Alena: A Novel (22 page)

A conjurer in the void.

Looking back on that time, it seems to me that I was not unhappy. Anxious, tired, unsure, occasionally mortified—but never bored, never unengaged, always the thousand tiny cogs in my mind whirling like Ferris wheels, twinkling like stars. Even when exhausted I felt deeply awake, as though my senses had developed new subtleties of perception. I discovered in myself a new decisiveness—or, more likely, a decisiveness that had always been there but never had occasion to be employed—so that when Roald consulted me about the placement of the lights or the height of the vitrines or the typography of the wall labels, I found answers rising effortlessly to my lips, like bubbles in champagne.

And then there was Chris. I was so busy that there wasn’t much time to see him, but once or twice a week he came by the cottage, usually late, and we walked on the beach or else stayed in, drinking wine, talking a little, going to bed. I can’t say he had my whole attention—always a part of my mind was busily roaming the galleries, moving things around, worrying about wall text, and how I would ever finish my essay for the brochure. Still, I enjoyed having him in my bed: an older man, a handsome man whose sky-blue eyes blinked and lost focus when he moved on top of me on the lumpy mattress, between the sandy sheets I had no time to launder. After that first night, we slept together only indoors, only in the bed. I found if I kept my eyes wide open I could remember where I was at all times, and with whom. I could keep track of our wholeness. And if the pleasure was not as intense as it had been that first night, when the waves tumbled and the separate limbs and organs of the body floated like flotsam and jetsam through my mind—like something out of a surrealist painting—well, that was all right with me.

By mutual consent we told no one. It seemed simpler. Also, I worried what Bernard would think, and maybe Chris did too. He was, after all, twenty years older than I. Old enough, as the saying goes, to be my father, though happily my actual father was nearly sixty, and far away. Besides, there was pleasure in keeping a secret.

Despite my growing confidence, things could not be said to have gone well. Every installation has its surprises—delays, miscalculations, snags. Museums build time for them into the schedule, but in this case time would have been tight even if everything had gone smoothly. It did not go smoothly. We lost several members of the crew—one got mono, one had a car accident, and a third was offered a job on a fishing boat and couldn’t turn down the money—and Roald had to scrape the barrel a little to find bodies to get the work done. The vinyl maker misspelled Celia’s name (“Selia”!) and we had to rush order the eight-inch “C.” A lot of people who should have didn’t get their invitations, and the caterer backed out at the last minute, causing a scramble to find someone who could provide light hors d’oeuvres and pass glasses of prosecco on short notice. And then there was what happened up in the cherry picker, which we used for hanging lights and painting the twenty-foot-high ceilings.

One had to wonder at the number of mishaps. Was it just bad luck? The vinyl maker, the caterer, the invitations: these were all under Agnes’s purview. Every glitch reflected badly on the Nauk—that is on me, the curator, and on Bernard. Was it possible Agnes had neglected to send out a hundred invitations—had intentionally, perhaps, provoked the caterer—in order to undermine the institution to which she’d devoted a decade of her life? Why? Just because she didn’t like me?

Jake was certain we were being haunted. “It’s Maria Hallett,” he opined in a loud stage whisper to anyone who would listen.

To which Sloan replied, “That poor ghost’s never done us any harm in all these years, why would she start now?”

I didn’t hear Jake’s answer to this question, but I did catch him looking at me from time to time with a thoughtful expression, as though weighing the effect I might have on an old restless ghost.

Or, possibly, a new ghost. Because when I thought about invisible hands working to obstruct me, it wasn’t Maria Hallett’s name in my mind but Alena’s—her cold fingers licking against my spine, the clammy breeze of her ghostly breath against my cheek. Her inaudible footsteps hounding me from room to room, so that even when I was alone, I felt watched, judged, found wanting.

A
S THE OPENING DREW NEARER,
nobody slept much. All through the bright blue days—already, in late August, noticeably shortening—a stream of cars and pickups, vans and bicycles, jounced through the yawning gates and rattled up the lane, serenaded by deafening choruses of cicadas, invisible in the low scrub. Day and night, men (and a few women) in paint-stained jeans and work boots buzzed from room to room with Makita drills and measuring tapes, leaving their empty coffee cups on ledges and benches the way the cicadas left their empty shells in sandy clearings. In town and on the beaches, the summer crowds swelled as Labor Day approached, and the weather remained perfect from morning to morning, even as the days themselves lost meaning—impossible to tell a Sunday from a Thursday in the syrupy current of August—so that time became an endlessly unfurling and silken bolt of blue.

Switch on the television, however, and the view was different: somber faces with teeth like blocks of snow jabbered, and chalky shapes swirled on green weather maps, while leaning palm trees undulated their fronds like hula dancers. A hurricane, gathering strength off Cuba, was predicted to make its way up the Eastern Seaboard: Florida, the Carolinas, the Jersey Shore. Possibly Cape Cod. Of course, this early no one could say for sure. But Roald told me that the line at Mid-Cape Hardware, where he’d stopped for narrow-gauge wire and extra paint, was nearly as long as the one at Janie’s Famous Cones just down the block, tourists and residents alike buying up batteries and flashlights, masking tape and Band-Aids and bottled water. We stood in the museum lobby with its view of the bay, resplendent as an Aivazovsky, the blue waves sailing in equable as sheep, the ghost of a quarter moon dozing in the flawless sky.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Will we get hit?”

“I’ve lived here too long to speculate about the weather,” Roald said.
He-ah, whe-tha
. Two months in, I was less aware of the local accent, but every now and then its peculiar music pierced me, and I felt my own alienness like a loose bit of metal rattling in a fan.

I followed Roald into the second gallery where a row of blank black plinths waited like tilled fields. “What if we lose power?” I asked.

He flipped through some papers laid out on a folding table covered with packing blankets and open crates. “There’s the generator.”

“What about all the glass? Should we be boarding it up?”

He put the papers down. “Look,” he said. “The weather industry is paid to be alarmist. We almost never get a big storm up here this time of year. November, December, sure. But I can almost guarantee this isn’t going to be problem. We’ve got plenty of other things to worry about, if you feel like worrying.”

“All right,” I said. But again and again I caught myself checking the sea, trying to tell if the waves were higher, turning on the radio to hear the latest forecast, stepping outside to feel the wind. Standing still and listening, as though I might hear a whine in the air, or a faint rumble, signaling that something was coming. I listened for a sound like the tornado siren that would send us scurrying to the cellar several times a summer back in LaFreniere. Was that what you did during a hurricane too?

But there was nothing. The clear, bright weather held all week like a soap bubble, perfect and shimmering, while summer crowds fled seaside resorts from Miami Beach to Cape May. The days passed in irregular bursts, the hands of the clock spinning hours away so that it might be any time at all when you looked up. Nights I was too jangled to sleep. I lay in the lumpy bed, very still, breathing quietly, as though sleep would reward me for good behavior. Sometimes Chris’s straight-limbed body dozed beside me—he never stayed the night—but mostly I was alone. When all this was over, I thought—when the show was open—I’d look for a place to live that was really mine. Maybe I could find a little house with an actual view of the bay rather than this absurdity: a cottage a stone’s throw from the beach where you couldn’t even hear the surf!

One night, still sleepless at two a.m., I left the house and walked up the path to the top of the dune. The sea was black with bits of froth glowing white, the lace of foam visible across the dark sand when the waves broke. The sky was awash with stars, the Big Dipper lowering toward the bay. I scrambled down the steep sandy stairs to the beach, the chill that rose from the slow waves washing over me. On nights like this, Maria Hallett must have watched, as I was watching now. The same fine dry sand would have spilled into her shoes, the same cold stars glittered overhead, the same roaring in her ears as she looked out over the restless water. A young woman, like me, who had taken a leap in the dark, steering her life abruptly off the prepared track. Here she had stood, waiting for her lover as the storm that would grind his drowned body into the seabed gathered strength beyond the horizon. On a night like this, Alena had dived, naked, under a wave and stroked out into the darkness, never to come back. Never mind how strong a swimmer she was.

Maria Hallett had come so close to redemption only to see her hopes dashed to pieces, quite literally, before her eyes. If she haunted this shore—or if Alena did—who could blame them? If they chose to call up a storm on the day of my opening, who could stop them? Not I. Not any human hand.

Looking out, I thought the swells seemed larger. The wind on my face blew chilly and damp, and the sand blew, stinging and gritty, against my calves. I walked up the beach, wary of shells, my ears full of the roar of the waves. Back toward the dunes, a light bobbed faintly. It was a small, clear light, like that I imagined a whale-oil lantern might cast. I kept walking. If it was a ghost, it would melt away as I got closer. Either that or I would meet it face-to-face.

The yellow light grew brighter as I approached, and I could make out a standing figure, busy with something there in the dark. I stopped, my heart leaping, but it wasn’t a ghost. It was the painter, Old Ben, with his easel set up, working by the light of an old camping lantern.

“Hello,” I called. I didn’t want to startle him.

He looked up, saw me, then waved me away with an impatient motion and went back to work.

I came up to where he stood. He ignored me, painting steadily, his eyes moving between the black sea and his blackening canvas, his face taut as a bowstring. “Ben,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Painting.”

I squinted at the canvas: dark mounds that might have been waves, a darker swath that might have been the sky. A gray boat was tipped up on the edge of a swell, and in the middle foreground a silver streak with a feathery tail arced toward a pale figure whose face was hidden by a wing of hair. I looked steadily, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and the more I looked, the better I liked it. It was a good painting—a surprisingly good painting. I admired it, as I had admired his war painting with its obsessive, delicate strokes, its eccentric composition and haunting atmosphere. Though who knew how this canvas would look in daytime under bright, steady light? Or maybe the painting wasn’t meant for day but, like the horses and bison painted on cave walls in France, made to be seen only in the flickering half-light of ritual and dream.

I pointed to the silvery streak. “What’s that?”

“Arrow.”

“Arrow?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly, but it did look like an arrow, now that he had said it. I could see a sharp point, tiny feathers, the suggestion of motion.

“Shh!” His brush dug into the dark blob on his palette and he looked down the beach in both directions. “She wouldn’t like me talking.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

He went back to work.

“What’s that on the head?” I squinted at what might have been a bun of hair, except that the figure’s hair was clearly blowing across the face.

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know.” The tip of his brush found the shape, caressed it once, twice, three times with swirling strokes of crimson.

“I just paint out of my imagination,” he said.

The next morning I slept late for the first time since coming to Nauquasset. When I opened my eyes to what I took to be the gray of dawn, I was startled to see the hands of the clock out of place, both of them angled in the general direction of the nine. Stumbling out of bed, I pulled back the damp curtains. Rain spattered the window and fell in heavy, hissing sheets over the grass and the bayberry and the arrowroot shrubs, dusty no more. The windows rattled in their swollen frames, and the sky over the sopping gray-green dunes was the color of stone. As I stood, marveling at the way the world had changed its palette overnight, a new sound swelled over the spitting rain. Or rather, not a new sound, but one I had never heard from this room before: the swelling roar and seething crash of the surf. The storm had hit, and at last the ocean had become audible from my bedroom. It was ominous and threatening, and I wished I could not hear it.

Half an hour later I struggled up the path to the Nauk, which lay low and silent under the assault of the squall. I leaned into the wind, my hair blowing, my wayward umbrella tugging hard against my grip, wanting to be let go, and then suddenly inverting itself, metal struts on the outside like an arthropod. I was soaked by the time I reached the entryway bower and saw that one of the trellises had been ripped away, and the battered roses were pink smudges scattered across the muddy grass. And all the time the ocean boomed and thundered, the surf hissing like a dragon, streaming in frothing runnels down the water-darkened breast of the sand.

Inside, as usual, the air was cool and dry. Not for the first time I thought what a folly it was—an art museum on a cliff overlooking the sea! What the cost in electricity must be to dry the air I hated to think, not to mention the insurance. I paused in the lobby, dripping onto the tile floor. On the other side of the wall of glass, the flattened dune grass, the sky, and the furious bay were nearly blotted out by the rain.

Noise on a human scale—a cheerful clattering and banging—came from the galleries. I threaded my way among folding tables and half-erected vitrines, skirting a paint-spattered tarp, stepping over a thick orange extension cord. Roald was up on the cherry picker, fifteen feet in the air, measuring something and talking into his phone. “Sixteen and three-eighths,” he said. Behind him, also in the bucket, a young man more or less my age, with bright tattoos and thin blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, held a drill up to the ceiling and bored a hole.

Roald put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Not like that,” he said. “Tim, stop a second.” Then he was back to the phone. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
Prwah-blum.
“Nah, nothing to worry about.” He snapped the phone shut as the kid beside him—Tim—moved over a few inches and raised the drill again. “Did you hear me?” Roald said. “I asked you to stop. Okay?”

“Hello!” I called up. “How are things going?”

“Great!” Roald said. It was what he always said, whether the crew was ahead of schedule or the wrong kind of lumber had been delivered or a crate was dropped instead of being set down gently as a feather on the gallery floor. “Lovely weather we’re having!” he called.
Weh-thah
.

“Is the ark ready?” I asked. “Are the animals lined up?”

“Nah,” he said. “It’s not so bad as that.”

The kid beside him started drilling again, making a frantic whining that rose above the banging of hammers and the clattering of the rain.

“Hey,” Roald said sharply, “cut it out. We’re just going to have to do it over.”
O-vah
.

“It’ll be fine,” the boy said sullenly.

“I said stop.” Roald touched the arm with the drill.

“I know what I’m doing!” The rebellious fierceness in the kid’s voice surprised me—I’d never heard anyone on the crew talk back to Roald. He jerked away from the older man’s hand and held up the drill. Gritty plaster dust snowed down over their heads, settling in the bucket and drifting to the gallery floor. I brushed some from my hair and stepped back, peering up, trying to see.

Again Roald reached for the kid’s arm and said something I couldn’t hear, and then the shriek of the drill was replaced by the boy’s furious cry. “Why should I listen to you!” He waved the drill wildly in the air. “A crazy, pervy old man who cut off his own finger!”

A silence, except for the drumming of the rain. And then Roald said, “Give me the drill, Tim.”

All work in the room had stopped. The four or five other members of the crew looked up, some of them shading their eyes to see better. A man I recognized—older, heavyset, with a heavy black beard going gray—stepped forward. “What’s going on up there?” he called.

“I heard you did it to impress her!” the boy cried. “That’s disgusting. And I guess it didn’t do you any good!” He switched the drill back on, and Roald tried to grab it. They struggled. Then someone called out, and something tumbled down, thudding dully on the hard floor.

“Christ!” someone yelled, and the man with the beard shouted, “Call an ambulance!” The room whirled into motion. Only Roald’s body lay like one of the figures in Morgan McManus’s installation at the base of the cherry picker—face down, one leg splayed out at a terrible angle—while up by the ceiling Tim crouched in the cupped palm of the lift.