“And then we seemed to be back where we had been so long ago, with her calling me a coward. You’ve lost your edge, she said. You just want to play it safe. You want to live in your comfortable house and keep everything clean like all the other rich people!
“It was around this time that Alena met Morgan McManus. I was relieved at first. Before that, I had noticed that Roald, who’d worked for us for years, had started looking at her differently—as though he were cold and she were a fire. Well, lots of men have looked at her like that. But Roald! I was angry at her. I could see the way she kept touching him, whispering to him. I told her to leave him alone, but she just laughed. And then one day he called and said he wouldn’t be at work, he’d had an accident.” Bernard shut his eyes, his long lashes stiff and bristly as straw.
“So I was glad at first when McManus showed up to occupy her. He started stopping by the Nauk, hanging around. You couldn’t help noticing him. Alena was intrigued by him—how he could have a different body, basically, every time he showed up. I didn’t see it that way. I used to say he was just changing his clothes.
“Alena did a studio visit with him and encouraged his work. She saw him emerging from the tradition of Paul Thek—which superficially he was, I guess, but without, in my opinion, the depth or vision Thek had. We argued about that. About McManus. By then, after so many years, it was established between us that she was the one with the eye, and I was the money guy. She had the daring sensibility. I was amenable. That had been our shtick for a long time, and when it was a shtick, it was fine. But somewhere along the line, it had hardened. It had become, for all intents and purposes, our reality.
“And then there were the drugs. We’d both done a lot of experimenting, of course. LSD, Ecstasy, mushrooms. And then cocaine, increasingly, as the eighties wore on. At a certain point we both cut way back. We had seen too many people, artists especially, disappear down that dark hole. Alcohol was good enough for us, we agreed, or grass. I didn’t even smoke pot for years, though Alena liked to, she had a steady supply. But McManus was into all kinds of drugs. He was in tremendous pain all the time, Alena said—real pain and phantom pain, though I guess phantom pain is real enough. He took Vicodin and OxyContin and phenobarbital. He liked cocaine, and he dabbled in meth, and he did heroin sometimes—just now and then, Alena said, when the pain was unendurable. But how many people take heroin just now and then?
“And then Alena started showing up for work high on one thing or another. Agnes would cover for her, saying she had called and was running late, or that she was sick, but half the time she had no more idea where Alena was than I did. If she was downstairs in her rooms, Agnes could go wake her up and try to get her dressed. After a while, she was doing that almost every day—going down there and dragging Alena out of bed, pouring coffee down her throat, running the shower. But if Alena wasn’t there—if she was at McManus’s, or somewhere else—well, there wasn’t anything to do.
“One night Alena showed up at my house and said she was giving McManus a show. That’s what she said—she was giving him one. I said no, she wasn’t. We weren’t. I had never said that quite so baldly before. I had tried to argue her out of doing certain exhibitions, but if she insisted, I always acquiesced. But not McManus. Not those recorded agonies and fake bits of gore and derivative corpses. No.
“And so, again, we had the old argument. That dull, exhausting, endless wrangle about risk and edginess, bravery and cowardice, and about, always, the next thing. What it would be.
“We were in the living room, I remember, and the doors were open, and we could hear the waves rolling in. We were leaving for Venice the next day, for the Biennale. I had been looking forward to that—to getting away from the Nauk for a week or so. Getting Alena away. We always had a good time at the Biennale, and I thought it would be good for us. But now she told me that she had changed her ticket so we weren’t traveling together. She had a friend she wanted to see in Paris, she said, and there were a couple of shows. A couple of performance pieces. She said—I hardly noticed that she said this, she slipped it into the conversation when I was already angry, but I’ve thought about it often enough since—she was thinking about going back to performance herself. She had an idea that had been going around in her head, and she thought if she saw these particular pieces, it would help her think it through. She would stay a day or two, then get a flight to Venice. Or, if she couldn’t get a flight on such short notice, she would take the train.
“I told her I was disappointed. I said I hoped she’d come to Venice soon. And she said, why should she come when I wasn’t going to want to have any fun. She meant drugs, parties. She was taunting me, telling me again that I had gotten old, that I’d lost whatever daring I’d once had. She took out the little silver vial where she kept her coke, and a silver tray, and she laid out a couple of lines. You won’t even do a little coke, will you? she said.
“Well, I did the coke. Why not? It was an easy enough gesture to make, and I missed the energy it gave me. The sense that everything was within reach. I used to feel that way a lot, even without coke, but it seemed to me that night that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt it. And of course, we’d had a lot to drink. I thought—it was stupid of me—but I thought once I did the lines she’d shut up about the rest, about edginess, and cowardice, but that wasn’t what happened. That was just the beginning.
“She started to go on about McManus. She said what a great artist he was, and how the Nauk show would make him an art-world star, and how anyone who couldn’t see it had scales on his eyes! Maybe she was just trying to work me up. I told her she was wrong, that she was the one who was blind, that McManus had her fooled. He was a charlatan, she was in love with his ruined flesh, his freakishness. I wish I hadn’t said that, but I did.
“And she said—Alena said—You’re not the man I knew! You’re not the man who shot the apple from my head. The brave archer. I’ve always remembered that, she said. That beautiful night. That grand gesture! I have never felt so alive, she said, as standing on the beach that night as you drew your bow.
“And, after a while, I gave in.
“The night was overcast, no stars, but the clouds formed a milky dome over the beach that seemed to cast its own eerie glow. A good night for ghosts, Alena said. Maybe we’ll see Maria Hallett, she said. Alena had always wanted to see Maria Hallett’s ghost.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, I said.
“There was no papier-mâché apple that night, just a real apple Alena had taken from the kitchen when I went to get my bow. It had been a long time since I had drawn it, but it felt good in my hands. It felt right as I strung it, like an old friend I was meeting again after a long absence. I felt—it’s terrible to say it—young again, and I thought maybe Alena was right. Maybe, I thought, we could go back to the beginning—that this could fix things between us. This act. This one bow shot.
“From thirty paces, standing in the cloudy dark, Alena was beautiful. She wore a white dress embroidered with tiny red beads, and those pink plastic go-go boots she loved, that she had bought on eBay, and that were good for the beach because you could hose the sand off them. She was smiling, though I remember that I thought even then that it wasn’t the smile I had expected. It wasn’t joyful but rather a smile of calculated satisfaction, the smile not of the bride but of the mother of the bride, watching the wedding go like clockwork.
“And then I drew. I was picturing already how we would walk back to the house together, and maybe open a bottle of something, and talk. I remembered that she had said she was thinking about a performance, about creating a piece, and I thought I would ask her about it, not realizing we were already in the middle of it.
“I lined up the shot. It felt effortless, intuitive, just the way it was supposed to feel. But as I let the arrow fly a noise startled me, a sort of cry. Something white disappeared into the dunes—a cloud of hair, maybe. And when I looked
back, Alena was on the ground with the arrow in her throat.
“I ran down the beach. Already the sand was dark with blood, and a terrible sound came from the hole in Alena’s throat. Almost anywhere else I could have hit her would have been better than that. In what seemed like a few moments, though I don’t know, really, how long it was, she was dead.
“Of course—I should have called for help. Of course! She might have been saved somehow. But I doubt it. And anyway, I panicked. The boat was right there, on the beach where it always was, and the tarp was in the boat shed, and there were rocks scattered on the sand. The plan was already in place. It had waited in my head all those years for its moment, and now that moment had come.”
Bernard shut his eyes. He put his head down on the table. I sat, unable to speak, as if I too had an arrow buried in my throat. My finger was numb where, unfeelingly, it still touched his. I wanted urgently to take my hand away, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that if I moved it, if I took myself away from him, Bernard would collapse right there in the kitchen, a man of ash.
I covered his hand with my own. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “It was what she meant to happen.”
He head was still on the table, but he moved it back and forth, indicating no.
“It was,” I said. “It was her last grand gesture! Her great performance. And if McManus had gotten her message in time, if he had come earlier, the world would have seen it. A terrible stunt, or a great work of contingency art—who knows? But he wasn’t there. You did what you did, and no one saw. No one but Old Ben, who can’t tell the present from the past, fact from imagination. Chris Passoa thinks she killed herself. In a way, she did kill herself. You were just the instrument she chose.”
His voice was muffled by the table. “No.”
“Yes. It’s over. You can get up tomorrow, and come to work, and start again.”
He sat up slowly. His eyes were black stones in his gray face. Vacancies. “It’s too late,” he said. “Alena was right. I’ve lost whatever courage I once had. I can’t start over. I tried. Finding you, bringing you here. I thought it could be done. I felt all right in Venice, showing you the Scrovegni Chapel, seeing the light in your eyes. The dawning of something.
“But once we got back here, I could see it was a mistake. She was everywhere. Alena. In every room, in every view, in the sound of the waves. I even thought, not for the first time, of turning myself in, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it, I had to leave. That’s why I ran off almost as soon as we arrived. I kept thinking about her out there in the Plunge, her body devoured, her bones caught in their plastic shroud, maybe drifting free. Assuming I even had the place right in the dark. Assuming no storm stirred up the ocean floor, changed the geography. But that’s what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Yes, the storm came up. The bones washed up. None of it matters. It was an accident! It was suicide by proxy. You might as well have been driving a bus she jumped in front of!”
“She didn’t know she was going to die.”
“She left it to chance. That was how she wanted it. You read the quotation. She died as part of a piece of art.”
We were quiet, thinking about that. And then Bernard said, “It’s so strange how you can’t hear the ocean from here. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”
“I hate it,” I said. “I’ve hated it all summer.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Oh, what does it matter?”
“We could have exchanged houses. Every time I hear the ocean, it’s like hearing her voice. It’s as though she’s been diffused into Cape Cod Bay, so that every time a wave washes up, she’s back again.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not like that at all. She’s gone! For two years you’ve held her inside you, she’s been burning through you like acid, destroying you. But now that you’ve told me, it won’t be like that anymore.” I took his hand and tugged at it, that cold shred of flesh. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you. It will be all right. Let’s go down to the beach right now. There are no ghosts. I’ll show you.”
He let me pull him heavily to his feet, let me drag him across the linoleum to the door, steady him over the threshold and down the crooked steps.
The night was cold, clear, still, like a night in a paperweight. A million stars pricked the blackness with their icy tongues. As we came around the side of the house, the sound of the bay rose up out of the darkness, and Bernard stopped where he was as if frozen, a man not of ash but of frost and rime, arctic-hearted, snow-blind. A glacial prince.
Off to the east, where the Nauk hulked on its dune, an orange glow spread across the low horizon. “Is the Nauk burning?” Bernard asked. Hope rasped in his voice like a wasp in winter. Every instant the color of the sky shifted, lightening from shade to shade like a clarinet rising through shimmering octaves.
But it wasn’t fire, or music, or any other human fabulation stippling the world with beauty.
“No,” I said. “It’s just morning.”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ingrid Schaffner and Rob Tuchmann for their attentive reading of this manuscript and their astute recommendations. Susie Merrell read an early draft and saw what was missing; Ira Pastan offered advice on birds, boats, and underwater geography; Linda Pastan reviewed every revision. Special gratitude to Harvey Pastan, who suggested a solution to a difficult plot point. And many thanks to everyone at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave me an education in an unknown world; any mistakes or misapprehensions about contemporary art are entirely my own.
Alena: A Novel Page 29