Alena: A Novel (17 page)

Poison ivy gleamed on the side of the road as I pushed through the fence and walked up the lane past the wild roses and the ripening beach plums and the heather teeming with field mice and ticks. In the mown grassy space where the museum staff parked, an unfamiliar car was pulled in next to Agnes’s big Dodge sedan. As I climbed the stairs to the offices, rather than the usual sepulchral quiet, I heard voices, laughter, something being poured. A man’s voice was speaking loudly, women’s voices chiming in. My first thought was that Bernard had come back early, but even as I hurried up the steps, I knew that wasn’t it. The voice, though clearly male, was pitched too high. It was bright and unfamiliar, its words tumbling into the air like fizzy liquid into a glass.

In the moment before they saw me, I took in the scene. Agnes and Sloan and Jake sat on the low couches, glasses in their hands, their faces tilted toward a man who sat in a low chair with two big wheels like a Roman chariot: a tanned, handsome, crooked man with black hair and blue eyes and a big silver watch glinting on the strong wrist of the hand that held his glass. He had no left arm, and in another moment I saw that he didn’t have a right leg either—at least not beyond a short stump around which his trousers were sewn shut. Despite this, he seemed physically very at ease as he leaned toward Agnes, saying something that obviously pleased her. Her pale face was a shade less pale than usual. She sank back against the cushions, smiling, balancing her glass on her chest with her crimson claws. On his other side, Sloan wore an intent expression on her little pointed face, reminding me of the carved fox on the gate at the bottom of the lane. Her hand rested on the shiny wheel of the chair, close to the stump, and as I watched, I saw her finger stretch toward it, possibly grazing the cloth of his pants, though her eyes were directed at Jake, who was examining the bottle they were pouring from. Squat and heavy, it held a pale greenish liquid that might have been chartreuse or absinthe, both drinks I only knew of from reading. Papers were spread on the coffee table. Frozen in the doorway, I thought perhaps I could disappear back downstairs before anyone noticed me. But as I began to turn, the quick, restless eyes of the stranger found me, and he smiled. He had strong teeth, like a movie star or a shark. “Don’t run away,” he said. “I bet I know who you are: Bernard’s new pet.”

As the others turned, the mood turned too, dimming and cooling, although out the window the noon sky remained as bright as a robin’s egg. Agnes sat up, straightened her splayed legs in their black fishnets, neatened the papers and turned them upside down. “I thought you were visiting Mrs. Somerset.”

“I was,” I said. “I did.” It occurred to me that when Alena had made such pilgrimages, they had lasted much longer. All day, perhaps. No need for the staff to hurry back to their desks, then. Sloan set her glass down, and Jake nodded an embarrassed greeting, not meeting my eye. But it was hard to look anywhere but at the man in the chair: his wide torso in its pressed gray and purple shirt, a weird, off-kilter symmetry in the missing arm and the opposite missing leg. The broad, tanned, handsome face that seemed almost to belong to some other body.

“This is Morgan McManus,” Agnes said. “He just stopped in.”

McManus—to whom Alena had made a promise.

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t let me . . . I have some work.” I blushed. It was so obvious I was lying.

“Not yet,” McManus protested. “Sit down at least for a minute.” He had to put his glass down on the table to shake my hand. His grip was cool. His fingers curled, eel-like, around mine. “So you’re the new boss,” he said. “Agnes, pour the new boss a drink, she looks skittish. Don’t look that way, I’m an old friend of the Nauk. I love the place! A little dream museum out on the rim of the world. Bernard’s dream, of course, but here we are all living in it.”

Jake moved over to make room on the couch. Sloan tossed her head so that her hair fluttered in the light. Agnes poured, handed me a glass.

Despite his disfigurement, Morgan McManus held himself as though he wanted to be looked at—as though he knew what a sight he was with his handsome face, his crooked smile, and his differently crooked body, attractive and repulsive at once, like both poles of a magnet. Electricity seemed to pulse from him, filling the room with its crackling scent. My eyes were drawn toward the parts of him that weren’t there, unable to absorb the wrongness of a shoulder with no arm, a few inches of thigh that stopped short like a bridge no one had bothered to finish building. He raised his glass toward mine. “So,” he said, “how did you find the old toad?”

I blushed again, because hadn’t I too thought of her as a toad? Somehow he had unzipped my mind and seen inside. “A little confused, but fine.”

“Alena used to say she was like that person in Greek mythology who asked for eternal life and ended up shriveled into a grasshopper. Better off dead, but forgot how to die!” He laughed, showing those teeth. “Of course, some people would say the same about me.”

Agnes made a noise in her throat like a suppressed giggle. “Stop it. You’re shocking the new boss.”

“She’s not shocked. Are you?” McManus shifted in his chair, leaning forward so far I was afraid he would topple out. His bright eyes probed me.

I sat up straighter, tossed my hair over my shoulder. “I thought she looked very well for someone so old.”

“Well said! And what about the cowlike sister? Have you seen her cow palace with its daisies and clover, where she chews her cud?”

I looked away. I didn’t like him talking about Barbara like that, but I found that his words rang a bell in me: a small, clear, silver bell. I wondered what they had said about me before I came in. “Yes. I’ve had the opportunity of enjoying every category and variation of floral upholstery. Not to mention wallpaper, rugs, tea services.” I lifted my glass to my lips and took the cool viscous liquid into my mouth. It tasted bitter, vegetal, like the husks of walnuts. Sloan giggled, whether at what I’d said or at something else I couldn’t tell. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see if her fingers touched the stump or just hovered near it. What would it be like to be touched on a place that wasn’t supposed to exist?

“It’s hard to think of them coming from the same parents,” McManus said. “He’s the cuckoo. The changeling.” He nodded at my glass. “Drink up.”

I took another gulp. It burned, like something a medieval herbalist might prescribe to flush out demons. “They seem very attached to each other,” I said. “Despite their differences. Of course, I didn’t know them before.” Before this month, I meant; before I came to Nauquasset. But I thought they must all be thinking that I meant before Alena—before Alena drowned—as though her death were the one still center around which everything turned.

“Alena was the changeling,” Agnes said. “Alena was the one the fairies left.”

“To drive the humans wild,” McManus said.

I lifted my glass and let my tongue lick up the last drops. Alena was a changeling. Alena drove the humans wild. Her name ran through my head as though on a droning loop. To make it go away I said to McManus, “Do you mean you? Did she drive you wild?”

When he smiled, the crookedness of his face grew more apparent, one half lifting higher than the other like an animist mask, which had the disconcerting effect of making him look handsomer. He gestured to his body. “I’m only half human,” he said.

“Half wild, then.” I stared at him openly, the warmth of the alcohol rippling through me in pleasant wavelets.

“Morgan is half wild all the time,” Sloan said, and leaned into him, her hair falling across his chest.

“Jake,” McManus said, “pour the new boss another drink.”

Jake refilled my glass and topped off the others as well.

“Not for me,” Agnes said. “I have work.” She stood and strode with superb dignity to her office, impersonating in her stiffness the matron of a boarding school, or an old-fashioned English housekeeper, her back straight, her torpedo breasts leading the way.

McManus said, “Agnes says you’re reopening Labor Day weekend.”

“I hope so. Nothing’s settled yet.”

“You know Alena promised me a show.”

The alcohol burned less now when I drank. I supposed I must be getting used to it, the way one got used to anything new: the taxidermied goat wearing a tire around its middle, portraits of dollar bills and electric chairs, painting on the body with sunburn or with scars. “I heard it had been discussed.”

He picked the papers up and rattled them. “We were looking at the plans,” he said. “Of course, things are different now. I understand that. My work has changed too.” He shuffled the papers in his one hand, looking for the ones he wanted. I could see mock-ups of the galleries, xeroxed blueprints, printouts of what looked like photographs of human limbs. “I’d love to show you what I’m working on.” He wheeled closer to the table and fanned the papers out, forcing Sloan to sit back. I pulled my own chair up and glanced reluctantly through the pixelated images. They weren’t, though, like the photos Sloan had shown me on her phone, which came as a relief. There was a waxy yellow arm, a foot mottled red and blue, a cocoa-brown torso from the navel to neck, and another arm, this one shark-skin black. Still, there was something about them. They looked dead, but at the same time they seemed to vibrate darkly, as though something living throbbed, trapped inside their deadness. Perhaps it was the alcohol.

“These are casts,” he said. “Usually they lie on the floor of an installation, though occasionally I’ve shown them on their own.”

“Interesting.” I blinked, trying to see more clearly. They were ugly pieces, bland and cold and smooth. They made my stomach flutter. I didn’t want to look at them. “What are they made of?”

“A lot of them are plastic. I have a fabricator I work with. Some, though, I make myself out of wood, or wax. Styrofoam that I coat and paint.”

“I like the wax ones best,” Sloan said. “They look like they want you to squeeze them.”

McManus leaned forward. “You really have to see them in context,” he said lightly, touching my leg.

Startled, I jolted back, banging my knee on the table. “Sorry,” I said.

McManus smiled, the one side of his face rising, the other remaining still. “Maybe you could come by my studio sometime.”

I pulled the shards of my dignity together. “I’m afraid my mobility is limited at the moment. I don’t have a car.”

He leaned back in the chair, his hips slipping forward so that the end of his stump slid over the edge of the seat, the sewn seam twitching. “I’ll pick you up,” he said.

Alone in my office, the door shut, I stood by the enormous window and dialed Bernard. The sky, so blue an hour earlier, was pale with haze.

“Cara,”
he said. “How are you? How are things in that dimple on the sea nymph’s elbow?” He sounded relaxed, ebullient, his voice projecting a brightness I hadn’t seen in person. Through the phone I could hear voices, rumblings, chinkings. Ice rattling, laughter. “Wait,” he said, “I’ll just go outside.” I listened to the sounds shift, the roar of voices exchanged for the roar of cars. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, how are you? What have you been doing?”

“Barbara took me to see Willa Somerset today,” I said. Standing wasn’t easy. I steadied myself against the glass, then took a careful step toward my chair and dropped into it, clutching the hard leather arm.

“Wonderful! Willa is the Nauk’s guardian angel. She’s sharp. She sees things clearly.”

I thought of the old lady’s flickering confusion, her plaintive desire for Alena, her unconscious chewing. I wondered when Bernard had last been to visit her. “Yes. Barbara said. Only, Bernard?”

“What,
cara
?”

“
I’m
the curator. Right?
I
choose the shows.”

Through the phone, I could hear footsteps approach, heels clattering. The squeal of a bus, the slam of a door, a snatch of music from a radio. Out the window I watched the wind ripple the grass, the gray-green waves churning glassily in the afternoon glare. A barely visible airplane droned overhead, a silver flaw in the hazy sky. Why was Bernard still there—wherever there was—when he claimed to love it so much here? “Of course,” he said.

“Good. I just wanted to make sure. I want to be clear about my role.” I opened my mouth again to tell him about McManus, but instead I found myself saying, “It’s all so new, and everything’s so undefined.”

Faintly through the phone came a man’s voice, musical and unfamiliar: “You almost done?”

“We’ll work together, of course,” Bernard said. “Consider, discuss.”

“But ultimately it’s my job?” Out over the water a black cormorant flapped heavily by, flying low over the churning bay. A motorboat drew a seething line of dirty white through the gray-green water. The sky, nearly drained of blue, was the color of skimmed milk.

“Yes,” he said. “Your job.”

I
WAS MAKING AN OMELET
for dinner when someone knocked on the door. Chris Passoa stood on the step in the cooling air, tall as an August cornstalk, the blue scrub casting bulging shadows across the grass behind him. “I thought I’d see how you were doing,” he said. “I know Bernard has been away.”

“Oh!” I said. “Thanks! I’m doing fine.”

He stood patiently, holding a bottle of wine, his eyes even bluer than I remembered, until it occurred to me to invite him in.

The cramped kitchen smelled of scorching egg even with the windows open. Yesterday’s dishes cluttered the counter and the floor was sticky. “I’m just making dinner,” I said.

“Do you like to cook?”

“Not much. When I was in New York, I lived on takeout.”

He looked without comment at the faded curtains and sagging cabinets. “I spent a summer in New York once, as a bicycle messenger. Makes police work look safe.” In his faded jeans, short-sleeved shirt, and close-cropped hair, he looked almost like someone I might have known if I’d stayed in Wisconsin, but there was a brighter edge to him: an expansive tang of sea and salt half concealed by his loose-limbed way of moving, the way a plainclothes cop might, under certain circumstances, half conceal his gun. He was Bernard’s age, but he didn’t look it. Barbara had mentioned that he was divorced, that his wife had run off with a contractor to Florida years before, taking the kids. Had he ended up in a fading suburban ranch with empty bedrooms haunted by the past? Or had he moved somewhere else, to a white-painted condo with a little deck overlooking the bay, or a weathered barn in a salt meadow with the bed in a loft? I couldn’t guess. He was relaxed, alert, opaque. He gave off a faint mineral scent, astringent and clean.

“Did you like New York?” I asked.

“It served its purpose. It confirmed that I’m not a city person.” He handed me the wine.

What did he want from me? Was the chilled bottle a courtesy, a pretext, a cue? Was he just being neighborly? Whatever his motive, I wasn’t sorry to see him: a human face in my lonely cottage under the dune. “Should I open it?”

“Why not?”

The sun slanted in through the west-facing window. I moved self-consciously around the room, finding glasses and a corkscrew, folding over the omelet. I held the pan up. “Hungry?” I didn’t expect him to accept, but he did. I got out a second plate, beige with a brick-red border. The one already on the table was yellow with a design of poppies. Both of them were ugly, though the yellow one seemed to be trying not to be, while the other didn’t seem to care. Which was worse?

We touched glasses. “To the Nauk,” Chris Passoa said. “What’s the new show going to be?”

“Oh—nothing’s settled yet.”

Out the window, the sky was a sentimental abstract, pink and orange and reddish gold. Chris Passoa ate his omelet. His benign, quizzical gaze settled over me. His big wristwatch caught the sun and sent a disk of light fluttering around the room, while his long legs bumped the underside of the table. “You have an idea, don’t you?” he said.

Despite myself I felt, at his words, a spark of pleasure. A glow. “Yes. I have an idea.”

“Does it involve dead things?”

I thought of McManus’s dismembered bodies, his bereft orphaned ears and smooth lonely limbs, separated from their familiar sockets. I looked at Chris Passoa—his clean, whole, wholesome self. “No,” I said. I sipped my wine. “No dissections. No dead fish.”

“Living things? People or, I don’t know, sheep? Bats? Beetles in jars, maybe?”

“Ah,” I said, “you’re a traditionalist.”

“I like paintings. I like Gauguin and Salvador Dalí. And that guy who painted the diner at night.”

“Edward Hopper.”

“Him.”

“I like them too,” I said.

He cut what was left of his omelet into thirds, rearranged them on the plate. “I guess people don’t paint like that anymore.” His eyes, watching me, were like patches of noon sky. I understood that this was a question.

“Some people do. But you have to remember, part of what makes those artists great is that what they were doing seemed new and strange to people in their time—a hundred years ago! Just as strange as some of the things people are doing today seem to you.”

“As strange as a lot of dead fish nailed to the wall?”

“I heard they made beautiful patterns.”

“They stank,” he said. “Literally stank.” He stabbed the pieces and finished his omelet in three quick bites, gulping like a pelican.

“Maybe part of the idea of the installation was the contrast—the tension—between the beauty of the form and the ugliness of the smell.”

He thought about that. He seemed to think with every part of himself, waiting for new ideas to light up his mind. “Can I ask a stupid question?”

“Go ahead.”

“It seems like art these days is mostly about ideas. Is that right? Not about things?”

“That’s not a stupid question,” I said. “You’ll have to try harder.” The golden coolness of the wine slipped through me as I thought about how to answer him. “Art has always had ideas,” I said. “It’s always been about something. It’s not always clear, of course—even to the artist—what those ideas are. But think about it. Take the cave paintings in France from fifteen thousand years ago. They weren’t about decorating cave walls. They were about the idea of hunting—about effectuating a buffalo. Helping the gods to provide one. Or the early Renaissance paintings of the Madonna that made Jesus look like a real baby for the first time. They’re not in any absolute way an improvement on the flat pictures that came before, but they’re about the idea that the Son of God is truly, actually human. And Gauguin—isn’t painting an orange horse partly about the idea of color in painting—how color can evoke reality without mimicking it?”

The blue of his eyes edged slowly toward gray as he concentrated. “That’s still different from fish on a wall,” he said. “Isn’t it? Or a canvas with nothing but a couple of a words? Or a big pile of candy?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is different. But it’s more useful to focus on the ways they’re all the same.”

“Which is how?”

“They all engage your visual sense in a new and powerful way. They all provoke you to feel something.” I listened to my words fall slowly through the room, rippling outward. I believed them to a point, but it wasn’t so simple either. You couldn’t nail art down like a fish to a wall.

“And what if I feel nothing?”

“Then maybe the artist has failed,” I said carefully. “Or maybe the failure is yours.”

His eyes edged grayer. “How do you know which it is?”

“Sometimes you don’t.”

“But isn’t that important?” He sounded frustrated for the first time. “Shouldn’t you be able to tell the difference?”

“That’s why you need to see a lot of art,” I said. “Look and think and talk to other people and look some more. You get better at it.”

“The pile of candies,” he said. “Bernard has those in his living room.”

“Félix Gonzáles-Torres. That work is about AIDS, among other things. About depletion and loss, and about consumption. It involves you pretty directly, right? You eat a candy, you deplete the work, you take it literally into yourself.”

He shook his head. “I hear your words,” he said. “But they’re just words to me.”

I thought about getting up, clearing the table, signaling that it was time for him to go. Instead I poured more wine into the glasses. “How long have you known Bernard?” I asked.

“Since we were kids. They summered here, his family, and we lived across the road. In a small house with no view. Like this one.” He grinned, resting both arms squarely on the oilcloth, and for half a moment I thought how strange it was—how arbitrary—that humans had two arms. His watch was plain, heavy, silver, with a black leather band, and his hand was large and calloused. A capable hand. “Bernard and I used to wade around the marsh together. Get wet. Catch frogs. Sometimes we’d paddle around in an old canoe. And then, when he moved here year-round, we were in school together.”

“What was he like? When he was younger.”

“He was always artsy, I guess. He drew, and he sang in the chorus. But basically he just seemed like one of us. Only richer, of course.” His fingers played silent arpeggios on the table, all ten of them, a mute sound track. “He loved the water. Sailing, fishing. He was into archery, which I guess was kind of unusual. He went to tournaments and won medals. He said he wanted to be a professional archer, but that was a joke. He was hardly going to say he wanted to run an art museum, was he? Even if he knew.”

“How about you? Did you always want to be a policeman?”

The sun had moved and the room was growing dark. Chris Passoa stretched his legs across the floor, taking up more and more space in the little room. “I wanted to sail around the world,” he said. “Go to Tahiti. Isn’t that where Gauguin went? Drink coconut milk for a while. Get back on the boat, continue on to New Zealand. Madagascar. Keep going till I fell off the edge of the world! Just imagine it: Alone on the ocean at night. A warm breeze, a million stars. Silence.” The electric pulse of his interest hummed at me through the briny air. In the dusk it was easy to forget how much older he was. And anyway, I liked it that he was older. Seasoned, and clear about what he wanted. Accustomed to himself. “Silence,” he repeated, “and darkness. The world the way it was before electricity. Before outboard motors. Before Jet Skis, machine guns, televisions, tourism. Alone with your thoughts, reliant on your wits and your own two hands. And then, when you got tired, another green island waiting.” In the near dark, his pale hair glowed faintly, the way moon jellies glow in the waves at night.

I leaned across the table. “It wasn’t ever really like that, you know. There was violence, syphilis, hurricanes. People have always longed for Arcadia. But you could only ever get it in art.”

“Not even in art, I’d say,” he said, “these days.”

And then we were kissing, very gently, with the plates disarrayed across the table, the glasses and forks and salt shakers splayed out. I stretched toward him over the Formica like a figurehead on a ship, and I shut my eyes, wanting him to press his mouth hard into mine, to lift me across the table onto his lap. To draw my breast from my blouse like a prize. But he just kept kissing, softly, tirelessly, his lips caressing my open mouth, his breath steady. He tasted familiar—well, like omelet and wine—and I thrust my tongue deeper to see what other flavors lurked in the dark. I touched his face, ran my palm along his cheek, ear, neck, arm, thigh, noting their textures, their particular sizes and shapes. As though a man were merely a collection of parts, each one capable of giving and receiving pleasure without reference or connection to the whole. With my eyes shut I seemed to be sinking through the floor into some dark buoyant space between the house and the dune.

“Open your eyes,” Chris Passoa whispered.

The dim room spun into view. His face looked younger than I remembered, unclouded and innocent.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said politely, as though we had just met.