Alena: A Novel (14 page)

Although a general impression of those days stays with me—a mood, a muffled, foggy adumbration despite the fine weather—I remember very little of how I actually spent my time once I got into my office, which didn’t feel like my office at all. Always when I went through the door in the morning, there was a moment when I had to force myself to remember that I wasn’t trespassing, and it was always a relief to find the gray chair empty and to see the pool of cold sunshine on the floor and my little stack of notepads and pens on the empty shelf where I had left them, as though I half expected someone to have moved them in the night. But what I did when I sat behind that finlike desk I can neither remember nor quite imagine, though I know I must have sat there for hours at a time.

I do remember that from time to time I went to the exhibition wing to walk through the galleries—to stand in them, measuring the walls with my eyes, and to feel the way one space moved into the next: what the space itself suggested, accommodated, perhaps denied. I loved those galleries immediately—inordinately—and every day I came to love them more. I loved the way the outside light fell, by way of the colonnade—obliquely, delicately, creating a golden glow that invested the rooms, even when empty, with something of the vibrancy of art. Visiting at different times of day, sometimes staying a long while, I learned how that glow brightened over the course of the morning and into the afternoon; how different walls lightened and dimmed as the hours passed; where the shadows collected. I loved the way the sound of the waves cast a mood, varying as the weather varied, so that both sound and sight brought the landscape of the outer world into the galleries. Somehow, instead of the sensation of time standing still, which I had felt so often in the great museums of the world, here at the Nauk the movement of time was more present to me than it had ever been before, as though I could feel the earth turning slowly under my feet.

From the bright colonnade running the length of the galleries, one looked out and down not only on the surging ocean and the wide stretch of beach, but also onto the dunes themselves, where the pale green beach grass waved, interspersed with black patches of dried seaweed and large shells and the long swaths of weathered fencing intended to prevent erosion. Although the galleries were on the first floor, from this side—the back, ocean-facing side of the building—we seemed to be quite high up. As I began to understand that the Nauk was built into a hill, I wondered what was underneath the galleries. Storage rooms? A shop? Boilers and pipes and dehumidifying compressors? There must be stairs somewhere, I thought, leading down. And one day, perhaps my second week at the Nauk, I noticed for the first time a door at the far end of the colonnade. It was an odd sort of door, made to blend into the wall, with a C-shaped recessed handle instead of a knob. I went over to it and pulled, but, like so many other doors here, it was locked.

What a mix of emotions I felt at that moment surging and frothing through me the way the ocean surged and frothed on the beach below. What was I doing here in this place of empty rooms and locked doors? Why had Bernard brought me here only to strand me as though on a sandbar while he ran off in pursuit of money, or distraction, or sex, or whatever it was that kept him moving, as though he were a molecule of ocean water rather than a man? Why had I not been able to so much as get a front door key? Why couldn’t I stand up to Agnes, or even to Sloan, to insist on a key, or a desk with drawers, or a detailed copy of the budget, or Alena’s Rolodex, which had, according to Agnes, been temporarily misplaced? Something was wrong with me. I was the curator, it should have been simple. I shut my eyes against the tears that began to fall—more salt water in this watery world—angry at myself for crying but too despondent to stop, when I had the sudden, sickening conviction of being watched.

And when I opened my eyes, there was Agnes, standing at the far end of the colonnade.

She was dressed, as always, in black, her hem just brushing the tops of her boots. She had changed the pink streaks in her glossy hair for electric blue, and she stood fixing me with her stony eyes, her head cocked to one side like a giant crow. I blinked at her, determined not to show how much she had frightened me. I had no idea how long she had been there. “I was wondering where you were,” she said. “You weren’t in your office.”

“I was looking at the galleries,” I said. “It’s so important to get to know the space.” I sniffed hard and wiped my fist across my nose.

“It looks to me,” Agnes observed, “like you were trying to open that door.”

I turned back to the door, which stood blankly, blandly shut, like a wall of snow. “I just happened to see it,” I said. “I never noticed it before, somehow, the way it’s built into the wall.”

She moved toward me, her high-heeled boots making surprisingly little noise on the hard floor. “Of course,” she said, “it’s designed not to be noticed, isn’t it? The eye—most people’s eyes—slips right over it. But you have sharp eyes, don’t you? Eyes that have been trained to notice. That’s what they teach you at curator school, isn’t it?”

I nodded, though it wasn’t. The curatorial studies programs were about art history, and theory, and individual research—presumably one knew how to see already. Not that skills didn’t get honed there. Not that there weren’t many kinds of seeing. “Of course, I only went to community college,” Agnes said, stepping closer, “but I notice things too.”

My mouth was dry. She continued toward me down the hall, growing larger, blocking out the light, her starburst of keys jangling on their leather strap.

“Do you want to know what’s behind there?” she asked. She was so close that I could smell her: the burnt chemical odor of her hair, and the sweetness of incense, and the pungency of old cigarette smoke and cloves.

I shrugged. I didn’t care what was behind the door, not anymore. I wanted to get away from her, but I knew I had to stay.

“Why don’t I show you.” Agnes drew nearer still. Heat radiated from her body in the cool hall. She was standing far too close to me. I took a step back and she took one forward, and now I was pressed up against the door. There was nowhere to go. She chose a key from her dangling bundle and shook the whole bunch at me until my slow brain understood that she wanted me to move aside.

The key turned silently in the lock. Agnes put her hand out and pushed the door inward, motioning for me to go first. When I hesitated, she smiled. “Don’t be frightened,” she said. “This is the way to Alena’s rooms. You didn’t know she had her own special rooms in the building, did you? In case she didn’t want to go home. Or if there was someone she wanted to entertain privately. Or if she and Bernard wanted a quiet place, you know, to have a few drinks.”

I moved through the door into the shadowy stairwell lit by dim LEDs on the walls, small square fixtures arranged in a cascade of staggered columns following the spiraling stairs down. The stairs themselves were steep and slippery. “Careful,” Agnes said. “You don’t want to fall.”

Down we went. I could smell earth, and damp, and something else, an overripe odor I couldn’t identify, like the smell of my mother’s kitchen when she was making jam. At the bottom of the stairs, another door with another lock. I don’t know how Agnes found the right key in the near dark. Maybe she knew them all by touch.

Beyond the door was a long low-ceilinged room. Old Oriental rugs in shades of garnet and pearl and sapphire stretched across the floors, some with patterns of gardens and others with spirals or paisleys. Low velvet couches sat plush, brushed, draped with scarves, and a square black-and-gold table supported cut-glass candy dishes and crystal vases and amber eggs and ivory figurines and malachite lamps with green silk shades. The walls were covered with what looked like tangles of seaweed, the thick, dark green, rubbery kind they call dead man’s fingers. You would have thought it was the worst kind of décor for a room so close to the ocean, subject to damp and mildew, but the museum’s climate control must have extended here too, for it was cool and dry, not even any cobwebs in the corners or dust on the crystal rims of the dishes or the smooth head of the plump jade monk. Crimson roses bloomed in a bowl, not a petal drooping, as though they had been arranged that very day. And along the wall that faced the bay, sliding glass doors, each like a living canvas, seemed carefully composed: pale green beach grass at the bottom, tossing in the strong breeze; then a wide strip of shifting blue-gray and green-gray that was the ocean; and above that, the robin’s-egg blue of the sky stippled with clouds. The air was still, but the sound of the ocean was like a living thing in the room: the long, low gathering of the swell; then the pause, like a suspended breath; and at last, after the aching delay, the falling off, the tumbling, the heaving collapse of the mercurial wave, foaming white onto the steadfast shore.

“It’s a beautiful room, isn’t it?” Agnes said. Again she fixed me with those sharp eyes, standing lightly like a big black bird on the glowing carpet, swinging her galaxy of keys.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

Agnes began to glide around the room, her fingers drifting down to straighten a violet glass dish that didn’t need straightening, to pluck a paling petal from a rose in the bowl, to graze the bald head of the jade monk with her fingertips. “Have you ever seen a room like this?” she asked. “Alena had extraordinary taste, didn’t she? She’d walk through a market in Istanbul or Tangier, and she’d see the one thing worth having.” She reached up and touched her own dangling earring, shards of ruby-colored pendants arrayed in tapering rows. “She brought these back from Malta for me,” she said. “I used to fill my holes with studs and rusty safety pins. Then Alena said, ‘Agnes, why do you want to wear all that junk? Aren’t the holes themselves more beautiful than that fistful of cheap hardware?’ And she gave me these. ‘Better one perfect thing,’ she would say, ‘than a hundred ordinary ones!’ And then she would laugh, because one perfect thing was never enough for her. She always wanted ten perfect things—a hundred—why not? When they called out to her the way they did, as though begging her to choose them. ‘Aggie,’ she used to say, ‘it’s like they have voices only I can hear. They cry out to me like lost souls. Who am I to turn them away?’ It was the same when we were kids at Woolworth’s and she’d come home with the best nail polish colors, the best lipsticks, hidden inside her shirt. ‘They were calling out to me,’ she’d say. ‘I couldn’t let them languish!’ No one ever caught her. She was always special, even then. She had a kind of glow that made you want to be near her. People were always giving her gifts—men were. Even when she was twelve. Women too. Once we were walking down the street and a woman in a fur coat gave her a diamond clip. Out of the blue!
This will look pretty in your beautiful hair,
the woman said. And it did. Alena wore it for a few days and then, when she got tired of it, she gave it to me.”

All the time she spoke, Agnes kept her eyes fixed on my face, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. Out the glass doors, the ocean rose and fell—the same ocean you could see from upstairs or outside, but it looked different here, darker and wilder, as though somehow Alena’s spirit was touching everything, even the view, intensifying it, perfecting it—as though things themselves could be changed merely by being chosen.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

“I remember the last time we were together in this room,” Agnes said. “Just before Venice. She was looking forward to the trip. She loved to travel, loved to dress up, to see and be seen. It was extraordinary that she stayed in Nauquasset as long as she did. She could have gone anywhere: New York, London, Zurich. But she stayed. She used to say,
Where else could I have freedom like this? Where else could I answer to no one?
Of course, nominally she answered to Bernard, and to the board. But Bernard never said no, and the board did whatever he told them to. And she loved the ocean! She swam like a fish, she could have swum to the Vineyard and back if she wanted to. And she sailed all the time, she was a wonderful sailor.
Even the wind does my bidding, Aggie,
she used to say.”

“Yes,” I said. I could picture it: Alena perched like a Nereid on a white boat, sheet in one hand and rudder in the other, her long ivory limbs impervious to the sun.

“You can almost see her, can’t you—here in these rooms?” Agnes said. “I can. I can see her sitting just there, on the sofa, her legs tucked under her, talking to me that last night. The night I was telling you about.”

I could, I could see it too. Alena sitting there, just as Agnes described.

“It was very late. I had finished her packing for her, even though she wasn’t leaving for another two days. I was taking a trip too, to visit my mother who was ill, and I had to leave before she did. But I always did her packing. It was good fortune that our trips overlapped, that if I had to be away, it would be mostly when she was too. I didn’t have to worry she would need something and I wouldn’t be there.

“Alena had just come back from a swim. She liked to swim at night off the beach here, she knew the tides and the currents. It’s a quiet stretch, no one ever bothered her. And then she’d come back up to shower and dress. Sometimes she’d sleep here if she didn’t feel like going home.”

I wondered where home was, where Alena had lived, what had happened to her house. I wondered what had happened to Agnes’s mother, whether she had gotten well.

“She sat right there,” Agnes repeated. “Her hair was wet, a dark fountain, and her skin glowed. She was talking about Venice. ‘Every year it gets duller, Aggie,’ she said. ‘The art world. More shiny and obvious. Oh, the artists are all so clever—they’d fuck with their brains if they could!’ She liked to say that—
fuck with their brains
—it made her laugh. She’d had enough of the mind, it was the body that interested her. The art she loved—the artists she loved—were the artists of the body. Marina
, Catherine Opie, Carolee Schneemann. Art should be felt in the gut, she said. Art should scare you. It should take your breath—literally—away.”