Alena: A Novel (13 page)

T
HE DAYS STREAMED BY,
rippling and skittering, drawing me along in their current. I had been thinking of the Nauk as a kind of Sleeping Beauty’s castle (though with the princess herself mysteriously absent), an enchanted stillness fixing the very air so that nothing breathed, no dust gathered, no spider threaded a web across any sunny corner of the silent building protected by invisible thorns. But of course, that wasn’t what it was like at all. While in the southern wing of the museum the galleries had stood empty, on the north side Agnes and Sloan and even sometimes Bernard had continued to work. The board of directors had to be dealt with, the building kept up, bills paid, and email answered. Even Jake and the public outreach coordinator, a tall, quiet, weathered man who wore his prematurely gray hair in a ponytail tied with a piece of string, came in from time to time, though what they found to fill the hours during those long, slow months wasn’t exactly clear. Still, what had Louise done besides read the papers and talk on the telephone? Not much. And of course, during all that time—the time since Alena had disappeared—inquiries and proposals from artists kept coming in, and requests for images from past shows, and people wanting catalogues, and other people wanting to rent out the building for weddings, not to mention journalists wanting information about Alena and floating absurd and speculative stories, based on ghosts of rumors picked up from dubious and untraceable sources, about how she died. There was a theory that she’d been the victim of one of a series of shark attacks the authorities were hushing up, another about a pagan ritual, conducted at night on a driftwood raft, that had taken a tragic turn. There was an elaborate and persistent story about a secret party held on a yacht out in the bay—booze and drugs and naked partygoers, wasted off their gourds, with painted bodies and glitter-encrusted hair, leaping from masts into the black, churning ocean—all of them making it back aboard but one.

Whose yacht? Why painted bodies? How was it there were no witnesses to this glittering carnival? Nobody could say.

If only news of exhibitions traveled half as widely, or generated a quarter of the interest! It seemed clear to me—as Sarabeth had suggested in Venice—that by closing after Alena’s disappearance the Nauk had wasted the kind of publicity that comes perhaps once in a lifetime, and which might have been leveraged to bring a small flood of first-time visitors through the door. Even if only one in ten actually took in the art, that would have been something! Of course, had I known it, we would have more than enough of that kind of curiosity before long.

In the mornings, the sun woke me early. The thin curtains were no match for the strong pink light that pooled on the floor shortly after five, then spread and shifted, pink going to apricot, to butter, then bleaching to dazzling bone. I would lie for a while on the lumpy mattress, my hand tracing the curves of the painted metal headboard, breathing in the smells of must and sun and salt. Mice scrabbled in the walls—I could hear them if I woke up in the night—and innumerable spiders, small, almost transparent, spun webs in every corner and were efficiently replaced by their relatives, or rivals, after every vacuuming. Every morning I woke with the sour taste of anxiety on my tongue, dimly aware of chaotic, exhausting dreams. Before heading up to the chilly, humidity-controlled office of the Nauk, where Agnes would either be waiting for me, making a dumb show of her patience, or would shortly swim into view full of false, effusive apology, I climbed up through the sharp, whispering dune grass and stumbled down through the soft sand to the beach.

Bernard had left Nauquasset almost as soon as we arrived. He maintained, in addition to his large house on the Cape, an apartment in Manhattan, another one in Boston, and a lodge (that’s what he called it) in Aspen for skiing. He spent at least half his time elsewhere, and he seemed surprised that I was surprised about this. As though I could have had any idea what a life like his was like!

Another thing that became clear almost at once was that, although Bernard was the Nauk’s nominal director, and though Barbara had suggested that I would be in charge, it was Agnes who ran the place. All the strings for all the systems were held in her pale plump hands with their sharp crimson nails. She kept the accounts, created and tracked the budgets, processed payroll, paid the bills, supervised the staff, kept the contracts, and, of course, was the holder of the keys. There were a surprising number of locked doors at the Nauk, especially considering how small the staff was—how small the whole place was. I had seen inside some of them—one was a file room, one a storage room for cartons of Nauk publications, one held AV equipment, and one was a janitor’s closet. When, occasionally, I asked about one or the other of the doors, Agnes would say, “Of course we can arrange for you to examine everything from top to bottom when you have the time.” Or, “I can assure you, there’s nothing remotely interesting in there, but of course, if you insist on seeing for yourself, you need only say so and I’ll arrange for it immediately.” But insisting was not something I was able to do. Instead, I would nod, blush, and change the subject, as though I had done something to be ashamed of. Agnes had a great bouquet of keys on a length of green leather that she must have kept in her office somewhere. Every now and then she carried it looped around her wrist, and then she clanked as she walked, like a Victorian ghost.

Every morning the beach was made anew. The patterns of seaweed, of shells, of the dark damp sand of the lower beach and the paler, finer sand of the upper—of the gaping and shutting holes made by mole crabs, and the clusters of geometric tracks of little birds, and the ribbons of rounder, deeper tracks left by dogs—all these were different each day than they had been the day before. Looking out toward the horizon, I waited to see great whales breeching, spouts like giant geysers squirting white into the sky. I imagined wooden ships from the days of the explorers, their sails pregnant with wind.

Even as early as six I was seldom alone. Occasional joggers huffed along the shore, leaving dark tracks. Women in hooded sweatshirts, with bare brown legs and floppy hats, exercised ambling Labradors and trotting shih tzus, and the occasional surf caster, strong-armed and patient to the point of indifference, whipped his line again and again into the teeming white-laced waves, reeling in nothing but the wet salty air. Sometimes an old man—white hair blowing around his ravaged face, as thin as a blade of grass, in sweat-stained shirt and jeans the color of the sky—stood at a portable easel painting the scene: blue sea, pale sand, pink clouds, and the distant shimmer of land on the horizon as the arm of the Cape turned back on itself.

The beach was long and pale and striped at low tide, and black crinkled seaweed lay in dark ranks, the water glittering gold and navy blue. I left my towel on the sand, waded into the cold water, and dove into a gathering wave. The clean chill washed through me. I could feel the sharp outline of my body as I moved through the water, arm over arm, out past the surf to where the swells rose and fell in gentle humps, my warming body strong and easy in the sunlit bay. I turned and swam along the shore, tingling with exertion, reminding myself not to swim too far in this direction. The powerful tide was with me now but would be against me when I turned back. The water turned green as the sandbar came up underneath me, then blue again as it fell away. I stopped to tread water, looking out to the horizon. Birds dove around the wreck of the
Lady Margaret
, its rusting iron hull a feeding ground for fish, the tops of its black chimneys just visible at dead low tide. And beyond that was the Plunge, the kettle hole in the ocean floor created, as I understood it, by a large chunk of stagnant ice that had lingered as the rest of the glacier had receded after the last ice age—exactly the process that had formed southern Wisconsin with its constellations of shining lakes.

One morning on my walk I ran into Chris Passoa. In an old gray T-shirt from which the message had faded, aqua swim trunks, and old black sneakers, he had apparently been running on the beach. Now, though, he was just walking, his tall shadow knifing across the sand. His pale hair caught and held the yellow light, and his legs were tan and muscled. I had just finished my swim, and my hair dripped onto my shoulders and down my back, the salt drying on my flushed skin.

“How’s the water?” he asked as we stopped to say hello.

“A little warmer than yesterday. And yesterday was a little warmer than the day before. By Labor Day it should be almost pleasant.”

He smiled. “And teeming with tourists as well.”

I couldn’t picture the beach as anything but mostly empty. “I love how easy it is to swim here. How the salt holds you up.”

He held up a finger. “You have to be careful. Especially if you’re not used to the currents.”

Must every action—every word and thought—recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did?

I told Chris Passoa about my Lake Michigan summers, how the great lake was as powerful and unpredictable as any ocean. He listened with an attentive skepticism in his sky-blue eyes, the sun setting the hairs on his brown arms alight. He reminded me of the men of my childhood, friends of my father and of my older brothers, who could split a cord of firewood in an easy afternoon, shoot a rabid skunk at dusk, chow down half a pork roast at supper, and whistlingly ease a cow through a hard labor at midnight, no effort or muck or animal stupidity or human failure ruffling their steady competence. There was a kind of uniform tranquillity, an ageless, timeless sufficiency about them—about him—that consoled me, though I had fled from it not so very long ago.

“I can’t imagine a lake that big,” he said.

“Don’t tell me the stereotype of policemen having no imagination is true.”

“Well. It’s hard to compete with you creative types.”

“I’m not a creative type. I’m an academic.” I poked at the sand with my toe. Gritty at the surface, it was cool and fine underneath, almost silky. There were small stones buried in the sand, brown and beige and muddy white. “Of course, some people are both.”

Bending, he picked a flat stone out of the sand, measured the waves, then skipped it out across the water: five, six, seven,
splash
. A wave ran up the beach as far as our feet, its white foam boiling then receding, sinking into the sand. A gull glided by on a current of air, its shrill lament tumbling down the sky. “They treating you well up there? Up at the Nauk?”

“Yes,” I said politely. “Everyone’s been wonderful.”

“You getting along all right with Agnes?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You know, she was very close to Alena.” The syllables of her name, with their long open vowels, sounded like an incantation on the morning air.

“Oh?” I said. I wanted to know—I burned to know—but I would not let him see me burning.

He picked up another stone, also flat and perhaps five inches across, though when I looked at the beach all I could see, aside from broken slipper shells and eviscerated crabs, were large bumpy pebbles. Five, six, seven, eight,
splash
. “They grew up together. In Oregon somewhere. The story is that Alena helped Agnes out of a situation—an abusive boyfriend, maybe. Or it might have been something that happened when they were kids. A drunken father? An older cousin who . . . ? Something. And then, when Alena’s father died, Agnes asked her parents to take her in, and they did. Otherwise she would have had to go back to Russia. Her mother had died long before, when Alena was very young. So, if Agnes is slow to warm up to a newcomer, you can understand why.”

The sun edged higher in the sky, hotter. Terns circled and dove in the chop beyond the wreck. A noisy family with an enormous spotted dog was settling in for the day with blankets and deck chairs and insulated coolers. Was Chris Passoa asking me to feel sympathy for Agnes, with her stony eyes and her vampire style, her obstructive obsequiousness? To pity her, even? “I imagine she’ll warm up to me sooner or later,” I said doubtfully.

“Of course she will. Once you show her what you’re made of.”

And what was that?

He bent again, plucking a thin white stone with an elegant vein of dark gray out of the sand. “Your turn.”

Our fingers grazed as I took the flat slab. Distractedly, I hurled it out over the chilly waves.

One,
splash
.