Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  “That’s right.” She seemed to relax slightly. “The dining room, near the Mapplethorpe.” Then she let out a little cry and exclaimed, “Flowers!” Her eyes, still looking at the nurse, were full of longing. “She brought me flowers when she came, didn’t she, Hannah?”

  “Yes, Mrs. S. Sometimes she did.”

  “Always! I told her it was coals to Newcastle, but she said you could never have too many flowers. I don’t argue with that.” I made a mental note to bring flowers the next time I came, though I hoped there might not be a next time. Still, she was on the board.

  “The roses are beautiful,” I said, nodding in the direction of a large vase on a table near the window, through which the ocean was visible in the distance, a shifting sliver of blue.

  The old lady ignored my vacuous remark, but she stared at me for a long moment, her wrinkled face smoothing slightly like a pool when the wind dies down. “So, the Nauk will reopen,” she said. “It’s about time. We didn’t work as hard as we did to see it languish up there on the cliff, waiting for the sea to take it. People said we were fools to build on that site. Storms, erosion, global warming. Every year the dunes recede, except, of course, for the years when they accrete. My family has lived here for two hundred years, and it’s always been like that. The land comes and goes, the sea threatens. We decided to take our chances, Bernard and I. Why not? Nothing lasts forever.” Her gaze bored into me, sharp and hawklike. “What kind of show are you thinking of? After all this time, you’ll want to make a splash.”

  I told her I wasn’t sure yet, but that I had thought of Celia Cowry.

  “Celia Cowry!” She set her cup down, clattering it dangerously into its gold-rimmed saucer. “Celia Cowry wouldn’t make a splash if you dropped her out of a helicopter into the bay!”

  I set my own teacup down too, very carefully, not making a sound or a ripple, then sat up straight on the edge of my velvet chair. “I think her work is quite interesting,” I said. “How she instrumentalizes local forms—seashells—to address political and social issues. The way she explores replication, figuration—how art mimics and does not mimic life. And of course, it’s quite beautiful.”

  “Beautiful!” she cried. “You’d be better off with ugly!”

  I blinked at that—at the old toad on the sofa advocating ugliness. I gestured around the room at the lovely objects dazzling from every surface. “You have an eye for beauty,” I said.

  She tipped her squat, quivering body in my direction. “A head for business, that’s what I suggest you cultivate!” she said. “For the museum business. That’s what Alena had, even when she was fresh from the egg.” Her face went as gray as her shawl as she made this speech and she coughed, a low choking cough deep in her chest.

  “Aunt Willa,” Barbara cried, moving toward her as she shut her eyes, bracing herself with her hand on the tea table. “Are you all right?”

  The nurse bustled over, flourishing an inhaler. “You sit back now, Mrs. S,” she said. “You just sit still a moment.” She slipped the plastic mouthpiece between the thin painted lips and depressed the canister.

  The old lady gasped and sat back, blinking and wheezing.

  “She’ll be all right in a minute,” the nurse said. “No matter what I say, she goes and gets herself worked up.”

  “Well, we’ll be on our way,” Barbara said, gathering her purse. “It was good to see you Aunt Willa.”

  The old lady sat passively as Barbara kissed her cheek, leaving a pink mark on the gray skin. Then she put out her hand with its ballast of rings and clutched Barbara’s arm, holding her there. “I thought you were bringing Alena,” she said.

  Barbara glanced at the nurse, who shook her head, disowning responsibility. “Not today,” she said.

  “I always feel better when I see Alena,” the old lady said plaintively. “So full of life, that one! It cheers an old lady up.” Her eyes, trailing across the room, landed on me, and she started. “Who are you?” she asked.

  There was a silence as the room waited for my answer. I felt light-headed, all the glittering surfaces—teacups and polished tables and letter knives and glass doorknobs—like little suns that would blind me if I looked too long.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  We went through the heavy door. The dogs waiting with their noses to the cracked car windows barked ecstatically.

  “I’m so sorry,” Barbara said, whether to them or me I couldn’t tell.

  “That’s all right,” I said stiffly. “I know I’m not Alena.”

  “That’s not such a bad thing, you know.” She stroked Dolly’s silky muzzle. “I think it’s lovely you’re considering Celia Cowry. I’ve always liked those pretty shells.”

  Back at the Nauk, Barbara dropped me at the bottom of the lane. As I watched the station wagon disappear over the hill, a numb, uneasy feeling swamped me. It felt like homesickness, but homesickness for what? Not for LaFreniere with its long straight roads through the silent corn, its fish boil Fridays, its gravel parking lots behind taverns littered with empty Old Style cans. Not for my New York student days, sharing a smelly one-bedroom facing the airshaft. Not for working for Louise.

  The gates were shut but not locked, and as always my heart lifted at the sight of them: the wood silvered by time and weather, the neat rows of living creatures lovingly carved, so many of them that each time I looked at the gate I noticed one I hadn’t noticed before. Today my eye caught a fox, its pointed nose raised as though catching a scent, its bushy tail electric with the joy of being a fox. It seemed to look up at me, steady and bright-eyed and sly. I ran my hand along the smooth wood, wondering as I had so often wondered before at the way a dead substance like wood or clay, cardboard or steel or stone, having been touched by the artist’s hand, became vital, animated, quick. It was the opposite of what King Midas did, the reverse of the Gorgon’s gaze. I’d never understood the idea one heard so often that art—as opposed to life—was eternal. Didn’t paint fade, wood crack, canvas buckle, photographic negatives turn brittle and decay? Ask any conservator and they’d tell you just how fragile a work of art was. Ask the exhibition installers in their white archival gloves, the insurers with their checkbooks, the watchful uniformed guards. Already time was working on this gate, splintering the edges. The whiskers of the rabbit and the smallest tentacles of the jellyfish were beginning to wear away. No, it wasn’t art that was eternal, but nature, ever resourceful, always rising out of the ashes. The implacable ocean, the tireless wind. The shifting, gritty, penetrating sand.

  Poison ivy gleamed on the side of the road as I pushed through the fence and walked up the lane past the wild roses and the ripening beach plums and the heather teeming with field mice and ticks. In the mown grassy space where the museum staff parked, an unfamiliar car was pulled in next to Agnes’s big Dodge sedan. As I climbed the stairs to the offices, rather than the usual sepulchral quiet, I heard voices, laughter, something being poured. A man’s voice was speaking loudly, women’s voices chiming in. My first thought was that Bernard had come back early, but even as I hurried up the steps, I knew that wasn’t it. The voice, though clearly male, was pitched too high. It was bright and unfamiliar, its words tumbling into the air like fizzy liquid into a glass.

  In the moment before they saw me, I took in the scene. Agnes and Sloan and Jake sat on the low couches, glasses in their hands, their faces tilted toward a man who sat in a low chair with two big wheels like a Roman chariot: a tanned, handsome, crooked man with black hair and blue eyes and a big silver watch glinting on the strong wrist of the hand that held his glass. He had no left arm, and in another moment I saw that he didn’t have a right leg either—at least not beyond a short stump around which his trousers were sewn shut. Despite this, he seemed physically very at ease as he leaned toward Agnes, saying something that obviously pleased her. Her pale face was a shade less pale than usual. She sank back against the cushions, smiling, ba
lancing her glass on her chest with her crimson claws. On his other side, Sloan wore an intent expression on her little pointed face, reminding me of the carved fox on the gate at the bottom of the lane. Her hand rested on the shiny wheel of the chair, close to the stump, and as I watched, I saw her finger stretch toward it, possibly grazing the cloth of his pants, though her eyes were directed at Jake, who was examining the bottle they were pouring from. Squat and heavy, it held a pale greenish liquid that might have been chartreuse or absinthe, both drinks I only knew of from reading. Papers were spread on the coffee table. Frozen in the doorway, I thought perhaps I could disappear back downstairs before anyone noticed me. But as I began to turn, the quick, restless eyes of the stranger found me, and he smiled. He had strong teeth, like a movie star or a shark. “Don’t run away,” he said. “I bet I know who you are: Bernard’s new pet.”

  As the others turned, the mood turned too, dimming and cooling, although out the window the noon sky remained as bright as a robin’s egg. Agnes sat up, straightened her splayed legs in their black fishnets, neatened the papers and turned them upside down. “I thought you were visiting Mrs. Somerset.”

  “I was,” I said. “I did.” It occurred to me that when Alena had made such pilgrimages, they had lasted much longer. All day, perhaps. No need for the staff to hurry back to their desks, then. Sloan set her glass down, and Jake nodded an embarrassed greeting, not meeting my eye. But it was hard to look anywhere but at the man in the chair: his wide torso in its pressed gray and purple shirt, a weird, off-kilter symmetry in the missing arm and the opposite missing leg. The broad, tanned, handsome face that seemed almost to belong to some other body.

  “This is Morgan McManus,” Agnes said. “He just stopped in.”

  McManus—to whom Alena had made a promise.

  “Oh,” I said. “Don’t let me . . . I have some work.” I blushed. It was so obvious I was lying.

  “Not yet,” McManus protested. “Sit down at least for a minute.” He had to put his glass down on the table to shake my hand. His grip was cool. His fingers curled, eel-like, around mine. “So you’re the new boss,” he said. “Agnes, pour the new boss a drink, she looks skittish. Don’t look that way, I’m an old friend of the Nauk. I love the place! A little dream museum out on the rim of the world. Bernard’s dream, of course, but here we are all living in it.”

  Jake moved over to make room on the couch. Sloan tossed her head so that her hair fluttered in the light. Agnes poured, handed me a glass.

  Despite his disfigurement, Morgan McManus held himself as though he wanted to be looked at—as though he knew what a sight he was with his handsome face, his crooked smile, and his differently crooked body, attractive and repulsive at once, like both poles of a magnet. Electricity seemed to pulse from him, filling the room with its crackling scent. My eyes were drawn toward the parts of him that weren’t there, unable to absorb the wrongness of a shoulder with no arm, a few inches of thigh that stopped short like a bridge no one had bothered to finish building. He raised his glass toward mine. “So,” he said, “how did you find the old toad?”

  I blushed again, because hadn’t I too thought of her as a toad? Somehow he had unzipped my mind and seen inside. “A little confused, but fine.”

  “Alena used to say she was like that person in Greek mythology who asked for eternal life and ended up shriveled into a grasshopper. Better off dead, but forgot how to die!” He laughed, showing those teeth. “Of course, some people would say the same about me.”

  Agnes made a noise in her throat like a suppressed giggle. “Stop it. You’re shocking the new boss.”

  “She’s not shocked. Are you?” McManus shifted in his chair, leaning forward so far I was afraid he would topple out. His bright eyes probed me.

  I sat up straighter, tossed my hair over my shoulder. “I thought she looked very well for someone so old.”

  “Well said! And what about the cowlike sister? Have you seen her cow palace with its daisies and clover, where she chews her cud?”

  I looked away. I didn’t like him talking about Barbara like that, but I found that his words rang a bell in me: a small, clear, silver bell. I wondered what they had said about me before I came in. “Yes. I’ve had the opportunity of enjoying every category and variation of floral upholstery. Not to mention wallpaper, rugs, tea services.” I lifted my glass to my lips and took the cool viscous liquid into my mouth. It tasted bitter, vegetal, like the husks of walnuts. Sloan giggled, whether at what I’d said or at something else I couldn’t tell. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see if her fingers touched the stump or just hovered near it. What would it be like to be touched on a place that wasn’t supposed to exist?

  “It’s hard to think of them coming from the same parents,” McManus said. “He’s the cuckoo. The changeling.” He nodded at my glass. “Drink up.”

  I took another gulp. It burned, like something a medieval herbalist might prescribe to flush out demons. “They seem very attached to each other,” I said. “Despite their differences. Of course, I didn’t know them before.” Before this month, I meant; before I came to Nauquasset. But I thought they must all be thinking that I meant before Alena—before Alena drowned—as though her death were the one still center around which everything turned.

  “Alena was the changeling,” Agnes said. “Alena was the one the fairies left.”

  “To drive the humans wild,” McManus said.

  I lifted my glass and let my tongue lick up the last drops. Alena was a changeling. Alena drove the humans wild. Her name ran through my head as though on a droning loop. To make it go away I said to McManus, “Do you mean you? Did she drive you wild?”

  When he smiled, the crookedness of his face grew more apparent, one half lifting higher than the other like an animist mask, which had the disconcerting effect of making him look handsomer. He gestured to his body. “I’m only half human,” he said.

  “Half wild, then.” I stared at him openly, the warmth of the alcohol rippling through me in pleasant wavelets.

  “Morgan is half wild all the time,” Sloan said, and leaned into him, her hair falling across his chest.

  “Jake,” McManus said, “pour the new boss another drink.”

  Jake refilled my glass and topped off the others as well.

  “Not for me,” Agnes said. “I have work.” She stood and strode with superb dignity to her office, impersonating in her stiffness the matron of a boarding school, or an old-fashioned English housekeeper, her back straight, her torpedo breasts leading the way.

  McManus said, “Agnes says you’re reopening Labor Day weekend.”

  “I hope so. Nothing’s settled yet.”

  “You know Alena promised me a show.”

  The alcohol burned less now when I drank. I supposed I must be getting used to it, the way one got used to anything new: the taxidermied goat wearing a tire around its middle, portraits of dollar bills and electric chairs, painting on the body with sunburn or with scars. “I heard it had been discussed.”

  He picked the papers up and rattled them. “We were looking at the plans,” he said. “Of course, things are different now. I understand that. My work has changed too.” He shuffled the papers in his one hand, looking for the ones he wanted. I could see mock-ups of the galleries, xeroxed blueprints, printouts of what looked like photographs of human limbs. “I’d love to show you what I’m working on.” He wheeled closer to the table and fanned the papers out, forcing Sloan to sit back. I pulled my own chair up and glanced reluctantly through the pixelated images. They weren’t, though, like the photos Sloan had shown me on her phone, which came as a relief. There was a waxy yellow arm, a foot mottled red and blue, a cocoa-brown torso from the navel to neck, and another arm, this one shark-skin black. Still, there was something about them. They looked dead, but at the same time they seemed to vibrate darkly, as though something living throbbed, trapped inside their deadnes
s. Perhaps it was the alcohol.

  “These are casts,” he said. “Usually they lie on the floor of an installation, though occasionally I’ve shown them on their own.”

  “Interesting.” I blinked, trying to see more clearly. They were ugly pieces, bland and cold and smooth. They made my stomach flutter. I didn’t want to look at them. “What are they made of?”

  “A lot of them are plastic. I have a fabricator I work with. Some, though, I make myself out of wood, or wax. Styrofoam that I coat and paint.”

  “I like the wax ones best,” Sloan said. “They look like they want you to squeeze them.”

  McManus leaned forward. “You really have to see them in context,” he said lightly, touching my leg.

  Startled, I jolted back, banging my knee on the table. “Sorry,” I said.

  McManus smiled, the one side of his face rising, the other remaining still. “Maybe you could come by my studio sometime.”

  I pulled the shards of my dignity together. “I’m afraid my mobility is limited at the moment. I don’t have a car.”

  He leaned back in the chair, his hips slipping forward so that the end of his stump slid over the edge of the seat, the sewn seam twitching. “I’ll pick you up,” he said.

  Alone in my office, the door shut, I stood by the enormous window and dialed Bernard. The sky, so blue an hour earlier, was pale with haze.

  “Cara,” he said. “How are you? How are things in that dimple on the sea nymph’s elbow?” He sounded relaxed, ebullient, his voice projecting a brightness I hadn’t seen in person. Through the phone I could hear voices, rumblings, chinkings. Ice rattling, laughter. “Wait,” he said, “I’ll just go outside.” I listened to the sounds shift, the roar of voices exchanged for the roar of cars. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, how are you? What have you been doing?”