Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  “No.”

  “So restful. Sometimes I think if I hear one more wave breaking . . .” He started walking again. “Right away I loved archery. I was good at it. Have you heard of instinctive shooting? Our instructor, a young man with a little beard—his name was actually Robin, if you can believe that, or he said it was—taught it to us. Instinctive shooting is about being in harmony with the bow, feeling the flight of the arrow in your blood. It’s about breathing and stillness and not-thinking. He used to come around and place his palm on your chest as you drew to make sure you were breathing correctly. There would be his hand on my bare skin, and I would pull the bow back, aiming not with my eye and brain but with my whole being. And he would make me hold it, drawn like that, the arrow cocked on the taut string, saying, ‘Breathe, Bernard, breathe!’ And then, at last, he would say, ‘Now!’ And I would let my arrow fly. My very first time I hit the gold.” He stopped again, and this time he turned to me with a hard, dark look. “Do you know what gold is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the color of the bull’s-eye in target archery. The center of the target. If you’re scoring points, that’s a ten.” He waited, letting the buzzing silence fill my ears like water. Then he said, “And the outer circle of the target. Do you know what color that is?”

  “No.”

  “But if you had to guess?”

  “White?” I whispered.

  “Very good. Excellent. And how many points do you think white might be worth?”

  “One?” My lips shaped the word, but my breath could barely push it out.

  “One,” he repeated. Then he began to walk again, up and down the room, which felt to me like a sealed capsule, cut off from the world, hurtling through the darkness of a starless universe.

  “After that summer,” he said, “I started to compete in tournaments. My mother would drive me to archery competitions all over New England and down into New York and Pennsylvania. For a couple of years I dreamed of being an Olympic archer. But then I hurt my wrist falling off my bike, and by the time it healed, I had lost so much practice.” He drank again, the glass nearly empty so that he had to tilt his head back, exposing the pale skin of his throat. He was right behind my chair, and I could smell him: salt and bitter orange and alcohol. He put out his hand to steady himself, placed it on my shoulder for the barest instant as he regained his balance. Then he sat down across from me again. “And then, when I was in seventh grade, we moved to the Cape year-round. I had always been happier here than in Boston, and even though we moved because my father was sick, I was thrilled. I had always liked sailing, but now I was obsessed with it. I was always out, in almost every weather, from April to October. I had my own boat, named after my dog who had died, the Caspar. My first boat.

  “My father died my senior year in high school. I went to Middlebury for college, where he had gone, mostly because my mother wanted me to. They didn’t have a real sailing team, though, so I joined the archery team and started shooting again.

  “I met Alena during freshman orientation. We were in line for something or other, me and all these other nervous kids, and there she was. She was standing right in front of me in a white dress and a Cleopatra wig and gold lamé sandals. We started talking. She had seen an exhibition of Joseph Cornell boxes that summer at MoMA, and as it turned out, I had seen it too. That was enough. We became inseparable. Everyone at school was in love with her—or else they scorned and despised her—but she didn’t care about that. As long as they noticed her, as long as they talked about her, that was what she wanted. She turned out to know quite a lot about art, mostly through reading. A lot for an eighteen-year-old, anyway. I did too. My mother had taken me to the MFA and the Gardner when I was younger, and we went to New York frequently—my parents kept an apartment there—so I had spent a lot of time in museums. But I can’t say art was my passion before I met Alena. For her it was a mystery, in the sense of a religious mystery. She knew about all kinds of artists I’d never heard of—Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Allan Kaprow. Joseph Beuys. People who were pushing art in new directions. It was thrilling to me, and learning about it through and with Alena made it twice as thrilling. Sometimes on weekends we would take the bus to New York and go to openings and performances she knew about. I had the key to our apartment, which made it easy.

  “When summer came, I invited her to Nauquasset with me. My mother was thrilled I was bringing home a girl. I didn’t tell her Alena was just a friend. Well, of course, she wasn’t—she was much more than that.

  “That summer I taught Alena to sail. She was good at it immediately. She had a natural sense for the wind, and she was strong, and nothing scared her. She had studied ballet, so she had balance and agility. But ballet was too old-fashioned for her. Too rigid. She had started making up her own dances, and then she decided she should have props—scarves and umbrellas and papier-mâché masks. She would take things from the beach to drape over herself—seaweed, and strings of shells that she would spend hours tying onto fishing line. She started doing these performances on the beach. I invited my high school friends. She would make her entrance from the water, which meant she had to basically lie down in the shallows with only her face up, trying to look inconspicuous while the audience arrived. And then, when it was time, she would come out of the ocean and dance, leaping and crawling across the sand, draped in dead man’s fingers and jingle shells.

  “I had to keep up my archery, for the team. Alena wanted to learn that too, and I tried to teach her, but either I was a bad teacher or she didn’t have a talent for it. Either way, she gave up, but she would hang around when I was practicing in the meadow behind our house, where I had set up a course with bales of straw and a target. I had gotten pretty good again. One day I hit five bull’s-eyes in a row. Alena took the apple she’d been eating and balanced it on her head, and she said, Let’s play William Tell. She said it would make a wonderful finale to one of her shows.

  “Of course, I said no. It was crazy, no one was that accurate, certainly not me. But she wouldn’t stop talking about it. She kept bringing it up. She teased me, saying I was a coward. Why should I be afraid if she wasn’t? She said it didn’t have to be a real apple. To make her point, she made a big model of an apple out of papier-mâché. It was about two feet high, and she made a kind of stand for it that fit like a crown on her head. She put it on and ran down to the end of the course. Fraidy cat, she called, when I wouldn’t shoot. As though we were children. Which, of course, we were.”

  The level in the bottle had dropped alarmingly. This time Bernard poured, his hand steady as a hand of ice despite everything he had drunk. He filled both our glasses up to the rim so the viscous liquid curved up over the lip. I bent my head to drink, but he sat down and lifted his to his mouth, not spilling a drop.

  “There was something else too,” he said. “A boy. A surfer. I’d met him at the beach, and he’d offered to teach me to surf. He was older than me. He had done a year of community college, then dropped out and gotten a job somewhere and rented a room over the paint store. I said no at first, but then I wished I hadn’t, and when he asked me again, I said yes. He took me surfing, and then we went back to his room, and he taught me about sex.” That was all Bernard said, but I felt I could see it: the crooked room with its stained shag carpet; the lumpy bed, its striped sheets wrinkled and gritty; the yellowed window shade always pulled down to hide the view of the alley; the boom box on the floor with a pile of cassette tapes overflowing a cardboard box. On the bed, one boy arched over the other—Bernard’s slim body braced yet pliant, fierce and alive, his amazed face buried in the musty pillow, his hair a mane for the surfer to grapple in his calloused hands.

  “After that, I refused to go to the beach,” Bernard said. “I wouldn’t go into town. I was afraid of running into him, even though of course I was desperate to run into him too. Alena could see something had happened, but I wouldn’t te
ll her what. I couldn’t talk about it. And then one night, when my mother was out, she got a bottle of vodka and we went up to my room and drank it, and she made me tell her what had happened. She was like that—she was relentless, and seductive, and she placed her hand on my chest and stared into my eyes and said, Tell me. And so I told her. How she laughed! I don’t know what I thought would happen—I guess that she would be appalled—but of course she didn’t care. She just couldn’t believe that this beautiful surfer boy wanted me and I was hiding in my room. She tried to make me go see him right then—she wanted us to go into town and find him. She said I was a coward—a fraidy cat again—a sissy. I’d been called that before, of course. I said I wasn’t a sissy, and she said I was, I was afraid of my own desires, and I wouldn’t even shoot a two-foot-high papier-mâché apple off her head! She was back to that again. You have to do at least one, she said. And so I got my equipment, and we walked down to the beach.

  “It was a chilly night, but thank God the wind wasn’t blowing. The flags were limp on their poles. She put the apple on her head, and I paced out thirty steps along the beach, and then I turned back and drew the bow. It felt effortless, the way Robin had taught us, though probably it was the vodka. And the rage, of course. I was so angry at Alena, and at the surfer, and, of course, at myself, that I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care if I killed her, it would serve her right. I could almost see it—the arrow flying, burying itself in Alena’s heart, and the stupid apple falling off as her body dropped to the sand with the arrow sticking up, quivering, like a stake in a vampire at the end of a movie.

  “But if that happened, what would I do with her body? I decided I would get a tarp from the boat shed and wrap her up tight with some rocks, and take her out in the little boat we kept on the beach, out to the Plunge. That’s a place we used to fish. A kettle. A kind of well in the bottom of the ocean floor.”

  “I know what the Plunge is,” I said.

  “I would dump her overboard,” Bernard said. “And no one would ever know. So you see, it was all planned out a long time ago.” All the time he was speaking, Bernard had one hand clenched loosely around his glass of gin and the other hand on the Formica surface of the table, moving it slowly, so slowly I couldn’t see it move, but every time I looked, it was closer to mine until at last the tip of his middle finger nudged up against my own. For a moment we sat without speaking, connected like that. Even with just that tiny bit of him touching me, I seemed to feel his whole heavy weight, as though he were a drowning, flailing body I was trying to rescue in deep water.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I didn’t miss. I drew the bow, and I loosed the arrow, and it shot right through the center of the apple and split it clean in two.

  “Alena and I were closer than ever after that. I had passed her test, I suppose. And she had freed me, because it was true, I stopped being afraid. After the surfer, there was another boy, the son of some friends of my parents. And after him, there were always boys, or men.

  “Alena kept doing her performances. They got stranger, and more complicated, and she started inviting more people to watch. Grown-ups too, not just kids. Everywhere she went she met people. In coffee shops, on the beach, or just walking around town. She was practicing her charm, starting conversations with strangers. And now she was using all kinds of props—dead birds she found, and little paper cups that she would fill with paint or Kool-Aid and pour over herself. She started using the ocean not just as a backdrop. She would run in and out of the water, catching the surf in glass jars and setting them out in patterns, making little fires out of driftwood and burning origami fish that she had folded out of silver paper that made green sparks when it burned. Sometimes she burned real fish too, or dead birds, which made a terrible smell. These performances—masquerades, she called them—were part dance, part witchcraft, part burlesque. And they were utterly hypnotic.

  “And then she got another idea. She would get into the water and ask someone to call out a number, and then she would have the group count to that number while she went under and waited for them to finish counting. We had to count very loud so she could hear us and know when to come back up. And after a while, people started yelling out higher and higher numbers, and once someone yelled out a hundred and fifty, and I tried to make the counting go faster, but I couldn’t, and she made it all the way to the end, but then she just lay on the sand, half dead, and couldn’t finish the masquerade.

  “I made everybody go away.

  “In the fall we went back to school. Both of us were studying art history. Alena claimed to be bored with the Roman architecture and the Italian Madonnas and the Dutch still lifes, but I loved all of it. Still, she kept bugging me to go away more and more often. One weekend we went to Philadelphia, where she had some friends in art school. We went to the art museum and stumbled on the Duchamps. And then one of the art students told us about the ICA, where they were having a show of Paul Thek, and we went to see that. We both got obsessed with Paul Thek: the casts of body parts, but also the complex small sculptures with lights and shells, and the paintings, and of course the meat. The work was so raw, and also so beautiful. It got Alena interested in objects again, which was a relief to me, after the masquerades. We started to fantasize about having our own gallery—or better yet, our own little museum, only not an ordinary museum. It would be small, intimate, devoted to the work of one artist at a time. Neither of us knew the word Kunsthalle then, but that was basically what we were dreaming up.

  “And eventually, a long time later—I’m skipping over many things, of course—we opened the Nauk. I paid. Well, I could afford it. My mother had died, and Barbara and I had inherited everything. After college I worked at Christie’s in New York for a while, and Alena worked for a couple of galleries, Janis Saunders and later Gagosian.

  “In almost every important way, the Nauk was hers—Alena’s. She chose the land, she worked closely with the architect, she designed the interior herself. She picked the artists she wanted to work with. We talked about all these things together, of course, but for the most part I followed her lead. She had an extraordinary eye—an instinct for what was interesting, a sense of which artists were about to take enormous leaps in their work. I was happy to be a part of it, and to see her happy.” He paused, letting the word—happy—ring out. His eyes blazed with darkness, and the quiet of the room seethed.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I can’t.” Panic fluttered in his voice like a bat caught in a drape. “I can’t. I shouldn’t have told you any of this.”

  “You were happy . . .”

  “Yes. We were happy! We lived happily ever after. The end!”

  “Bernard.” I pressed the tip of my finger against the tip of his. “Finish the story.”

  His tanned skin was chalky and his eye sockets looked too big for his face: dark pools someone might fall into and drown. He got up from the table and began opening all the cabinets. “Don’t you have anything else to drink?”

  “There’s rum above the broom cupboard.” The rum had come with the house, a sticky, half-empty gallon of Captain Morgan.

  “I hate rum,” he said, pulling it down.

  I tried to smile. “And I thought you were a sailor.”

  “Sailors only drank rum because it was all they had.”

  “I think you really missed sailing these last two years,” I said. “Chris told me how much you loved to sail.” It felt strange saying his name, and I stumbled over it. I wondered if Bernard noticed. I wanted him to. I couldn’t remember, anymore, why I had wanted to keep any secrets from him.

  “Chris believes Alena committed suicide,” he said. He stood drawn up in the corner where the broom cupboard was, the jug of rum hugged to his chest, his limp hair as gray as dust in the pulsing light.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he really does? Really believes that? Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow a
nd believe something else.”

  “Sit down,” I said.

  “I should go home.”

  “Bernard,” I said. “Sit down.”

  He looked at me doubtfully, like a dog eyeing a newspaper. Then he crossed the frayed linoleum and sat, pouring an inch of rum into both our glasses. It smelled like cough syrup and rancid butter. We drank. Then he laid his hand back on the table where it had been, where mine still was. Again our fingers touched. And he went on.

  “It wasn’t until we had been open for maybe a decade that things began to change. Alena began to be more and more interested in working with a different kind of artist. People who were doing things that were darker, more violent, more extreme than artists we had shown before. More to do with the body. Of course, the art world has always had room for that strain of work. But the new generation—people like Galindo working with blood, or Ron Athey’s S&M spectacle, or Daria Angel’s knife dances—it started to seem to me that it was the extremity alone that interested them. And what interested Alena. Maybe it had to do with getting old. She was approaching fifty. Well, we both were. Alena had always enjoyed showing off her body as though it were a valuable possession, but suddenly the value of that possession had plummeted. That was intriguing to her, even as it was dismaying, and I think that was part of what rekindled her interest in the body, her own and other people’s. She wanted to do a show of Iris Vertigo, and I didn’t want to, and we argued, but in the end we did it. And then she wanted to do a show of Kira O’Reilly, and we argued again. And then we were arguing about every show. It seemed to her, she said, that I was smothering her creative impulses. And it seemed to me that all she wanted to do was to push me, to propose shows I didn’t want to do because she knew I wouldn’t want to do them.