Alena: A Novel (26 page)

N
EWS ABOUT THE BONES
was on the internet that night. By the next morning, like a change in the weather, the Nauk offices were flooded with phone calls and emails, everyone wanting to know what we knew. As they had two years earlier, reporters made their way through the gates and up the winding drive. I was surprised at first that there was so much interest—after all, everyone already believed Alena had drowned. But I suppose no one likes to miss the opportunity to finger the bones of the dead. Besides, what else was there to report on out here on the edge of the earth, especially once summer was over? We put together a brief statement:
Complete surprise . . . deeply saddened . . . old wounds reopened . . . no idea how
. To his credit, Jake, who was the front line, urged all the reporters and gossip seekers who came through the door to see the show, which some of them did. In the absence of actual information, what else was there for them to do? One day, coming downstairs from my office, I found Bernard standing like a trapped animal among flashing cameras and bulging microphones in the lobby. I told him to go home. I would talk to the press. I would come and see him every day and give him a report. It would be easier for me, I said, since I hadn’t known Alena. I remember how strange it felt, saying that.
I didn’t know Alena
. I felt so powerfully that I did know her.

It wasn’t just the press. Ordinary people came too—from the town, locals mostly, who worked in tourist shops and real estate offices and restaurants, many of which closed up the Tuesday after Labor Day. Not a lot of people, but some. A couple of the news stories mentioned the name of the show if only in passing, at least once identifying it as the last exhibition Alena had organized. You could see the work in some of the TV segments, the grid of curled snails showing up in a pan of the galleries, or a quick collage of images from different rooms preceding a longer shot of the beach at Willet’s Landing, where the boot had washed up. I wouldn’t have expected the work to look as good on television as it did—rich and gleaming, the tension between the fidelity to realistic form and the idiosyncratic use of color catching the eye and holding it. Maybe I was the only one who noticed.

My relationship with Bernard had entered a new stage. He wanted me around him all the time. I would look up from my desk to see his tall shape hovering in my doorway, his shadow falling across my rug. Or the phone on my desk would ring, and there would be his voice in my ear asking if I’d seen some email, or if I’d spoken to Celia lately, or if I wanted lunch. Suddenly we were eating most of our meals together, at restaurants in Nauquasset and Wellfleet and Truro where Bernard was greeted by name, though neither of us ever seemed to be very hungry, and the waitstaff was constantly removing nearly full plates. Or in the evenings when the galleries closed—when Agnes slung her big black purse over her shoulder, and Sloan dangled her small black purse from her wrist, and they sauntered together out to where the cars were parked—Bernard would ask if I wanted to come by his place for a drink. I always said yes.

Bernard seemed to dislike the deck overlooking the bay, preferring to sit in the den on the other side of the house, each of us cupped in our own black Bertoia chair, drinking Lillet and Lagavulin. He’d light the gas fire, though the September nights were not particularly cold, and we’d sit watching the flames the way we had watched the artificial fire in the desk in Venice during the first day we’d ever spent together. Wasn’t this what I had imagined, back when Bernard had asked me to come to the Nauk with him? What I had longed for all summer when he’d been away in New York or Provincetown or Boston, or even here in Nauquasset shut up alone, not wanting company? At least not my company. But despite the semblance of intimacy now, we spoke very little. Or if we did speak, it was of superficial things: Barbara’s new puppy or the latest art-world gossip or the weather. These conversations petered out quickly, coughing and sputtering like a dying outboard motor until we were left drifting in an opaque and watery silence. Marooned.

In the evenings, after the Nauk closed for the day, I would bicycle over to Bernard’s house in time for the local news. He couldn’t stop himself from watching it, and I didn’t want him to be alone. It was strange—truly surreal—to see the parade of faces, our colleagues’ and our own, on television. I watched Bernard watch his on-screen simulacrum, hollow-eyed and grim, declining to comment; but also his older—or rather, younger—self, handsome in a pale gray suit. In those bright pictures of happier days he was smiling, touching flutes of golden liquid with a tall angular woman with dark wings of hair and a ruby pendant nestled between her breasts that matched her laughing scarlet mouth. Alena.

She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was asymmetrical, as though she comprised two slightly different versions of herself, and her nose was sharp and bumpy, like a shard of rock. But there was something about her. Her black eyes glowed and her white neck stretched, lifting her pearly breasts slightly out of her black spangled dress. She moved with the self-conscious elasticity of a dancer, and her sharp mobile face drew the eye, as though she were a burning candle and the rest of the world were moths. There she shimmered on the other side of the gauzy screen, vibrant, glamorous, slipping her bare white arm around Bernard’s waist, fitting perfectly, as though she were literally a part of him. Then, as the camera ogled, she reached up with her shiny lips and placed a kiss on the edge of his mouth, marking him with a fat red slash that remained after she had finished, like a wound.

That was the first night I stayed at Bernard’s house, in the guest room down the hall from his bedroom with its Mapplethorpe photographs and its Paul Thek painting and the small treasured Brancusi. His bathroom with its marble tub on winged brass claws was the size of my parents’ living room back in LaFreniere. I tried not to make comparisons like this—what did one world have to do with the other?—but sometimes they presented themselves with the force and persistence of a groundhog in the garden, burrowing under all fences, eluding all snares.

Even with the unexpected publicity, attendance was modest. On the first day after the opening—that Labor Day weekend Saturday—we had nine visitors. Sunday, the day the story broke, we had twenty-two, and after that, we averaged between about fifteen and thirty. Sometimes less. Chris Passoa stopped by several times over the holiday weekend, before I sent Bernard home. I’m sure Jake counted him in the attendance figures to make them look a little better, but he wasn’t there for the art. He wanted to talk to Bernard. He kept asking him the same questions, or similar questions, over and over, as though Bernard had some useful perspective he would offer up if Chris found the right way of approaching him. And maybe that’s all it was. But it seemed to me that there was a trick hidden somewhere, like the one with the disappearing handkerchief. He was fixated on Bernard’s loss of interest in sailing, and he asked to see the bills of sale for his two boats, which Bernard obligingly dug up. He had sold the big sloop to a man on Martha’s Vineyard and the catamaran he kept on the beach to a couple up in Maine, both through ads on the internet.

One night I was at Bernard’s house when Chris rang the bell. When he came into the room and saw me, his face lit with an unpleasant light like a fluorescent bulb in a plastic lamp. “Hello!” he said. “Seems like I never see you anymore. How’s the show going?”

“Fine, thanks. How are you, Chris?”

“Oh, fine. Busy, as I’m sure you can imagine.” He accepted the whiskey Bernard offered, and the chair, then sat for an hour going over all the local friends of Alena’s he had talked to who hadn’t seen her that night, and all the out-of-town friends who hadn’t heard from her, and the restaurants she hadn’t eaten at, and the owners of the boats she sometimes borrowed whose vessels had been safely docked. “What am I missing, Bernie?” he asked. “Who am I overlooking?”

“It sounds like a pretty complete list to me, Chris.”

Then he told us that the last number Alena had ever called, according to phone company records, belonged to Morgan McManus. “He’s an artist,” Chris Passoa said. “Do you know him?”

“Yes,” Bernard said.

“Any good?”

“Alena thought so.”

“I guess somebody interviewed him two years ago, but it wasn’t me. So I went out there this afternoon. To his studio.” His mouth went thin and his eyes got small. It was as though just thinking about McManus’s work could make a person uglier. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “I thought it was sort of the art equivalent of a slasher movie.”

Bernard made a noncommittal sound through his nose.

“He says he didn’t talk to Alena,” Chris reported. “He says his phone was off, she left a message. Nothing in particular. No information there, just another dead end.”

Which wasn’t what McManus had told me, quite. He’d said Alena wanted to show him something. But maybe he didn’t believe in cooperating with police, or maybe he didn’t like Chris. Why, after all, would he?

Oh, I was tired of the whole thing! Of Chris’s nosing about and studiously unstudied glances, and the so-called news stories that contained no news, and the way Alena continued to occupy the center of everyone’s attention despite having been dead two years! “Can I ask a question?” I said.

“What?” Chris said.

“The investigation of Alena, of how she died, has reached this whole new pitch since the boot washed up. But I don’t see how anything is really different. Before, she had mysteriously disappeared, no one knew what had happened to her, and she was presumed dead. Now, she mysteriously disappeared, no one knows what happened to her, and we know for sure that she’s dead. Isn’t the situation basically the same? She drowned in the bay, one way or another, even if we don’t know exactly how. Why can’t you just leave it at that?” I could feel Bernard listening beside me like a schoolboy listening for the recess bell.

“There are two reasons,” Chris said. “First, now we have a body. That necessarily sets certain procedures in motion.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You have a handful of bones.”

“Second, before this, I could see in my head what might have happened. Alena goes for a midnight swim, which we know she likes to do. She gets a cramp or hits a current, or maybe she just overestimates herself, and that’s it. But this, with the boot, doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t picture what the accident would have been.”

“Maybe she committed suicide!” I said. “Maybe she went for a swim wearing all her clothes, including the boots, the way Virginia Woolf put stones in her pockets!”

But Chris had already dismissed that theory. “No one says she showed any signs of being suicidal. Also, it’s hard to believe she would have got far enough, laden down like that. The tide was running in all night. Her body should have washed right up.”

And then, the next day, there was Morgan McManus in the frame of Bernard’s television, standing on a beach—our beach, the beach at the Nauk—gesturing with a sleek black prosthesis at the dunes. It was cloudy, the sky low and white, the yellow sand crisscrossed with bird tracks and tire tracks and the manic, galloping tracks of dogs. “Over there,” he was saying. “She left me a voicemail saying to come, and to bring my video camera. She told me she had something. Something I wouldn’t want to miss.”

Out of the frame a voice asked, “But when you arrived, she wasn’t here?”

“No. I was late.”

“But you saw something?”

The screen switched to a dark wobbly scene, a different view of the same beach. In the green glow of what seemed to be a night-vision camera, you could see a boat running out of the water onto the shore, a tall figure splashing out. “I did,” McManus said. “I saw this man, Bernard Augustin. Getting out of his boat.”

I stared. It was almost impossible to make out what was going on in the shaky video. The tall figure had its back to the camera. With its long legs and broad shoulders, wet hair plastered to its head, it might have been Bernard. But then again, it might not. The sail fluttered down and the man—I could tell it was a man now, I could see the bathing trunks—bent over it, folding, bunching. He seized the bow of the catamaran and dragged it across the sand onto a two-wheel dolly, then bungeed it in place and heaved it up toward the dune. Everything seemed to be happening very fast. Then the screen went blank, and a sound came from where Bernard sat in his chair—a strangled sound like water gurgling in a drain. He slumped, the remote dangling from his hand.

“Bernard,” I said. My voice sounded tinny, swallowed up by the resonant silence of the dark room. But he didn’t seem to hear me. “Bernard, listen to me! So he taped you coming back from a sail. So what?” I got up and squeezed beside him in his chair. “You used to sail a lot. Who could keep track of every time? It’s perfectly plausible that you forgot.”

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said.

“No,” I said. “This is where I belong. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” I touched his cold face, caressing his jaw, the skin near his lips where Alena had kissed him. The doorbell rang.