Alena: A Novel (10 page)

“Hello, Agnes,” Bernard said.

“Hello, Bernard. How nice to see you back at the Nauk.” Her voice was cool and smooth, like the underside of a stone. Neither of them made a move to kiss or shake hands.

“It’s good to be back,” Bernard said.

“You look tan. Europe suits you.”

“Nothing suits me like home.”

She made no comment, instead turning her stone-gray eyes to me. She bowed her head, then tossed back her fine jet hair. “So you’re the new boss.” She paused, looking me over with a bright red frown, her eyes chilling me everywhere her gaze settled.

I tried to step forward and offer my hand, but I was frozen where I stood as though struck with a spell. Anyway, she would have seen it tremble.

“I’m Agnes,” she said. “The bookkeeper.” Something in the way she said it made me think that the words held concealed meaning, as though the entries she kept in her book were not, perhaps, merely financial.

“Agnes is the business manager,” Bernard explained. “Office manager. Keeper of budgets and schedules. She has one of those minds, what do you call it, Agnes? A photographic memory?”

“Eidetic,” Agnes said. “Eidetic memory.”

“The Nauk couldn’t run without Agnes,” Bernard said. “She’s been here since the beginning.”

“I worked for Alena,” Agnes said. Her eyes darkened like stones darkening with rain. “She brought me here when the museum opened, and I’ve been here ever since.”

“They knew each other since they were kids,” Bernard said.

Out the window, the waves gathered and broke, roaring and hissing. I knew I should say something—that my muteness was ridiculous, embarrassing to Bernard as well as to myself. “Well,” I managed. “I look forward to working together.”

She stretched her lips. “Won’t it be nice.”

Bernard looked at his watch. “Let’s see the galleries, shall we? I have a meeting in Bourne at eleven.”

“You’d better get going.” Agnes lifted her head, making her earrings shimmer. “You won’t believe the traffic. I’ll take her through.”

“Would you mind?” Bernard was already moving toward the door. “I’ll be back this afternoon. And then there’s dinner at my house at eight. I’ve invited a few people. Roald can drive you.”

“People?”

“To meet you. No point waiting.” He waved to me, frowning distractedly, and was gone.

I looked around for Roald, but he had vanished too. It was just Agnes and me in the chilly lobby, the waves annihilating themselves on the shore behind us, and motes of silvery dust swimming in the glare.

Agnes shifted her weight to one hip and narrowed her eyes. “I can’t say you’re what I was expecting.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“And you worked where before?”

I told her.

“You were a curator there?” She had a way of standing very still so that she seemed almost like a primitive sculpture, something Gauguin might have carved out of ebony.

“No.”

There was no need to say more, to pin down my exact position like an insect on a pin. Curatorial assistant or coat-check girl, it amounted to the same thing.

“Well,” she said, “Bernard’s always been sentimental.”

Starting to feel light-headed, I sucked the humidity-controlled museum air into my lungs and stood up straighter, trying not to wobble in my sandy heels. “Of course, this is all new to me,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll have a million questions.”

She lifted her chin slightly, tilting her head like a large bird, possibly a swan. Like a swan, she had a surprisingly long and elegant neck and a haughty, inscrutable glare. “You’re the boss,” she said.

Passing the front desk, we slid through the empty galleries that opened off a long sunlit corridor she called the “colonnade.” There were four galleries, with tall arched doorways between them, although there were no doors. The walls were white, the wooden floors a weathered silver. It wasn’t an enormous space but it seemed to unfold endlessly, like a building in a dream. It was strange to me how empty it was, though of course I’d known it would be empty. The walls were blank, but at the same time they felt inhabited, as though the ghosts of the art that had hung there lingered, invisible but attendant, on the verge of shimmering into view. I hadn’t done a lot of research—there hadn’t been time—but I knew about the Nauk’s famous show of Kimball Whiting, those enormous pale collages of cotton and pasteboard and bits of bone, and I’d seen the catalogue for the Denise Dolorian fish exhibition where the tanks she filled the galleries with held only water, while dead fish, nailed to the walls, decayed in real time. Visitors were given plastic pinchers for their noses, but the health department shut the show down after four days. The reviewer for
The New York Times
had declared, “Particularly in the last gallery, where hundreds of tiny sardines are pinned to the walls in the shape of a great, glittering, Hokusai-like wave, the beauty of the form, the rankness of the smell (against which the colorful nose plugs are inevitably, if not intentionally, insufficient), the moral indictment in regard to the emptying of the oceans, and the inescapable presence of the process of decay, give this exhibition an exciting and visceral complexity that almost compensates the viewer for the ordeal of being there.”

“What an extraordinary space,” I said. My voice echoed in the empty room, extending the platitude.

“People talk about this space as a train with a series of cars,” Agnes said. “Something about the view of the ocean through the windows of the colonnade gives a sense of motion. Don’t you think?”

I paused, trying to feel it. “Yes,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

Agnes smiled to show she knew I was lying. “Alena used to say she felt like she was on the railway from Moscow to Vladivostok. You know where that is?”

“I know where Moscow is.”

“Vladivostok is clear at the other end of Russia, on the Pacific Ocean. The end of the world! We think America is big, but Russia is twelve time zones long. Can you imagine that?” She was looking at me hard with those fish-gray eyes. I felt there was another, larger question smoldering under the one she was ostensibly asking: not could I imagine a country with twelve time zones but, perhaps, did I have imaginative scope? Could I push my mind out to the edge of the world? Was I strong enough, daring enough? Was I—in the smallest way—like Alena?

“For someone who grew up in the Midwest, Nauquasset feels like the edge of the world,” I said.

Agnes tilted her chin higher and looked around as though considering the empty gallery. “It’s not a huge amount of space,” she said. “Still, four rooms. To fill them just so, to control the flow from one to another, letting the story of the show unfold. Allowing for mystery, surprise, even shock. It’s not as easy as you might think.”

“But I suppose you can take the walls down? Make one big space?”

“Certainly. If that’s what you want. Alena used to say that anyone could hang contemporary art in a warehouse.” She waited, letting the words settle through me like splinters of ice. “Of course, you’ll have your own ideas.”

“Of course,” I echoed.

The empty rooms stood patiently, a row of fallow fields waiting to be sown.

The offices were in the opposite wing, a few rooms opening off a central space with a couple of work stations and a waiting area with a couch and copies of
Artforum
,
Parkett
, and
BOMB
. The curator’s office—my office—was large and airy, with a view of the bay. The desk was a drawerless, tapered, finlike sheet of polished steel jutting from the wall, the chair a nest of cushioned gray leather panels. There was a wall of books, an oval mirror, Robert Arno prints on the wall: a silver leaf, a golden bug, a rust-colored seed at the end of an emerald stalk. They were stunning prints, the lines full of tension, the colors shimmering, a sense of life caught by a pin even through Arno’s stylization. But though I admired the work, I didn’t like having it there. It was beautiful but cold, dark beneath the glowing color. Arno was famous for sometimes using his own blood to ink the plates, though some people said he only used chicken’s blood. That was what I had always assumed, but looking at the prints now, I suddenly believed that the rusty red came from his veins. That he had left a piece of himself there on the paper, that pain had been part of the process of bringing this object to life.

Beyond the desk, a sitting area near the window contained a low square table, an iron-gray sofa, and beside the sofa, a paper Akari light sculpture rising sinuously from metal legs. A conch, a quahog, and a handful of slipper and jingle shells bisected the table, along with three flat gray stones with veins of white like lightning. I picked up the nearest stone and ran my fingers down the pale seam. Behind me, Agnes drew an audible breath, and suddenly I understood that the grouping was not just an arrangement; it was a work of art.

“Andy arranged those for Alena,” Agnes said. “One day when he stopped by.”

I glanced at her with minnow eyes that darted immediately away. Could she possibly mean Andy Goldsworthy? I put the stone down.

“Of course, if you don’t like them there, I can have them moved.”

“No, no. Thank you! They’re fine.”

“I don’t know what arrangements you made with Bernard about redecorating.”

“Oh,” I said. “The office is fine. I wouldn’t change anything.” I gestured helplessly at the table, the prints, the books, the desk.

“That desk is by Vaarni. She had it sent from Finland.”

“It’s beautiful.” It
was
beautiful—everything in the room was beautiful—but cold too, like something that belonged on the bottom of the ocean, or on the moon.

Agnes moved silently across the dark carpet and touched the sheet of steel. She ran her index finger along the cold surface tenderly, as though along a body. “Even Bernard was shocked when he saw the price. But she got her way.” She glided out of the room again, leaving me to scurry after her.

In the outer area, a young woman who had not been there when we passed through before leaned against the edge of an ordinary wooden desk. Sylph-thin, pale-haired, clad in a tiny pink dress and tall white boots, she regarded me from within a cloud of bubble-gum-sweet perfume. Nearby stood a young man, the sleeves of his T-shirt cut off to better reveal the tattoos snaking up one arm, encircling his neck, and sliding down the other arm in a weave of roses, pirate flags, scrawny lions, and sword-wielding angels. Later, when I knew him better and had had more time to look, I would notice the three-headed rooster, the blooming saguaro cactus, and the constellation of brightly colored poison-dart frogs vying for space on his skin. He wore eyeliner, and eye shadow the color of a bruise, and his honey-colored hair lay in fat cornrows across his head. “This is Sloan,” Agnes said, nodding toward the woman, “and that’s Jake.”

Sloan was a year or two younger than I was, Jake a few years older, but basically we were peers, or could have been in a different place under different circumstances. Here, though, I was their new boss, timid and jet-lagged and wearing a wrinkled butter-yellow blouse with a floppy collar. Still, if I had been able to summon something—some spark of warmth or authority—it might have been better later. As it was, they regarded me with hooded eyes as I asked awkwardly, “And what do you do at the Nauk?”

“I’m the AA,” Sloan said. She had a thin, tinny voice and a way of holding her head forward on her long neck that made me think of a small giraffe. “Phone answering, mail sorting, appointment making. I’ll keep your calendar, and I can sign your name if you want me to. I don’t do spreadsheets.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Jake is the front desk,” Agnes said.

“When we’re open,” Jake said. “When we’re not, like now, I’m laid off. But, hey, I have my own art to do, so that’s cool.”

“You’re an artist?” I asked politely.

“I can wield a blowtorch.”

“Well, I hope we’ll be open soon.”

“Yeah, we all hope that,” Jake said.

“Of course, things will take time. But I hope we can at least pick what the first new show will be this summer.”

“But the next show’s selected,” Sloan said. “Right?”

I stared at her. With her pale face and her long neck, she looked oddly like a thin version of Agnes. She uncrossed her high white boots, her feet stamping lightly against the floor.

“It is.” She looked at Agnes. “Right? Alena promised Morgan.”

“I didn’t know there were exhibition plans,” I said. “But if promises were made . . .” If promises were made, what? Was I obliged to keep Alena’s promises? Of course, if there were contracts, that would be something else.

“Morgan McManus.” Sloan’s face flushed the color of the inside of a conch shell. “His show was on the schedule. His first big show. Right, Aunt Agnes?”

Aunt Agnes! I looked from the young pink face to the older whiter one: the same sharp chin, the same thin nose, the same frown, though one mouth was painted pale rose and the other crimson.

“Sloan is my sister’s oldest,” Agnes said, her voice no more or less chilly than it had been before. “But you don’t need to worry. She’s an excellent AA.”

“Sloan’s the best,” Jake put in.

“I’m not worried,” I said. I was feeling more and more out of place, like a cow trying to negotiate a beach. “Who is Morgan McManus?”