Alena: A Novel (12 page)

B
ERNARD’S HOUSE
was an airy nineteenth-century shingled barn that had been cleverly converted with the help of a new wing of bedrooms along one side and a broad deck overlooking the bay. In the high white living room, Cindy Sherman film stills hung in a row over the fireplace. Glenn Ligon’s smudged words dripped illegibly across a large canvas near the door, and the wall opposite the deck was penciled with the fine regular lines of a Sol LeWitt. In one corner, thousands of Félix Gonzáles-Torres candies in ice-blue wrappers lay twinkling in the light of the black glass Fred Wilson chandelier. Voices and laughter came from the deck, but I found myself going the other way, slipping through a door into a hall off which opened a powder room, a butler’s pantry, a gleaming laundry, and a large tiled mudroom, crowded but neat. A row of plaid jackets and waterproof slickers hung on hooks, duck boots and rain boots were lined up on a shelf, and there were four or five fishing rods, several tackle boxes, two pairs of binoculars (one large, one pocket-sized), some tennis rackets, and three black unstrung crossbows standing in a corner like forgotten Giacomettis.

In the hallway itself, framed photographs hung on the wall, some old black-and-whites of long-ago brides and babies and family groups, others of Bernard at various ages, engaged in various vigorous outdoor activities: holding up an enormous fish; drawing a bow on an archery range; sailing. I was going down the row looking at them when Barbara bustled through, wearing not an evening gown but rather a plain blue skirt and sweater. “Hello!” she said.

“What amazing photographs,” I said. What I meant was how startling it was to see Bernard so young, though it was true that they were good pictures.

She touched a finger to a photo of Bernard when he was probably barely a teenager, grinning and sunburned, a medal on a blue ribbon around his neck. He had been a skinny boy, his hair brown and shaggy, braces on his teeth. The field he stood in was so green—green as Easter grass—it looked like you could eat it. “I took that one,” Barbara said. “At the state archery championships in Nenameseck. I used to take a lot of pictures.”

I pointed to one of the sailing photographs, taken when Bernard must have been about twenty. Lean and brown, bare-chested, a blue captain’s hat perched on his head, he squinted into the wind with the faraway look of a young Greek sailing off to Troy. “That’s beautiful.”

“That’s not one of mine. Alena took the sailing ones. That was the first summer she spent here, after Bernie’s freshman year at Middlebury. Well, and hers too, of course.”

“That’s where they met?”

“Yes.”

I scanned down the row, a sudden clamminess palpable in the air. I could see now that the sailing pictures had a similar look, full of dramatic shadows and odd angles, so that the subject (Bernard) seemed magnetized in place on a shifting plane. The photographs captured him looking not directly into the camera, as in the picture Barbara had taken, but obliquely, his gaze suggesting a world beyond the frame, from which the viewer was excluded. “She was talented,” I said.

“Yes. At a lot of things. Sailing, swimming. She studied ballet. She used to do these performance things down on the beach, very strange, but Bernie said they were good.” We stood together, listening to the laughter from the deck that drifted toward us like the laughter from some ghostly ship away over the water, and to the waves rolling, and then to the crunch of a car approaching along the oyster-shell drive, some last guest arriving. Or perhaps—the thought irradiated me—perhaps it was Alena herself arriving! Perhaps she had had enough of the company of the dead and was returning to claim her place, was putting in a surprise appearance like a guest star gracing the set of a plodding comedy. Perhaps, as I had half suspected, she had never died at all! Mad as it was, it seemed to me that Barbara had the same apprehension. She froze, listening, as the car came to a halt and the engine quieted. The door slammed with a metallic shudder, and then a man’s voice called, “Hey! Where’dya want the ice?”

Barbara turned up the wattage on her hostess’s smile. “And you?” she asked brightly. “What are your hobbies?”

Dinner was served on the deck at an oval table arrayed with plain white plates, heavy silverware, dishes of seasoned almonds, votive candles. It was an informal party. In the sleeveless black shift I had worn to every occasion in Europe I was overdressed and, despite the discreet heaters that warmed the air as the temperature dropped, chilly. The sun hung, red as a Joan Miró sun, on the horizon, laced by ragged salmon clouds that pinkened and thinned as the flushed disc slid downward. Overhead, the dome of the sky lit up almost turquoise, then faded to lavender, topaz, violet-gray. A plump, balding man in cranberry trousers—Barbara’s husband, Tom—stood near me as the dark sea took its first bite of the blushing orb. “Watch,” he said. “Watch for the green flash.”

“Flash?”

“A flash of green light. Just when the sun disappears.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No. But it’s a proven astronomical fact.”

Obediently I watched as the crown of light was swallowed, sublimely, by the hungry sea. All the guests watched, standing at ceremonial attention with their champagne flutes lifted as the final sliver was devoured, the encrimsoned clouds sagging and shredding, as though it were a performance prepared for their pleasure by a necromancing impresario.

“Did you see it?” Barbara’s husband demanded. “Did you see the flash?”

“No. Did you?”

“No. Well, the atmospheric conditions here aren’t ideal.”

“Too much moisture in the air.” This pronouncement was made by a big, bullet-headed man in a black pullover, his blond-white hair shorn as close as an astronaut’s. “It’s easier to see in a drier climate.”

“Hello, Chris,” Barbara’s husband said. “Have you met the Nauk’s new curator?” We shook hands. “Chris is a good person to know,” Tom advised. “He’s the local chief of police.”

“Oh! How impressive!” I was starting to feel the champagne, the golden bubbles shimmying through me, leavening my mood, loosening my limbs.

“Of a miniature police force,” the chief said mildly.

“I think I had one of those when I was a child. It came with a miniature police station you could fold up and carry around by a handle.”

“Very convenient,” Chris Passoa said. “Especially if you could inflate them in a moment of need.”

“By dropping them in water, perhaps,” I suggested. “Like sea monkeys.” Maybe because we had police chiefs in LaFreniere, Chris Passoa, unlike the other guests, seemed like someone it was possible to talk to.

“The first time I ever saw a sea monkey was at Bernard’s house. I remember pouring the instant-life eggs into the tank and watching the creatures appear. It was tremendously disappointing. Living on the Cape, we knew a shrimp when we saw one.”

Bernard drifted over, refilling glasses. “Hello, Tom,” he said. “Hello, Chris.”

“Come fishing tomorrow,” the police chief said. “It’s my day off.”

“Sorry.” Bernard placed his hand on my bare shoulder. “I have a curator to look after.”

“Bernard is a fish magnet,” Chris Passoa explained. “Put him in a boat and the fish are drawn right to him.”

Bernard laughed. “You make me sound like a piece of squid.”

“You have fish pheromones is what it is. Larry says the bass are running.” He called across the deck to a stocky man of medium height with an alert terrier’s face and hair that seemed to have been frozen in place in the moment of blowing back in the wind. “Right, Larry?”

“I caught three this morning off Willet’s Landing,” Larry said. “And I was barely trying.”

“Maybe the Plunge. That’d be quick. Leave at six, back at nine. No problem.”

“Excuse me,” Bernard said. “I just—” Like an apparition, he melted away into the house, leaving behind a cold place on my shoulder where his hand had been.

“Do you fish?” the man with frozen hair asked me.

“Only in lakes.”

“Get Bernard to take you. The Plunge is a great spot, a mile out, straight off the beach in front of the Nauk. It’s a sort of deep pit in the ocean floor, left behind by the glaciers after the last ice age.” Feeling a lecture on local geology coming on, I excused myself to fetch the sweater I hadn’t thought to bring. Once in the house, I poked my head into all the rooms I dared, looking for Bernard, but found only a gaggle of caterers clattering pans in the kitchen, a den with a breathtaking violet-and-puce Warhol Jackie silkscreen across from a wall of bookshelves crammed with fat glossy art books, and a blond woman with the pointy nose and beady eyes of an opossum smoking a cigarette in the back hall.

Dinner was green gazpacho, followed by grilled swordfish, couscous with raisins, and haricots verts, with raspberry mousse for dessert. Seated between Roald, who barely spoke, and Larry, the man with the hair, I had trouble eating. Larry spent the meal refilling his glass and demanding to know what I thought about various artists, then offering his own opinions.

“You should do an Ed Ruscha show! Anyone who can make gas stations look like that is worth showing. I could lend you some, if you decide to go in that direction.”

I said I understood that it was the Nauk’s policy to give artists who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance a special opportunity to extend themselves in a new way. Ed Ruscha and his gas stations, meanwhile, were doing fine.

“Yes,” he reflected, “Alena could always tell who was about to become famous just before they did. It was a gift she had. A kind of second sight.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

“She had a brilliant mind,” he said. “A brilliant woman, beautiful clothes. Thin as a rail, and that black, black Russian hair! It comes from interbreeding with Tatars.”

“Oh?”

“Absolutely. And, you know, the Mongolians.” On my other side, Roald made a noise in his throat, then lifted his glass and drained it. He kept his left hand, the one with the missing finger, in his lap. “Which?” he said. “Tatars or Mongolians?”

“She said she was descended from Genghis Khan!” Larry said.

“She said a lot of things,” Roald said.

Larry emptied the bottle of Pinot Grigio into his glass and set it down on the table, where it was spirited away by a discreet hand and replaced with a full one. “What about you?”

“Me?” I touched my own brown hair that came from nowhere in particular.

“Who are you thinking of showing? The first show after we’ve been closed for two years! That will be an event.”

“I don’t know yet. There’ll be time to figure that out, I hope.”

“Not much. Not if we’re going to open Labor Day weekend!”

I stared at him, at his red face and his preternaturally wide eyes (maybe they were Botoxed?) and his stiff, silvery, wire-terrier hair. “Isn’t that soon?”

“Bernard!” Larry called down the table. “Didn’t anyone tell this young lady we’re opening Labor Day weekend?”

Bernard, who was seated at the far end of the table next to his sister, looked around at the shadowy faces shifting in the candlelight. “Are we?”

“Certainly we are! When Barbara told us you were bringing back a curator, we decided. The Nauk has been closed too long. If we open Labor Day, while the tourists are still here, we’ll make a splash. Otherwise, you might as well wait until May!”

“Larry’s right,” said the blond, opossum-nosed woman I’d seen smoking. “You know we pretty much let you do whatever you want, Bernard. But this time we’re putting our foot down.”

Bernard looked at me across the flickering lights. It was full dark now, with a river of stars overhead, the mild surf lapping. “That’s not a lot of time to put together an exhibition,” he said.

“Just a modest one,” Larry said. “Just to show that the Nauk hasn’t actually fallen into the sea! Wait another season and people will forget we ever existed. Your new curator seems smart enough. She’s young and energetic.” He turned to me with his bright terrier’s face. “You’re up to the challenge, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

And then they were all looking at me: all those wealthy, casually well-dressed people with their expensive hair and their boats and their hard sparkling eyes. I sought out Chris Passoa’s clear blue gaze, but he was no longer at the table.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I was up early, but I dawdled around the little house till close to nine. No one had told me what time to show up at the office. I had imagined that Bernard and I would be together here at the Nauk the way we had been in Europe, meeting for breakfast, spending the days together, sharing ideas, thoughts, perceptions as we worked—I think I had pictured us at facing desks—planning exhibitions and organizing the Nauk’s brilliant future as easily as we had planned our daily itineraries. But the reality was quite different.

So I headed up the path alone, this time in flat sandals, arriving at the little enclosure of green by the front doors at exactly nine.

It was a sunny morning. The pink roses glowed against the white wooden trellises, and the soft rushing of the waves formed a steady backdrop to the bright twittering of songbirds. The green grass dazzled, its blades thick and blunt, some sturdy variety that could withstand the salt air. The doors, however, when I tried them, were locked. Inside—as well as I could tell, peering in through the long sidelights—all was dim and quiet. Through the foyer, the wall of glass on the far side framed the green swells. I sat down on the bench and looked up at the cloudless sky. I tried to imagine that sky unrolling across America: Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin. What were my parents doing now, eight a.m. their time, breakfast long over, the cows milked, the dishes washed, the beds made, the tractor halfway down the long field where the corn stood in neat, tall rows like a zombie army? Was it really the same sky, stretching from here to there, from me to them? I stared hard into the blue, which was milder, softer than the blue of my childhood, as though the paint on this part of the sky wasn’t quite dry. There was a tempera quality to it, an opacity different from the flat, factual blue of home. My head ached. I shut my eyes and pressed my hands to them, wishing I could lie down on the bench with my arms over my head, but surely someone would come soon, and I didn’t want to be seen like that.

Shortly after ten, the sound of an engine rumbled up the slope, and a car rolled into view, turning off the lane into a little grassy area bounded by a rail fence. Agnes and Sloan got out either side. Dark-haired and blond, fat and thin, middle-aged and young, they nonetheless moved with the same apparent indifference, both dangling their purses from their fists, both tossing their hair back with the same reflexive jerk of their long pale necks, so that they seemed for a moment like two characters played by a single actress appearing in the same frame by some cinematic trick. I stood up.

“Oh dear,” Agnes said. “Are we late?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m afraid I was early.”

“I hate to think of you waiting. If I had known when you wanted us, of course we would have been here.”

“I didn’t know when—what was usual.”

“Well,
usually
we get in at ten or ten-thirty. But of course, you tell us what you think is best.” She had her key out and was fitting it into the lock. She was dressed in black again, a long-sleeved cotton knit dress and black stockings, thick black eyeliner enlarging her cool gray eyes. “Didn’t Bernard give you a key?”

“No.”

“Really?” Agnes stood, plump hip cocked, black and pink hair lifting slightly. “I thought he did.”

I shook my head. But had he? He had given me a key ring, that was true, with a key on it, the key to the house, and a little silver horseshoe charm on the ring. I had left it on the kitchen table, it had hardly seemed worth locking up just to come across the way. It wasn’t as though I had anything to steal. “Unless the key to the house unlocks the museum too?”

“No,” Agnes said. She was still looking at me as though waiting for me to acknowledge my mistake. Sloan, meanwhile, hadn’t said a word.

Could there have been a second key on the ring? Was that the sort of thing a person could forget or be mistaken about? I concentrated, thinking of the silver horseshoe charm, the metal ring with its single key lying on the scarred Formica, and in my mind’s eye the key began to shiver, splitting itself down the middle. Now there were two keys, I could see them clearly, lying in a rhombus of sunlight. Agnes opened the door to the cool tiled lobby and we went in. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have made a mistake.”

Agnes bent over an alarm system keypad on the wall and punched in numbers. “It doesn’t matter. Like I said, if we had known what time you wanted to start, of course we would have been here. Alena never got into the office before eleven, but you’d get emails she’d sent at two in the morning. She was a night owl, that was her. Her nature. But Sloan and I will do whatever you like, just let us know.”

By now we were upstairs. Sloan turned on the lights and sat at her desk in the outer office. “Would you like some coffee?” Agnes asked. “Sloan can make some.” Sloan was busily typing away at her computer, not paying any attention.

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Do you prefer tea? Sloan, would you boil some water, please.”

Sloan pushed her chair back and stood up. She was wearing a chartreuse dress today, thigh length with a square neck and a back consisting of crisscrossed straps, the same white boots and bubblegum scent as yesterday.

“Please don’t bother,” I said. “I had coffee when I got up.”

As though she hadn’t heard me, Sloan continued on into the kitchenette and ran water into an old red kettle that she put on the stove.

“Really,” I said. “I don’t want any.”

I could see Sloan’s lips move, but her words were drowned out by the hiss of water boiling off the burner.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s for us,” she repeated. “We always have tea in the morning. Alena drank it all day long.”

Even today, after all that happened—safely landed on this cool balcony bright with flowers and swaddled in fog—that morning floats in my memory like a tar ball on the back of a wave. I couldn’t do anything without help—help that was given so condescendingly, with such calibrated disdain, that I felt like an old lady asking for assistance using the toilet. How young I was! I believed, I suppose, that I should have been born knowing how to get onto the Nauk’s computer network, how to jiggle the cord on the printer when it didn’t work, where phone numbers were kept, and stamps, and notepads—or, if I hadn’t breathed in this knowledge with my first breaths, that I should certainly have picked it up in graduate school. It was weeks, I believe, before I stumbled on the supply closet—or rather, on my way to the kitchenette, caught a glimpse behind the door Sloan was closing on the shelves of paper, tape, staples, and pens. Until then, when I needed something, I asked Sloan or Agnes, who procured the item seemingly by magic. I suppose I knew there must be a supply room somewhere. I should, of course, have simply asked—in fact, I believe I did ask once, stumblingly:
There must be someplace I can get pencils myself?
At which Agnes lifted her sharp chin and remarked relentlessly, “I’m always happy to bring you anything. If I’m not here, Sloan will do it. You don’t need to get up. Alena would just buzz through on the intercom.”

“Is there an intercom?”

“Of course. That blue button on the phone.” Impatience leaked from her like water from an irrigation hose.

“Thank you, Agnes. I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s my job.”

I remember, a little later, pressing and re-pressing the blue button in the cold tank of my office and nothing happening. I didn’t realize you had to press it
before
picking up the receiver rather than after. I couldn’t bear admitting to Agnes that I couldn’t make it work, so I sat a long time, still and silent, like a rabbit hiding in the grass.

The expensive desk by Vaarni had no drawers, no cubbyholes, no in-baskets or blotters. It was a smooth sheet of steel, cold to the touch, slippery, with a thin silver computer, a black phone by Bang & Olufsen, and a tall vase of mother-of-pearl pussy willows. When I wanted to make notes, I made them on pads of paper in my lap rather than disrupt the glittering surface. I took a few books from a shelf and piled them along the tops of other books to make a little space to store my pads and pens. When Agnes noticed, she said, “Would you like me to get rid of those books?”

“No, no. I just—wanted a little space.”

“I can have them boxed up if they’re in your way.”

“Please don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother. No doubt you have your own books,” Agnes said, her gray eyes fixing me in place.

“Yes,” I said with growing panic. “But I don’t have them with me. It will be a while before they come.”

“Still,” she said. “We might as well be prepared.” At that moment, Bernard happened to come in, wearing jeans and flip-flops, his checked shirt untucked, a big, greasy cardboard take-out box in his hand.

“Lunch,” he said. “You like fried clams?” Then, seeing or sensing something—my panicked face, the electric chill in the air—he asked what was going on.

“I was just saying to Agnes that there’s absolutely no need to pack up the books!” I blurted.

“What books?”

It wasn’t that Agnes was warmer with Bernard, but that he never seemed to notice how she behaved. I wondered later whether she minded that. He treated her cordially, but no more so than he would have treated a humanoid automaton, so that the fact that she behaved a bit like one seemed, in his presence, more or less natural. When I was alone with Agnes, she always felt too large to me, too cold, but Bernard’s presence—also large, but warmer and livelier—seemed to put her into acceptable proportion.

“Alena’s books,” Agnes said. “She wants the shelves.”

“I don’t!” I said. “Just half a shelf, a place to put my things. Pads and pencils and—”

“Why don’t you put them on the desk?” Bernard asked impatiently. “Isn’t that what it’s for?” Then his eyes snagged on the rows of books, as though they had suddenly become visible: Tracey Warr’s
The Artist’s Body
, Carolee Schneemann’s
More Than Meat Joy
, a Vito Acconci catalogue. The handsome features that had inscribed themselves on my memory over the last weeks were sliced open in one blow, like a melon under a cleaver. “Yes,” he said. “Box them up! I don’t know why you haven’t done it already.”

“Right away,” Agnes said.

“But it’s not . . .” I said. “I mean, I don’t see why. Not
all
of them!” But neither Bernard nor Agnes paid any attention.