Alena: A Novel (25 page)

Policeman or not, Chris looked shocked. Which was, of course, the point. “Alena wanted to do things like that at the Nauk?”

“Not exactly like that,” Bernard said.

I thought of Morgan McManus, his intricate prostheses and fabricated corpses and recorded screams. But that was more atrocity art than body art—more documentary than performance. It wasn’t as though McManus was mutilating himself; the war had done that work for him.

“So you argued about that? And then you went off to Venice, and when she didn’t show up, you thought, Just as well. Is that what you’re saying?”

Bernard’s hand grew heavier in mine as though somebody had turned gravity up. “Look,” he said. “I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. You don’t even know if those are Alena’s bones.”

“That’s true,” Chris said. “I don’t.”

“Like you said, maybe she gave the boots away. Maybe she sold them on the internet!”

Chris ran a hand through the fuzz on his head. “Maybe,” he said. But I don’t think anybody in the room believed Alena would do that.

Upstairs, the opening was winding down, and down in Alena’s room, the interrogation was too. Chris stood up.

“Great show,” he said to me. “Great to see the Nauk open again.” Halfway to the door he stopped and turned. “We should go fishing sometime, Bernard. You still fish, don’t you? Even if you don’t sail.”

“It’s been a while.”

“Why did you sell your boats, by the way?”

Bernard sighed. “I was tired of sailing.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. I mean, there was a time, Bernard. I remember a time when sailing was your life.”

He left the door open when he went out. I thought I should follow him up the stairs, but I had entered that state beyond exhaustion when the mind empties and shimmers like a soap bubble, floating up seemingly outside one’s body. And besides, Bernard kept hold of my hand. “Stay a moment,” he said. “I meant to say—congratulations on your show,
cara
. Have I said that yet?”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. It’s a beautiful exhibition. Thoughtful and compelling. And you did it so quickly, and with so unconscionably little help.”

The soap bubble quivered and thrilled. “Thank you,” I said again.

“You should be prepared, though,” he went on gently, like a parent explaining to a child why she can’t have a kitten. “I doubt it’s going to get much attention. Don’t let it upset you, it’s just the nature of these things.”

I looked at him, amazed. “There are three hundred people upstairs!”

“For the party. Free food and drink. And, of course, because they’re curious. About you, and me, and about the Nauk.” And about Alena, he didn’t have to say; she was all around us, her body in the rich and opulent objects, her breath in the very air. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

I heard him with my ears, but his words didn’t touch me. I was too light, too high, drifting in the scented eddies up by the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

Bernard leaned back into the plush cushions, sighing, pulling me back too; pulling me toward him until my head rested on his shoulder. I shut my eyes, breathing in the smell of his jacket, his fine white shirt, his skin. “I’ve been— I haven’t been . . .” he said. “Since we got back. I brought you here and then— You’ve deserved a better employer. I’m sorry.” His voice clanged hollowly, like the hulk of a rusted ship hitting rock.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I must have known then, dimly, or suspected; not what he had done exactly, which no one could have guessed, but that he had done something. Like a swimmer caught in a current, I flailed in the tide of my dawning knowledge, unwilling to acknowledge or even consider the implacable, indelible truth.

Upstairs, the party glittered and tintinnabulated on, though its ranks had thinned somewhat. It was undeniable that more sparkling, swaying guests were topping off their glasses than looking at Celia’s work. I slid among them, inconspicuous enough in my black dress, and then, finding the heat and noise unbearable, I ducked out the door, thinking I would go home. Outside, Chris had stopped to chat with some people I didn’t recognize. I tried to slip by, but he caught up to me as I started down the path. “Hey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well,” he said. “Things have changed.”

I didn’t answer. He walked with me down the slope in the dark, through the trilling of the crickets and the rocking of the waves. I kept my head down. I found I didn’t want to look at him. At last he grasped my arm to stop me, the sudden warmth of his hand making me realize how cold I was: cold and wrung out, my ears ringing with voices and screeching laughter and wheezing evasions and half-truths.

“You’re caught up in something,” he said. “You stumbled into it. It has nothing to do with you.”

I looked up, but instead of Chris’s steady noontide face looking down at me, it was Bernard’s face I saw—his grizzled head and his gentleness and the darkness in his eyes. I saw him crouching beside me on the floor in the Arsenale in Venice, his questions and the smell of bitter oranges and his beautiful socks. I heard his voice in my ear as we entered the Scrovegni Chapel, saw him sitting across the table in the breakfast room at the Gritti saying,
You could stay with me
. He had reached out his hand and pulled me up into this new life. Even with Chris Passoa’s fingers tight on my arm, and warmth rooting through me from his hot skin, I knew, if I had to choose, whom I would choose. And it seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that I did have to.

I pulled away. “I wish you’d leave Bernard alone!” I said. And then I stumbled down the path through the dark.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE OPENING,
I got to work early and walked through the silent galleries. In the first room the seashell sculptures lay coupled on their plinths—pairs of scallop shells and oyster shells, slipper and jingle shells—all in their distinct and slightly unsettling colors, while a wider vitrine held a grid of coiled snails. In the second room, crabs and crayfish, tiger shrimp and pink shrimp smoldered under plexi, while whorled and fluted barnacles fanned out around the huge relic of the horseshoe crab. In the room after that were shimmering jellyfish in reds and yellows, and in the final room the sea foam pieces glittered in staggered rows like sunlit waves caught at the moment of breaking. Every time I saw the sea foam pieces they stopped me, caught me weblike, as if I were a fly. That day I stood among them for a long while, feeling the old familiar spark leap to life inside me, traveling down to the core of me, my whole body thrumming in recognition. They were elegiac sculptures, fragile and glossy, the creamy glaze laid loosely over black and purple and oxidized green, so that the milky surface gradually revealed to the eye something richer, darker: a depthless submarine world of teeming color.

Upstairs, I answered email and waited for Bernard. Sloan, bright as a canary with her yellow dress and darting eyes, was at her desk in the outer office, and Agnes was in her own office with the door shut, talking on the phone. I could hear her voice rising and falling on the other side of the wall, and though I tried not to listen, once or twice I caught myself with my head cocked, trying to parse the stream of sound into words.

Did Agnes know about the boot? About the bones? Could it have been she who had identified the tattered pink plastic as belonging to Alena in the first place?

Sometime after ten, Celia showed up. I heard her talking to Sloan, asking for Bernard, expressing surprise he wasn’t in yet. “Did you have an appointment?” Sloan asked.

“Do I need one?” The razor’s edge in Celia’s voice turned Sloan haughty.

“I’m just saying—you might not just expect him to be here, you know, whenever.”

I got up and hurried into the outer office. “Celia!” I said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Congratulations!”

Clad in a purple and gold tunic over black leggings, her eyes thickly outlined, her lids sparkling gold, Celia did not look placated. She looked like Cleopatra disembarking from her barge. “What for?” she wanted to know.

What for? “On the show, I mean! I was just downstairs walking through it again. It looks as spectacular this morning as it did last night.”

“No news, then?”

For a moment I thought she was talking about the bones.

But of course she didn’t mean that. She meant reviews, articles, an inquiry from a collector. “Come into my office,” I said.

We sat on the sofa in front of the Goldsworthy coffee table. Moodily, she put a finger on a ribbed scallop and moved it to a different spot. Together, haltingly, we recapitulated the night: who had come, what they had said, who had worn what. I was depressed by the awkwardness with which the conversation bumped along. The show had just opened, but in a real way the passion was already over. The exciting labor—hers and mine—was all behind us. We were like a poorly matched married couple who, having dropped a child off at college, find themselves trapped together in the car on the long drive home.

We were both relieved when Bernard showed up. Hearing him speaking with Sloan in the outer office, we bustled out to greet him. He looked stiff and gray, and there was a patch of bluish grizzle on his jaw that he had missed shaving; but his shirt was pressed and his mist-colored linen jacket was crisp, and his smile as he took Celia’s hands and kissed her on both cheeks began to burn away the yellow fog that had been coiling around us.

“What a night!” he said. “What a way to relaunch the Nauk! Celia, I knew the show would be good, but I have to say—it exceeded even my expectations.”

Celia glowed, a gold undertone shimmering under her skin, echoing her gilded eyelids. “But where did you disappear to?” she asked, more flirtatious than angry. “I looked and looked!”

Squeezing her hands, he notched his smile up. “Sometimes I have to put on my invisibility suit,” he said. “But I’m always there.”

“Oh!” Sloan said. “I’d rather fly than be invisible!” We all looked at her. In her bright, scant dress and teased, bleached hair, that she had no taste for invisibility was hardly a surprise.

“I knew a man who said he could fly,” Bernard said. “He made himself a pair of quite beautiful wings.”

“What of?” asked Celia, ever interested in materials.

“Tyvek and bamboo. Hello, Agnes.”

Agnes stood in her open doorway, a pillar of coal in her habitual black. “There’s that man who
grew
wings,” she said. “That bio-artist in Australia. They make these synthetic frames, then use stem cells or something to train the flesh to grow over them. Alena knew him. She wanted to give him a show.”

Alena’s name made cold ripples in the air, and then Bernard and Celia spoke at once.

“Do they work, though?” Bernard asked.

“Can he grow feathers?” Celia asked.

“No,” Agnes said. “They’re more like bat wings.”

“Ah,” Celia said. “For night flying.”

Then the door opened, and Chris Passoa came in wearing jeans and a mustard-colored button-down shirt and a brown woven tie. “Morning everyone,” he said cheerfully. “I might have thought you’d take the day off after a night like last night. Glad to see it’s not true.” He didn’t look at me.

“Good morning, Chris,” Bernard said. “We do work hard in this business.”

“Well,” Chris said, “if you call standing around and yakking work.” He turned to Celia. The pale fuzz on his head seemed as alert as buzzing antennae. “I’m full of admiration,” he said. “I had no idea you could do things like that with pottery.”

“Ceramics,” she said.

“I’d be scared to touch them.”

“I’m sure you deal with more frightening things in your profession every day. Good-bye, Bernard.” Not bothering to take her leave of the rest of us, she sailed regally out the door.

Agnes’s red and gold earrings threw off agitated shards of light. “Is it true?” she asked. “That boot you found—it was Alena’s?”

Chris Passoa slouched against the wall, his pale blue eyes grazing each of us—Bernard, Agnes, Sloan, finally me—like a herding dog keeping tabs on its flock. I looked away. I couldn’t help it. I could feel his bright tug, the way my body was pulled toward him like a daisy turning toward the sun, but I didn’t want that now. “Yes,” he said. “They’re hers. And the bones as well. I’m sorry. We’ve all but confirmed it.”

Bernard startled. “But you said— How do you know? Did you get a DNA sample or something?”

Chris sat down on the sofa. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket, set it on the coffee table, and unfolded it. Inside were four small metal bands, two thicker and two narrower, glinting dully in the wan office light.

Slowly, her earrings trembling, Agnes crossed the room and knelt on the carpet in front of them. “Her toe rings.”

“They were in the boot. Tangled in the nylon stocking.”

Frozen in place, Bernard’s eyes were fixed on the twists of metal. From her knees, Agnes looked up at Chris, then wrenched her gaze wildly around the room. Sloan crossed to her on her heron legs, sank to the ground, and enfolded her aunt’s black-clad bulk in her bare bony arms.

Agnes’s hands folded over the rings. Chris let her take them. She squeezed them in her fists, pressed her fists to her chest. There were no tears, no sound, but her white face blanched whiter still, like a bone bleached by the sun.

“It makes it real, doesn’t it?” Chris said. “Alena’s dead. We knew it before, but now we know it differently.”

A faint mosquito-like whining seemed to start up in my head. My thoughts buzzed in confused alarm.

“But,” Sloan said. “Wearing
boots
?” It seemed as if she wanted to say more but was unable to find the words.

Chris’s eyes, animated by an electric alertness, kept moving, from Agnes’s hunched form, to Bernard’s stiff figure, to Sloan, to me. “Yes,” he said. “So she wasn’t swimming, as we originally guessed.” His statement fell through the room like a stone. “Of course, it could have been a boating accident. Though we don’t know of any missing boats.” Another stone. “Except for Bernie’s, of course.” He smiled like someone making a joke. “But he sold those.”

Still clutching the rings to her chest, Agnes stared at him. “I don’t understand!” she cried. “What happened to her?”

“We don’t know,” Chris said. “That’s what we have to find out.” Again his eyes roamed, pausing at each one of us. When his gaze fell on me, I realized that I felt ill. My breathing was irregular and I was flushed and sweating.

“I looked through the files again this morning,” he said. “Just to refresh my memory. Alena was seen last the evening of the day before the flight she was supposed to take to Paris, but which she didn’t get on. She had dinner with Monica Halloran in Wellfleet.” I knew Monica Halloran; she was the blond woman who looked like an opossum whom I had met at the dinner Bernard had given when I first arrived. Chris leaned back against the couch, crossing his legs. The room was completely silent now, except inside my head, where the whining, the buzzing, grew steadily louder. I remembered what Morgan McManus had told me—that Alena had tried to reach him by phone that night. She’d called to say she had something to show him, but he hadn’t picked up his cell. Presumably that information was in Chris’s file too. And in any case, it amounted to nothing. “Monica left her around eight-thirty,” Chris said. “It was June, still practically broad daylight at that hour. She was packed, ready to go. What did she do then?” He couldn’t really have expected an answer, and certainly he got none. He amended his question. “What did she usually do at such a time? The evening before she went on a trip.” He paused. “Bernard?”

Bernard’s head jerked up. “I didn’t see her,” he said.

Chris waited. “No,” he said. “I know that. I was just going to ask, I know you traveled together a lot over the years. I thought you might be able to say what kinds of things she usually did on the night before she was going somewhere.” The empty handkerchief in which he’d brought the rings still lay on the coffee table, and he picked it up now and stuffed it thoughtfully, bit by bit, into his fist.

“I don’t know,” Bernard said. “Different things, I guess.”

“Different things like what?”

“Meet a friend for a drink, go to a movie, go for a swim. Sometimes she went up to Boston the night before, to see people.”

“She didn’t do that this time,” Chris said. “Her car was still in her garage.” His words were grains of sand poured through a funnel into my head, joining their brothers by the thousands. Soon there would be no room left in there.

“I should have been with her!” Agnes said. Her brittle voice rushed through the words so that she sounded like a tape played slightly too fast. “Usually I did her packing on the night before a trip! Alena was a terrible packer. She always traveled with far too much luggage, and she’d squash everything together so it was wrinkled when she got anywhere. But I had to visit my mother, so I did it a day early. I wasn’t here that night to help her.” She sat very still, black as a charred stump after a forest fire, though her earrings continued to tremble slightly, throwing red beads of light across the floor. The discovery of the bones had made Alena’s death raw again, and now she had the anguish of thinking her absence might have contributed to that death. I remembered what she had said to me, the first time she took me down into Alena’s room.
It was good fortune that our trips overlapped.

“Bernard?” Chris prompted gently.

“I don’t know what she did,” Bernard said irritably. “I was busy getting ready to leave myself.”

“Of course.” Chris put the fist with the handkerchief inside it up to his ear, listened, then tapped the flesh near his thumb. The sound of my blood thundering through my veins was so loud I was having trouble making out anyone’s words. “It must have taken a lot of time, getting ready for a trip like that. And you were alone? No friend to help you pack?” He glanced at Agnes, who was staring into space, looking at nothing. “No one to confirm where you were or jog your memory?” Bernard might have agreed—or disagreed—or snapped at Chris Passoa, or cried out—but I wouldn’t have known. The wave of rushing blood overtook me, and everything went black. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor looking up into Bernard’s haunted face.
“Cara?”
he said.

On the sofa, Chris Passoa opened his hand, releasing a fistful of air.