Alena: A Novel (28 page)

Bernard guffawed.

Chris’s face shut up like an anemone.

I said, “Alena would have been Maria Hallett, of course.”

McManus smiled at me, and for a moment, as our gazes caught, we might have been alone in the room. “Of course,” he said. And then a thought came to him, I could see it flicker to life on his face. “Maria Hallett’s hut,” he said. “That bum who sleeps in it.”

“Old Ben?” Chris said. “What about him?”

“He was there that night. I heard him moving around the way he does. Maybe he saw something.”

M
C
M
ANUS COULDN’T WALK WELL
on sand, so Chris Passoa suggested we drive his Jeep out to Willet’s Landing, where four-wheel-drive vehicles could cut through to the beach. The night had grown cold. Bernard and I sat in the back as we bumped along the driveway, then headed up the shore road. I reached out and took his hand. It lay limply in mine, like a dead hand, and he turned his head away, watching the dark shapes of the scrub rise and fall in the salty dark. At Willet’s Landing, Chris turned down the track between the dunes, the long grass sighing against the metal body of the Jeep. And then we were through onto the beach, with the waves breaking and the white foam gleaming on the cold sand. I rolled my window down and let the chilly air wash over me. Stars were bright and thick. McManus tapped his rubbery flower against the dashboard. It made a flaccid, squelchy noise. This was the stretch of beach where the boot had been found—a bit of plastic detritus spat out by the sea. Where was the rest of her, the hundred-odd lost and lonely bones? In the front seat, McManus started whistling. Chris Passoa stopped the Jeep. “It’s just over there,” he said.

I opened my door and stepped out into the soft sand. We were the only people on the beach, but up on the dune you could see the lights of a few houses, though the summer was over. A little way down, a long low building crouched on the crest of the bluff, a prism of darkness against the stars. “That’s the Nauk,” I said in surprise, and suddenly the shape of the shadowed beach around me became familiar. Chris Passoa got out from behind the wheel, and McManus got out too, holding on to the side mirror. Bernard stayed where he was.

“I’ll go see if he’s there,” the police chief said. “If he is, I’ll bring him.”

We waited. The surf roared dully, monotonously, as though nothing could ever surprise it. The cold beach was littered with broken shells and egg cases and hard dark stones. A shadow slipped across the sand, and looking up, I saw a large bird—an owl, possibly—gliding by in silence. McManus said, “Whatever you did to her, it must have been here.”

Bernard said nothing. He had closed his eyes and leaned back in the seat. He might have been asleep.

“Did you tie her up?” McManus said. “Did you hit her with a rock? Didn’t she scream? Or did you gag her first?”

“Stop it,” I said.

McManus looked at me and said, “If you think he’s ever going to sleep with you, you’re kidding yourself.”

“He’s my boss,” I said.

“Even Alena couldn’t convert him. Though of course they slept together once or twice when they were in college. She could always tell he was queer, though. She told me she knew before he did. She always saw things clearly, Alena. Her inner eye was as sharp as a scalpel.”

“Alena’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It feels like she’s gone for a swim and will be back any minute. She loved swimming at night, didn’t she, Bernard?”

Bernard opened his eyes as though his lids were made of lead. “Yes,” he said. “She did.”

In Wisconsin too we had swum at night: in depthless quarries and silty ponds, in wide shallow rivers and black indifferent lakes. But this was different—the hungry waves grumbling and churning at the edge of the earth, the doorway to the kingdom of krakens and sharks. It was a miracle anyone ever made it out.

Chris Passoa materialized from the dunes, leading a thin, windblown figure with a wild white cloud of hair and beard. “I didn’t do anything,” the old man said. “Don’t send me back.”

“Nobody’s sending you anywhere,” Chris said. “We want to talk to you.”

“No one uses that place,” the painter said. “Just ghosts.”

“We want your help. We’re hoping you can help us.”

“I can’t help anyone. All I can do is paint.”

“Bernard?” Chris said. “Can you please come out here?” Bernard got out of the car and stood, tall and pale in the wind, his jacket blowing. “Do you know this man, Ben?” Chris asked.

The painter stared at Bernard. We waited.

“He can’t tell what’s real from what’s not,” Bernard said.

The old man gestured in the direction of the Nauk. “He runs that place up there,” he said.

“Have you seen him on this beach before?”

“Lots of times.”

“Have you seen him with the woman who used to work there? Alena? You know who that is, don’t you?”

The old painter turned toward the policeman. The wind was cold, and freezing spray drifted up from the black, hissing waves, but he wore only a vagrant’s threadbare shirt, and his feet were bare. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” he said. “She went into the sea.”

“That’s right.”

“She used to swim, lots of nights. Without her clothes on,” the painter said. “I didn’t watch.”

McManus laughed. “Do you think she cared if you watched or not? If you jerked off, crouching in the dunes? Why should she care about that?”

“McManus,” Chris said.

“I only see her in dreams now,” the painter said.

“I’ll bet you see her in your dreams,” McManus said. “The question is did you see her the night she died?”

The old man blinked. His face was wrinkled and creased like an old tortoise, but his white hair and beard shone in the moonlight like the pure breath of cows on an autumn morning.

“Ben,” Bernard said. “These men want to know if you saw Alena and me together, here on this beach, two summers ago. The night she disappeared. June, it would have been. Near the solstice. This man thinks I killed her. He thinks I put her body in my boat and sailed away and dumped it in the ocean. They want to know if you saw that.”

The painter looked out to sea as if he were struggling to remember. The waves rolled in, as they did every night. How many nights had he seen them? How could he be expected to tell one night from the rest? Then he said, “I saw the arrow.”

“What arrow?” McManus said.

“A streak in the air.”

“A streak?”

“Like a tracer. They would start the tracers first, and then the shooting. Green light everywhere! Flares exploding red and yellow, mortar rounds dazzling, color everywhere, light painting the sky, the jungle going up in flames, orange on black.”

“What jungle?” Chris Passoa asked, a tic of impatience in his voice. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s talking about the war, I think,” I said. “Vietnam.”

“How to paint that?” Ben was growing agitated. “All that horror—how to capture it?”

“Surely they didn’t have arrows in Vietnam,” Chris said.

“Streaks in the burning air the color of snakes,” the painter said. “Snakes in the jungle the size of culverts. An arrow streaking like a white snake through the air. A body falling. Bodies floating down the river, surrounded by leaves and old rubber.”

“Stop it,” McManus said. “Stop acting crazy!”

“It sounds like he’s describing one of your installations,” Bernard said.

“Ray Donovan died,” the painter said. “Charlie Claymont died. Rusty Bigelow died.” He swiveled his head in small jerks like a bird, as though he were seeing them out there in the dark. “Ghosts don’t sleep. They blow across oceans, carrying their deaths in their hands like melons.”

“Ben,” Chris said. “Listen. Do you remember the last time you saw Alena?”

The painter didn’t seem to hear. He rubbed his long fingers down the sides of his jeans, his shoulders twitching.

“He can be perfectly lucid if he wants to be!” McManus said. “Ben, remember Alena? She used to give you a pint of bourbon sometimes, and cigarettes. I’ll give you a whole gallon of Old Grand-Dad if you can tell us about the last time you saw her!”

“Why not cash?” Bernard said, but Chris put up a hand.

The old man blinked rapidly as though trying to clear his vision. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “The last time. She swam out of the bay and crawled up onto the sand. She was exhausted, poor thing. She’d been in the water too long.” He stared out at the dark waves. Behind us, up on the dune, a light went on.

“When was this?” Chris said.

“Last night. No—the night before. She crawled out of the sea and walked along the shore. The waves lapped at her white feet. You say she’s gone, but she’s not gone.” He was trembling all over now, tugging at his beard.

“Ben!” McManus cried. “You know she’s dead. You know they found her bones! When was the last time you saw her
alive
?”

Chris Passoa put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll take you back to the hut.” The stars, which see everything, glittered coldly in the deathless sky.

“You’d better get him his bourbon, McManus,” Bernard said. “He’s answered your question.”

Up on the dune, a second light went on. This time Bernard saw it too. “That’s coming from the Nauk,” he said. “Who’s up there?” He moved through the dark across the soft blowing sand toward the stairway. McManus lurched after him, placing his fake leg carefully, though once he reached the weathered staircase with its sturdy railing, he was fine. I followed them, wondering what they expected to find. Did they think the ghost Old Ben claimed to have seen had climbed the stairs and slipped into the Nauk? That they would get a last look at Alena? That a ghost would need lights?

The museum doors were unlocked. The lobby was dark and empty, and no light shone in the galleries or along the colonnade. We climbed the stairs, Bernard still leading. Lights blazed in the deserted outer office, illuminating Sloan’s cluttered desk and the pristine sofa area and the black rank of filing cabinets. The door to Agnes’s office was ajar, but no one was in there, no one we could see. “Agnes?” Bernard called. “Sloan?” He opened the door to his own office and peered in, then shut it again and moved to mine, where he hesitated, hand on the knob. If Alena had come back—if her ghost had come back—this was where she would be, wasn’t it? Despite the months I had spent in it, it wasn’t really my office at all.

Bernard opened the door and went in. McManus followed, limping into the dark space, his flesh hand brushing the walls, the Robert Arno prints, the coffee table shells, the cold fin of the desk. Except for them, the room was empty. McManus stood by the big window and looked out at the bay surging restlessly under the cold stars. “Alena loved this view,” he said. “She said she could see whales.”

“There aren’t any whales in the bay,” Bernard said. “The water is far too shallow.”

“She said she could see them.”

“Let’s go,” Bernard said. “There’s nothing here.” But in the lobby, he yawed around the empty front desk, turning away from the doors, driven on as though before an insistent wind into the darkened galleries. Still in single file, we tacked through them, watched by the shadow sculptures waiting for daylight on their plinths.

The door at the end of the colonnade was unlocked. The cascade of LEDs was illuminated, plunging into the cavity in the floor through which the iron staircase helixed. Down we went in a clanging stampede, no one saying a word. The door to Alena’s room was ajar. Bernard laid his palm on its surface and swung it wider, peering in as McManus huffed behind him, pawing the floor like a restless horse.

There was no one in the first room, that lush chamber of rugs and velvet sofas and jade figurines, though a brass lamp in the shape of a mermaid cast a pinkish glow through the patchoulied air. Bernard strode to the far end, then ducked behind a Japanese paper screen etched with cranes and chrysanthemums.

There was another, smaller room behind the screen, also carpeted with red and pink and blue carpets. This one was dominated by a high square bed that looked like something Queen Elizabeth might have slept in: canopied and curtained in lapis and silver, bolstered with silk pillows the size of Saint Bernards. A large wooden cabinet inlaid with dark stars crouched opposite, along with a carved bench with a velvet seat and a big oak writing table with pigeon holes and narrow drawers at which Agnes was perched like a fat black ibis, turning over the pages of a book. She looked up slowly, her pale face shining in the light of an oil lamp of the kind that would have burned whale oil in another century, a faceted goblet topped with a glass globe. Dried tears had left salty tracks on her face. When she spoke, it was to McManus, and it was as though they had picked up in the middle of a conversation they were already having. “What were you doing when she called?” Agnes said. “What was so important you couldn’t be bothered to pick up your phone? Was it whores? Were you in an OxyContin stupor?”

McManus sagged. He sat down on a velvet ottoman at the foot of the bed. “You think it doesn’t make me feel like shit every day?” His hollow tone matched hers. They were like people calling to each other from the bottom of separate wells. “You think I don’t replay that night in my mind, over and over? Leaving my phone on this time, picking it up, hearing her voice? I was working.”

“Laying out your fake bodies,” Agnes said. “Steeping in your false death while Alena was actually, truly dying! And where were you?” she asked Bernard. “Cavorting in the dark with some boy you picked up on the beach? Counting your treasure? You know you never paid her what she was worth!”

Bernard’s voice was a faint scratch on the surface of the air. “Alena was very well compensated,” he said, but his words were swept away by the gale of Agnes’s fury and grief as they left his lips.

“The Nauk couldn’t have existed without Alena. She made it what it was.” Agnes caressed the book on the desk. It was folio-sized, its leather covers etched with the shapes of leaves. Her hair lifted electrically, as though she were amber rubbed on silk. “This is her notebook,” she said. “Her last one.”

Bernard stood by the door, holding on to the fluted jamb. McManus’s eyes were flares in the darkness of his face. Agnes opened the book. “This is the last page she wrote.”

We converged, moving across the rug with its pattern of curling vines and pomegranates. At the top of the heavy paper, Alena had written what seemed to be a title:

Dying Is an Art,
1
,
and two lines from Sylvia Plath:

“Dying / Is an art, like everything else.”

Next came a line from Duchamp: “In fact, the whole world is based on chance . . .”