Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  Beyond the door was a long low-ceilinged room. Old Oriental rugs in shades of garnet and pearl and sapphire stretched across the floors, some with patterns of gardens and others with spirals or paisleys. Low velvet couches sat plush, brushed, draped with scarves, and a square black-and-gold table supported cut-glass candy dishes and crystal vases and amber eggs and ivory figurines and malachite lamps with green silk shades. The walls were covered with what looked like tangles of seaweed, the thick, dark green, rubbery kind they call dead man’s fingers. You would have thought it was the worst kind of décor for a room so close to the ocean, subject to damp and mildew, but the museum’s climate control must have extended here too, for it was cool and dry, not even any cobwebs in the corners or dust on the crystal rims of the dishes or the smooth head of the plump jade monk. Crimson roses bloomed in a bowl, not a petal drooping, as though they had been arranged that very day. And along the wall that faced the bay, sliding glass doors, each like a living canvas, seemed carefully composed: pale green beach grass at the bottom, tossing in the strong breeze; then a wide strip of shifting blue-gray and green-gray that was the ocean; and above that, the robin’s-egg blue of the sky stippled with clouds. The air was still, but the sound of the ocean was like a living thing in the room: the long, low gathering of the swell; then the pause, like a suspended breath; and at last, after the aching delay, the falling off, the tumbling, the heaving collapse of the mercurial wave, foaming white onto the steadfast shore.

  “It’s a beautiful room, isn’t it?” Agnes said. Again she fixed me with those sharp eyes, standing lightly like a big black bird on the glowing carpet, swinging her galaxy of keys.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Agnes began to glide around the room, her fingers drifting down to straighten a violet glass dish that didn’t need straightening, to pluck a paling petal from a rose in the bowl, to graze the bald head of the jade monk with her fingertips. “Have you ever seen a room like this?” she asked. “Alena had extraordinary taste, didn’t she? She’d walk through a market in Istanbul or Tangier, and she’d see the one thing worth having.” She reached up and touched her own dangling earring, shards of ruby-colored pendants arrayed in tapering rows. “She brought these back from Malta for me,” she said. “I used to fill my holes with studs and rusty safety pins. Then Alena said, ‘Agnes, why do you want to wear all that junk? Aren’t the holes themselves more beautiful than that fistful of cheap hardware?’ And she gave me these. ‘Better one perfect thing,’ she would say, ‘than a hundred ordinary ones!’ And then she would laugh, because one perfect thing was never enough for her. She always wanted ten perfect things—a hundred—why not? When they called out to her the way they did, as though begging her to choose them. ‘Aggie,’ she used to say, ‘it’s like they have voices only I can hear. They cry out to me like lost souls. Who am I to turn them away?’ It was the same when we were kids at Woolworth’s and she’d come home with the best nail polish colors, the best lipsticks, hidden inside her shirt. ‘They were calling out to me,’ she’d say. ‘I couldn’t let them languish!’ No one ever caught her. She was always special, even then. She had a kind of glow that made you want to be near her. People were always giving her gifts—men were. Even when she was twelve. Women too. Once we were walking down the street and a woman in a fur coat gave her a diamond clip. Out of the blue! This will look pretty in your beautiful hair, the woman said. And it did. Alena wore it for a few days and then, when she got tired of it, she gave it to me.”

  All the time she spoke, Agnes kept her eyes fixed on my face, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. Out the glass doors, the ocean rose and fell—the same ocean you could see from upstairs or outside, but it looked different here, darker and wilder, as though somehow Alena’s spirit was touching everything, even the view, intensifying it, perfecting it—as though things themselves could be changed merely by being chosen.

  “I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

  I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

  “I remember the last time we were together in this room,” Agnes said. “Just before Venice. She was looking forward to the trip. She loved to travel, loved to dress up, to see and be seen. It was extraordinary that she stayed in Nauquasset as long as she did. She could have gone anywhere: New York, London, Zurich. But she stayed. She used to say, Where else could I have freedom like this? Where else could I answer to no one? Of course, nominally she answered to Bernard, and to the board. But Bernard never said no, and the board did whatever he told them to. And she loved the ocean! She swam like a fish, she could have swum to the Vineyard and back if she wanted to. And she sailed all the time, she was a wonderful sailor. Even the wind does my bidding, Aggie, she used to say.”

  “Yes,” I said. I could picture it: Alena perched like a Nereid on a white boat, sheet in one hand and rudder in the other, her long ivory limbs impervious to the sun.

  “You can almost see her, can’t you—here in these rooms?” Agnes said. “I can. I can see her sitting just there, on the sofa, her legs tucked under her, talking to me that last night. The night I was telling you about.”

  I could, I could see it too. Alena sitting there, just as Agnes described.

  “It was very late. I had finished her packing for her, even though she wasn’t leaving for another two days. I was taking a trip too, to visit my mother who was ill, and I had to leave before she did. But I always did her packing. It was good fortune that our trips overlapped, that if I had to be away, it would be mostly when she was too. I didn’t have to worry she would need something and I wouldn’t be there.

  “Alena had just come back from a swim. She liked to swim at night off the beach here, she knew the tides and the currents. It’s a quiet stretch, no one ever bothered her. And then she’d come back up to shower and dress. Sometimes she’d sleep here if she didn’t feel like going home.”

  I wondered where home was, where Alena had lived, what had happened to her house. I wondered what had happened to Agnes’s mother, whether she had gotten well.

  “She sat right there,” Agnes repeated. “Her hair was wet, a dark fountain, and her skin glowed. She was talking about Venice. ‘Every year it gets duller, Aggie,’ she said. ‘The art world. More shiny and obvious. Oh, the artists are all so clever—they’d fuck with their brains if they could!’ She liked to say that—fuck with their brains—it made her laugh. She’d had enough of the mind, it was the body that interested her. The art she loved—the artists she loved—were the artists of the body. Marina , Catherine Opie, Carolee Schneemann. Art should be felt in the gut, she said. Art should scare you. It should take your breath—literally—away.”

  I put my hand to my chest. My own breathing was coming and going, fast and shallow as though I had a fever. I thought of Marina lying still as a viewer cut her with a knife and licked the blood; of Catherine Opie inscribing her wish on her body in scars; of Carolee Schneemann choreographing a dance with naked bodies and raw meat. I was starting to feel uncomfortably warm. The room was crowded with objects: shiny, heavy, blind forms that seemed to me suddenly like living things turned to stone. I fanned my face with my hand, listening to the waves. Agnes was talking, her voice droning like a hornet. I could hear everything she said, but the words seemed to float into my mind from a great distance. “The last show had just closed,” she said. “Dessa Michaels, the dissection pieces. It got a lot of attention, Alena should have been pleased. But she had decided it was too distanced. Too abstracted. The thing itself was eclipsed, she said. Sh
e said that a lot about art that didn’t live up to her standards—The thing itself is eclipsed! She wanted to strip it bare, whatever it was. Like staring into the sun, or looking at the naked face of God! That was what she wanted—art so potent it would make the heart stop. I wish I could die from art, she used to say. Die from art! The ultimate consummation.”

  She paused. The room buzzed with her words, my ears rang with them. I needed to sit down.

  “You look pale,” Agnes said, watching from her height as I lowered myself onto the velvet sofa.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Probably you’re tired. You get faint, maybe you’re anemic. You should make sure you get enough rest.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Does talking about art like that upset you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She sat down beside me. “Do you like it too, then? Might we see some shows about the body from you?” The derision in her voice was unmistakable.

  “I like all kinds of art.”

  Heat shimmered off her in waves as if from pavement on a summer afternoon. “We sat right here,” she said. “She asked me to brush her hair. I always used to brush Alena’s hair, and braid it or put it up, from when we were kids. She had beautiful hair, thick and black and slippery as obsidian. Volcanic glass. I could French braid it by touch in the dark. So I did. I brushed it out for her, and she said, ‘Aggie, I don’t even know why I’m going. Maybe I’ll just change my mind and stay.’

  “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Stay. Why should you go? What’s there that’s better than what you have here?’ I meant it too. Art-world celebrities, super-rich collectors, jealous curators, everybody trying to look more successful than they were. Why did she need that? Why did she want it?

  “But she always went, she was restless, that was part of who she was. But she always came back.” The ocean was restless too, surging forward and falling back, always clamoring for the shore but unable to possess it, like a ghost lover whose arms drift through the body of the beloved.

  Always came back, Agnes said. But not this time. Did Agnes decline to believe that? Did she refuse, like the mother of a soldier reported missing in action, to look death in the face? Was that why she kept the room like this, immaculate? Did she believe Alena would return any day—any hour—and the Nauk would be ready, waiting for her like a bridegroom? “It’s been two years,” I said, or thought I said, but my syllables, like motes of dust, floated away and disappeared.

  Agnes leaned close. “I’m telling you this because you need to understand.” Her words spiraled down through my ear, their tiny vibrations reverberating like thunder in the dark. “You’re only temporary here.”

  13.

  ONE MORNING I WOKE UP thinking of Celia Cowry, whose small ceramic sculptures Bernard and I had remembered at the same moment in Venice. An African-American artist, she often used the forms of seashells, glazed in the hues of skin: pinkish white, coffee brown, clay red, ochre, golden, ebony. Some of them were delicate, some cruder and heavier. Some glowed pristinely, while others seemed encrusted with barnacles and mud. She showed in New York, and her work had been included in group exhibitions in half a dozen contemporary art museums across the country, but as far as I knew, she’d never had a solo museum show. And she lived on the Cape, Bernard had said. Maybe she would be the right artist to relaunch the Nauk. The local connection would be useful, attracting press attention and a crowd at the opening: Cape buzz. She was unquestionably deserving of a larger audience. I remembered the insistent pull of her work, posed on square columns arrayed around a sunny upstairs room in a Chelsea gallery.

  One piece in particular had stayed with me, a sculptural diptych of scallop shells side by side, one pink, the other a coppery brown, both of them speckled with tiny holes. The two shells were almost touching at the edges of their flared bases, and the narrow gap that separated them was tense and electric. They seemed to ache toward each other, fluted ridges leaning inward like the wake of two boats on convergent paths, so that you could imagine the rocking, heaving waves that would result when the two sets crossed. The piece was called Parents. The burn in my chest when I saw it stayed with me for a long time. It rekindled when I read a review of another show of hers in Sculpture magazine accompanied by a photo of five or six similar pairings—the vacant bellies of oysters, the private spirals of snails, the spiny and skull-like conchs. The work was about identity, which could help attract attention, but it was subtle and complicated. I wouldn’t be choosing it because of its content, but I knew that content would provide a useful hook for reviewers. Finding her phone number in an old telephone directory in a kitchen drawer, I called her and arranged for a studio visit the next day.

  Bernard was in New York, so I asked Roald to drive me. “How are you getting along?” he asked as we bumped through the silvery gates with their orderly menagerie and sped into the hot, florid morning. Haow-ahh yoo gettin ah-lah-ng.

  “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Roald’s truck was old, with cracked vinyl seats, roll-down windows, a radio but no CD player. Sand had collected in the grooves of the rubber floor mats and formed pale drifts in the corners of the foot wells. It had a standard transmission, so he had to keep his left hand on the steering wheel much of the time; I tried not to look at the place where his finger wasn’t. The cab smelled musty, but the breeze through the open windows was fresh. We passed a doughnut shop, an ice cream shop, a bait and tackle shop, their parking lots crowded with muddy pickups and simmering SUVs. “Are you finding things to be what you expected?”

  “It was hard to know what to expect.” He nodded as though what I had said meant something. “Everyone has been very helpful. Of course, it must be strange for them, having me here. No one could blame them for finding it an adjustment.” I watched his face out of the corner of my sunglasses.

  “There had to be a new curator sometime,” he said. “They had to expect that.”

  Noo-ah kyoo-ray-toah.

  “Well, but it was so sudden. And everyone was so used to Alena.” I tried to say the name casually, naturally, but although I did not actually stumble over the syllables, they came out louder than the rest of the sentence: a blurt, a cough, like a pelican disgorging a fish.

  Roald glanced over at me, a flash of those blue-green eyes with the cloudy swirl in them, a dark vein in a pure crystal. “It’s good to have new blood,” he said. “It’s good the Nauk will open again. What’s the point of an empty museum? The place should have reopened long before now.”

  We had entered the town, and Roald was forced to slow as we were caught in the web of high-summer tourist traffic, everyone wanting lunch or T-shirts or sunscreen or tequila. Rows of towheaded children dressed in pink trailing after their salon-blond mothers, athletic-looking men in flip-flops talking on cell phones, bronzed and wrinkled old women in T-shirt dresses whistling to dogs. “Do you think they’ll ever find her body?” I asked.

  In front of us, a yellow VW bug stopped short, the driver calling out the window to some teenagers on the opposite sidewalk, something about fishing, drinks, the marina. Roald pressed the heel of his hand to the horn. “How should I know,” he said, and his thumb found the empty spot above his knuckle.

  The small house stood at the end of a bumpy driveway. We were inland now, the ocean neither visible nor audible from this patch of lawn surrounded by orange daylilies, purple roses of Sharon, and a ragged clump of butterfly bush with actual butterflies on it: small yellow ones and delicate white ones and a few lavender blue ones—dozens of butterflies clinging to the slender branches and the purple flower clusters. Getting out of the truck, I moved softly across the lawn, not wanting to disturb them as they sat so quietly, some with their wings open and others with their wings pressed together like praying hands.

  “Nice,” Roald said loudly, seeing where I was looking, then reaching across the long s
eat to slam my door. It was only then, my heart set fluttering like a cloud of butterflies itself, although the creatures remained absolutely still, that I understand that this was art. “Thought they were real, didja?” Roald said.

  “I guess she fooled me,” I said.

  “Guess she did. I’ll be back at noon.” Waving, he bounced the truck back down the driveway, leaving me alone.

  The stoop was dark, damp, concrete, shaded by a corrugated plastic overhang festooned with egg-sac-studded cobwebs. I rang the bell and a minute passed, then another minute. Invisible sparrows twittered behind me in the hot grass. The butterfly bush with its false cloud of butterflies glowed hotly in the sunshine. I wondered what she had made them out of, those perfect replicas. Or perhaps they were preserved specimens she had caught, or bought, and affixed with wire or glue to her living bush. I rang again.

  Unless the bush, too, was artificial.

  Growing anxious, I held my thumb to the bell a long time. At last I heard shuffling footsteps, the distant rattling of dishes, a cat meowing. The door rasped open.

  Celia Cowry was a small, plumpish woman in a bright pink muumuu and green silk Chinese slippers. She had smooth toffee-colored skin, and her eyes glowed almost golden under her thin, arched, crow-black brows. “Come in,” she said. “I was dreaming about this half the night! We had such a nice visit in my dream.” She laughed as she led me into the musty hall. “In my dream you were taller, though. And your hair was darker.”

  I followed her into the studio, which was the main room of the house, what once would have been an open-plan living room/dining room. A shabby paint-spattered couch and kilim rug under a coffee table provided a sitting area, but the rest of the space was given over to a big worktable, a wheel, open shelves lined with jars of tools and tubes of glue and paint, with cleansers and brushes and labeled glazes, and with sculptures in every stage of making: damp cloths shrouding what I presumed were works in progress, shapes formed in clay waiting to be fired, as well as finished pieces. More finished pieces sat on a long table pushed up against the sliding glass door, shell sculptures mostly, peach and pink, coffee and cocoa, bone and ochre and terra-cotta red. A large sculpture of a horseshoe crab caught my eye. Brown and green and black, hunched as though exhausted, it looked like the last survivor of a dead planet. Beyond the glass doors, a big brick wood-fired kiln sprawled on the patchy grass. I moved toward the table of shells. “Are these new?”