Alena: A Novel (29 page)

Below that was a diagram, a graph with two axes. The x-axis was labeled “Trajectory” and the y-axis was labeled “Outcome.” On the graph she had drawn a standard bell curve tailing away toward “1 / White” at the left and “10 / Gold” at the right. The top of the curve was marked by a skull and crossbones.

“‘Dying is an art,’” McManus read aloud, slowly, as though each word were a needle in his mouth.

Agnes seemed to be growing bigger, her dress blacker, her face haughtier, her hair more electric. It rose from her head like the feathers of a furious bird. “Have you even heard of Sylvia Plath? She’s that poet who stuck her head in the oven.” The words spread out in ripples through the room, liquid and cold.

“Alena wouldn’t kill herself,” McManus said, as he had said before.

“There was nothing she wouldn’t do,” Agnes said. “You thought you pushed things so far! Alena was willing to go farther than anyone.”

Even in the midst of all that horror, which prickled my skin like snow falling in summer, and the despair that bubbled up through the soupy room, I found the circuits of my skepticism lighting up. Was that what art was about—who was willing to go the farthest? Were risk and chance more valuable than form and feeling? Had abasement utterly displaced transcendence? And if so, had I made a terrible blunder in choosing the direction of my life? But I leaned in even as I was wondering this, my eyes catching in the diagram’s web. There was something undeniably magnetic about the puzzle aspect of art, teasing meaning from marks and clues, the mind ticking away in tandem with the eye like the right- and left-hand parts on a piano. What was
1
/ White
? What was
10
/ Gold
? What was the meaning of that Jolly Roger, hoisted high and speared on the top of the y-axis like a head on a pike?

“What does she mean by the quote about chance?” I asked. “She wasn’t sure if she was going to die or not?”

“She died,” Agnes said. “She died and the crabs ate her body.”

I leaned in closer to the bone-white page. “Trajectory of what?”

Footsteps rang on the iron steps, and Bernard reached out and slammed the book shut. Agnes squawked, and McManus wheeled around, his flower hand a streak of red in the air. Chris Passoa stood in the doorway of the room, which seemed to tilt toward him as though we were on a raft and he had weighted down one end. His eyes slid to the nut-brown cover of the book with its stamped pattern of leaves that looked like they were gusting in the wind. “What’s that?” he asked.

Agnes’s voice clanged like a buoy bell marking the rusted iron caverns of a submerged wreck. “A message from beyond the grave.”

He made his way forward, his feet treading on the pomegranates. He looked tired. Fine bits of sand clung to his jacket, and there was a wisp of dried salty eel grass caught in his hair. He opened the book and turned the pages covered in writing, rows of words in fine black ink, the letters calligraphic, runic, crossed and flourished so that the writing looked almost like Cyrillic, although it wasn’t. There were lists, some of things to do, others of names, and still others of random-seeming objects:

1. cat’s eye

2. eggshell

3. rabbit’s foot

4. burning leaves

There were sharp, vivid ink sketches of seabirds and of oysters and of jeweled necklaces drooping from long headless necks. There were weather reports:
clear sky with SW winds, gusty, seas three feet
. There were menus:

mint soup

rabbit stew

frisée with pears and pistachios

meringues

and lines of poetry: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” If she wrote down private thoughts or recorded events of her life, she didn’t do it here. At last Chris reached the final page, the one we had been looking at. He studied it a long while. Then he raised his head and studied us.

“What does it mean?” he asked. “Dying is an art?”

No one answered him. At last, seeing that none of the three of them would speak, I said, “It’s a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath.”

His pale eyebrows lowered and his jaw braced as though to squeeze the name’s identification out of his memory. “That poet who killed herself?”

I nodded.

He thought about that, then looked at the page again. “What about the graph? What are
trajectory
and
outcome
?”

Again his question was met by silence. I looked at the triumvirate of dumb figures: administrator, collector, artist. They seemed to stand together on one side with their biases and intuitions and practical skills, while here on the other side stood I, the lone art historian. “It looks as though she was working on a new work of art,” I said. “Some artists use chance as an element in their work. Marcel Duchamp was one of the first. You can see the other quote is from him. The idea was to trick yourself out of your own subjectivity, to free yourself from only doing the sort of thing you yourself would think of to do.”

Chris Passoa shook his head. “You’re speaking in riddles again.” He sounded fed up with puzzles and enigmas, with art and artists and their tranced oracles. Maybe with women. He wanted things to be what they seemed. Well, that was his problem.

“It looks as though she was planning some activity—something risky—without knowing how it would turn out. For example, if she swam off the beach in the dark for a certain amount of time—or maybe at a certain angle, a trajectory from the shore—maybe she would be able to swim back, and maybe she wouldn’t.”

He stared at me. “And that would be a work of art?”

“Ideas, processes. Contemporary art often deals in things like that.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

He touched the page, tracing the bell curve with a blunt finger. “Death is in the middle,” he said. “The trajectory goes both ways. Presumably she’d live at either end.”

“Maybe the trajectory at either end is swimming parallel to the shore, and the one in the middle is going straight out.”

“And how would she decide? You’re saying by chance?”

“Maybe she would—I don’t know—pick an angle out of a hat. Or find a sign in nature. If the wind is blowing southeast, I’ll swim southeast. Or if I see a gold bird . . .” If she saw a gold bird, what? The colors were clues, I could see that, but I couldn’t make sense of them. How were gold and white opposites, for instance? And, if the angle from the shore was the issue, wouldn’t the numbers go from 0 to 180?

“Forget the details for a minute,” Chris said. “You’re saying Alena committed suicide—she drowned herself—as a work of art?” His stark words scorched through the room. Agnes made a drowning sound in her throat, and McManus waved his flower hand like a torch. Bernard seemed to recede into himself, his face metallic, his body attenuating like a blade. From the beach, the liquid heartbeat of the blind waves toiled and sighed.

“Maybe,” I said.

“It seems crazy,” he said. “But it fits with the other things you’ve told me. That Alena was interested in extreme forms. People lying down with feathers and knives.”

“What does she know?” McManus said. “She didn’t even know Alena!”

The roiling air of the room seemed to shift, settling here and churning there.

By the desk, Agnes began to cry. She sat up straight and tall in her black dress, earrings sparkling like constellations of bloody stars.

Chris Passoa took the book and tucked it under his arm.

R
ATHER THAN BE DRIVEN HOME
by Chris Passoa, Bernard came back with me to the little house under the dune. We walked together down the sloping path, and when Bernard stumbled I took his arm to steady him, and we went on like that under the brilliant stars. Something felt different—odd—and after a minute I realized that the crickets were gone. There was no urgent chirping to counterpoint the monotonous dirge of the sea.

We went into the kitchen with its Formica table and warped cabinets, its wallpaper decorated with teacups and roosters. I got the gin out of the pantry. We drank it, iced, out of juice glasses, the only light coming from the flickering fluorescent tube over the stove. “It’s over,” I said. “It’s been awful, especially tonight, with McManus, and the video, and Old Ben, and the notebook. But now it’s over.” My voice shrilled like a teakettle in the damp kitchen. Bernard drank his gin as though it were water. “Stop,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can say that helps. I know—I know even though you disagreed . . . How you felt about her.”

He banged his hand on the table. “I said
stop
! You don’t know how I felt about her. How could you?”

My face grew hot, my eyes stupidly wet. “You’re right,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry.” I wiped my eyes. “I just feel so bad for you.” It was true that I felt bad for him, but mostly I just felt bad. I almost wished Alena wasn’t dead. How much worse competing with a ghost than with a living woman!

“Bad for me!” Bernard laughed. “Bad for
me
! I’m the luckiest man in the world.” His face began to color, blood rushing to it until it was dark red like a polluted moon. He said, “Do you want to know why?”

I stared at him—at his cooked lobster face and his sunken bloodshot eyes and his big bony hands tented around his glass. “Why?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Tell me.”

He finished his gin and poured himself a refill. Then he scraped his chair back across the linoleum and got up and began walking around the room, crossing from the stove to the door that led to the laundry yard and back. As he walked, he began to speak, not looking at me, holding his glass in front of him like a candle through a dark hall.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I hated sports. I was that quintessential skinny, faggy boy who couldn’t hit a baseball or shoot a basket, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to do any of that. I loved music and drawing and dressing up. My grandmother used to sew costumes for me. My favorite was an Indian brave, a fringed leather tunic and beaded moccasins and feathers. I used to change into it the minute I got home from school and run all over the house, whooping.

“And then, when I was nine, my parents sent me to summer camp for a month in Maine. It was a primitive place, up near Moosehead Lake, with no electricity or hot water. There were sports every afternoon, and so, in order to avoid baseball, I signed up for archery.” He stopped. The only sound in the room was the buzzing of the fluorescent bulb over the stove. “You can’t hear the ocean from here,” he said in surprise.

“No.”

“So restful. Sometimes I think if I hear one more wave breaking . . .” He started walking again. “Right away I loved archery. I was good at it. Have you heard of instinctive shooting? Our instructor, a young man with a little beard—his name was actually Robin, if you can believe that, or he said it was—taught it to us. Instinctive shooting is about being in harmony with the bow, feeling the flight of the arrow in your blood. It’s about breathing and stillness and not-thinking. He used to come around and place his palm on your chest as you drew to make sure you were breathing correctly. There would be his hand on my bare skin, and I would pull the bow back, aiming not with my eye and brain but with my whole being. And he would make me hold it, drawn like that, the arrow cocked on the taut string, saying, ‘Breathe, Bernard, breathe!’ And then, at last, he would say, ‘Now!’ And I would let my arrow fly. My very first time I hit the gold.” He stopped again, and this time he turned to me with a hard, dark look. “Do you know what gold is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the color of the bull’s-eye in target archery. The center of the target. If you’re scoring points, that’s a ten.” He waited, letting the buzzing silence fill my ears like water. Then he said, “And the outer circle of the target. Do you know what color that is?”

“No.”

“But if you had to guess?”

“White?” I whispered.

“Very good. Excellent. And how many points do you think white might be worth?”

“One?” My lips shaped the word, but my breath could barely push it out.

“One,” he repeated. Then he began to walk again, up and down the room, which felt to me like a sealed capsule, cut off from the world, hurtling through the darkness of a starless universe.

“After that summer,” he said, “I started to compete in tournaments. My mother would drive me to archery competitions all over New England and down into New York and Pennsylvania. For a couple of years I dreamed of being an Olympic archer. But then I hurt my wrist falling off my bike, and by the time it healed, I had lost so much practice.” He drank again, the glass nearly empty so that he had to tilt his head back, exposing the pale skin of his throat. He was right behind my chair, and I could smell him: salt and bitter orange and alcohol. He put out his hand to steady himself, placed it on my shoulder for the barest instant as he regained his balance. Then he sat down across from me again. “And then, when I was in seventh grade, we moved to the Cape year-round. I had always been happier here than in Boston, and even though we moved because my father was sick, I was thrilled. I had always liked sailing, but now I was obsessed with it. I was always out, in almost every weather, from April to October. I had my own boat, named after my dog who had died, the
Caspar
. My first boat.

“My father died my senior year in high school. I went to Middlebury for college, where he had gone, mostly because my mother wanted me to. They didn’t have a real sailing team, though, so I joined the archery team and started shooting again.

“I met Alena during freshman orientation. We were in line for something or other, me and all these other nervous kids, and there she was. She was standing right in front of me in a white dress and a Cleopatra wig and gold lamé
sandals. We started talking. She had seen an exhibition of Joseph Cornell boxes that summer at MoMA, and as it turned out, I had seen it too. That was enough. We became inseparable. Everyone at school was in love with her—or else they scorned and despised her—but she didn’t care about that. As long as they noticed her, as long as they talked about her, that was what she wanted. She turned out to know quite a lot about art, mostly through reading. A lot for an eighteen-year-old, anyway. I did too. My mother had taken me to the MFA and the Gardner when I was younger, and we went to New York frequently—my parents kept an apartment there—so I had spent a lot of time in museums. But I can’t say art was my passion before I met Alena. For her it was a mystery, in the sense of a religious mystery. She knew about all kinds of artists I’d never heard of—Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Allan Kaprow. Joseph Beuys. People who were pushing art in new directions. It was thrilling to me, and learning about it through and with Alena made it twice as thrilling. Sometimes on weekends we would take the bus to New York and go to openings and performances she knew about. I had the key to our apartment, which made it easy.

“When summer came, I invited her to Nauquasset with me. My mother was thrilled I was bringing home a girl. I didn’t tell her Alena was just a friend. Well, of course, she wasn’t—she was much more than that.

“That summer I taught Alena to sail. She was good at it immediately. She had a natural sense for the wind, and she was strong, and nothing scared her. She had studied ballet, so she had balance and agility. But ballet was too old-fashioned for her. Too rigid. She had started making up her own dances, and then she decided she should have props—scarves and umbrellas and papier-mâché masks. She would take things from the beach to drape over herself—seaweed, and strings of shells that she would spend hours tying onto fishing line. She started doing these performances on the beach. I invited my high school friends. She would make her entrance from the water, which meant she had to basically lie down in the shallows with only her face up, trying to look inconspicuous while the audience arrived. And then, when it was time, she would come out of the ocean and dance, leaping and crawling across the sand, draped in dead man’s fingers and jingle shells.

“I had to keep up my archery, for the team. Alena wanted to learn that too, and I tried to teach her, but either I was a bad teacher or she didn’t have a talent for it. Either way, she gave up, but she would hang around when I was practicing in the meadow behind our house, where I had set up a course with bales of straw and a target. I had gotten pretty good again. One day I hit five bull’s-eyes in a row. Alena took the apple she’d been eating and balanced it on her head, and she said,
Let’s play William Tell.
She said it would make a wonderful finale to one of her shows.

“Of course, I said no. It was crazy, no one was that accurate, certainly not me. But she wouldn’t stop talking about it. She kept bringing it up. She teased me, saying I was a coward. Why should I be afraid if she wasn’t? She said it didn’t have to be a real apple. To make her point, she made a big model of an apple out of papier-mâché. It was about two feet high, and she made a kind of stand for it that fit like a crown on her head. She put it on and ran down to the end of the course.
Fraidy cat,
she called, when I wouldn’t shoot. As though we were children. Which, of course, we were.”

The level in the bottle had dropped alarmingly. This time Bernard poured, his hand steady as a hand of ice despite everything he had drunk. He filled both our glasses up to the rim so the viscous liquid curved up over the lip. I bent my head to drink, but he sat down and lifted his to his mouth, not spilling a drop.

“There was something else too,” he said. “A boy. A surfer. I’d met him at the beach, and he’d offered to teach me to surf. He was older than me. He had done a year of community college, then dropped out and gotten a job somewhere and rented a room over the paint store. I said no at first, but then I wished I hadn’t, and when he asked me again, I said yes. He took me surfing, and then we went back to his room, and he taught me about sex.” That was all Bernard said, but I felt I could see it: the crooked room with its stained shag carpet; the lumpy bed, its striped sheets wrinkled and gritty; the yellowed window shade always pulled down to hide the view of the alley; the boom box on the floor with a pile of cassette tapes overflowing a cardboard box. On the bed, one boy arched over the other—Bernard’s slim body braced yet pliant, fierce and alive, his amazed face buried in the musty pillow, his hair a mane for the surfer to grapple in his calloused hands.

“After that, I refused to go to the beach,” Bernard said. “I wouldn’t go into town. I was afraid of running into him, even though of course I was desperate to run into him too. Alena could see something had happened, but I wouldn’t tell her what. I couldn’t talk about it. And then one night, when my mother was out, she got a bottle of vodka and we went up to my room and drank it, and she made me tell her what had happened. She was like that—she was relentless, and seductive, and she placed her hand on my chest and stared into my eyes and said,
Tell me
. And so I told her. How she laughed! I don’t know what I thought would happen—I guess that she would be appalled—but of course she didn’t care. She just couldn’t believe that this beautiful surfer boy wanted me and I was hiding in my room. She tried to make me go see him right then—she wanted us to go into town and find him. She said I was a coward—a
fraidy cat
again—a sissy. I’d been called that before, of course. I said I wasn’t a sissy, and she said I was, I was afraid of my own desires, and I wouldn’t even shoot a two-foot-high papier-mâché apple off her head! She was back to that again.
You have to do
at least
one,
she said. And so I got my equipment, and we walked down to the beach.

“It was a chilly night, but thank God the wind wasn’t blowing. The flags were limp on their poles. She put the apple on her head, and I paced out thirty steps along the beach, and then I turned back and drew the bow. It felt effortless, the way Robin had taught us, though probably it was the vodka. And the rage, of course. I was so angry at Alena, and at the surfer, and, of course, at myself, that I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care if I killed her, it would serve her right. I could almost see it—the arrow flying, burying itself in Alena’s heart, and the stupid apple falling off as her body dropped to the sand with the arrow sticking up, quivering, like a stake in a vampire at the end of a movie.

“But if that happened, what would I do with her body? I decided I would get a tarp from the boat shed and wrap her up tight with some rocks, and take her out in the little boat we kept on the beach, out to the Plunge. That’s a place we used to fish. A kettle. A kind of well in the bottom of the ocean floor.”

“I know what the Plunge is,” I said.

“I would dump her overboard,” Bernard said. “And no one would ever know. So you see, it was all planned out a long time ago.” All the time he was speaking, Bernard had one hand clenched loosely around his glass of gin and the other hand on the Formica surface of the table, moving it slowly, so slowly I couldn’t see it move, but every time I looked, it was closer to mine until at last the tip of his middle finger nudged up against my own. For a moment we sat without speaking, connected like that. Even with just that tiny bit of him touching me, I seemed to feel his whole heavy weight, as though he were a drowning, flailing body I was trying to rescue in deep water.

“Go on,” I said.

“I didn’t miss. I drew the bow, and I loosed the arrow, and it shot right through the center of the apple and split it clean in two.