Alena: A Novel (31 page)

“From thirty paces, standing in the cloudy dark, Alena was beautiful. She wore a white dress embroidered with tiny red beads, and those pink plastic go-go boots she loved, that she had bought on eBay, and that were good for the beach because you could hose the sand off them. She was smiling, though I remember that I thought even then that it wasn’t the smile I had expected. It wasn’t joyful but rather a smile of calculated satisfaction, the smile not of the bride but of the mother of the bride, watching the wedding go like clockwork.

“And then I drew. I was picturing already how we would walk back to the house together, and maybe open a bottle of something, and talk. I remembered that she had said she was thinking about a performance, about creating a piece, and I thought I would ask her about it, not realizing we were already in the middle of it.

“I lined up the shot. It felt effortless, intuitive, just the way it was supposed to feel. But as I let the arrow fly a noise startled me, a sort of cry. Something white disappeared into the dunes—a cloud of hair, maybe. And when I looked back, Alena was on the ground with the arrow in her throat.

“I ran down the beach. Already the sand was dark with blood, and a terrible sound came from the hole in Alena’s throat. Almost anywhere else I could have hit her would have been better than that. In what seemed like a few moments, though I don’t know, really, how long it was, she was dead.

“Of course—I should have called for help. Of course! She might have been saved somehow. But I doubt it. And anyway, I panicked. The boat was right there, on the beach where it always was, and the tarp was in the boat shed, and there were rocks scattered on the sand. The plan was already in place. It had waited in my head all those years for its moment, and now that moment had come.”

Bernard shut his eyes. He put his head down on the table. I sat, unable to speak, as if I too had an arrow buried in my throat. My finger was numb where, unfeelingly, it still touched his. I wanted urgently to take my hand away, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that if I moved it, if I took myself away from him, Bernard would collapse right there in the kitchen, a man of ash.

I covered his hand with my own. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “It was what she meant to happen.”

He head was still on the table, but he moved it back and forth, indicating no.

“It was,” I said. “It was her last grand gesture! Her great performance. And if McManus had gotten her message in time, if he had come earlier, the world would have seen it. A terrible stunt, or a great work of contingency art—who knows? But he wasn’t there. You did what you did, and no one saw. No one but Old Ben, who can’t tell the present from the past, fact from imagination. Chris Passoa thinks she killed herself. In a way, she did kill herself. You were just the instrument she chose.”

His voice was muffled by the table. “No.”

“Yes. It’s over. You can get up tomorrow, and come to work, and start again.”

He sat up slowly. His eyes were black stones in his gray face. Vacancies. “It’s too late,” he said. “Alena was right. I’ve lost whatever courage I once had. I can’t start over. I tried. Finding you, bringing you here. I thought it could be done. I felt all right in Venice, showing you the Scrovegni Chapel, seeing the light in your eyes. The dawning of something.

“But once we got back here, I could see it was a mistake. She was everywhere. Alena. In every room, in every view, in the sound of the waves. I even thought, not for the first time, of turning myself in, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it, I had to leave. That’s why I ran off almost as soon as we arrived. I kept thinking about her out there in the Plunge, her body devoured, her bones caught in their plastic shroud, maybe drifting free. Assuming I even had the place right in the dark. Assuming no storm stirred up the ocean floor, changed the geography. But that’s what happened.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Yes, the storm came up. The bones washed up. None of it matters. It was an accident! It was suicide by proxy. You might as well have been driving a bus she jumped in front of!”

“She didn’t know she was going to die.”

“She left it to chance. That was how she wanted it. You read the quotation. She died as part of a piece of art.”

We were quiet, thinking about that. And then Bernard said, “It’s so strange how you can’t hear the ocean from here. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”

“I hate it,” I said. “I’ve hated it all summer.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Oh, what does it matter?”

“We could have exchanged houses. Every time I hear the ocean, it’s like hearing her voice. It’s as though she’s been diffused into Cape Cod Bay, so that every time a wave washes up, she’s back again.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like that at all. She’s gone! For two years you’ve held her inside you, she’s been burning through you like acid, destroying you. But now that you’ve told me, it won’t be like that anymore.” I took his hand and tugged at it, that cold shred of flesh. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you. It will be all right. Let’s go down to the beach right now. There are no ghosts. I’ll show you.”

He let me pull him heavily to his feet, let me drag him across the linoleum to the door, steady him over the threshold and down the crooked steps.

The night was cold, clear, still, like a night in a paperweight. A million stars pricked the blackness with their icy tongues. As we came around the side of the house, the sound of the bay rose up out of the darkness, and Bernard stopped where he was as if frozen, a man not of ash but of frost and rime, arctic-hearted, snow-blind. A glacial prince.

Off to the east, where the Nauk hulked on its dune, an orange glow spread across the low horizon. “Is the Nauk burning?” Bernard asked. Hope rasped in his voice like a wasp in winter. Every instant the color of the sky shifted, lightening from shade to shade like a clarinet rising through shimmering octaves.

But it wasn’t fire, or music, or any other human fabulation stippling the world with beauty.

“No,” I said. “It’s just morning.”

I am grateful to Ingrid Schaffner and Rob Tuchmann for their attentive reading of this manuscript and their astute recommendations. Susie Merrell read an early draft and saw what was missing; Ira Pastan offered advice on birds, boats, and underwater geography; Linda Pastan reviewed every revision. Special gratitude to Harvey Pastan, who suggested a solution to a difficult plot point. And many thanks to everyone at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave me an education in an unknown world; any mistakes or misapprehensions about contemporary art are entirely my own.