Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  “I came to see if you were all right,” she said. “I heard you were there when it happened. When Roald fell.”

  “I’m fine.” I stood up as she moved closer, black and relentless as the waves out the window. “Have you heard anything?”

  “Heard?”

  “How he is.” Whether he was going to die, I meant. But I couldn’t say it.

  “It must have been awful to see him fall,” Agnes said.

  “Yes. Awful.”

  “I once saw someone plunge from a hotel window. Eight floors up. She died instantly. Well, probably not instantly. I always imagine time bends at the end. Stretches. Like when a glass slides from your hand and you watch it drop, and it feels like it’s happening in slow motion. The shattering. I think the last moments before you die must be like that, don’t you?”

  We looked at each other, both of us waiting to see if I would ask again about Roald, whose body had seemed to fall not in slow motion but so fast I could hardly see it, and silently. But I didn’t ask. Agnes moved around the desk and went to the window, where pea-sized raindrops immolated themselves and slid down the thick glass in rivulets. “Look at the bay,” she said. “This office has the best view of any room in the Nauk. Alena insisted on it. See where the dunes dip? It looks as though the waves will crash right through the gap when they’re high like this. Alena loved storms.”

  “You must miss her enormously,” I said. “I know you were close.” I couldn’t see her face, but the hem of her long black skirt swayed slightly, as though a breath of the gale had found its way into the room.

  “Yes,” she said. “I miss her.”

  “It must be hard. Having to look every day at the bay where she . . . swam.”

  Now, slowly, she turned toward me, tilting her head like a crow considering a shiny object or a bit of trash. “Where she died, you mean.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Where she died.”

  “Alena wasn’t afraid of dying. Just of dying tritely. ‘Everyone dies, Aggie,’ she used to say. ‘You only get one shot at it. I don’t intend to waste mine!’ She had no patience with people who were afraid of risk. She drove fast with the top down, the wind in her hair.”

  I blinked, trying to keep up. “You mean,” I said, “that she courted danger?”

  Her face glowed palely. “No. It wasn’t danger she courted. It was beauty. To live life as one continuous beautiful gesture, like a wave breaking!”

  I knew my horror must be seeping from every pore. “You’re saying she equated beauty with death,” I said. Again I saw Roald’s body falling through the gallery. Was that Alena’s idea of beauty? Would it have lit the fuse of delight in her to see it?

  “Not death. Risk. Dancing at the edge of the cliff in a storm.”

  “I think of beauty quite differently,” I said.

  “Alena’s vision was always ahead of its time.”

  Out the window, the racing waves towered higher, hurling themselves onto the martyred shore. It was easy to imagine a wall of water rushing up through the soaked dunes, breaking over the roof. Washing the Nauk into the sea. Alena would be sorry, if that happened, that she had missed it.

  But the Nauk did not wash away into the sea, not then, and Roald did not die. His death still waited for him, either more or less beautiful than being semi-accidentally shoved out of a mechanical lift during a gallery installation; there was no way of knowing. He had broken his left femur, three ribs, and his tailbone, that was all. Though surely it was enough. I found this out a few hours later when Chris Passoa came up to the offices. I heard his voice saying something to Sloan, and the next thing I knew I was standing in the doorway looking at him in his long black impervious policeman’s raincoat that dripped copiously onto the rug as he unbuttoned it. “Hello,” he said, in what might have been a perfectly neutral voice, but which seemed to me to contain the charged totality of what lay between us. Suddenly Bernard was standing in his office doorway too.

  “Roald,” I began.

  “Roald is going to be all right,” Chris said. “I went to see him at the hospital.”

  Thank God.

  “What about Tim?” Bernard said.

  Chris inclined his head toward Bernard’s office. Bernard turned around, and Chris followed, and I hurried in after them before the door shut.

  Chris took off his raincoat and draped it over a chair. He sat down, and Bernard and I sat down too. “We sent Tim home,” Chris said. “Everyone seems willing to agree it was an accident.”

  Relief made Bernard spray his irritation around the room. “God knows how we’re going to get everything done before the opening without Roald! Assuming there is an opening. If the storm keeps up like this, maybe there won’t be.”

  “Does that happen?” I asked.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Chris said cheerily when Bernard failed to answer. “Probably there’s some ritual sacrifice involved.”

  “Alena would have taken care of that,” Bernard said. “That was her kind of thing.” It was strange to hear him say her name. He almost never spoke of her.

  Chris raised his eyebrows, nearly transparent lines on the ridge of his forehead, velvet to the touch. I thought he might turn and look at me, but he didn’t. “I remember those things she used to do on the beach,” he said. “That first summer she came to visit. Dancing around the fire. Burning stuff. Wearing feathers. Do you remember that, Bernard?”

  “I remember,” Bernard said.

  “I wouldn’t waste time worrying about the storm,” Chris said, as a gust hurled the rain against the window like fistfuls of pebbles, and the dark sky darkened another shade. “It’ll blow itself out by tomorrow night. Wednesday at the latest. A good storm always stirs things up. This one’s already washed up some interesting junk.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “A boot.” Chris looked brightly around the room. The wind whined higher, and a wretched seagull, careening through the feverish air, sent its lament spiraling down through the cascade.

  “That’s not unusual,” Bernard said.

  “Ah, but this is not your standard Carhartt. Some kind of shiny plastic. And inside, a surprise.” He looked at Bernard, casually but with a lurking sharpness. “The remnants of a sock. Could be a stocking. And inside that, bones. Tibia and fibula.” He reached down that broad, warm hand and touched his own lower leg.

  Alena, I thought. I looked at the men to see if they were thinking it too. The circles under Bernard’s eyes were darker than ever, as blue-black as newly poured asphalt. Chris’s face remained bright and blank, a mask rather than a face. It was the first time I’d seen him when he was working, and it gave his body an alert tension, like a sheepdog sniffing the air. “The first thing,” he said, “is to figure out who’s gone missing over the last, I don’t know, year. Two, three years, maybe.” He paused, as though waiting for Bernard to say something, but Bernard remained silent. “Fishermen washed overboard,” Chris went on. “Pleasure boat excursioners. Locals, tourists.” Another pause. “The body would have had to be in the water a while. Hard to say how long. Or how far they might have traveled. The bones.”

  Finally Bernard spoke. “It couldn’t be Alena,” he said. “I mean, after all, if she was swimming, she wouldn’t have been wearing boots.” He stopped. The wind moaned and sighed.

  “Unlikely to be a swimmer,” Chris allowed.

  But nobody knew for sure Alena had been swimming.

  We listened to the wind, which seemed determined to tear the grass and trees and buildings out of the sand, and then Bernard asked absently, “Where was it found? The boot.”

  “Willet’s Landing.” Chris checked the sky. “Might be letting up a little. Think I’ll make a dash for it.” He picked up his raincoat. “Let’s hope this is the end of your troubles,” he said to Bernard. Then he turned to me. “I’m looking forward to the show. I hope it w
ill engage my visual sense in a powerful way and provoke me to feel something.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Have a minute to walk me out?”

  I followed him down the stairs into the lobby. His body in its policeman’s raincoat was confident, confidential. I wanted to touch him, but I wasn’t sure it was allowed. There was a new hard energy around Chris, a bright shield that drew me toward him and at the same time kept me back, like a humming science fiction force field. He was newly compelling, and yet I didn’t like the way he had spoken to Bernard. Did he think the boot might be Alena’s, or not? We reached the empty lobby. The rain rattled against the glass and the vexed wind whined hungrily. The weather didn’t look like it was letting up to me. Chris stopped. “I heard you were there when it happened,” he said.

  “Yes. I was right below the lift. I saw him fall.”

  He stepped closer, but not close. His boots were loud on the terra-cotta floor. “Are you all right? Because Roald’s going to be fine, you know.” I could feel the heat of him through his invisible force field, but he was behaving like someone professionally concerned for my welfare. Someone older and scrupulous. Which, of course, he was.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “It was an accident. Just one of those things.”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew about accidents; I had grown up on a farm. Men being run over by tractors, men drowning trying to rescue cattle from floods. Instead, I leaned toward him as though inclined by the wind. “Before it happened,” I said, “Tim said something to Roald. He said Roald had cut off his finger—his own finger—to impress a woman. I’d seen that he was missing one. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Just the rumor. The one everyone knows.”

  “I don’t. Tell me.” I could see he didn’t want to. “Please,” I said. I plunged my hand through the force field and touched his arm.

  Chris looked away from me out the windows. Perhaps he preferred the sight of the storm to the avidity I couldn’t hide on my face. Yet he didn’t pull away. “Roald was supposed to have been in love with Alena,” he said. “She flirted with him, but she was never really going to be interested in someone like him. That was obvious. So, apparently—this is what people say—he got it into his head that doing something like that, cutting off his own finger, would mean something to her. Prove something. God knows what.” He turned back from the window and looked at me, and he laid his own calloused hand over mine on his black-clad arm. Between our bodies, a radiant slice of air shivered. “Of course it’s crazy, the whole story,” he said, leaning closer. “I’m sure it happened in a moment of carelessness when he was working.” Then he kissed me, a slow, hard kiss, right there in the gray light of the empty lobby. It was different from our other kisses. I could feel him on the other side of it in a new way, as though before it had been only his lips I was kissing.

  I wanted to press myself against him, to unbutton his raincoat and slip inside it with him, but I didn’t dare. Anyone could have come by and seen us. Bernard or Agnes. Anybody.

  And so we lurched on toward the opening.

  As Chris had predicted, the storm soon blew itself out. The weather cooled and the leaves on the rosebushes, from which every flower had been wrenched, turned frail, the browning flesh of the leaves shredding around the tenacious veins, the spotted rose hips showing autumnal colors. The bay was a crazy quilt of blues and greens and grays, alive with ripples and furrows. Inside the Nauk the show unfurled like a flower, the galleries in constant flux, the floors gritty with plaster dust and sawdust. The crew redoubled its efforts, and a collection was taken up for Roald, who had been released from the hospital and lay in bed at home, attended in shifts by his sister, who worked nights at the doughnut shop, and his teenaged niece. I supposed Bernard must have sent a big check too, but I didn’t ask. Bernard had withdrawn, armadillo-like, inside the shell of himself, and although he always spoke to me pleasantly, politeness had taken the place of the warm, intuitive bond I had felt in Venice when thoughts and ideas seemed to wash between us as though we were two bathers immersed in the heat of the same mineral spring.

  We did what we could to keep Celia happy and out of the crew’s hair, but most of what needed to be done was to settle what should go where, which necessarily involved her, and which proved more contentious than I was prepared for. I felt the rooms should reflect the chronology of the work, so the viewer could see the way her vision unfolded, follow the thread of a kind of story. To Celia, however, that approach seemed pedantic. “Who cares when or what or how I made what!” she said. “What matters is the way they exist in the present moment.” She wanted to group the pieces according to what she called season—spring, summer, and so on—though how she decided which pieces went with which season I could never figure out. It was intuitive, and therefore not susceptible to discussion.

  Some artists have a powerful instinct for displaying their work to its best advantage, but Celia was not among them. Unable to distinguish her best work from the mediocre, she couldn’t edit, wanting to crowd too many pieces together until they could barely breathe. I resisted as tactfully as I could.

  Collaborating with the artist on the installation of her art was one of the parts of the job I had most looked forward to: the framing of a shared vision; the careful arrangement of a thousand details small and large like twigs and sticks and logs laid to make a bonfire; and then, on the night of the opening, the pleasure of holding two tandem sparks to the kindling and watching it blaze. But I had chosen Celia, and if I had chosen badly, well, I had no one to blame but myself.

  A part of me was saddened by her transformation from an artist who claimed to have no interest in a career to someone determined to control every angle. But if she stridently and obstinately insisted on time-consuming, trivial, last-minute changes—well, wasn’t this show the distillation of all the passion, the lonely days, the breakthroughs, the failures, the seared skin and sleepless nights and refusals and renunciations of her entire life? Who could blame her for her suspicious vigilance, her reluctance to cede control for an instant? Or even for her relentless testing of all of us—of me and Bernard and the crew—to discover whether we might, at some crucial moment, stand between her and the consummation of her vision?

  Not I.

  Bernard took her to lunch, to dinner, drove her out to Provincetown to see some galleries. I met with her in my office to talk about wall labels, installation photography, invitation lists. But of course we spent most of our time in the galleries, where she demanded the plinths be made an inch and a half higher and complained that the nonreflective plexi used for the vitrines was too reflective. She grumbled about the lack of advertising, demanded to see the list of the press we’d contacted, wondered why Artforum wasn’t doing a feature. She was terrified that the show would come and go, as all her others had, and nothing would be changed. Well, of course she was.

  I remember the opening as a whirl of tanned cleavage, hair every shade of artificial, complicated dresses in a hundred shades of black. Every now and then a familiar face floated into view—Barbara’s, Willa Somerset’s, one or two members of the crew. I had braced myself to see McManus, but he didn’t show up. I supposed he was too angry; after all, in his mind this should have been his show. Bernard, wearing a tuxedo and looking very handsome in a slightly vampiric way, made a speech that seemed well received, though I was too nervous to take in anything he said, just as the names of the people he introduced me to over the course of the evening skipped off the surface of my brain like arrows off a castle wall. Celia, sea-queenly in shimmering green silk with many pleats, drifted from group to group, nodding and smiling, inclining her head to exchange a remark or throwing it back in mirth. She never looked my way, except for once, when I was standing by myself in a corner and she, also alone, came sailing like a great shining dragonfly through the arched doorway from the colonnade. For a moment I forgot all my frustr
ation and all my regret, and I could only think how magnificent she was! Between us in the room, Celia’s vivid and startling sculptures gleamed on their plinths, displaying their peculiar beauty to hundreds of pairs of eyes. She didn’t notice me at first, but then—feeling my eyes on her, perhaps—she looked up. Just for a moment the diamond stare softened, and she ducked her head in a quick nod of recognition. And then someone came up to speak to her, and she turned away. It was Chris, taking Celia’s adroit ceramicist’s hand in his policeman’s paw. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d kissed in the lobby three days before. They exchanged a few words, then he noticed me, excused himself, and made his way to my corner. “Congratulations,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “What do you think of the show?”

  “It looks like someone went down to the beach and picked up a bunch of shells,” he said, smiling.

  “There’s a little more to it than that,” I said.

  He seemed to be standing very close to me, but he wasn’t really. It was as though he extended beyond his body, the way you can feel the chill and damp of the ocean as you approach it over the warm sand. I put my hand lightly on his arm and guided him to the nearest vitrine, in which a pair of mussel-shell sculptures glistened, purplish black threaded with silver. One was open wide like a mouth, the other shut tight. Arguing, it was called. “You don’t really think they just look like a couple of shells, do you?”

  He stared down through the plexi. “Maybe not. They don’t look cold, somehow. They look briny, but kind of . . . I don’t know.” He laughed and looked at me instead. “Not human, exactly.”

  “You’re taught to see in a particular way, right? As a policeman. To—what—look for clues? Be open to possibilities? To turn things over in your mind, waiting for patterns to emerge.”