Alena: A Novel (9 page)

H
OW WELL
I
REMEMBER
my first night in that house. I had so little with me—just the suitcase I had packed less than a month before in my studio apartment a thousand miles away. Here was the cotton nightgown, knee length, white with blue forget-me-nots, that I had worn between the heavy ironed linens of the Ritz—the Baglioni, the Gritti—and before that, the more ordinary sheets of the Hotel da Silva in the little room adjoining Louise’s, back in the dimness of my other life. Now, pulling back the candlewick bedspread on the sagging bed, switching on the light with its frayed cord, pressing my face to the window out which the wan moon rode low over the scrubby meadows, I wondered about Louise. Had she recovered from her illness? From my desertion? What version of my story was she telling in the museum, which would travel like wind through a cornfield across the Midwest? It wasn’t that I wanted to be back there; I didn’t. I had no false nostalgia. But lying in the damp, crooked room that was now mine, listening to the brigades of crickets chanting in the grass all around the house, the occasional car passing on the road at the end of the lane, a bullfrog croaking in a marshy pond somewhere, I began to shiver despite the warmth of the close night. My mind spun its wheels, trying to assimilate all that had happened to land me exactly here, and my pulse raced every time the house creaked, jolting me out of half-dreams. I tried to relax, to force myself to breathe, but my muscles twitched like the whiskers of a nervous cat, and my lungs seemed choked by the acrid smoke of the bridges I had burned.

It was a relief when the first gray light seeped through the curtains and I could give myself permission to get up.

Downstairs, the refrigerator was empty, but I found coffee and filters, and there was clumped sugar in one of the sticky canisters. I was wandering around the house looking everything over—the pedestal table, the skirted yellow couch, the begrimed paintings of fishing boats—when someone knocked. Assuming it was Bernard, I hurried to the door, eager to put last night’s unpleasantness behind us. But when I swung it open, an unfamiliar man stood on the wooden step. Perhaps fifty-five, with broad shoulders and a weathered face and more than a bit of a gut, he wore a plaid flannel shirt untucked over his jeans, the laces of his paint-spattered work boots dangling. His thick silvery-brown hair was wet—I could see the comb marks—and his pale blue eyes, set deep under a sunburned brow, were spun with green, like a marble I’d had when I was a girl: a rare sea-glass swirlie. He held a brown paper grocery bag in one arm.

“You’re the new curator?” I pulled the lapels of my robe together as his voice, all stretched vowels and missing
r
’s, drifted toward me, as thick as seaweed. It was the first real Cape Cod accent I’d heard:
Yoo-ah tha noo-ah kyoo-ray-tah?

“Yes.”

He held out the bag of groceries. “Brought you a few things. Tide you over till you can get to a store.”
Tide yoo o-vah. Get to a sto-ah.

Behind him the morning was turning from pink to blue. Birds chattered in the bushes, and the smell of the sea freshened the air, though I could not see it. “Thank you,” I said.

“I’m Roald Egeland,” he said.

I waited for more, but there wasn’t any, just the brown bag, a little crumpled, that he held out patiently, like a dog offering a ball. “I’ve made some coffee,” I said. “Would you like some?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

I held the door and he came in, looking around at the kitchen in silence as I poured coffee for him and more for myself, adding the milk he’d brought. The swirl of white descending through the dark liquid soothed me. “I hate to drink it black,” I confessed.

“I’ll take it any way I can get it. On the boat we drink it out of thermoses, three days old.”

I put away the milk and bread, bacon and butter, bananas and cans of soup, and the sweating bag of mixed frozen vegetables he’d brought. Noticing the broken drawer, he crouched down and peered at the cracked wood. “What happened here?”
What happaned hee-ah?

“I guess I pulled too hard.”

He frowned, opening and shutting the other drawers. “I’ll come back later and fix it. And anything else that needs. I’ll take a look around. I can get you a dehumidifier for the damp, not that it’ll do any good if you have the windows open. Can’t dry out the whole Atlantic Ocean, can you?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Sorry, you’re a fisherman? A handyman?”

He stood up straighter, the green swirl in his eyes glowing almost fluorescent as his springy eyebrows lowered. “I’m the head preparator,” he said. “I install the shows.”

“Oh!” I said. “Bernard didn’t— Head preparator, then. How nice of you to think of bringing . . . of fixing . . .” I couldn’t seem to finish a sentence, they broke up or trailed away, leaving acid bubbles of anxiety floating in the damp air. I wished I was dressed at least, not wearing my old robe with its pattern of red hibiscus and yellow canaries, a Christmas gift from my aunt Bet in Green Bay.

“Bernard asked me to come by. He didn’t say? Sometimes he forgets, he gets distracted. And he’s impulsive. Well—I don’t have to tell you!” He laughed, a bright clap of mirth that took me by surprise. “Who else would skedaddle off to Venice and come back with a new curator in tow?”

I flushed. It seemed crazier all the time—that he had chosen me, that I had come. One of these days I’d have to fly out and deal with my apartment and my things, but not yet. Not yet. I looked up shyly into Roald’s broad face with its tracery of lines like the surface of fired clay. “I keep wondering about the last curator,” I said. “The one who . . . Was this the beach she would have swum out from? Right here?”

Roald’s face shut up like a clam and he looked away out the window where a bird twittered mindlessly in a bush. “Who knows? Probably. She often swam there.” He drank his coffee. I stood very still, my bare feet cold on the gritty linoleum.

“And her body was never found?”

“They looked for a long time. Boats, nets, charts of the currents. At first it seemed just a matter of time until they found her. But time kept going by.”

“So no one really knows if it was an accident or not?”

“What else could it have been?”

“I just thought—maybe she could have run away?” I didn’t want to say that I wondered if she had killed herself.

Roald turned his blue and green marble eyes to me. “Sometimes,” he said, “I try to convince myself of that. She was Russian, you know. Her family. She came here when she was five, but she remembered things. The cold, the sky. The shimmering gold domes they have there, on their churches. She wanted to see the Ural Mountains, the Amber Room, Lake Baikal. She always said . . .”

I waited, trembling, for him to tell me what she always said. It was the first time, I think, I understood that she was real. Alena.

“What?”

“She said she was too big for this country. She said Russia was big enough,
free
enough.” He laughed, more darkly this time. “Isn’t that a joke? Russia, free!” He put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. His ring finger was missing on his left hand, a pinkish stump marking the place it should have been.

“What happened to your finger?”

“Accident,” he said, and put his hands behind his back.

“You were close to her.” I was sorry when I realized it. I had started to feel he was someone I could like.

“No,” he said. “No. I wouldn’t say that.”

There were footsteps on the stoop, a perfunctory knock. The door swung open and there was Bernard, wearing an expression of weary, gray-faced geniality like a courteous ghost. He was dressed like Roald, except that his jeans and red plaid shirt looked stiffer, newer. “Good morning,” he said. “Hello, Roald. Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Thanks for coming over. Is that coffee you’re drinking?”

“I’ll make some more,” I said. “It’ll only take a minute.” A false heartiness hung in the air like an oily gauze. I wanted to brush it away, to see the contours and corners of the world clearly, but instead I put another pot of coffee on and said I would go get dressed.

“Yes,” Bernard said. “Let’s get going. It’s a busy day!”

Busy with what? I thought of Louise sitting in her office with her plump, taupe-stockinged legs crossed, talking on the phone, scanning the paper, stirring cream into her tea. Surely Alena hadn’t spent her days like that! I hurried up the stairs. Behind me I heard Roald say, “How was Venice?”

“Crowded. Every year it gets more . . .”

More what?

My few clothes were crumpled and in need of washing. I’d have to find some time to run them through the washing machine and hang them out to dry. That was all right for summer, but what would it be like in February? Perhaps there was a laundromat in town. Well, but how would I get there? My thoughts chased each other in circles as I threw on the blue skirt that used to be my favorite, and a yellow blouse that wasn’t too wrinkled but that, I suddenly remembered, Bernard had said made me look like I was ten. Still, it would have to do. I brushed my hair, put on lipstick, ran the mascara wand through my lashes. I slipped into my shoes, black slingbacks with a high wedge heel and an open toe. They were a little scuffed by now, but they made me taller.

At the top of the stairs I hesitated, suddenly wobbly. The air was thick with damp and salt so that it felt like inhaling a heavy broth through which oxygen trickled and burbled, paddling valiantly toward the thirsty lungs. What if I climbed back into bed? What if I pretended to be sick? What if I really was sick?

“Yes, very young.” Bernard’s voice echoed up the stairs, followed by a murmur I couldn’t make out. “No, I don’t think so . . . Obviously.” More murmuring. “Well, it was Agnes’s idea. I don’t care one way or the other . . . Did she? Well, she’ll just have to—”

I clattered down, making as much noise as I could. It was obvious they were talking about me: Bernard didn’t think something about me, Agnes would have to do something-or-other about me. It was I, without a doubt, who was very young.

And what was Roald saying in his quiet,
r
-less voice? I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

When I came into the room, all sound ceased except for the buzzing of the overhead light fixture.

“I’m ready!” I said.

Bernard looked me up and down, frowning slightly. “Are you really going to wear those shoes?” he said.

I saw what he meant as we walked up the sandy dirt path. The high slingbacks slipped, my feet nearly coming out of them. The day was bright with a strong breeze fluttering the beach grass. On the long back of the dune, the south wing of the Nauk glittered in the sun, just as in the pictures I’d seen. Where the wings came together in a shallow V, like a child’s rendering of a soaring gull, there was a little grassy area mostly enclosed by tall square hedges. Here, out of the wind, roses bloomed on trellises, and benches on either side of the entryway invited sitting. Flanking the broad door, narrow strips of glass extended from the foundation to the roof, offering a glimpse—through the museum’s tiled lobby—to the glass wall beyond, out which blue waves rolled in foam-capped ranks toward the invisible beach. Standing there, bracing myself to go in as though to dive into that cold blue water, I felt for the first time the strange tension I would later understand the spot was designed to evoke: the peaceful garden stasis of the green grass, the pink roses, the trimmed fragrant yew hedges blocking the wind, confounded by the haunted sound of the ocean waves behind the building. The restless, relentless roar and suck of the sea.

Bernard opened the door.

In the cool, airy lobby, the glittering ocean through the wall of glass surged and lolled, not blue from this vantage but gray: a gun-metal gray and dirty white prairie stretching away to the horizon. My breath caught like a fishbone in my throat. My ruined shoes leaked sand across the terra-cotta. I felt sure a whale would surface from the deep as I watched, or a proud luffing galleon glide into view from out of the frame, beyond which lay the sixteenth century, perhaps, or the beginning of time.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathed, dislodging the fishbone. Beautiful! The most banal and meaningless word in the language, catchall for everything from the decorative to the compellingly grotesque.

“It’s an instructive view,” Bernard said. “If the art doesn’t make you feel something at least approaching that, what’s the point?”

“And one day, of course, it will swallow us all.”

I turned to see who had spoken. A woman I hadn’t noticed stood near the reception desk. She was large, tall and overweight, wearing a black, low-cut, calf-length dress. Her hair, an unnatural, glassy, pink-streaked black, made her pale face look even paler than it was, pale as a fish belly, or a scrim of frost. How did she manage that, living here? Her lips and fingernails were painted crimson, and her lobeless ears were studded up and down with holes, most of them empty except for the two long curtains of red stones and gold filigree that rippled and swung whenever she moved her head. A gold chain hung around her neck, disappearing down the top of her dress to lodge invisibly between her breasts, which looked hard and potentially dangerous, like a pair of torpedoes.