Alena: A Novel (16 page)

You never know quite how a studio visit will go. Generally I consider these sessions among a curator’s greatest pleasures. The deep access. The invitation to step into the embodied mind of the artist. Some studios are messy, materials everywhere, the floor littered with old rags and dirty T-shirts and empty bottles and shriveled mouse droppings. Others are so clean and tidy it’s hard to see how any work gets done in them at all—and indeed, sometimes I think very little does, that a blocked artist will spend her energy arranging and rearranging until the shelves of tools become a kind of sculpture, displacing the actual work. Some artists are preternaturally verbal, especially the ones who have recently emerged from art school, where talking about your work is almost as valued a skill as making it. Increasingly in the art world, artists must be their own interpreters and advocates. The work is not presumed to speak for itself; rather, the artist becomes a living extension of the work, a kind of conjoined twin whose function is to mediate between the art—which like an autistic sibling speaks only in codes and riddles—and the outer world of gallery owners, collectors, curators, writers, and, of course, the public. With artists like these, studio visits come to resemble graduate seminars or
Artforum
essays, and a great deal of alert tact is necessary to pry open cracks in the slick surface of the verbal assault and let something like substance leak out.

Celia Cowry was not an artist like that. While hardly inarticulate, and sometimes no more comprehensible than your average recent art school graduate, her words seemed to me more like occult objects than exegeses. She seemed almost to consider the pieces she had made as though she had dreamed them into existence, like a character in Borges, rather than to have actually made them with her hands. When I asked her about that first show of hers I had seen in New York, her answer shocked me.

“I threw that work away,” she said. “It was all wrong.”

A hard shiver washed through me. “You—what?”

“Threw it away! I smashed it first. Working in ceramic, you spend so much of your energy trying not to break things, trying to prevent them from breaking themselves. It’s almost like spell-casting, as though if you concentrate hard enough you can summon a protective field around each object. But of course, it mostly doesn’t work. Sometimes an object just
wants
to break, you know?”

I tried to look as though I knew.

“It’s amazing to break something on purpose,” she said. We were sitting by now on the shabby, sagging sofa in the corner, sipping the sun tea she steeped in jars on the concrete ledge outside the sliding glass door. “Especially something you’ve put so much time into. And not just you! Other people. And when that something has been on display, had a value placed on it, been carefully packed and even more carefully unpacked, dusted by a trained expert with a single feather or whatever they do. To pick up an object like that and hurl it against the wall!” She leaned toward me. Her face was alight and I could smell the patchouli oil she wore, and wet clay, and the pungency of chemicals, and the fustiness of the Cape damp, and the clean pines that stood around the house, surviving cousins of the trees whose massacre she had memorialized.

“I was so interested in those pieces,” I said carefully. “I liked the pairings. The doublings. I thought—well, of course the forms were so extremely realistic, and then the colors were natural colors but not the colors the shells would naturally have been. Human colors. Skin tones—right? You said just now that you would like to make a sculpture with the exact texture of skin. Isn’t that the next logical step after your exploration of skin’s color?”

“No, no. Not at all!” She shook her head vehemently, her shoulders in the pink muumuu trembling with ardor, raised herself higher on the couch like a stretching cat, kicked off her slippers, and tucked her bare horny feet underneath her. “You’re missing the point. Color is—” she began, then broke off. “While texture . . .” Her plump arms described expansive shapes in the air.

“What?” I asked urgently. “Color is what? Texture is what?”

“Texture is
universal
!” She plucked the word triumphantly out of the buzzing air.

I decided to go back and try again. “When I saw those pairings,” I said carefully, endeavoring to pile my words into a solid edifice, “it was the subtlety I loved. The objects were beautiful, but you also found a way to bring in other things. Family, and race. The personal and the political.”

“No, no, no,” she said again. “That’s not it. I made the shells some colors and not other colors, that’s all. I put them in pairs because the vitrines were too big for one, too small for three.”

I couldn’t take that statement seriously. The vitrines would have been made to whatever size she and the curator worked out. “But,” I said, “that one piece.
Parents
, it was called. And isn’t it true that your mother was white and your father was black?” I was afraid she would be angry or offended, but she only sat back on her heels, leaning into the sprung sofa as though the invocation of her parents had softened her. “The purpose of titles,” she said, “is so you can refer to the works conveniently, without confusion. Otherwise you’re reduced to pointing, like a caveman.”

“Still,” I persisted, “you could choose any name you wanted. You could have called that piece
Snow
, or
Kitty Cat
, or
Anarchy
, but instead you called it
Parents
.”

She gave me a sly, sideways look. “What if I told you there was a typo on the label? That really the piece was called
Patents
, but the printer made a mistake?”

“Patents?”
I echoed in confusion. “What kind of a title is that?”

“You’re the curator,” she said triumphantly. “You tell me.”

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
Bernard was scheduled to get back, Barbara picked me up in her old Mercedes station wagon with the dogs in the backseat. We had an appointment in Provincetown to meet Willa Somerset, the first person other than Barbara whom Bernard had asked to serve on the museum’s board. “She’s old now, of course,” Barbara said as we sped down the Mid-Cape Highway. Like her brother, she liked to drive fast. The dogs draped their muzzles ecstatically out the open windows, their ears careening like windmills. “And her mind isn’t always quite . . . To us she seemed old even when we were children. She used to come by on her bicycle in her skirts and long socks to bring our mother cuttings from her garden. She’s famous for her garden, and for her scrimshaw collection. She’s a scrimshaw expert. And she knows a lot about Wampanoag culture. The Wampanoag hunted whales here, you know, long before the British came.”

“Wam-pa-what?” I asked. I was nervous, unsure how I should speak to this great Cape lady.

“The native populations of the Cape. Nauquasset is a Wampanoag word. It means crown of the sea. Isn’t that pretty?” I thought of the building we had left behind us, glittering on the brow of the dune. It was good to be away for a morning, to be borne along amid the smells of dog and old leather and Barbara’s flowery perfume. “Of course, she doesn’t ride her bicycle now. She’s ninety-three and she’s had two strokes. Trouble with her lungs. It was Willa, you know, who donated the land for the Nauk. Her family has lived on the Cape forever—since the eighteenth century, I think. They owned a lot of property. Now she owns it. She’s the last one.”

“What will happen when she dies?” I was thinking of Celia Cowry’s neighbor’s land, the trees cut down, the houses built. “Does she have children?”

“She never married. She’s—you know. Like Bernie.” At first I didn’t understand what she meant, but then she went on, “I think she knew what he was before he knew himself. She used to bring him books, big books about art. Books about temples in Greece and Egyptian pyramids. There was one about Michelangelo, he used to drag it with him everywhere. He must have been about six! Oh, she always adored Bernie.”

I tried to imagine Bernard as a boy: thin as a shadow, girlishly beautiful with those gray eyes and long lashes. Watchful, melancholy, passionate. Caressing with his gaze glossy pictures of the statue of David, the Vitruvian man inscribed in his circle, the erect finger of God igniting Adam into life. I remembered an old book my father had for some reason, of Dürer’s engravings. As a child I used to make a game of finding the hidden animals in those tricky forests of etched lines. Even then I felt something: a stirring, a veiled mystery. The bright secret magic, sensed but not understood, that rose and fell beneath the surface of marks like breath.

Willa Somerset lived in a roomy shingled saltbox cottage set back from the road and enclosed in a riot of flowers. You entered the property through a latched gate, then ducked under a trellised archway smothered in white star-shaped clematis. Orange trumpet vine grew up the south wall of the house, tiger lilies and white and pink hollyhocks gave way to foxgloves and dark purple columbine. Fragrant tobacco flowers filled the space under the magnolia tree, and golden nasturtiums spilled their round leaves down the sides of broad terra-cotta pots. In the corner, beside the spent peonies, tall fringed orange spikes, like something in a surrealist painting, flamed out of clumps of feathery bluish foliage.

The door was opened by a broad-faced nurse in a white uniform, including the sort of winged cap I had otherwise seen only in old movies. Through the hall, in the long dim room, an old lady was arranged on a sofa under a gray cashmere shawl. A table in front of her was set for tea, with a plate of slices of bread and butter, a bowl of apricots, and blue and white cups and saucers, some painted with dragons and some with clouds.

“Hello, Aunt Willa!” Barbara said. “You’re looking well.” She bent over and kissed the old woman, her bulk suspended awkwardly over the small brittle figure resting on the hard, old-fashioned, pale green chesterfield.

“Hello, dear,” came the answer. “So nice of you to come and visit. And I see you’ve brought someone.” She peered up at me greedily through her pearl-gray cat’s-eye glasses.

“This is the new curator,” Barbara said. “Bernie asked me specially to bring her to meet you. He’s sorry he can’t come himself, but you know how Bernie is—always rushing around!” She gestured, and I stepped forward into the light so she could see me better.

“I’m so happy to meet you,” I said. “Your garden is so beautiful.”

The old woman stretched her neck, her mouth working as though chewing a tough bit of quahog. “
You’re
not Alena!” she announced.

A hollow place in my chest dilated, filled with an icy sting.

Barbara sat down on the sofa and took the old lady’s hand. “You know Alena’s gone, Aunt Willa. This is her replacement. We’ve come to have tea with you.”

“Tea, yes. I know. Everything’s ready.” She looked at me hard, as though daring me not to vanish. Then she looked pointedly away. The nurse sat on a low chair in a corner, the white of her uniform like a blank place in the crowded room in which a great number of glass cases and wooden shelves and little tables held any number of interesting objects: silver thimbles, faded cloth dolls, china egg cups, stone arrowheads, necklaces of sharks’ teeth, necklaces of shells, and innumerable pieces of scrimshaw—oval panels and curved hair pieces, bracelets and knife handles and domino boxes. In the center of the mantelpiece, a filigreed clock on a footed wood-and-ivory platform was flanked by two large whale teeth inscribed with castles and waterfalls.

“Why don’t I pour,” Barbara said. She picked up the teapot. It was so quiet that the sound of the fragrant tea filling the cups seemed very loud, and I could hear our hostess’s labored breathing as she reached for the plate of bread and butter to pass. “Have you had Portuguese sweet bread?” Barbara asked me. “Aunt Willa gets it from a bakery that’s been there since I was a girl. She used to take me there and we would buy sugar cookies decorated with frosting stars. Remember, Aunt Willa?”

Our hostess didn’t answer. Her face was a mass of wrinkles and brownish age spots, over which her spun-sugar hair floated like a cloud. I bit into the soft, buttery bread. “It’s delicious,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, the old lady turned to me, regarding me blankly as though she hadn’t noticed me before. “Who are you?” she asked.

I put my plate down.

“Aunt Willa,” Barbara said sternly. “This is the new curator. Bernie found her in Venice. She’ll be organizing a new show so we can get the Nauk open again.”

Found, I thought. Like a shell on the beach.

“I understand you donated the land for the Nauk,” I said.

“New curator?” Her eyes clouded with confusion behind her sparkling lenses. “New? But what about Alena?” She glared at me, the ridge of her brow prominent beneath her sparse eyelashes. “Alena used to bring me things,” she said. “That eighteenth-century snuff box on the mantel. The shadow puppet from Java. Hannah, where is it? I don’t see it.” Her gaze darted anxiously around the room until the nurse said loudly in her soothing Caribbean accent, “We moved it to the dining room, remember, Mrs. S?”

“That’s right.” She seemed to relax slightly. “The dining room, near the Mapplethorpe.” Then she let out a little cry and exclaimed, “Flowers!” Her eyes, still looking at the nurse, were full of longing. “She brought me flowers when she came, didn’t she, Hannah?”

“Yes, Mrs. S. Sometimes she did.”

“Always! I told her it was coals to Newcastle, but she said you could never have too many flowers. I don’t argue with that.” I made a mental note to bring flowers the next time I came, though I hoped there might not be a next time. Still, she was on the board.

“The roses are beautiful,” I said, nodding in the direction of a large vase on a table near the window, through which the ocean was visible in the distance, a shifting sliver of blue.

The old lady ignored my vacuous remark, but she stared at me for a long moment, her wrinkled face smoothing slightly like a pool when the wind dies down. “So, the Nauk will reopen,” she said. “It’s about time. We didn’t work as hard as we did to see it languish up there on the cliff, waiting for the sea to take it. People said we were fools to build on that site. Storms, erosion, global warming. Every year the dunes recede, except, of course, for the years when they accrete. My family has lived here for two hundred years, and it’s always been like that. The land comes and goes, the sea threatens. We decided to take our chances, Bernard and I. Why not? Nothing lasts forever.” Her gaze bored into me, sharp and hawklike. “What kind of show are you thinking of? After all this time, you’ll want to make a splash.”

I told her I wasn’t sure yet, but that I had thought of Celia Cowry.

“Celia Cowry!” She set her cup down, clattering it dangerously into its gold-rimmed saucer. “Celia Cowry wouldn’t make a splash if you dropped her out of a helicopter into the bay!”

I set my own teacup down too, very carefully, not making a sound or a ripple, then sat up straight on the edge of my velvet chair. “I think her work is quite interesting,” I said. “How she instrumentalizes local forms—seashells—to address political and social issues. The way she explores replication, figuration—how art mimics and does not mimic life. And of course, it’s quite beautiful.”

“Beautiful!” she cried. “You’d be better off with ugly!”

I blinked at that—at the old toad on the sofa advocating ugliness. I gestured around the room at the lovely objects dazzling from every surface. “You have an eye for beauty,” I said.

She tipped her squat, quivering body in my direction. “A head for business, that’s what I suggest
you
cultivate!” she said. “For the museum business. That’s what Alena had, even when she was fresh from the egg.” Her face went as gray as her shawl as she made this speech and she coughed, a low choking cough deep in her chest.

“Aunt Willa,” Barbara cried, moving toward her as she shut her eyes, bracing herself with her hand on the tea table. “Are you all right?”

The nurse bustled over, flourishing an inhaler. “You sit back now, Mrs. S,” she said. “You just sit still a moment.” She slipped the plastic mouthpiece between the thin painted lips and depressed the canister.

The old lady gasped and sat back, blinking and wheezing.

“She’ll be all right in a minute,” the nurse said. “No matter what I say, she goes and gets herself worked up.”

“Well, we’ll be on our way,” Barbara said, gathering her purse. “It was good to see you Aunt Willa.”

The old lady sat passively as Barbara kissed her cheek, leaving a pink mark on the gray skin. Then she put out her hand with its ballast of rings and clutched Barbara’s arm, holding her there. “I thought you were bringing Alena,” she said.

Barbara glanced at the nurse, who shook her head, disowning responsibility. “Not today,” she said.

“I always feel better when I see Alena,” the old lady said plaintively. “So full of life, that one! It cheers an old lady up.” Her eyes, trailing across the room, landed on me, and she started. “Who are you?” she asked.

There was a silence as the room waited for my answer. I felt light-headed, all the glittering surfaces—teacups and polished tables and letter knives and glass doorknobs—like little suns that would blind me if I looked too long.

“Nobody,” I said.

We went through the heavy door. The dogs waiting with their noses to the cracked car windows barked ecstatically.

“I’m so sorry,” Barbara said, whether to them or me I couldn’t tell.

“That’s all right,” I said stiffly. “I know I’m not Alena.”

“That’s not such a bad thing, you know.” She stroked Dolly’s silky muzzle. “I think it’s lovely you’re considering Celia Cowry. I’ve always liked those pretty shells.”

Back at the Nauk, Barbara dropped me at the bottom of the lane. As I watched the station wagon disappear over the hill, a numb, uneasy feeling swamped me. It felt like homesickness, but homesickness for what? Not for LaFreniere with its long straight roads through the silent corn, its fish boil Fridays, its gravel parking lots behind taverns littered with empty Old Style cans. Not for my New York student days, sharing a smelly one-bedroom facing the airshaft. Not for working for Louise.

The gates were shut but not locked, and as always my heart lifted at the sight of them: the wood silvered by time and weather, the neat rows of living creatures lovingly carved, so many of them that each time I looked at the gate I noticed one I hadn’t noticed before. Today my eye caught a fox, its pointed nose raised as though catching a scent, its bushy tail electric with the joy of being a fox. It seemed to look up at me, steady and bright-eyed and sly. I ran my hand along the smooth wood, wondering as I had so often wondered before at the way a dead substance like wood or clay, cardboard or steel or stone, having been touched by the artist’s hand, became vital, animated, quick. It was the opposite of what King Midas did, the reverse of the Gorgon’s gaze. I’d never understood the idea one heard so often that art—as opposed to life—was eternal. Didn’t paint fade, wood crack, canvas buckle, photographic negatives turn brittle and decay? Ask any conservator and they’d tell you just how fragile a work of art was. Ask the exhibition installers in their white archival gloves, the insurers with their checkbooks, the watchful uniformed guards. Already time was working on this gate, splintering the edges. The whiskers of the rabbit and the smallest tentacles of the jellyfish were beginning to wear away. No, it wasn’t art that was eternal, but nature, ever resourceful, always rising out of the ashes. The implacable ocean, the tireless wind. The shifting, gritty, penetrating sand.