Alena: A Novel (30 page)

“Alena and I were closer than ever after that. I had passed her test, I suppose. And she had freed me, because it was true, I stopped being afraid. After the surfer, there was another boy, the son of some friends of my parents. And after him, there were always boys, or men.

“Alena kept doing her performances. They got stranger, and more complicated, and she started inviting more people to watch. Grown-ups too, not just kids. Everywhere she went she met people. In coffee shops, on the beach, or just walking around town. She was practicing her charm, starting conversations with strangers. And now she was using all kinds of props—dead birds she found, and little paper cups that she would fill with paint or Kool-Aid and pour over herself. She started using the ocean not just as a backdrop. She would run in and out of the water, catching the surf in glass jars and setting them out in patterns, making little fires out of driftwood and burning origami fish that she had folded out of silver paper that made green sparks when it burned. Sometimes she burned real fish too, or dead birds, which made a terrible smell. These performances—
masquerades
, she called them—were part dance, part witchcraft, part burlesque. And they were utterly hypnotic.

“And then she got another idea. She would get into the water and ask someone to call out a number, and then she would have the group count to that number while she went under and waited for them to finish counting. We had to count very loud so she could hear us and know when to come back up. And after a while, people started yelling out higher and higher numbers, and once someone yelled out a hundred and fifty, and I tried to make the counting go faster, but I couldn’t, and she made it all the way to the end, but then she just lay on the sand, half dead, and couldn’t finish the masquerade.

“I made everybody go away.

“In the fall we went back to school. Both of us were studying art history. Alena claimed to be bored with the Roman architecture and the Italian Madonnas and the Dutch still lifes, but I loved all of it. Still, she kept bugging me to go away more and more often. One weekend we went to Philadelphia, where she had some friends in art school. We went to the art museum and stumbled on the Duchamps. And then one of the art students told us about the ICA, where they were having a show of Paul Thek, and we went to see that. We both got obsessed with Paul Thek: the casts of body parts, but also the complex small sculptures with lights and shells, and the paintings, and of course the meat. The work was so raw, and also so beautiful. It got Alena interested in objects again, which was a relief to me, after the masquerades. We started to fantasize about having our own gallery—or better yet, our own little museum, only not an ordinary museum. It would be small, intimate, devoted to the work of one artist at a time. Neither of us knew the word
Kunsthalle
then, but that was basically what we were dreaming up.

“And eventually, a long time later—I’m skipping over many things, of course—we opened the Nauk. I paid. Well, I could afford it. My mother had died, and Barbara and I had inherited everything. After college I worked at Christie’s in New York for a while, and Alena worked for a couple of galleries, Janis Saunders and later Gagosian.

“In almost every important way, the Nauk was hers—Alena’s. She chose the land, she worked closely with the architect, she designed the interior herself. She picked the artists she wanted to work with. We talked about all these things together, of course, but for the most part I followed her lead. She had an extraordinary eye—an instinct for what was interesting, a sense of which artists were about to take enormous leaps in their work. I was happy to be a part of it, and to see her happy.” He paused, letting the word—
happy
—ring out. His eyes blazed with darkness, and the quiet of the room seethed.

“Go on,” I said.

“I can’t.” Panic fluttered in his voice like a bat caught in a drape. “I can’t. I shouldn’t have told you any of this.”

“You were happy . . .”

“Yes. We were happy! We lived happily ever after. The end!”

“Bernard.” I pressed the tip of my finger against the tip of his. “Finish the story.”

His tanned skin was chalky and his eye sockets looked too big for his face: dark pools someone might fall into and drown. He got up from the table and began opening all the cabinets. “Don’t you have anything else to drink?”

“There’s rum above the broom cupboard.” The rum had come with the house, a sticky, half-empty gallon of Captain Morgan.

“I hate rum,” he said, pulling it down.

I tried to smile. “And I thought you were a sailor.”

“Sailors only drank rum because it was all they had.”

“I think you really missed sailing these last two years,” I said. “Chris told me how much you loved to sail.” It felt strange saying his name, and I stumbled over it. I wondered if Bernard noticed. I wanted him to. I couldn’t remember, anymore, why I had wanted to keep any secrets from him.

“Chris believes Alena committed suicide,” he said. He stood drawn up in the corner where the broom cupboard was, the jug of rum hugged to his chest, his limp hair as gray as dust in the pulsing light.

“Yes.”

“Do you think he really does? Really believes that? Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and believe something else.”

“Sit down,” I said.

“I should go home.”

“Bernard,” I said. “Sit down.”

He looked at me doubtfully, like a dog eyeing a newspaper. Then he crossed the frayed linoleum and sat, pouring an inch of rum into both our glasses. It smelled like cough syrup and rancid butter. We drank. Then he laid his hand back on the table where it had been, where mine still was. Again our fingers touched. And he went on.

“It wasn’t until we had been open for maybe a decade that things began to change. Alena began to be more and more interested in working with a different kind of artist. People who were doing things that were darker, more violent, more extreme than artists we had shown before. More to do with the body. Of course, the art world has always had room for that strain of work. But the new generation—people like Galindo working with blood, or Ron Athey’s S&M spectacle, or Daria Angel’s knife dances—it started to seem to me that it was the extremity alone that interested them. And what interested Alena. Maybe it had to do with getting old. She was approaching fifty. Well, we both were. Alena had always enjoyed showing off her body as though it were a valuable possession, but suddenly the value of that possession had plummeted. That was intriguing to her, even as it was dismaying, and I think that was part of what rekindled her interest in the body, her own and other people’s. She wanted to do a show of Iris Vertigo, and I didn’t want to, and we argued, but in the end we did it. And then she wanted to do a show of Kira O’Reilly, and we argued again. And then we were arguing about every show. It seemed to her, she said, that I was smothering her creative impulses. And it seemed to me that all she wanted to do was to push me, to propose shows I didn’t want to do because she knew I wouldn’t want to do them.

“And then we seemed to be back where we had been so long ago, with her calling me a coward.
You’ve lost your edge,
she said.
You just want to play it safe
.
You want to live in your comfortable house and keep everything clean like all the other rich people!

“It was around this time that Alena met Morgan McManus. I was relieved at first. Before that, I had noticed that Roald, who’d worked for us for years, had started looking at her differently—as though he were cold and she were a fire. Well, lots of men have looked at her like that. But Roald! I was angry at her. I could see the way she kept touching him, whispering to him. I told her to leave him alone, but she just laughed. And then one day he called and said he wouldn’t be at work, he’d had an accident.” Bernard shut his eyes, his long lashes stiff and bristly as straw.

“So I was glad at first when McManus showed up to occupy her. He started stopping by the Nauk, hanging around. You couldn’t help noticing him. Alena was intrigued by him—how he could have a different body, basically, every time he showed up. I didn’t see it that way. I used to say he was just changing his clothes.

“Alena did a studio visit with him and encouraged his work. She saw him emerging from the tradition of Paul Thek—which superficially he was, I guess, but without, in my opinion, the depth or vision Thek had. We argued about that. About McManus. By then, after so many years, it was established between us that she was the one with the eye, and I was the money guy. She had the daring sensibility. I was amenable. That had been our shtick for a long time, and when it was a shtick, it was fine. But somewhere along the line, it had hardened. It had become, for all intents and purposes, our reality.

“And then there were the drugs. We’d both done a lot of experimenting, of course. LSD, Ecstasy, mushrooms. And then cocaine, increasingly, as the eighties wore on. At a certain point we both cut way back. We had seen too many people, artists especially, disappear down that dark hole. Alcohol was good enough for us, we agreed, or grass. I didn’t even smoke pot for years, though Alena liked to, she had a steady supply. But McManus was into all kinds of drugs. He was in tremendous pain all the time, Alena said—real pain and phantom pain, though I guess phantom pain is real enough. He took Vicodin and OxyContin and phenobarbital. He liked cocaine, and he dabbled in meth, and he did heroin sometimes—just now and then, Alena said, when the pain was unendurable. But how many people take heroin just now and then?

“And then Alena started showing up for work high on one thing or another. Agnes would cover for her, saying she had called and was running late, or that she was sick, but half the time she had no more idea where Alena was than I did. If she was downstairs in her rooms, Agnes could go wake her up and try to get her dressed. After a while, she was doing that almost every day—going down there and dragging Alena out of bed, pouring coffee down her throat, running the shower. But if Alena wasn’t there—if she was at McManus’s, or somewhere else—well, there wasn’t anything to do.

“One night Alena showed up at my house and said she was giving McManus a show. That’s what she said—
she
was giving him one. I said no, she wasn’t. We weren’t. I had never said that quite so baldly before. I had tried to argue her out of doing certain exhibitions, but if she insisted, I always acquiesced. But not McManus. Not those recorded agonies and fake bits of gore and derivative corpses. No.

“And so, again, we had the old argument. That dull, exhausting, endless wrangle about risk and edginess, bravery and cowardice, and about, always,
the next thing
. What it would be.

“We were in the living room, I remember, and the doors were open, and we could hear the waves rolling in. We were leaving for Venice the next day, for the Biennale. I had been looking forward to that—to getting away from the Nauk for a week or so. Getting Alena away. We always had a good time at the Biennale, and I thought it would be good for us. But now she told me that she had changed her ticket so we weren’t traveling together. She had a friend she wanted to see in Paris, she said, and there were a couple of shows. A couple of performance pieces. She said—I hardly noticed that she said this, she slipped it into the conversation when I was already angry, but I’ve thought about it often enough since—she was thinking about going back to performance herself. She had an idea that had been going around in her head, and she thought if she saw these particular pieces, it would help her think it through. She would stay a day or two, then get a flight to Venice. Or, if she couldn’t get a flight on such short notice, she would take the train.

“I told her I was disappointed. I said I hoped she’d come to Venice soon. And she said, why should she come when I wasn’t going to want to have any fun. She meant drugs, parties. She was taunting me, telling me again that I had gotten old, that I’d lost whatever daring I’d once had. She took out the little silver vial where she kept her coke, and a silver tray, and she laid out a couple of lines.
You won’t even do a little coke, will you?
she said.

“Well, I did the coke. Why not? It was an easy enough gesture to make, and I missed the energy it gave me. The sense that everything was within reach. I used to feel that way a lot, even without coke, but it seemed to me that night that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt it. And of course, we’d had a lot to drink. I thought—it was stupid of me—but I thought once I did the lines she’d shut up about the rest, about edginess, and cowardice, but that wasn’t what happened. That was just the beginning.

“She started to go on about McManus. She said what a great artist he was, and how the Nauk show would make him an art-world star, and how anyone who couldn’t see it had scales on his eyes! Maybe she was just trying to work me up. I told her she was wrong, that she was the one who was blind, that McManus had her fooled. He was a charlatan, she was in love with his ruined flesh, his freakishness. I wish I hadn’t said that, but I did.

“And she said—Alena said—
You’re not the man I knew!
You’re not the man who shot the apple from my head. The brave archer. I’ve always remembered that, she said. That beautiful night. That grand gesture!
I have never felt so alive,
she said,
as standing on the beach that night as you drew your bow
.

“And, after a while, I gave in.

“The night was overcast, no stars, but the clouds formed a milky dome over the beach that seemed to cast its own eerie glow.
A good night for ghosts,
Alena said.
Maybe we’ll see Maria Hallett,
she said. Alena had always wanted to see Maria Hallett’s ghost.

“
There’s no such thing as ghosts,
I said.

“There was no papier-mâché apple that night, just a real apple Alena had taken from the kitchen when I went to get my bow. It had been a long time since I had drawn it, but it felt good in my hands. It felt right as I strung it, like an old friend I was meeting again after a long absence. I felt—it’s terrible to say it—young again, and I thought maybe Alena was right. Maybe, I thought, we could go back to the beginning—that this could fix things between us. This act. This one bow shot.