FIRST, DOE POSTED the juiciest portion of the Gus Romany video on the Belfry Instagram account. Then she turned to her anonymous account seekrit-hamptons and posted the Daniel Mantis photograph (hashtag #justgoodfriends). Most important tasks of the day accomplished in ten seconds. Good omen. Then a bird flew into the sliding glass door. Crack. The small body lay on the concrete.
She took a moment to grip the edge of the table. Then she walked over and eased open the door. A tiny shudder went through the bird.
“Aw, fuckit,” Doe said. “Really?”
She looked into its shark eye. Anger made her hands shake.
“You idiot bird,” she told it. “Like you’ve never seen a window before?”
What kind of bird was it? If it were a seagull, she could enjoy its misery, considering how many fries she’d lost to them. But this bird was small and brown. Maybe a sparrow? What did she know about birds except they sang?
Doe could stand just about anything. Except the suffering of the stupid.
“Shit.” Doe picked up one of the beach rocks that lined the path to the main house.
“I’m sorry,” she said before she dropped the rock on the bird’s head.
When she looked up, she saw her landlord’s five-year-old twins, Shannon and Shawn, staring at her, their mouths open so far she could see half-chewed cereal. Fifteen-year-old Annie stood behind them, her eyes shining with female-role-model worship.
“You are such a badass!” Annie called.
“Mom!” the kids screamed.
THE DAY HAD kicked off with an early-morning walk with her boss. So right away, morning ruined. Catha Lugner had asked her to meet at 7:30 A.M., a really inappropriate request. When she was at work, she worked. Was she supposed to walk whenever Catha wanted her to? She spent eight hours a day at the museum with Catha leaning over her computer, breathing chai fumes and asking what she was working on, or leaving an article about social media from, like, a newspaper on her desk with a sticky note saying, This is right in your swim lane; let’s put a pin in it! There was a reason everybody loved Ruthie and nobody liked Catha. A person who could put a semicolon on a Post-it was just advertising her smug self.
On the walk it all became clear. Catha had asked her to deliver a basket from Locavoracious in Greenport, leaving it on Ruthie’s porch for Adeline Clay that very morning, as though it weren’t Memorial Day weekend and as though you weren’t supposed to order ahead. Catha had just said, “I totally trust in your ability to facilitate this.”
Here was the thing: Doe had to make sure Ruthie wasn’t there when she delivered it “because we don’t want to bother Ruthie on move-out day.” She had also asked her to post that Romany video to Instagram and told her not to ask Ruthie about it: “Just go ahead, initiative is part of your job description!” Then she told Doe that she was doing an excellent job and Catha had her eye on her. “I set a high bar with my compliments,” she’d said, fixing Doe with her scary tiny eyes, the gaze that nailed itself to your spine. This was her way of letting Doe know that even a compliment was secretly about her own superior standards to the rest of the sorry world.
This would all be perfectly fine, because work sucked no matter where you worked, but Doe had a feeling that it was all bullshit. Catha was doing some down-and-dirty dancing around the board, trying to maneuver herself into Ruthie’s job.
Doe had a work philosophy, and it was this: Don’t shovel bullshit if you’re not a farmer. It was actually a saying of her mother’s. Which meant it was illogical and stupid, but sort of worked occasionally.
After the walk Doe had gone straight to Locavoracious and knocked hard on the door until the owner opened it. Doe had to basically beg her to assemble a basket, but it wasn’t until she dropped Adeline Clay’s name that the door opened wide. She was even offered coffee.
The basket now sat on her kitchen counter. She slipped out the note Catha had given her to tuck inside. Written across the top in puce block type was CATHA SHAND-LUGNER.
Welcome Adeline!
It’s Catha Shand-Lugner, Deputy Director of the Belfry Museum. I just wanted to welcome you to Orient on behalf of the Belfry! Hope you enjoy the (organic) goodies!
CSL
PS. I’m enclosing an invite to our annual welcome-to-summer party, Spork. It’s a fun event and a great way to meet fellow Orient-ers! Hope to see you there!
So much wrong in so little space. Just the word goodies alone…
She grabbed the basket and headed out to her car. Her landlord Tim was in the yard, balancing a mug of coffee and his keys. He frowned when he saw her, and her pulse did a little jump. She smiled and waved as she crossed to her car, giving him all the teeth she could.
“It was a mercy killing!” she called. “Promise!”
“Huh?”
Shit, he didn’t know. “I’m heading out,” she said. “Do you need me to pick up Annie at the farm stand later? I know it’s her first day!”
Keep moving as you toss out the offer. Keep smiling. With every encounter she worried that Tim or Kim would start the ball rolling. Doe, have you found a place, it’s almost June, summer and all, and you’re on winter rates…so these days she had perfected the art of Conversing While Walking Away. Their garage apartment was the cheapest she’d been able to find, and if they kicked her out she’d need to answer “roommate wanted” ads, which was unthinkable, or live in her car, which she’d promised herself she would never, ever do again.
She could tell by the way Tim crinkled his eyes and rocked back on his heels that her question annoyed him as much as it tempted him. When she’d first moved into their rental, Kim and Tim Doyle had gladly taken all her offers to run errands, do chores, and babysit the twins. Kim had left the back door open so that Doe could come in without knocking. Soon Doe was doing things like emptying the dishwasher or setting hamburger meat out to defrost. Doe still remembered the dinner when Kim had taken the last brownie and said, “I know this is rude but you’re family, so there.”
She was family. She knew Kim hated her sister, she knew Annie was having a hard time at school, she knew where the green glass pickle dish went.
Since Easter, Kim had cooled. The back door stayed shut. She hadn’t asked her to babysit in weeks. Doe knew how to sidle herself into friendship, how to be cheerful and available and helpful and see what the person or the family needed and supply it. The flaw was, she never knew when or why people started to turn.
“No, thanks, she has her bike. Doe, we really need to talk. I got your check, but…summer rates start in June. You know that.”
She couldn’t afford summer rates; she could barely afford winter. If she didn’t supplement her income with occasional photo sales she wouldn’t make it. Museums paid dick.
“I know. I thought maybe you’d give me a pass and I’d double up in August. Summer is when I pick up my extra income.”
“Well, sure, Doe, we’re not going to put you out on the street.” Tim shifted his feet. “I mean…but we really need the money. Kim wants to put it on Airbnb.”
Yeah. Here was the problem with her world. Everybody always needed the money.
“Oh,” she said. “If you could give me another couple of weeks…”
“Sure. Anyway,” he said, “I get the impression you’ll always land on your feet.”
Doe clicked her smile into place, but she felt the burn. Senior year of high school, when she’d practically moved into Jassy Chasen’s house, tiptoeing barefoot past Mr. and Mrs. Chasen’s bedroom and hearing, Don’t you get the sense that she’s quite the little operator, though?
It was weird how the things she did to make herself indispensable ended up making her dispensable. Like eventually she ended up highlighting some dividing line she was trying to cross. The pathetic truth was that she’d loved the Chasens and she loved the Doyles. Doe got crushes on happy families the way other girls got crushes on the bass player.
Tim backed out of the driveway in his truck. He didn’t wave goodbye.
Shannon and Shawn appeared out of nowhere like spooky ghost twins. They swayed side to side, in that creepy twin motion they had. “Mom said the bird was probably stunned,” Shannon said.
“She said a bird gets knocked out but then they fly away again,” Shawn said.
“There was no pulse,” Doe said.
“Birds don’t have a pulse.”
“Yeah, they do,” Doe said. “I know. I trained to be a vet.”
This appeared to be something they couldn’t fight, so they went away to ask Mom. Doe took the opportunity to get in her car.
She drove the short distance to Ruthie’s. Mike’s truck was in the driveway as well as a black Range Rover. Doe climbed out of the car and dumped the basket on the porch, but couldn’t resist a peek into the window. From this angle she could see into the open kitchen. Adeline Clay leaned against a counter, laughing. Mike stood next to her, holding up a bunch of radishes. Jem cast a quick glance at a barefoot guy in shorts sitting in a chair, his back to Doe. His fingers tapped on a coffee cup. She could read his boredom.
Something about the scene was creepy, like a Gregory Crewdson staged photograph come to life. Almost like a family dynamic, all that emo pulsing around and under the waving radishes. She wished she could snap a photo. Not for Instagram, for herself. Instead she beat it back to her car.
She checked her phone. The Daniel Mantis photo already had thirty-six likes.
Doe had snapped this photograph two weeks before, on a rainy May weekend. Pure luck. She’d first recognized Stephanie Terrell, an anchorwoman on CNN, and then scrutinized the man she was with. He kept his head low, and was wearing a baseball cap. They were under an enormous red umbrella. She’d followed them for several blocks until they lowered the umbrella to duck into Ralph Lauren. Just as he opened the door she got the shot. The glinting silver rain, and Stephanie Terrell putting her hand over his as he held the door…Instagram-worthy, right there. Stephanie looked beautiful and windswept, and Daniel looked furtive. Doe had held the photograph until now, Memorial Day weekend, when it would make the biggest splash.
Mantis was known—discreetly—for having two girlfriends at a time. They were always serious women, journalists and UN attachés and businesswomen, and they all knew about one another. This year, one of those women was Adeline Clay.
Summer! When things got hot. Her season.
Mantis was a billionaire, an art collector, a financial raider who did yoga and wrote the bestseller The Mindful Shark. He was rumored to be thinking about political office, now that you didn’t need experience to run. He was throwing a huge party on Sunday afternoon, which she was planning to crash. Traffic would be road-rage-worthy but it would totally be worth it. Rihanna might be there, and the cream of the Hamptons crowd.
She was sure she’d pick up at least one good shot. She was going for one million followers this summer, minimum.
Her ambition was simple: to become a thing.
She’d pissed off a lot of people last summer, but since the account was anonymous, she could just let it build. It only meant new followers (469,000 and counting!). Beautiful people on their fifth glass of rosé, celebrity couples looking glum for just a moment, the better for gossip blogs to speculate on their “last stages.” Last summer the account had jumped by 23,000 after she’d posted the picture of supermodel Polina throwing up on a lawn in Montauk.
She wasn’t just snarky. She made the beautiful more beautiful, too. She’d been a photography major, a useless degree unless you decided to treat pictures like nothing, free to the world. The pictures themselves didn’t matter, only their ability to generate likes and regrams. She had an eye, and filters, and a killer photo app. Thanks to social media, you could build a whole career on people being judgy.
In the folder of wacky useless advice her mom had given her there was one bit that spoke to her: Make your living on the rich. Other than that, it was Wax your bush, A backpack is not a purse, Don’t expect breakfast with a one-night stand.
Thanks, Mom.
As if she’d summoned her by negative vibrations, her phone twinkled. It was Shari.
Did you find out about that spa job got to get out of fla b4 a hurricane blows me away lol
answer your mama doorangel pie you can’t run from family
…Dorie damn fuck this phone I’m driving
…
in other words you were right about everything you were right about Ron
please can I live with you for a while
Live with her? Pinpricks of panic on her skin. She looked around, as if Shari were already there and she needed escape routes.
Ron is out on bale he came by Ritas to see me. Bail! I hid in the bathroom Rita kicked him out she’s brave as shit unlike me lol what a scene
anyways if I could just crash with you until I’m on my feet
…
I looked up the word genuflect its just the same as truckle
in case you don’t get it I’m truckling
keep on trucklin
This was followed by the happy face scrunched into a kiss.