Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  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, an
d 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.

  10.

  BERNARD’S HOUSE was an airy nineteenth-century shingled barn that had been cleverly converted with the help of a new wing of bedrooms along one side and a broad deck overlooking the bay. In the high white living room, Cindy Sherman film stills hung in a row over the fireplace. Glenn Ligon’s smudged words dripped illegibly across a large canvas near the door, and the wall opposite the deck was penciled with the fine regular lines of a Sol LeWitt. In one corner, thousands of Félix Gonzáles-Torres candies in ice-blue wrappers lay twinkling in the light of the black glass Fred Wilson chandelier. Voices and laughter came from the deck, but I found myself going the other way, slipping through a door into a hall off which opened a powder room, a butler’s pantry, a gleaming laundry, and a large tiled mudroom, crowded but neat. A row of plaid jackets and waterproof slickers hung on hooks, duck boots and rain boots were lined up on a shelf, and there were four or five fishing rods, several tackle boxes, two pairs of binoculars (one large, one pocket-sized), some tennis rackets, and three black unstrung crossbows standing in a corner like forgotten Giacomettis.

  In the hallway itself, framed photographs hung on the wall, some old black-and-whites of long-ago brides and babies and family groups, others of Bernard at various ages, engaged in various vigorous outdoor activities: holding up an enormous fish; drawing a bow on an archery range; sailing. I was going down the row looking at them when Barbara bustled through, wearing not an evening gown but rather a plain blue skirt and sweater. “Hello!” she said.

  “What amazing photographs,” I said. What I meant was how startling it was to see Bernard so young, though it was true that they were good pictures.

  She touched a finger to a photo of Bernard when he was probably barely a teenager, grinning and sunburned, a medal on a blue ribbon around his neck. He had been a skinny boy, his hair brown and shaggy, braces on his teeth. The field he stood in was so green—green as Easter grass—it looked like you could eat it. “I took that one,” Barbara said. “At the state archery championships in Nenameseck. I used to take a lot of pictures.”

  I pointed to one of the sailing photographs, taken when Bernard must have been about twenty. Lean and brown, bare-chested, a blue captain’s hat perched on his head, he squinted into the wind with the faraway look of a young Greek sailing off to Troy. “That’s beautiful.”

  “That’s not one of mine. Alena took the sailing ones. That was the first summer she spent here, after Bernie’s freshman year at Middlebury. Well, and hers too, of course.”

  “That’s where they met?”

  “Yes.”

  I scanned down the row, a sudden clamminess palpable in the air. I could see now that the sailing pictures had a similar look, full of dramatic shadows and odd angles, so that the subject (Bernard) seemed magnetized in place on a shifting plane. The photographs captured him looking not directly into the camera, as in the picture Barbara had taken, but obliquely, his gaze suggesting a world beyond the frame, from which the viewer was excluded. “She was talented,” I said.

  “Yes. At a lot of things. Sailing, swimming. She studied ballet. She used to do these performance things down on the beach, very strange, but Bernie said they were good.” We stood together, listening to the laughter from the deck that drifted toward us like the laughter from some ghostly ship away over the water, and to the waves rolling, and then to the crunch of a car approaching along the oyster-shell drive, some last guest arriving. Or perhaps—the thought irradiated me—perhaps it was Alena herself arriving! Perhaps she had had enough of the company of the dead and was returning to claim her place, was putting in a surprise appearance like a guest star gracing the set of a plodding comedy. Perhaps, as I had half suspected, she had never died at all! Mad as it was, it seemed to me that Barbara had the same apprehension. She froze, listening, as the car came to a halt and the engine quieted. The door slammed with a metallic shudder, and then a man’s voice called, “Hey! Where’dya want the ice?”

  Barbara turned up the wattage on her hostess’s smile. “And you?” she asked brightly. “What are your hobbies?”

  Dinner was served on the deck at an oval table arrayed with plain white plates, heavy silverware, dishes of seasoned almonds, votive candles. It was an informal party. In the sleeveless black shift I had worn to every occasion in Europe I was overdressed and, despite the discreet heaters that warmed the air as the temperature dropped, chilly. The sun hung, red as a Joan Miró sun, on the horizon, laced by ragged salmon clouds that pinkened and thinned as the flushed disc slid downward. Overhead, the dome of the sky lit up almost turquoise, then faded to lavender, topaz, violet-gray. A plump, balding man in cranberry t
rousers—Barbara’s husband, Tom—stood near me as the dark sea took its first bite of the blushing orb. “Watch,” he said. “Watch for the green flash.”

  “Flash?”

  “A flash of green light. Just when the sun disappears.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “No. But it’s a proven astronomical fact.”

  Obediently I watched as the crown of light was swallowed, sublimely, by the hungry sea. All the guests watched, standing at ceremonial attention with their champagne flutes lifted as the final sliver was devoured, the encrimsoned clouds sagging and shredding, as though it were a performance prepared for their pleasure by a necromancing impresario.

  “Did you see it?” Barbara’s husband demanded. “Did you see the flash?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “No. Well, the atmospheric conditions here aren’t ideal.”

  “Too much moisture in the air.” This pronouncement was made by a big, bullet-headed man in a black pullover, his blond-white hair shorn as close as an astronaut’s. “It’s easier to see in a drier climate.”

  “Hello, Chris,” Barbara’s husband said. “Have you met the Nauk’s new curator?” We shook hands. “Chris is a good person to know,” Tom advised. “He’s the local chief of police.”

  “Oh! How impressive!” I was starting to feel the champagne, the golden bubbles shimmying through me, leavening my mood, loosening my limbs.

  “Of a miniature police force,” the chief said mildly.

  “I think I had one of those when I was a child. It came with a miniature police station you could fold up and carry around by a handle.”

  “Very convenient,” Chris Passoa said. “Especially if you could inflate them in a moment of need.”

  “By dropping them in water, perhaps,” I suggested. “Like sea monkeys.” Maybe because we had police chiefs in LaFreniere, Chris Passoa, unlike the other guests, seemed like someone it was possible to talk to.