Alena: A Novel (20 page)

That evening I went home at the usual time, tried to settle down. I ate some dinner, swept the floor, watched the news—or rather, turned on the news but couldn’t sit still to watch it. The day looped and relooped in my head: McManus slouched in his black Jeep. McManus pressing my hand into his thigh. The dizzying sensory turbulence roiling through his studio—roiling, still, through me. Celia’s voice on the phone saying
I could tell you liked the work
, my press release damp in my hand. I put that hand in my pocket now and stroked the silken severed foot as the newscaster squawked on about an Amazonian bird sighted in a local marsh and the most popular summer ice cream flavors. When the phone rang, I was afraid to answer it. Who could it be that I would possibly want to talk to? Bernard telling me he was staying away another week? Celia Cowry saying she’d destroyed all her work and was starting over? My mother wanting to know how things were?

But I had to answer it. It was the way I had been raised.

“Hey,” Chris Passoa said. “It’s a beautiful night. I wondered if you might want to go for a walk?”

Twenty minutes later he was knocking on the door, dressed in khakis and a clean white T-shirt, his hands in his pockets, jingling change. “You look lovely,” he said.

I hadn’t had time to shower, but I’d changed my clothes, afraid the ones I’d been wearing reeked. I’d combed my hair. “So do you,” I said. He did. He looked handsome and clean and limber, like an ad for the Marines.

He took my hand. “Shall we?” he said, and I wondered if he always spoke in received phrases and I just hadn’t noticed before. Yet the touch of his hand was fresh wood tossed on a fire. When I stumbled going up through the dunes and he steadied me with his arm, I thought he must hear the crackle of flames along my smoldering nerves.

It
was
a beautiful night. We had missed the sunset, but the sky was still blue and gold in the west, though darkening quickly. We left our shoes and walked barefoot across the cooling sand, seeking the firmer, packed part of the shore.

“So,” he said. “How was your day?”

I laughed. Impossible to explain—to anyone, even to Bernard! Even if I’d wanted to.

“Why are you laughing?” He squeezed my hand, and I shivered, and he asked me if I was cold.

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m not laughing, really. It was a fine day. It just . . . takes some getting used to.”

“What does?”

“My new life.”

I led him down to the water’s edge. Waves washed over our feet and calves. The bay was cold, a shock every time a wave broke, and the water was hard, abrasive with sand. The tide was coming in, and inside me, too, a tide was rising. The things I had seen with McManus roiled nearly visibly: naked eyeballs and gaping livers and dilatory limbs left behind when their torsos scurried away. I was hot and light-headed as though I had caught a germ, as though I had been infected by something in that bunker masquerading as a studio, that dark rip in the fabric of summer.

“You’re shaking,” Chris Passoa said. “Let’s go back.”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

We walked on in silence. What was there to say? My body overflowed with desire, my tongue felt too big for my mouth, and beside me Chris Passoa walked on as though walking were his great calling, as though he would be content to keep walking until he fell off the edge of the world. It was full dark now, the shy stars finally consenting to show their skin-white selves. I’d been holding his hand so long I could barely feel it anymore, it might as well have been my own hand. So I let go, stopped walking, and began unbuttoning my blouse.

“What are you doing?”

“Going for a swim.”

I removed my blouse, slipped off my skirt, unhooked my bra, tossed my panties up onto the sand. I didn’t look at Chris Passoa until I was completely naked. Then I did look. “You coming?” I asked. His expression was very solemn, but I could see his chest rising and falling faster than before, and as I waited, stippled with cold, he reached, at last, for his belt buckle.

Of course, I was thinking of her. Of Alena. How could I not? I dove under a wave and came up, gasping and scoured. After a moment Chris Passoa’s broad, square shoulders surfaced, his head dripping, blinking water from his eyes. I smiled at him and stroked out beyond the breakers to where the swells rose and fell more gently. Then I turned onto my back and lay floating, my breasts streaming with water, thinking of McManus in the Jeep saying how Alena’s breasts were as salty as oysters, how they glowed like moons. The silken fingers of the water caressed me, loosening my hair.

Chris Passoa swam well, much better than McManus ever would. He cut silently toward me, then stopped to tread water, taking the ocean into his mouth and spouting it out like a whale. “You’re a good swimmer,” he said. “Anyone would think you were a native.”

“I grew up in lakes,” I said. “I told you that. Weren’t you listening?”

“I heard every word you said,” he told me.
“Art engages your senses in new and powerful ways. Art provokes you to feeling something.”

“Shush.” I dove, aiming myself at him, barreling into his body under the water. My head butted his stomach, my hands reached for his legs, air bubbled from my nose. Then I surfaced, staying close, pressing the length of myself against him. Our mouths came together, both of us spitting sea water, needing our hands to stay afloat but caressing each other—keenly, seriously—with our bright skins. My breasts bobbed up to find his tongue, and my legs wrapped around his hips like tentacles, holding him in place. But as he slid inside me, I let myself shut my eyes, and what I saw inscribed on the blackness there were the bits and pieces of the bodies of the dead. Or maybe—who knew?—of the living. A hand, a knee, a breast, a heart. There they lay, pulsing and shuddering, as I pulsed and shuddered.

We didn’t stay out long. We swam to shore, struggled into our clothes, and he walked me back to the cottage with his arm over my shoulders as though he were protecting me. I didn’t ask him in. We kissed good-bye on the step, and he said he’d see me soon. In a minute his car was rumbling away.

For the second time that day I changed my clothes, putting on this time jeans and a sweatshirt with a hood I could pull tight over my hair. Then I took my new key and went back out.

By now the stars glittered brightly, cheerfully. The Milky Way was a road in a fairy tale I might follow if I needed a quick escape. Instead, I took the sandy path up through the dunes, fireflies blinking in the dark bushes as I approached the museum entrance. I drew the rabbit’s foot out of my pocket and fitted the key into the lock. It turned, smoothly and silently, and I went inside, feeling like a thief, expecting to feel my heart pounding. But in fact I was calm. It was the first time I had been in the Nauk alone. I liked it. I liked the cool air and the sense of space around me, the large smooth tiles under my feet and the glimmer and movement of the water beyond the glass wall, surging and ebbing. A silver path, cast by the moon, lay across the backs of the waves as the Milky Way arced across the sky, as though nature wanted to remind me that the world—my life—was full of possible directions, paths I might choose that would lead me—where? It was impossible to say.

I went upstairs, opened the door to Agnes’s office, and switched on the light. I didn’t want anyone to see me, but even less did I want to be someone who skulked and sneaked in the dark. I faced the row of file cabinets. They were neatly labeled: exhibitions, budgets, fundraising, and so on. I opened the first drawer in the public relations section, and it didn’t take long to find the press distribution list. I turned on the copier, waited through the comforting mechanical buzz and clack as it warmed up, then ran my press release through. Despite my fears, the machine did not jam. It did not run out of paper. It took me till after midnight, but I stuffed, addressed, and stamped a couple of hundred envelopes, humming to myself, cheered by the neat tower rising into the air. It was boring, but no more than canning tomatoes or detasseling corn, and far less sweaty and exhausting. I had a moment of doubt as I finished and found myself with a bountiful harvest and no obvious way to get it to market. I couldn’t just leave all this in the outbox by the elevators. I should have been able to, but I couldn’t. And there certainly wasn’t a public mailbox out here in the dunes. Then I thought of the rusty three-speed in the laundry yard that Roald had patched and oiled. I’d ridden it a couple of times down the road as far as the convenience store at the gas station, and once all the way to town.

Ten minutes later I was sailing down the two-lane highway, my cargo in a plastic garbage bag bungeed to my basket, my hair blowing everywhere. It was one a.m., and the road was empty. I pumped hard over the shallow hills. A million stars lit my way, and the gentle pulse of the surf kept me company, sighing, hushing itself, on my left hand all the way there and on my right as—cargo safely delivered into the sturdy belly of the mailbox on Ocean Street—I raced the setting moon home.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Bernard phoned me from his car. “I’m on the bridge,” he said. “The canal is the color of blueberries.”

“Funny. In Europe the canals weren’t blue.”

“Listen to you,” he said. “The voice of experience.” His words in my ear were like water on a parched tongue. I felt myself open and settle, filling the space around me more convincingly.

“Remember the light on the Grand Canal?” I said. “So green and gold.”

“I remember.”

“And what about the canals on Mars!” I was thinking of the photographs my father had shown me, dry red arteries in the dust of a distant planet, and of the summer sky over the fields: the Great Bear and the Lesser Bear, the Summer Triangle and Cygnus the Swan. My father’s shirt was soft, his face scratchy as he lifted me up in one arm and pointed with the other.

“I thought that was a translation error,” Bernard said.

The rumble of a car in the lane floated toward me. I opened my eyes and carried the phone to the window, thinking maybe it was him—Bernard—that he was just teasing me with his talk of the canal. Instead, Agnes’s sedan nosed up the sandy track and pulled into the parking area. It was a windy day, the grass bent over almost flat, the bushes leaning. I watched Agnes get out, a black blot on the bright morning. Sloan climbed out the other side, slim as a nail paring, her pale hair blowing. They ambled up the path, bent against the wind, and disappeared behind the white trellis.

“I should go,” I said.

“We’ll need to talk about the fall show,” Bernard said. “We don’t have much time.”

The dune grass fluttered in the yellow light. “Right,” I said.

“I have some ideas. And of course I’m eager to hear yours.”

I waited to hear myself tell him about Celia. Maybe it would be better to do it in person. Through the phone a seagull squawked mournfully, echoed a moment later by the call of a gull above my house. “See you soon!” I said brightly. Out the window, wings spread, the gull faced into the wind like a swimmer in a current, going nowhere.

Somewhere to the west, Bernard’s car raced toward me down the Cape, while up on the Nauk’s second floor Agnes perched in her black dress. The steady wind rushed over the building, nosing for loose shingles. Glancing in the mirror, I saw that I was wearing, once again, the yellow shirt with the floppy collar. I pulled it up over my head, catching my hair on a button. I yanked, the blouse came free, the button bounced across the room and rolled under the dusty dresser. I slipped on my black dress and faced the mirror again. I looked pale as an egg, but at least I didn’t look fifteen. Scrounging a lipstick out of my purse, I painted my mouth with its oily cherry shine. I fluffed my hair. My hair would be all right, I thought, if it were only a different color. Maybe I should dye it! Or shave it off.

It was quiet on the second floor of the Nauk when I came in. Sloan wasn’t at her desk across from the elevator. I directed my feet to Agnes’s office, someplace I usually avoided. The two of them, Agnes and Sloan, were standing on either side of the desk leaning toward each other, almost as though they were about to kiss. I rapped on the door frame and they turned in unison, like two heads on a two-headed beast.

“Bernard’s on his way!” I said.

They blinked their two pairs of eyes, one pair gray and the other green. “We know,” Agnes said.

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

Out Agnes’s window I could see the ocean, gray with big foam-topped swells as though each wave wore a jaunty cap.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Agnes said. “I wanted to ask you—have you been going through my files?” Her face remained impassive, unreadable, but Sloan’s was suddenly more alert.

“No,” I said. “Why would I do that?” We eyed each other. My disavowal had been instinctive, like a child lying about the cookie jar.

“How should I know? Maybe you were looking for something. You know I’m always happy to get you anything you need.”

It still wasn’t too late to say,
Now that you mention it, I did go in there one day . . .
The files weren’t private, after all. “Thank you,” I said.

Crowlike, she tilted her head on her neck, first one way and then the other. “Someone was in here.”

“How do you know?”

“One of the drawers wasn’t closed all the way.”

“Is anything missing?” I knew nothing was, but my heart galloped anyway.

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Well, then. Probably Don jostled it when he was cleaning.” Don was the janitor. I turned away, grateful that I had copied and returned the list.

“Just a minute,” she said.

Anxiety fizzed in my chest as though someone had opened a bottle of soda in there. I turned back. “I told you, I don’t know anything about it!”

Agnes let me wait. Then she said, “I was only going to ask you about lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Alena always liked to make a little fuss when Bernard showed up after being away.”

“Oh,” I said. “Certainly.”

“Of course, you might have other ideas.”

“Not at all. Please go ahead.”

“What do you want us to order?” She waited. Sloan solemnly picked up a pad and a pen.

“Whatever you think. I’m sure you know what he’d like better than I do,” I said, then wished I hadn’t said it.

As though hers was the face that registered emotion for the two of them, Sloan smiled.

I expected Bernard to sweep through the offices like sea spray, rinsing away the falseness, the awkward stage-show quality of the days. I sat waiting for him in my office like a child waiting for recess, and when I heard the car, I ran down, plunging through the door into the cloudy morning. He was standing on the grass, his hair blowing sideways across his face, looking up at the building. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling: pride, perhaps, or uncertainty, or sadness. I knew he must think about Alena all the time when he was here, though he never mentioned her. I knew this must be why he always left almost as soon as he arrived (though, no doubt, he did really have business to see to). He seemed thinner than I remembered, thin as a shadow in his pressed gray slacks and black linen shirt and moccasins. His smile when he saw me burned through my chest like brandy. Still, I resisted the urge to fling myself at him and instead walked slowly down the path, the wind pushing me on. He took my hands and kissed me on both cheeks.

“Cara,”
he said. All around us the dune grass waved as if in greeting, and the gray sky lightened a shade or two. “Everything’s going well?”

“Of course!” And then the door opened again, and I could feel them behind us, looming in front of the trembling roses: Agnes and Sloan. Bernard let go of my hands to wave, and we went to meet them. He didn’t seem to mind at all.

Lunch was laid out in the boardroom, which didn’t look out on the ocean but the other way onto the dunes and the lane. You could see my little house tucked under the swell of land, looking picturesque. Agnes had ordered lobster already out of the shell, and there was coleslaw and roasted corn salad, Portuguese rolls and petit fours iced in pink and green. There was Pellegrino and white wine, white china and fluted glasses. Bernard seemed to take all this for granted, filling his plate and pouring the wine, sitting back and stretching his long legs across the floor. I wondered what else he expected just to happen—things I couldn’t begin to guess at—and whether Agnes would mention them to me, or ask me about them, or just go ahead and do them.

“How’s the beach holding up?” Bernard asked, piling lobster onto a roll.

“Pretty well,” Agnes said. “We haven’t had a bad storm in a couple of years.” They talked about storms, storm fencing, erosion, sand bars, jetties, tides. I thought of Willa Somerset saying people had said they were crazy for building the museum on a dune. I thought of the wind, and what it would be like here in a storm in the winter, about ships that wrecked, drowning all hands. The talk turned to money: donors and insurance costs, the alarm system. Payroll, interest rates, assessment, property taxes. I tried to pay attention, asking questions until Bernard said kindly, “You don’t need to worry about the financial side yet. You can leave that to Agnes.”

Agnes nibbled a petit four. Sloan, sipping Pellegrino, raised her chin and looked at me with her cool green eyes.

After lunch, Agnes and Sloan went back to their offices. Bernard opened a second bottle of wine. “I’m sure you’ve been thinking about a show,” he said.

“Yes!” I set my empty glass down hard on the table. “Yes, I have.”

“Good,” he said, refilling my glass. “Me too.”

The wine was buttery and bright. It cooled my throat and slowed my jumpy heart. I hadn’t known wine could be like this until I met Bernard. There were a lot of things I hadn’t known. “I’ve been reading,” I said. “And thinking. I’ve made a couple of studio visits.”

“Who with?” He leaned back farther in his chair like a parent getting comfortable before a child’s recital.

I sat up straight, tugging at my black dress. I was glad I wasn’t wearing the shirt with the floppy collar. “Celia Cowry, for one,” I said. “That’s who I want to show. Celia Cowry.”

When Bernard smiled, he looked like a minor benevolent god. Leaning forward, he took my hand. “I can see why you’d think of Celia,” he said. “She’s done some beautiful work.”

“And she’s local but with a national reputation, which is perfect for us,” I said. “We want to get the Cape Cod folks excited, to give them a feeling of ownership. We want to make a splash here, with ripples that spread out across the art community!” Splash, where had I heard that word before in connection with Celia? Oh—when Willa Somerset had said she wouldn’t make one falling out of a helicopter. Luckily, Bernard had not been there.

“Not really much of a national reputation,” he said.

“But enough!” I took my hand back. He tilted his head as if trying to see the idea, or perhaps me, from some new angle, and I resolved to stop speaking with exclamation points. “We don’t want someone who’s already famous,” I said. “We want someone poised to move to the next level.”

“Cara,”
he said, “you don’t need to tell me what our mission is.”

“Good! Then I’m sure you’ll agree!”

But he didn’t agree, not at all. He took my hand again, insistently, firmly. I could smell him, pressed linen and shaving cream and bitter orange. He turned my hand palm up and examined it like a fortune-teller looking for clues. At the V of his shirt, his chest was starting to freckle. I felt a great tenderness toward that constellation on his skin, which I imagined emerged every summer like a message in invisible ink revealed by sunlight. “I see what drew you to Celia,” he said. “I do. Is she talented? Yes. Is she underrecognized? Certainly. Would her work look good in our galleries? Absolutely. But is she the right artist to relaunch the Nauk? That’s a different question.”

“Why? I don’t see that. Her work is terrific. It looks simple, but there’s so much going on. It’s ideologically complex.” I didn’t say “political,” it would have sounded too blatant and calculating. I didn’t say she was black, though that was what I meant too.
Ideologically complex!

Bernard sighed. He reached across to the plate on which he had left a mound of coleslaw and pressed it down with his fork. “It’s not like she’s underrecognized and thirty-five,” he said. White liquid spread out in a pool, trickling across the dish. “Maybe she’s past the point of going to that next level, if she hasn’t done it by now.”

I stared at him.

“I’m just being realistic.”

“I don’t understand! You say the Nauk prides itself on showing underrecognized art. On not showing the people everyone else is showing. How a show here can be the thing that finally nudges an artist into the broader sphere! And now you’re saying that we won’t show Celia because she’s too
old
?”

I waited for him to look embarrassed, but instead he looked at me the way you look at the corner of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly doesn’t seem to fit together neatly after all. “In the first place, you can’t turn your back on reality. We can only do what we can do. In the second place, I’m not saying we’ll never show her. I’m saying that now is not the time. In the third place, Celia hates it when people try to place her work in any kind of ideological context. She won’t go along with that.”