Orient (7 page)

In another life, with all of his heroic pointing, Paul Benchley could have been a valiant sea captain. In this life, at this hour of night, he was just a beleaguered home owner standing knee-deep in waste. “None of this has been settled,” Paul said tiredly. To Mills, some of it looked as settled as bedrock. Still, Paul kept pointing, kept opening doors, until finally history became garbage, literal garbage, the last room a tar pit of bloated black trash bags. “This is what I’ve already managed to throw out,” he said. “I told you to be prepared.”

What could Mills say? “Jesus, you weren’t kidding.” Yet he was strangely relieved by the junk—Paul really did need help, and no overnight job either, no afternoon sawing branches or sweeping a porch. They trudged back into the epicenter of the back rooms, where floral paper peeled from the walls, and broken plaster exposed buttery swabs of insulation. The cold here was finger numbing, and Mills fought back a shiver.

“Is this your mom and dad’s stuff?” Mills asked, glancing around for one of the picture frames, a way to put faces to belongings.

Paul nodded. “And believe me, I’m not a pack rat. I just never got around to dealing with their things. My father died seven years ago and my mother went in June. I pushed it all back into these rooms, and since I only come up on weekends I never found the time. Well, now you’ve seen the worst of it.” Guessing what Mills was looking for, he grabbed a stack of photographs from an open drawer, sifted quickly through them, and handed one over.

They looked happy, this old couple, engineers of their own stake in the twentieth-century suburban own-everything dream. His mother sat in a wooden foldout chair, her curly hair a premature gray, her hand poised on her shoulder to cup her husband’s fingers. The husband stood behind her, belt around his kidneys, a captain’s hat shadowing his eyes. His father was skinny, skin sunken but very
tan, his smile coming less naturally than that of his wife. All this stuff had been theirs: the
Birds of Long Island
guides, the laundry basket of beige bras and silk dresses, three wise men and a donkey placed on a sheet of antacid medication. It was the fate of most household items to linger on after their owners, offering accidental clues to their hopes and distractions. Paul’s parents, it seemed, had been perfectly normal: they liked birds and religious tokens and wore unisex snow boots and battled indigestion. And now they were dead, survived by a legacy of by-product, an avalanche of junk that never stopped rolling.

Paul took the photograph from Mills’s hands and returned it to the stack. “Honestly, I almost feel like I should burn these,” he said. “I think that might be the kindest form of death for family photographs. I’ve never seen anything more depressing than a box of old photos for sale in a Salvation Army. Those were all people who mattered. I guess that’s the advantage of our digital age. You can just press delete at the end of your life and no one can touch you.” Paul wiped his forehead. Sweat clouded his glasses.

“Do you miss them?” Mills asked. “Your parents, I mean.”

Paul blinked at the question.

“Yes. They were very good people. Orient people. My father owned a bait shop in Greenport, owned a few boats too, rented them out for bluefish season. And my mother ran a hotel for a while. Well, a bed-and-breakfast–type place on the tip that had been in her family for almost a century. It wasn’t very successful. Tourists stopped coming to Orient once the Hamptons took off. She had to let go of it to pay for my schooling, which was just as well. As a kid, I was put to work nights and weekends to keep up those rooms, which no one ever rented.” Paul blew a channel of air; it whitened before it faded. He dropped the stack of pictures in the drawer and jiggled it shut.

“What about this house?” Mills asked. “How long has it been in your family?”

Paul glanced up at the ceiling’s low, splintered crossbeams.

“My mother’s family had it for generations. If you walk outside, all the property as far as you can see along the Sound belonged to them. My grandfather was forced to sell most of it when he got married, parceled it up, and that was the end of the potato farms. But my parents stayed on here, making ends meet. I suppose that’s why I kept it when they died. I just can’t bring myself to let go of something that’s been in my family for so long. As you can see.” Paul nodded to the junk piles and laughed feebly. Mills noticed a mouse darting behind the phone books. Animals had made their homes back here.

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “Maybe I’ll just feel lonelier in this house after we clean all this out, with all these empty rooms. I think my parents always thought they’d have more kids . . .” He waved his arms like a Realtor, as if trying to fill the dead rooms with a flurry of life.

“Were you with your parents when they died? Did you”—Mills tried to find subtle roads—“take care of them?” Now that he’d seen their picture, he was curious to know how they had died. Why was a person’s exact cause of death so often more fascinating than what they did with their life? Because it explained how they suffered, Mills thought, because it was a reminder that everyone suffers in the end.

“I was with my mom. I came up for her last month. Cancer got her. And the treatments got her worse, so she stopped attending the chemo sessions I set up. I did all the stupid things a child does when a parent is on her deathbed.”

Mills didn’t know what all those stupid things were. “Like?” he risked asking.

Paul cleared his throat. “Like I bought a digital camera to record her recollections. I thought it would be a kind of show of respect, to have those Benchley stories chronicled on film. She was so sick, all I managed to get was a dying woman repeating my questions back to me and then going quiet, staring up at the ceiling like the answers to the past were all written there. She had dementia in the end.”

“You should have showed her the old photos. That might have helped remind her.”

Paul dipped his head. He wasn’t crying; Mills would have been able to see the tears behind his lenses. Grown men crying were like deep-water fish against aquarium glass, their mouths curved downward, drifting away from the light.

“I did try that,” Paul admitted. “I carted in the albums, spread them on her lap. Finally, and this was one thing I did get on camera, she brought her arm up and knocked the albums off the bed. ‘I’m sick of those times,’ she said. ‘Get them out of here and give me peace.’” Paul winced and forced a smile. “I realized how selfish it was, asking her to spend her last days entertaining me with memories. It’s hard to lose a parent—especially losing them that way, before they die, till they have nothing left to say to you even while they still can.” He paused. “Maybe the past stopped mattering to her. Maybe she was giving me permission to throw it all out.” His eyes looked vacant now, like a newborn’s, sliding around without absorbing details. Mills got the sense that Paul didn’t bring him out here only for his extra set of hands. He didn’t seem to have anyone else to talk to. Paul snapped awake, his cheeks flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go on like that. About parents.”

Mills lifted his hands to reassure him. It didn’t bother him to talk about other people’s parents, to know that children liked and sometimes missed their own.

Paul pinched his lips before he spoke. “You know nothing about your parents? Who they were, what happened before they gave you up? I mean, you must have some idea, right?”

“No, nothing—not a name or a reason,” Mills replied. “And I never asked, either.” The truth was, Mills had asked. For several years, on his birthday, he had gone to his caseworker and his counselor to ask for information, but they’d always shrugged while examining his file, UNKNOWN being their only response. He had tried other routes, with more enlightening results, but Mills liked Paul too
much to burden this first night with sad stories. “I’m not a wounded kid, you know,” he said. “It could have been worse. I learned how to tie my shoes same as everybody. If you don’t know it, you don’t miss it. And I had love around me most of the time.” That was the second lie he’d told Paul Benchley in the past two minutes.

Paul nodded, as if he understood. “Well,” he said, and let that be the final word. They drifted toward the front rooms, Paul extinguishing each light behind them, and Mills felt the impulse to wipe his feet when he reached the hallway, as if his shoes were soaked in a past he didn’t want to track through the rest of the house. Paul placed his hand on the banister leading upstairs.

“I forgot about the picnic,” he said as Mills lifted his duffel bag over his shoulder. “I hope that wasn’t awkward for you. Meeting all of those neighbors in one fell swoop.”

“I don’t think your neighbor likes me. The mom,” Mills said.

“Oh.” Paul touched his shoulder delicately. “Pam’s harmless. And I called ahead to let them know you were coming. Some people out here think the world ends at the causeway and anyone who manages to drive over it is trying to steal their souls. Or better yet, their views of the Sound. But most Orient people are pretty nice—if you answer enough of their questions and don’t give them too much to gossip about.”

“I won’t tell them about your back rooms,” Mills promised.

Paul laughed, clapping his hands together. “That’s not what I was thinking of. But thanks.”

They climbed the dark staircase—perhaps there was no switch on the ground floor, or perhaps Paul preferred the blue trail of moonlight that poured across the upstairs landing—to the colder second floor. Mills could feel the wooden beams shift under his sneakers, the house adjusting to his unfamiliar weight. Paul navigated the hall with quieter footsteps, walking past closed doors and less amateur seascapes framed in gold, limping slightly, as if reminded of a knee injury that was still healing.

Paul opened the last door and led him into a small bedroom. A different slant of moonlight, watery and white, spilled from the single window. The room’s ceiling slumped downward, and cobwebs grazed Mills’s forehead. He dropped his bag on the mattress, stiff from disuse, maybe never used. Maybe Mills was Paul’s first guest. He noticed a small door and opened it, expecting a closet until he looked inside and realized it was bigger than that, though too small for a bed. It was a room with no obvious purpose, and with almost nothing inside—not a lamp or a desk or a bookshelf. The only decoration on the wall was a poster of a lighthouse, a squat, doom-windowed structure blistered by a sunset of pinks and grays. He called to Paul, who had taken a folded green towel out of the closet and set it on the dresser, placing a plastic-wrapped toothbrush on top of it.

“Weird room,” Mills said, stepping farther into the tiny chamber. He felt his left foot give way, dropping into a bowl-shaped recess in the floor.

“Isn’t it?” Paul leaned against the doorframe, hands shoved into his armpits. “It’s a birthing room.”

“A what?” Mills jumped from the hole, as if the basin might still hold amniotic remains.

“A birthing room. Women used to deliver babies here.”

Mills shivered, he didn’t know why, some childish spook about a room where long-dead babies had been pulled from long-dead mothers. They didn’t have birthing rooms in California.

“Jesus—is this where
you
were born?”

“No, of course not.” Paul’s crossed arms suddenly read as a sign of rebuke. “But these were quite common in nineteenth-century homes. Whole lives would begin and end in one house. The purpose of a parlor, for example, was for the viewing of a dead body, for relatives to gather for their final visitation. It was only when entrepreneurs realized they could make money on death as well as life that the function of the home parlor was outsourced to the
business of the funeral parlor. In fact, when death finally left the home parlor, the name of the room was changed to—”

“A living room,” Mills guessed. “I never thought of that.”

“I know that might sound like progress, but from an architect’s perspective, I think it’s pretty sad. No one is born or dies at home anymore. Now we just live in temporary units, made of shitty drywall as interchangeable as renters who tape up a few pictures and call a place home. There’s nothing real about living anymore, is there? Every decade less and less.” Paul wiped his mouth, and Mills stepped back into the bedroom. He was too tired for more architectural wisdom, another lecture on the wonders of doorknobs, the majesty of the hinge. There’d be time to hear them tomorrow. “Don’t worry,” Paul said smiling as Mills snaked by him. “It’s not haunted.”

“Oh, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

Paul nodded. “You’re all set then? Have everything you need?” He retreated into the hall, saying good night as he shut the door.

Mills pulled off his shirt and slid out of his jeans, peeling off his white socks and tucking them into the cups of his shoes. In his underwear, his skin was blue, his nipples black as the moles that dotted his stomach. He slipped into the sharp bedsheets and stared out the window at the branches of an oak tree whisking against the glass. In just one day, he had gotten so far from New York. If he held his breath he could hear the water slapping against the shore. He wasn’t sure if coming to Orient had been the right move. Part of him wanted to hitchhike back across the body of the woman on the map, racing toward her head to crawl through her eyes and return to those acquaintances whose nights were just beginning and wouldn’t end until he awoke. Those places without birthing rooms or jungles of dead people’s possessions—that seemed more like living to him, no matter what Paul said, maybe more so for all their drywall and borrowed furniture, so that the living stood out. He thought of his friend Marcella with her chubby scorched fingers and
mmmmm
-ing breaths, his friend Lucas with his unbuttoned shirts and hamster-cage ribs rocking over his knees.

An erection jabbed in his underwear. Out of habit, Mills rotated on his stomach and balled the sheet against it. His penis was darker than the rest of his skin, as if permanently stained in ink. He had been circumcised at birth, not sloppily like some men he had seen, but expertly cut, as smooth and round as a bicycle helmet. Why had he been circumcised? Had his parents requested it, out of religion or hygiene or tradition? Or was it because a doctor asked and they were too stunned or indifferent to care? It was the only clue his body carried of his birth, which, for all he knew, had taken place in a room as empty as the one ten feet from his bed.