Alena: A Novel (15 page)

I put my hand to my chest. My own breathing was coming and going, fast and shallow as though I had a fever. I thought of Marina
lying still as a viewer cut her with a knife and licked the blood; of Catherine Opie inscribing her wish on her body in scars; of Carolee Schneemann choreographing a dance with naked bodies and raw meat. I was starting to feel uncomfortably warm. The room was crowded with objects: shiny, heavy, blind forms that seemed to me suddenly like living things turned to stone. I fanned my face with my hand, listening to the waves. Agnes was talking, her voice droning like a hornet. I could hear everything she said, but the words seemed to float into my mind from a great distance. “The last show had just closed,” she said. “Dessa Michaels, the dissection pieces. It got a lot of attention, Alena should have been pleased. But she had decided it was too distanced. Too abstracted.
The thing itself was eclipsed,
she said. She said that a lot about art that didn’t live up to her standards—
The thing itself is eclipsed!
She wanted to strip it bare, whatever it was. Like staring into the sun, or looking at the naked face of God! That was what she wanted—art so potent it would make the heart stop.
I wish I could die from art,
she used to say. Die from art! The ultimate consummation.”

She paused. The room buzzed with her words, my ears rang with them. I needed to sit down.

“You look pale,” Agnes said, watching from her height as I lowered myself onto the velvet sofa.

“I’m fine.”

“Probably you’re tired. You get faint, maybe you’re anemic. You should make sure you get enough rest.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Does talking about art like that upset you?”

“No. Of course not.”

She sat down beside me. “Do you like it too, then? Might we see some shows about the body from you?” The derision in her voice was unmistakable.

“I like all kinds of art.”

Heat shimmered off her in waves as if from pavement on a summer afternoon. “We sat right here,” she said. “She asked me to brush her hair. I always used to brush Alena’s hair, and braid it or put it up, from when we were kids. She had beautiful hair, thick and black and slippery as obsidian. Volcanic glass. I could French braid it by touch in the dark. So I did. I brushed it out for her, and she said, ‘Aggie, I don’t even know why I’m going. Maybe I’ll just change my mind and stay.’

“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Stay. Why should you go? What’s there that’s better than what you have here?’ I meant it too. Art-world celebrities, super-rich collectors, jealous curators, everybody trying to look more successful than they were. Why did she need that? Why did she want it?

“But she always went, she was restless, that was part of who she was. But she always came back.” The ocean was restless too, surging forward and falling back, always clamoring for the shore but unable to possess it, like a ghost lover whose arms drift through the body of the beloved.

Always came back,
Agnes said. But not this time. Did Agnes decline to believe that? Did she refuse, like the mother of a soldier reported missing in action, to look death in the face? Was that why she kept the room like this, immaculate? Did she believe Alena would return any day—any hour—and the Nauk would be ready, waiting for her like a bridegroom? “It’s been two years,” I said, or thought I said, but my syllables, like motes of dust, floated away and disappeared.

Agnes leaned close. “I’m telling you this because you need to understand.” Her words spiraled down through my ear, their tiny vibrations reverberating like thunder in the dark. “You’re only temporary here.”

O
NE MORNING
I
WOKE UP
thinking of Celia Cowry, whose small ceramic sculptures Bernard and I had remembered at the same moment in Venice. An African-American artist, she often used the forms of seashells, glazed in the hues of skin: pinkish white, coffee brown, clay red, ochre, golden, ebony. Some of them were delicate, some cruder and heavier. Some glowed pristinely, while others seemed encrusted with barnacles and mud. She showed in New York, and her work had been included in group exhibitions in half a dozen contemporary art museums across the country, but as far as I knew, she’d never had a solo museum show. And she lived on the Cape, Bernard had said. Maybe she would be the right artist to relaunch the Nauk. The local connection would be useful, attracting press attention and a crowd at the opening: Cape buzz. She was unquestionably deserving of a larger audience. I remembered the insistent pull of her work, posed on square columns arrayed around a sunny upstairs room in a Chelsea gallery.

One piece in particular had stayed with me, a sculptural diptych of scallop shells side by side, one pink, the other a coppery brown, both of them speckled with tiny holes. The two shells were almost touching at the edges of their flared bases, and the narrow gap that separated them was tense and electric. They seemed to ache toward each other, fluted ridges leaning inward like the wake of two boats on convergent paths, so that you could imagine the rocking, heaving waves that would result when the two sets crossed. The piece was called
Parents
. The burn in my chest when I saw it stayed with me for a long time. It rekindled when I read a review of another show of hers in
Sculpture
magazine accompanied by a photo of five or six similar pairings—the vacant bellies of oysters, the private spirals of snails, the spiny and skull-like conchs. The work was about identity, which could help attract attention, but it was subtle and complicated. I wouldn’t be choosing it because of its content, but I knew that content would provide a useful hook for reviewers. Finding her phone number in an old telephone directory in a kitchen drawer, I called her and arranged for a studio visit the next day.

Bernard was in New York, so I asked Roald to drive me. “How are you getting along?” he asked as we bumped through the silvery gates with their orderly menagerie and sped into the hot, florid morning.
Haow-ahh yoo gettin ah-lah-ng.

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

Roald’s truck was old, with cracked vinyl seats, roll-down windows, a radio but no CD player. Sand had collected in the grooves of the rubber floor mats and formed pale drifts in the corners of the foot wells. It had a standard transmission, so he had to keep his left hand on the steering wheel much of the time; I tried not to look at the place where his finger wasn’t. The cab smelled musty, but the breeze through the open windows was fresh. We passed a doughnut shop, an ice cream shop, a bait and tackle shop, their parking lots crowded with muddy pickups and simmering SUVs. “Are you finding things to be what you expected?”

“It was hard to know what to expect.” He nodded as though what I had said meant something. “Everyone has been very helpful. Of course, it must be strange for them, having me here. No one could blame them for finding it an adjustment.” I watched his face out of the corner of my sunglasses.

“There had to be a new curator sometime,” he said. “They had to expect that.”

Noo-ah kyoo-ray-toah.

“Well, but it was so sudden. And everyone was so used to Alena.” I tried to say the name casually, naturally, but although I did not actually stumble over the syllables, they came out louder than the rest of the sentence: a blurt, a cough, like a pelican disgorging a fish.

Roald glanced over at me, a flash of those blue-green eyes with the cloudy swirl in them, a dark vein in a pure crystal. “It’s good to have new blood,” he said. “It’s good the Nauk will open again. What’s the point of an empty museum? The place should have reopened long before now.”

We had entered the town, and Roald was forced to slow as we were caught in the web of high-summer tourist traffic, everyone wanting lunch or T-shirts or sunscreen or tequila. Rows of towheaded children dressed in pink trailing after their salon-blond mothers, athletic-looking men in flip-flops talking on cell phones, bronzed and wrinkled old women in T-shirt dresses whistling to dogs. “Do you think they’ll ever find her body?” I asked.

In front of us, a yellow VW bug stopped short, the driver calling out the window to some teenagers on the opposite sidewalk, something about fishing, drinks, the marina. Roald pressed the heel of his hand to the horn. “How should I know,” he said, and his thumb found the empty spot above his knuckle.

The small house stood at the end of a bumpy driveway. We were inland now, the ocean neither visible nor audible from this patch of lawn surrounded by orange daylilies, purple roses of Sharon, and a ragged clump of butterfly bush with actual butterflies on it: small yellow ones and delicate white ones and a few lavender blue ones—dozens of butterflies clinging to the slender branches and the purple flower clusters. Getting out of the truck, I moved softly across the lawn, not wanting to disturb them as they sat so quietly, some with their wings open and others with their wings pressed together like praying hands.

“Nice,” Roald said loudly, seeing where I was looking, then reaching across the long seat to slam my door. It was only then, my heart set fluttering like a cloud of butterflies itself, although the creatures remained absolutely still, that I understand that this was art. “Thought they were real, didja?” Roald said.

“I guess she fooled me,” I said.

“Guess she did. I’ll be back at noon.” Waving, he bounced the truck back down the driveway, leaving me alone.

The stoop was dark, damp, concrete, shaded by a corrugated plastic overhang festooned with egg-sac-studded cobwebs. I rang the bell and a minute passed, then another minute. Invisible sparrows twittered behind me in the hot grass. The butterfly bush with its false cloud of butterflies glowed hotly in the sunshine. I wondered what she had made them out of, those perfect replicas. Or perhaps they were preserved specimens she had caught, or bought, and affixed with wire or glue to her living bush. I rang again.

Unless the bush, too, was artificial.

Growing anxious, I held my thumb to the bell a long time. At last I heard shuffling footsteps, the distant rattling of dishes, a cat meowing. The door rasped open.

Celia Cowry was a small, plumpish woman in a bright pink muumuu and green silk Chinese slippers. She had smooth toffee-colored skin, and her eyes glowed almost golden under her thin, arched, crow-black brows. “Come in,” she said. “I was dreaming about this half the night! We had such a nice visit in my dream.” She laughed as she led me into the musty hall. “In my dream you were taller, though. And your hair was darker.”

I followed her into the studio, which was the main room of the house, what once would have been an open-plan living room/dining room. A shabby paint-spattered couch and kilim rug under a coffee table provided a sitting area, but the rest of the space was given over to a big worktable, a wheel, open shelves lined with jars of tools and tubes of glue and paint, with cleansers and brushes and labeled glazes, and with sculptures in every stage of making: damp cloths shrouding what I presumed were works in progress, shapes formed in clay waiting to be fired, as well as finished pieces. More finished pieces sat on a long table pushed up against the sliding glass door, shell sculptures mostly, peach and pink, coffee and cocoa, bone and ochre and terra-cotta red. A large sculpture of a horseshoe crab caught my eye. Brown and green and black, hunched as though exhausted, it looked like the last survivor of a dead planet. Beyond the glass doors, a big brick wood-fired kiln sprawled on the patchy grass. I moved toward the table of shells. “Are these new?”

She looked pleased. “Yes. I made these this winter.” She touched one with her finger, a scallop, fluted and mottled, slightly asymmetrical, curled in on itself like a sleeping animal. “I love scallop shells, don’t you?” she said.

“You’ve been making them for a long time,” I observed.

“Well,” she said, “but these are completely different.” I smiled, taking the remark for a little joke, but then I saw that she wasn’t joking. “I was so excited that you called now, just after the major breakthrough I had this winter!” There was something childlike about the unguarded way she spoke, her golden eyes glowing with affection as she moved through the room, pointing and describing, her Chinese slippers making shushing noises against the linoleum and her plump, blunt-fingered hands opening and shutting like bivalves in bursts of enthusiasm. She told me about the experiments she’d been doing with glazes, and how she’d come to understand that her earlier work had been too matte, the colors too dull, that the brushes she had been using were the wrong kind entirely. Also, she explained, the constancy of temperature while firing could not be overemphasized. As she talked, her fingertips caressed first one small sculpture and then another; she couldn’t keep her hands off them. She’d pick one up, cupping it carefully, and offer it to me to touch. “See how smooth that is?” she asked of a long, pointed, cone-shaped shell, rather like an icicle. “Your finger glides over it like glass.” Putting it down, she picked up a simple clamlike shell. “See how this one is just the slightest bit coarser? Smooth but also rough, the way silk is rough.” She picked up a shell that looked like an icing flourish on a fancy cake. “This one’s a periwinkle. It feels like polished quartz.” Obediently I touched each one, running my finger across the surface, listening and nodding, trying to feel the differences. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I’d like to have a show where the room was pitch black, or where everyone was given blindfolds. Instead of looking, people could use their sense of touch.”

“It would be a shame not to see the colors,” I said.

“The world has had enough of color,” she said. “No one has ever used color better than Giotto, and no one ever will. But to make art for the blind—now, that would be something!” Her eyes were as bright as a bird’s, her head cocking, birdlike, to one side as she went on: “Before I die, I want to make a glaze the exact texture of skin. Can you imagine that? But the technical challenges are mind-boggling.”

Slowly we made our way around the room. In addition to the shell ceramics, there were a few large pieces resembling tree stumps that she had carved out of wood, very detailed. She explained which was which, the American beech with the smoothest bark, the oak furrowed with dark rings, the white pine patchy and scaly with broader rings reflecting its quick growth. The roots spread out across the floor like the tentacles of octopi. I liked them very much. I wandered among them, asking questions, touching, comparing. The longer I looked, the more human they seemed: the apple with a kind of maternal grace, the several oaks dark and handsome like the heroes of romance novels. I asked her how long she had been making them.

Her mouth pursed and her forehead furrowed (like an oak!), making her look older. “This is my memorial series,” she said. “The lady who owned the land behind me died last year. Her sons sold it to a developer—five acres of mostly woods. They cut down the trees to build one of those places, you know. Oak Farms or Pine Estates or Cherry Tree Bower.”

I said it must be a hazard of living on the Cape.

Her golden eyes glowed angrily. “I took pictures,” she said. “I documented it! And I worked from those. These are portraits of corpses.”

I looked at the wood pieces again, seeing more clearly their penumbral, desolate quality, dark smears and stains where the sap had been spilled—very different from the shells that pulsed with gossamer being—and what came into my mind was Morgan McManus. His photographs of exploded human bodies. His candy-colored viscera and dismembered limbs. What was the essential difference between them, the narrow but profound crevasse that made me like the one and reject the other? Was it that the subject of one was human and the other wasn’t? That one was beautiful—aspired to beauty—and the other wasn’t, and didn’t? Did it have to do with the impulse of the artist?

But how could one ever pin down impulse, really? And how hopelessly outmoded even to try. “Have you shown these pieces?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t show them,” she said feelingly. “That would be like exhibiting the dead.”