Alena: A Novel (11 page)

“He’s a wonderful artist,” Sloan said in her tinny voice. “Brilliant and daring.”

“He’s a wild man,” Jake added. “Gulf War vet. Lost a leg and an arm! But nothing stops him.”

“What does he do?” I asked. “I mean, what kind of art does he make?”

“He shows how it happened, man,” Jake said. “War. And he shows his prostheses. He makes them out of all kinds of materials: wood and plastic and steel.”

I could feel my face go flat. Of course, I knew body art—the Viennese Actionists, Vito Acconci, Marina
. But whether because I still carried LaFreniere, Wisconsin, within me or for some other reason, I had never been drawn to it.

“He’s a photographer,” Sloan said. “He does nude self-portraits, with and without prostheses. And portraits of other wounded soldiers. Big. Bigger than life. Also video and installation work.” She looked down and started fiddling with her phone.

“Political,” I suggested. “Antiwar.”

“No,” Sloan said. “I don’t think he is antiwar. It’s more just personal with him.” Her face flushed even pinker, like a strawberry ripening in the sun: a succulent fruit many men might hope to pluck.

Then Agnes said, her voice as cool as ever—not the stone, but the earth under the stone, “Lately he’s doing re-creations. The battle of Fallujah. The battle of Najaf. The battle of Kandahar.” In her mouth, the place names stretched out:
Nah-jaahf, Kahn-dah-hah . . .

“For this show,” Sloan said, “he’s going to stage the scene where he lost his . . . where he was injured. Rubble, dead bodies, limbs in wax. Sound. And himself, all painted in blood and ash, lying in the middle. Six hours a day!” She held up the phone and I could see what looked like a photograph they might show on the news out of Iraq, only more graphic than anything I’d ever seen on the news: half a torso with its pink insides spilling out; a bright stream of blood flowing out of a gash in a leg; fragments of something—mercifully unidentifiable—in lime green, canary yellow, livid orange. An arm, neatly detached, lying in a puddle with its fist clenched. Oh, I prayed, let there not be contracts! Let my first task at the Nauk not be to coordinate the gaudy calculated restaging of death and dismemberment! I thought of the white galleries with their shining floors, their ever-shifting light, their glimpses of wild blue through the doorways and the colonnade, the rooms I was already falling in love with. Blood didn’t belong there, nor screams, nor burned and blackened bodies. What did belong I couldn’t say yet, but I felt that if I stood still and waited—just me, alone in the Nauk—the thing that did would swim into view.

“Alena promised him,” Sloan said again. “It’ll take a while for you to organize something new, anyway, and it’s wrong for the building to keep sitting empty.”

“Plus, you know, nature abhors a vacuum,” Jake said. “That’s why you find ghosts in empty places.”

“I hope there aren’t any ghosts at the Nauk,” I said.

“Oh, there are ghosts,” Jake said. “Maybe not up here. But down on the beach where the bodies washed up.” No one spoke. Agnes raised her chin, making her blood-red earrings sparkle, while Sloan looked at the floor. “From the wrecks, I mean,” Jake explained uncomfortably. “You know. Old shipwrecks. Ships would blow up onto the sandbar in storms and break apart. People say you can see Maria Hallett walking the point on foggy days, scanning the horizon. Waiting for Black Sam to come back to her.”

“Who’s Maria Hallett?” I asked.

“It’s a local myth,” Sloan said. “Pirates and storms. Eighteenth century.”

“It’s not a myth,” Jake said. “It’s history. It really happened.”

“Something happened,” Sloan said. “A ship sank. Nothing else is particularly clear.”

“A ship called the
Whydah
went down on April 26, 1717,” Jake said. “An African slave ship filled with gold. Off these shores. A pirate captain named Black Sam Bellamy was sailing back to Cape Cod to meet the woman he loved, Maria Hallett, when a storm came up and the ship went down in sight of land. There wasn’t anything anyone could do.”

Agnes, who had been silent since the subject of ghosts came up, said suddenly, “Some people say Maria Hallett was a witch.”

“Yes. The Witch of Wellfleet,” Jake said. “They say that after the wreck, mad with grief, she lived in a little hut in the dunes, watching the sea, causing other ships to go down. Other men to die. Her hut is still there,” he said, turning to me. “Or anyway, a hut people say is hers. Still today people blame her when engines stall and radios malfunction. They say she causes strange currents that pull people out to sea and drown them.”

Another pause. Agnes had gone so still she might have been turned to stone. Then Sloan said bravely, “I go to the beach at night all the time! I’ve never seen a ghost.”

Out the window, the ocean slid silently by, bright caps of white on navy peaks. A cloud passed in front of the sun, dimming the room.

I
N THE AFTERNOON
Bernard took me to meet his sister, who was chair of the Nauk’s board of trustees. “You’ll like Barbara,” Bernard said, but it was becoming clear that Bernard had little idea who or what I would like. Why should he? We barely knew each other.

I could see now what a folly the whole escapade was—this new life. We had behaved like lunatics, or like children, or like lovers in a play. Like Romeo and Juliet, we had met at a masked ball and made a doomed choice. Oh well, I thought as we sped along the sun-drenched pavement under the pale blue crystalline bowl of the sky. The speed and the air were cheering me up. Oh well, at least I’d escaped Louise! I wondered what she was telling people: that I was ungrateful, unstable, disloyal, deranged. I had left her in the lurch, I had leaped before I looked. Well, it was true, all of it! The thought gave me courage. I glanced at Bernard, who was driving fast. He looked very handsome, his chin thrust up and his nostrils flaring like a racehorse catching a scent in the wind. What did I know about him? My mother had asked that when I’d called to tell my parents about my change of plan. (That’s what I’d said: “I’ve had a change of plan.”)

“It’s not like I’m marrying him,” I’d replied over the crackling waves of air. “I’m just taking a job.”

“But is he . . . Has he . . . ?”
my mother said. I could see what she was asking: Whether passion was involved, whether he had used desire as a lure to trick me onto his hook. It was, and he had, but not the way she meant.

“No
,
Mom,” I said. “He’s gay, actually
.
”

But of course, that didn’t make her feel any better.

What
did
I know about Bernard? Nothing, or practically nothing. He might have been a con man, or a cokehead, or even a murderer for all I knew; but I was sure in my heart that he was none of those things. He was a man who loved art—loved it the way I did, as though it were a plate of food when I was starving, a long cool draught when I was dying of thirst. He was a man who had looked at me and seen something no one else had ever seen. What more did I need to know than that?

And as it turned out, he was right about Barbara. I did like her. She wasn’t anything like what I expected, which I suppose was a female version of her brother: tall and fashionable, swarthy and self-possessed. Barbara was noticeably older than Bernard for one thing, stout and blond and sunburned, with an enormous square-cut diamond on her finger and smaller hoops of diamonds in her ears. She and her husband, Tom, lived in a big white house on a big green lawn, fenced so her border collies had room to prance. She had two of them, Dolly and Major, old dogs, impeccably behaved, who followed her everywhere, looking up into her face with perfect devotion. “These are my loves,” she said, introducing them to me in her big sunny living room full of couches and rugs and chiffoniers and bulging armchairs and ugly lamps, the flowered upholstery covered with dog hair and knitted afghans. Photographs in silver frames crowded onto tables and windowsills, revealing the existence of a clutch of blond children shown at a range of ages, riding horses, captaining sailboats, brandishing trophies, roughhousing with dogs. I found out later that Barbara had four children in all, the youngest in France on a college year abroad. Now, with her husband off at work, or sailing, or playing golf, her daily passion was directed at the dogs, who sat on either side of her, keeping a wary eye on me. When Bernard hugged his sister, they looked on resignedly, as though they would have liked to drive him away if it had been permitted.

We sat on a flagstone patio and a maid brought tea, cookies, tangerines, cheese and crackers. “Or would you prefer a drink?” Barbara asked. “Wine? Gin and tonic?”

“Campari and soda,” Bernard said.

“Bernie. Don’t be difficult on purpose.”

“Vermouth, then.”

“Marta,” Barbara said to the maid, “please bring Mr. Augustin a glass of vermouth. And you, dear?”

“Tea is fine,” I said. Had Alena sat here drinking tea with Bernard’s sister on summer afternoons? Or had she preferred gin, vermouth, Campari and soda?

Barbara poured from a big green china pot in the shape of a cabbage. The creamer was a china shepherdess and the sugar bowl a woolly sheep. The cups, very delicate, were decorated with orange roses. Everything was obviously old and valuable, but extraordinarily ugly. Even the cushions of the wicker furniture were crowded with busy vines and scarlet blossoms and little pop-eyed bunnies peeking out from behind bushes.

But the house itself was a fine house, and the patio looked out over a wide pond, perhaps a mile across, with a little sailboat and a couple of kayaks bobbing by a gray dock. “We have swans,” Barbara announced. “Not nice birds, but very beautiful.”

“I remember when we were kids and that swan attacked you,” Bernard said.

“That was a goose,” Barbara said.

“It was white,” Bernard said, “with a long neck.”

“A white goose. It wanted my jelly sandwich.”

“It wanted you,” Bernard said, smiling. “You must have been five or six, just the size for a nice meal! I remember you were wearing a yellow two-piece bathing suit with polka dots. Hideous! It went right for your belly.”

“Oh, how I screamed!” Barbara laughed. “It hurt like heck. I think we went to the emergency room.”

“All the rest of the summer you went around pulling up your shirt to show people your scar.”

“I don’t remember that. But Mama must have hated it if I did.” She leaned over to touch my knee. “Our mother was a very proper lady. Poor woman, neither Bernie nor I was the child she had envisioned! I was so plump and brash, and my hair was always a mess. And Bernie was so . . . artistic.”

Bernard snorted.

Barbara’s hand, warm against my knee, melted me. Suddenly I missed my mother. Barbara was big and rich and loud, and my mother was a farmer’s wife; still, they were both mothers. “Tell me about yourself,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind my saying I pictured someone different. When Bernie said he’d found this woman in Venice who— I don’t mean it the way it sounds. It’s just that you’re—
younger
. To be basically running a museum. Aren’t you, dear?”

“Bernard runs it, though.” I glanced at Bernard. He had finished his drink and was peeling a tangerine.

“Oh, but you can’t count on Bernie! He’s always flying off somewhere, or going out on his boat. But you sold your boats, didn’t you, Bernie?” she added. “I still can’t understand why you’d do a thing like that.”

Bernard, helping himself to the cheese, frowned at the dog that was following the morsel’s trajectory with its damp, quivering snout. “I’ve lost interest in sailing.” He denuded the tangerine, broke it open, and slipped a slice between his lips.

The wind rippled the surface of the pond. The sun turned the crests of the ripples golden. A high, sharp cry pierced the blue air. “That’s our osprey,” Barbara said as the dogs pricked up their ears. “We have a nesting pair on the pond. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can see them dive for fish.”

“Who would win a fight between an osprey and a swan?” Bernard wondered idly, picking up another tangerine. He stood and wandered down through the thick grass to the dock. In his khakis and faded pink oxford shirt and old sneakers, he looked like someone playing a part; but I was starting to understand that this was actually who he was.

Barbara watched him. “He always loved sailing,” she said. “He won races when he was a boy, when he wasn’t off at archery tournaments, and he and Alena were out on the water all the time. I used to try to get her to join the yacht club, but she never would. You don’t have to like the people, I told her. It would have been good for the Nauk, all those wealthy businessmen. Of course, Bernard is a member, not that he ever goes. I’m sure he’ll get another boat eventually. Life goes on.” She paused, still looking worriedly across the lawn at her brother. What was I doing here with this frowsy, doggy woman and a man who had competed at archery?

Then she said, “You know what happened to her, of course?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been a terrible two years for poor Bernie. For a long time he was expecting her to be found—her body, you know. But no, nothing. At first he was agitated, and then he was despondent, but at a certain point he realized she wasn’t coming back. The whole thing has been absolutely devastating, but he’s beginning to get over it. You’re proof of that.”

I couldn’t bear to hear her say it, it felt so untrue to me. Bernard was throwing pebbles from the end of the dock, contemplating the ripples.

“We were delighted, Tom and I, to hear that Bernie had found someone. It’s time the Nauk was open again. Long past time. Frankly, we didn’t see why it had to close at all—the board didn’t. And not everyone is sorry there’ll be some new blood. A new vision. Some of the locals, even some of the board, didn’t like that show with the fish. Or that other one where the artist lived in the gallery and you could watch him doing, you know, everything.”

“I read about that,” I said. “Percy Kronfield. The guy with the X-Acto knife.”

She sighed. “Well, that was Alena. Always dramatic, always with the grand gesture! Not that she wasn’t superb at her job. We took Bernie’s word for that. What do Tom and I know about art? We’re just on the board because Bernie asked us. I’m on a lot of boards. And Tom knows about money. Though it did seem to us that the shows had gotten stranger in recent years. Fewer paintings and more . . .” She trailed off, either unable or unwilling to put a name to the kind of thing there had been more of.

“What does the board do, exactly?”

“We meet a few times a year. Get told what the upcoming exhibitions are and nod sagely. Give money, of course. Cast our eyes over the financial statements. I organize the fundraising gala. I’m good at parties.” It was very peaceful out there by the pond, but Barbara looked troubled, her broad brow rippled like the water. “I’ve arranged tonight’s dinner, for instance. Not that it’s much, just twelve people.”

“Oh! Twelve . . . !”

She pointed her worried brow at me. “He didn’t tell you? You’ll get used to that. Bernie has a big heart, but things slip his mind. Well, not business things so much.” She stopped.

“So, who will be at this dinner?” I tried to sound casual. For a panicked moment I considered asking to borrow something to wear, but I had a sudden image of blowsy roses on dinner gowns (surely people wouldn’t wear
gowns
?). And of course we were nowhere near the same size.

“Tom and me. And the Hallorans, who live down the road and are big collectors. And Bernie’s friend Chaz and his partner, Will, and the Steingartens, who bought that enormous place in Sandwich. Roald. And Chris Passoa, who we’ve known forever. Don’t look like that, there’s nothing to worry about. They’ll love you.”

I could picture it: a long oak table lit by a row of silver candlesticks with me at the far end in my yellow blouse and ruined shoes. And eleven pairs of eyes fixed on me, my farm-fresh face in their shocked vision superimposed—as in the famous nineteenth-century “spirit photographs” of William Mumler—with a shimmering, glamorous image of Alena.

The blue pond was placid after the restless ocean. Somewhere overhead the keening of the osprey inscribed the air, and something caught my eye, streaking downward. “Look!” Barbara cried. I saw the great bird rise, wings beating hard, from the sun-stippled water, something glinting and dripping in its feet. On the dock, Bernard stood motionless, the sun casting his long shadow across the riven, trembling pond.