Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  “Stop it,” McManus said. “Stop acting crazy!”

  “It sounds like he’s describing one of your installations,” Bernard said.

  “Ray Donovan died,” the painter said. “Charlie Claymont died. Rusty Bigelow died.” He swiveled his head in small jerks like a bird, as though he were seeing them out there in the dark. “Ghosts don’t sleep. They blow across oceans, carrying their deaths in their hands like melons.”

  “Ben,” Chris said. “Listen. Do you remember the last time you saw Alena?”

  The painter didn’t seem to hear. He rubbed his long fingers down the sides of his jeans, his shoulders twitching.

  “He can be perfectly lucid if he wants to be!” McManus said. “Ben, remember Alena? She used to give you a pint of bourbon sometimes, and cigarettes. I’ll give you a whole gallon of Old Grand-Dad if you can tell us about the last time you saw her!”

  “Why not cash?” Bernard said, but Chris put up a hand.

  The old man blinked rapidly as though trying to clear his vision. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “The last time. She swam out of the bay and crawled up onto the sand. She was exhausted, poor thing. She’d been in the water too long.” He stared out at the dark waves. Behind us, up on the dune, a light went on.

  “When was this?” Chris said.

  “Last night. No—the night before. She crawled out of the sea and walked along the shore. The waves lapped at her white feet. You say she’s gone, but she’s not gone.” He was trembling all over now, tugging at his beard.

  “Ben!” McManus cried. “You know she’s dead. You know they found her bones! When was the last time you saw her alive?”

  Chris Passoa put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll take you back to the hut.” The stars, which see everything, glittered coldly in the deathless sky.

  “You’d better get him his bourbon, McManus,” Bernard said. “He’s answered your question.”

  Up on the dune, a second light went on. This time Bernard saw it too. “That’s coming from the Nauk,” he said. “Who’s up there?” He moved through the dark across the soft blowing sand toward the stairway. McManus lurched after him, placing his fake leg carefully, though once he reached the weathered staircase with its sturdy railing, he was fine. I followed them, wondering what they expected to find. Did they think the ghost Old Ben claimed to have seen had climbed the stairs and slipped into the Nauk? That they would get a last look at Alena? That a ghost would need lights?

  The museum doors were unlocked. The lobby was dark and empty, and no light shone in the galleries or along the colonnade. We climbed the stairs, Bernard still leading. Lights blazed in the deserted outer office, illuminating Sloan’s cluttered desk and the pristine sofa area and the black rank of filing cabinets. The door to Agnes’s office was ajar, but no one was in there, no one we could see. “Agnes?” Bernard called. “Sloan?” He opened the door to his own office and peered in, then shut it again and moved to mine, where he hesitated, hand on the knob. If Alena had come back—if her ghost had come back—this was where she would be, wasn’t it? Despite the months I had spent in it, it wasn’t really my office at all.

  Bernard opened the door and went in. McManus followed, limping into the dark space, his flesh hand brushing the walls, the Robert Arno prints, the coffee table shells, the cold fin of the desk. Except for them, the room was empty. McManus stood by the big window and looked out at the bay surging restlessly under the cold stars. “Alena loved this view,” he said. “She said she could see whales.”

  “There aren’t any whales in the bay,” Bernard said. “The water is far too shallow.”

  “She said she could see them.”

  “Let’s go,” Bernard said. “There’s nothing here.” But in the lobby, he yawed around the empty front desk, turning away from the doors, driven on as though before an insistent wind into the darkened galleries. Still in single file, we tacked through them, watched by the shadow sculptures waiting for daylight on their plinths.

  The door at the end of the colonnade was unlocked. The cascade of LEDs was illuminated, plunging into the cavity in the floor through which the iron staircase helixed. Down we went in a clanging stampede, no one saying a word. The door to Alena’s room was ajar. Bernard laid his palm on its surface and swung it wider, peering in as McManus huffed behind him, pawing the floor like a restless horse.

  There was no one in the first room, that lush chamber of rugs and velvet sofas and jade figurines, though a brass lamp in the shape of a mermaid cast a pinkish glow through the patchoulied air. Bernard strode to the far end, then ducked behind a Japanese paper screen etched with cranes and chrysanthemums.

  There was another, smaller room behind the screen, also carpeted with red and pink and blue carpets. This one was dominated by a high square bed that looked like something Queen Elizabeth might have slept in: canopied and curtained in lapis and silver, bolstered with silk pillows the size of Saint Bernards. A large wooden cabinet inlaid with dark stars crouched opposite, along with a carved bench with a velvet seat and a big oak writing table with pigeon holes and narrow drawers at which Agnes was perched like a fat black ibis, turning over the pages of a book. She looked up slowly, her pale face shining in the light of an oil lamp of the kind that would have burned whale oil in another century, a faceted goblet topped with a glass globe. Dried tears had left salty tracks on her face. When she spoke, it was to McManus, and it was as though they had picked up in the middle of a conversation they were already having. “What were you doing when she called?” Agnes said. “What was so important you couldn’t be bothered to pick up your phone? Was it whores? Were you in an OxyContin stupor?”

  McManus sagged. He sat down on a velvet ottoman at the foot of the bed. “You think it doesn’t make me feel like shit every day?” His hollow tone matched hers. They were like people calling to each other from the bottom of separate wells. “You think I don’t replay that night in my mind, over and over? Leaving my phone on this time, picking it up, hearing her voice? I was working.”

  “Laying out your fake bodies,” Agnes said. “Steeping in your false death while Alena was actually, truly dying! And where were you?” she asked Bernard. “Cavorting in the dark with some boy you picked up on the beach? Counting your treasure? You know you never paid her what she was worth!”

  Bernard’s voice was a faint scratch on the surface of the air. “Alena was very well compensated,” he said, but his words were swept away by the gale of Agnes’s fury and grief as they left his lips.

  “The Nauk couldn’t have existed without Alena. She made it what it was.” Agnes caressed the book on the desk. It was folio-sized, its leather covers etched with the shapes of leaves. Her hair lifted electrically, as though she were amber rubbed on silk. “This is her notebook,” she said. “Her last one.”

  Bernard stood by the door, holding on to the fluted jamb. McManus’s eyes were flares in the darkness of his face. Agnes opened the book. “This is the last page she wrote.”

  We converged, moving across the rug with its pattern of curling vines and pomegranates. At the top of the heavy paper, Alena had written what seemed to be a title:

  Dying Is an Art, 1, and two lines from Sylvia Plath:

  “Dying / Is an art, like everything else.”

  Next came a line from Duchamp: “In fact, the whole world is based on chance . . .”

  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.

  26.

  RATHER 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.