people? If I knew that, maybe I could make it too.”

“Well,” she said. She once had a speech reserved for this occasion: a benediction against philistinism, a well-oiled sales pitch in favor of taste. It had been a long time since anyone had asked her the question. These days, everyone seemed like an expert. Mills stepped closer to the painting, standing on tiptoe in his sneakers. His finger twisted a curl of his hair.

“I mean, it’s ugly but it’s hardly shocking. It’s easy to make, so it doesn’t require a special skill. It isn’t nice to look at. At best, it’s a creepy sort of decoration. Like a deer head over a fireplace, but one that doesn’t match the rest of the room.”

“That’s more like it.”

“So?” He watched her intently, expecting an answer.

“It’s internal,” she said, flailing her hands. Her manifesto had escaped her. Why
was
it worth so much? Instead, another truth came rushing in to fill its place. “It’s an internal economy, with its own forms of regulation. It starts with the work and the hype that surrounds it. Those two things move through the system. And as they do, the product gathers value, through interest and attention and critique and speculation. But at all times the work itself must remain”—she thought of the precise word—“ineffable, indeterminate, between. It doesn’t point this way or that way, or it points different places depending upon where you are.”

“Like a compass,” Mills offered.

“No, a compass has a function. The work cannot have a function.” She drew herself up, intent on expressing this clearly, as if
her own sanity rested on the answer. “It doesn’t make any sense. None of it does. It’s just a bubble that won’t burst. I used to understand it, but I don’t anymore. Now I just accept it and play along, and as long as I play along it keeps expanding. Maybe that’s what it is, a place for the world to put its confusion.” Her eyes stung. “Now maybe you understand why I can’t paint. I’ve lost the point of it. Frankly, I can’t stand all of the intellectual doubletalk. I mean, you’re right. It’s a bunch of springs on fabric.” She wiped her eyes. “I shouldn’t say this, but when I met Gavril and he showed me his work, I knew it was good because it looked so wrong. It looked like the ruins of something right. And I knew when I saw it that he’d be brilliant. And I was right. I’ve been right. Gavril is a brilliant man.”

Why were her eyes watering? Why was the color draining from the room, making all the furniture—the dresser, the bed, the full-length mirror in which she looked every morning to find herself sleeping next to her husband—seem as demented as the springs on the painting? She blamed the vodka for her tears, for an already weakened body that was convulsing and driving her hands against her face, for her failure to make sense of any of it—the art, this house, Gavril and his gallerist standing over a puddle of tar, the man who brought mail to her door. “I guess it’s an education.”

Mills sat down next to her, placing his hand on her back. He didn’t tell her to stop crying. He simply held her back and let her finish.

“God, I’m just like my mother,” she said, “crying on the corner of the bed over nothing. I like to think she did that only after my father died, but it started before. She always left the door open so I would come in when I heard her sobbing, or so she could stop when she heard me coming. I never knew which.”

He touched her knee. His eyes weren’t absent when she looked at him. His lips moved together, building warmth. She might have kissed him if she hadn’t known better. She might kiss him anyway.

“Maybe it’s just a different way for people to see,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t have to answer anything. It’s perfect that some
things can be just like you said—confusion. There needs to be a place for that.”

“Does there?” she asked. “Is that really what we need more of? Isn’t there enough?”

“It puts food on the table. And it gives all of your friends nice lives. So it does do something. Maybe you’re just expecting too much.”

“Maybe,” she said. Somehow, for the last six months, she’d thought she hadn’t been expecting enough. She rounded her shoulders. “I’m sorry Gavril gave you such a hard time. Part of that brilliant-artist trip is the license to ask a lot of stupid questions, thinking he can be honest where others are afraid.”

He stared at the floor. She thought she could see the lights within him disappearing one by one. If she did paint again, she’d want to start with his face, if only to stoke that light, to free the fire and open it to the air.

“It didn’t bother me,” he said. “I told him I didn’t know anything about my parents, but that’s not true. I found my mother, saw her just as I see you.”

“Oh, man, that must have been hard,” she said. “Did you spend any time with her?”

“Not much. We spoke. Not like you and I are talking, though. Like we were strangers trying to sell each other things.”

She waited, but he didn’t continue. She didn’t press him. She had no right to push him further. But she no longer felt like she was talking to a child. They sat together on the edge of the bed, staring forward, as if they were traveling in the front seat of her car.

The sound of glass, shattering, came through the window from the back porch. Beth heard feet slapping on the pavement, followed by a sharp, aborted scream. “I better make sure no one’s hurt,” she said. She hurried down the steps and moved through the deserted living room. She heard engines revving in the driveway and saw headlights passing through the windows before disappearing down the road. Luz rushed through the back door, her breasts shaking
as she reached for a towel. Her dark skin was wet and glinting, her white underwear tracing a shell of hair.