Alena: A Novel (21 page)

“What’s the point of bringing me here?” I cried. “What did you intend for me to
do
? Not the business part, not the fundraising part, and apparently not the curatorial part either. I thought you hired me because you trusted my judgment.” He was beginning to see what Barbara, Agnes, and Willa Somerset—even Roald and Sloan—had seen the moment they met me: that he had made a fabulous mistake! Still, here I was.

“I do trust your judgment,” Bernard said. He pushed the coleslaw apart with his fork, one shred at a time. “About art. But a decision like this has many dimensions.”

“I’ve thought about it multidimensionally. Besides.” I took a breath. “I’ve already told her.”

“You
what
?”

“You said we were in a hurry! You said this was my decision!”

He shoved the plate and it spun off the edge of the table onto the floor, landing upside down. I jumped up and lifted it. On the beige carpet the slaw lay in its constituent parts: green cabbage, orange carrot, red pepper. Lunch deconstructed. “Agnes!” he yelled.

The door opened instantly.

“Clean this up!” He turned to me. “You’ll just have to tell her you changed your mind.”

“I can’t do that!” I was shocked. “How can I do that?”

“You’re the curator,” he said. “Figure it out.”

“Actually,” I said, “I sent out the press release too.” Bernard’s head jerked toward me, and his body trembled in its black and gray like a Doberman that has been ordered to stay. For a moment, trying and failing to meet his gaze, I was afraid of him. “Two hundred copies.”

Agnes looked at me, and then she looked away. “I’ll just get the carpet sweeper,” she said.

“You—” he said.

“What?” I said wildly. “What?” My mind clattered through the catalogue of names he might call me, and I saw myself storming back to the cottage, packing my things, catching a bus.

Bernard shut his eyes and lowered his hand. He sagged like a luffing sail when the wind dies. But he said nothing.

T
HE NEXT DAY, A
S
ATURDAY,
I was up early, hanging my laundered clothes in the cramped laundry yard, its dry grass pocked with anthills, and thinking of my pioneer great-grandmother who homesteaded in Nebraska (what, if anything, had she hung on her whitewashed walls—embroidered samplers?) when Bernard rang the bell.

He looked thinner, perhaps because he was holding his spine so straight, as though he were a fragile vessel that might break if jounced or jostled. He wore a jacket over a dress shirt with an open collar, a lapel pin in the shape of a scallop shell, scuffed shoes. The shadows under his eyes were burnished to a bluish gloss. Perhaps he had been out walking in the scrub. Perhaps he hadn’t slept. “May I come in?” he said.

“Of course. If you want to.”

We sat at the kitchen table. I wished I had music playing, or the radio news, but the only sounds were the dull tock of the clock on the wall and the gurgling hum of the refrigerator and the buzz of insects in the long grass around the house.

At last he said, “I got a call last night from someone at the
Times
. He said he got a copy of the press release and would like to set up an interview with Celia.”

“Oh, good! That’s good, isn’t it?” I didn’t know whether he meant
The Cape Cod Times
or
The New York Times
, but for the moment I was thrilled with either one.

“It’s good,” he acknowledged. “If Celia is willing to be interviewed.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” I asked. “Of course she will.”

“Have you asked her?”

“No.”

“Give her a call,” he suggested. “See what she says.” He held my gaze with bloodshot eyes. How differently he had looked at me across the breakfast table at the Gritti when he’d proposed that I come to work for him! That had been barely a month ago, but I felt I had both aged greatly since then and grown younger. There seemed to be so many things I didn’t know.

“You mean now?”

“Unless you think we have time to spare.” He spread his long hands on the table and examined them—clean oval nails, hairless knuckles, a thick gold ring with a black stone.

“So,” I said, needing to hear him say it, “we’re moving forward? With the show?”

“We have no choice.”

“You mean I’ve left us no choice.”

He reached out one of his hands—the one with the ring—and laid it gently over my own. “Look,” he said. “What’s done is done. The only thing to do is to move ahead. That’s what we’re going to do. My assumption is that the show is going to be fabulous.”

At his touch, all the air seemed to go out of me. I looked at his striped shirt, his sober eyes. “It will be fabulous,” I repeated, like someone under hypnosis.

His fingers traced gentle, soothing circles on the back of my hand. “But there’s lots to do.”

“I’ll call Celia,” I said.

“We should have dinner with her,” he said. “See if she’s free tonight.”

But as I was looking up her number, the phone rang, and it was Celia calling me. “I was just going to call you!” I said. At the table Bernard looked like a dog that has caught a scent. His scallop-shell pin sent a spot of brightness jumping across the wall.

“I just got off the phone with a man from the
Times
,” she said. “Calling people at home on a Saturday morning! Doesn’t anyone have manners anymore?”

I didn’t know where else the reporter would have called her, her home and studio being one. But I only said, “That’s good news, Celia. Interest like that. That’s very good for the show.”

“It is
not
good for the show when people have the wrong ideas! This man. A show by a black artist has to be about race. The artist has to be making a political point, everything has to have a hidden meaning! I don’t know where they get these ideas. But, oh.” Her tone shifted, her generalized outrage becoming pointed. “
Hidden Depths
? I know you must have meant well, but you really should have
talked
to me. You should have
consulted
me before you went off giving my show some name that would give folks the wrong idea. I’ve never not been consulted about the title of a show before. I know you’re young, honey, but surely you know that!”

All the time she spoke I felt hollower and less substantial—emptied out like the husk of a dead insect that the first breeze will blow away. I spun myself slowly toward the wall so Bernard couldn’t see my face. Still, he had to smell the stink of abjection streaming from me. I had done everything wrong. “Celia,” I said. “I’m so sorry. You’re absolutely right, I should have called. But I got the title from you! From something you said to me! I should have asked you explicitly. But time was so short. And, as I said, the words were yours.”

“That’s a poor excuse,” she said. “And I don’t believe I did say that—
hidden depths
. I do my best not to speak in clichés. But even if I did! People say all kinds of things. They don’t mean every single last one of them. I hate to say it, but this whole thing is starting to feel like a mistake.”

Oh, how I agreed with her! A mistake from beginning to end, a sequence of little explosions running down the length of a string of Christmas lights, each bulb shattering, filling the air with shards of glass. If only I could go back to the day Bernard drove me up the lane to the Nauk, I would do everything differently!

Or perhaps it would be better to go back further still, as long as I was time traveling, to the moment Bernard asked me to come to Nauquasset, and shake my head sadly. I could be back at my old job right now, listening to Louise talking on the phone . . .

But no. No, I wouldn’t do that. I was here; I was lucky beyond all reason to be here. I turned back toward Bernard, holding his weary gaze as I said, as soothingly as I could, “No, Celia—not a mistake. We are so thrilled to be doing this show. We’re so enthusiastic about your work! It’s truly luminous, and it’s a travesty that the world hasn’t given it its due recognition.” I paused, wondering if
travesty
had been going too far, but the throaty, grudging, punctuating sounds that came through the phone suggested otherwise. “I apologize again about the title. You’re absolutely right. But we can talk about changing it”—here Bernard winced a little and shook his head—“though I really think that doing that would be a mistake at this point. It’s a good title. It refers both to your engagement with the ocean and to your complexity, and it will pique people’s interest.” This was a lie—by now I hated the title—but Bernard gave me a small encouraging nod.

“The work is what should interest people,” Celia protested. But some of the anger had gone out of her voice.

“Of course! And it will. But they have to get into the galleries and see it first. You know that.”

“Getting people out to the edge of the world and into a couple of rooms. That’s a lot of work to expect some old title to do.”

“The title is just part of it. Getting the press interested—that’s huge. The reporter who called you this morning? That’s good, that’s just what we want. Now our job—yours and the Nauk’s—is to make sure the reporters get something they can use. That they have something they can write about. Even if the art is what they care about, they have to have a story. That’s their business.”

“I can do that,” Celia said, half scornfully. “Of course. As long as they don’t go asking me about race.”

I was glad Bernard couldn’t hear her. His handsome face brightened slowly like a fluorescent tube warming up.

The silver lining of our absurdly short timeline (“compressed” was the word we used, no one ever said “insufficient”) was that there was so little time to reflect on what a disaster the whole thing was. Not a total, unqualified disaster—a
qualified
disaster—but a disaster nonetheless. Celia had complete integrity, by which I mean she never compromised her unwillingness to talk about her art in relation to race—or, in fact, in relation to anything outside of itself. Neither did she tolerate anyone else doing so in her hearing. When she finally saw a copy of my press release, she was so angry she refused to speak to me for two days. Luckily we had done most of our work by then—chosen the pieces, transported them to the Nauk, tried them in various arrangements. There is nothing that lifts the heart like the absolute grace with which big tattooed art handlers lift and assemble a complicated piece of sculpture, shipped in parts and put together with the aid of a sketchy diagram. The show was mostly new work—there wasn’t time to fuss with loans, except from people Bernard knew well, and of course there was the work she had destroyed—so it was flatter than the exhibition in my head, a little one-dimensional. Still, it was a good show, even given the circumstances. It was a very good show. And some of the work in it was extraordinary. The enormous glazed sculpture of the horseshoe crab sent shivers through me every time I caught sight of it unexpectedly. Celia had made, as well, a series of long, whitish, intricate sculptures that looked abstract, but were, in fact, representations of sea foam as a wave broke onto the shore. That series alone, with its rhythm and simplicity, its virtuoso craftsmanship, and its subtle variation in color (some of the whites were almost green, others verged on purple, all of them with a depth reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter squeegee painting) would have justified the show to me. Celia was, I believed, an exceptional artist. I still believe it. Like many exceptional artists, she had (she still has) iron ideas, but unfortunately she lacked the instinct of some artists for productive provocation. Call it the Warhol strategy—or the Duchamp strategy, if you prefer. Like a child at bedtime who insists she’s not tired, Celia’s provocation was all unproductive, almost self-negating. Sometimes I thought this was just her scorpion nature, but other times it seemed to me that she had settled on this pose purposefully, out of some dimly perceived, horribly misplaced idea that the job of an artist was to hide her light under the darkest bushel possible and wait for a dedicated acolyte to be drawn to it like a clairvoyant moth.

Roald was extraordinary during the short, brutish installation. I have since known many wonderful preparators, but Roald stands out in my mind for his tireless cheerful calm and his understated skill. Dressed in a striped jersey like something a sailor might wear in an old movie, he ambled through the galleries, loose limbed and sharp eyed. He had a gift for spotting a difficulty before it arose, then preparing the atmosphere to handle it with a quip or a useful suggestion, like a gynecologist making a joke while lubricating the speculum. Celia’s shell pieces were simple enough to handle, though very delicate. But the crabs (there was a green crab, a fiddler crab, and a trio of lady crabs titled
Nefertiti’s Handmaidens
in addition to the spectacular horseshoe crab) were each made of five or six finicky pieces that had to be fitted precisely together. The sea foam series required tweezers and museum wax to assemble, which Roald insisted on doing himself. When Celia was there, she hovered and swooped, admonishing, warning, sighing theatrically, and generally prophesying doom, like a plump and muumuued Cassandra. Meanwhile, invitations were designed, nixed by Celia (too bright), redesigned, and sent out without consulting her again. When a friend showed her one, she was furious. When she found out the brochure we were publishing wasn’t in color, she threw a tantrum. When a reporter asked her about the titles of the works (her titling was, I suppose, productive provocation—or would have been if she hadn’t regularly squashed people’s interest the moment she provoked it), she hit the ceiling and stayed up there, bouncing and squeaking like a helium balloon, until the air finally went out of her.

I felt terrible, of course. I felt I could have found an artist to show whose work I liked and who wouldn’t have made everyone’s life so miserable if only I had asked for a little guidance. To his credit, after his initial outburst, Bernard never said another word about it. But for Agnes—and, following her example, Sloan and Jake—no opportunity to complain about Celia went unwasted. Unless, that is, the opportunity to criticize me superseded it, as when, the day before we opened, Celia sought me out in my office to complain about the shade of white the gallery walls were painted. I heard her out (everyone in the offices, I suppose, heard her out), then soothed, murmured, apologized, nodded, explaining that—regrettably—it just wasn’t physically possible to repaint the walls in time. When she eventually stalked away down the stairs like a coral and blue dust devil, the following dialogue floated clearly through my open door:

Alena would never have stood for that.

She would have given her the stare. Rapier of ice, voice of honey!

Half a minute and she would have had her eating out of her hand. She had such a way with artists.

They were always grateful to her. And why not? What’s an artist without a curator? Nothing. Alena understood that.

Even then, it pleases me to recall, I was more puzzled than wounded by the implication of this final remark. An artist without a curator was still an artist—that was clear. But a curator without an artist?