Alena: A Novel (24 page)

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 frustration 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.”

“The life of a small-town policeman is hardly Sherlock Holmes,” he said. But I could see he didn’t really mean it.

“Try looking at the work like that.”

He turned his gaze obediently down.

“Now tell me what you see.”

“Curves.”

“Good. That’s a start.”

He looked up. “Are the mussels meant to be women, then?”

“Try not to be so literal. Don’t stop looking. You’re just warming up.”

“Actually,” he said, “as much as I’m enjoying the art lesson, I’m looking for Bernard. Have you seen him?”

“Oh.” I let go of his arm. “What for?”

“You mind if I check upstairs?”

“Is it about Roald and Tim?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

I trailed half a step behind him through the humming galleries and across the crowded lobby and up the stairs. In the outer office, Sloan and Jake and a couple of other young people lounged on the sofa passing a bottle. They startled when they saw us—probably some of the kids were under twenty-one—but Chris just raised his hand peaceably. “Seen Bernard?” he asked.

No one had.

He knocked on Bernard’s office door, waited, tried the knob. The door swung open onto shadows: the hulking shape of the desk, the spidery chairs, the black bottomless pool of oval rug in the middle. “Bernard?” Chris called, as though he might be hiding somewhere in there in the dark. But the only answer was the sea, gathering and breaking, gathering and breaking down on the shore. “Do you think he might have gone down to the beach?”

“I don’t know. Why would he do that?”

“Breath of fresh air?”

First, though, we checked the other offices—mine, Agnes’s—and the conference room, and the bathroom, even the storage closet, as the young faces on the sofa watched, only slightly curious, waiting for us to go.

Outside, the night was chilly. A few people stood around in clumps near the bare trellised rosebushes, slapping mosquitoes and smoking cigarettes. Crickets chanted frantically in the bushes, broadcasting the end of time, and the wind shivered the long blades of the dune grass, which tossed and settled like hair. Surely Bernard was here, I thought, relieved—doing his job, just out in the open air. But as we moved from group to group, my relief curdled, and I felt queasy, as though I were in a small boat among heaving seas.

We went through the sighing grass to the steps leading to the beach. Chris headed down the steep staircase in his polished shoes. Wiggling out of my sandals, I followed him.

The steps were cold, splintery, slippery with sifted sand. At the bottom, a small crowd stood in their dress clothes on the beach, cheering on a couple of pale figures splashing and whooping ten yards out in the water. The moon blazed a silver path across the humped backs of the waves. The stars glittered like mica. Every wave that neared the shore glittered too, with bioluminescence—tiny sea creatures, moon jellies most likely—carrying their own light wherever they went like tiny prophets. The smell of dried seaweed hung in the air, mixed with bonfire smoke. Chris approached one person after another, but no one had seen Bernard.

I rubbed my goosefleshed arms, following Chris’s gaze as he stared out toward the horizon. “What are you looking for?” The splashing bathers had come in, dried off, were made much of by their friends, and I couldn’t see anything out there, just the cold moonlight glittering on the cold waves.

“Bernard likes to sail at night.”

“He doesn’t sail anymore,” I said. “He sold his boats.” But I looked as hard as I could into the dark, searching for a gliding shadow, a glint of white hull on the water. “Anyway, wouldn’t he have lights?”

“With the moon like this you can see okay.”

“What about other people seeing you?” I pictured collisions, hulls split in two. Though who else would be out there, lightless themselves, to run into him?

He sighed, kicked the sand, turned to me. “There’s nowhere else? Back offices or storage places or, I don’t know, a secret passageway?”

And then I remembered Alena’s rooms. “I’m sure he wouldn’t be there,” I said aloud.

“Wouldn’t be where?”

W
E CLIMBED UP
from the beach and plunged back into the blazing galleries. The blaring chatter ricocheted off the white walls faster than ever, and no one seemed to be looking at the art, which posed patiently in its vitrines like statues in Midas’s garden. We threaded our way among the shifting groups, the eccentrically cut dresses and colorful cummerbunds and glittering handbags and women’s eyes painted to look like peacock feathers. No Bernard. As we approached the end of the colonnade, I began to worry, realizing that the door would certainly be locked; I didn’t have a key, we would have to find Agnes and ask her for it. But the handle gave at once under my hand. A black gap yawned in the white surface of the wall, and we slid through, pulling the door shut behind us.

It was pitch-black in the hallway. The cascading lights were off. Pipes clanked in the walls, and my heart clapped like a muted bell in my chest as Chris switched on a flashlight, swinging the beam around to take the measure of the space. Aiming the light downward, he picked out the perforated metal wedges of the spiral staircase steps. “This way?”

There wasn’t any other way to go.

Down and around he clattered, disappearing into the dark until I could see only the top of his head, the pale fuzz that I tried to keep in view as I picked my way down as fast as I dared, clutching the railing, the smell of damp earth filling my nostrils. I could hear Agnes’s voice as though her words still echoed in the stairwell:
Careful. You don’t want to fall
.

Below me, the footsteps stopped. There was no sound, only the yellow glow of the flashlight beam. Then Chris’s voice rang out cheerily: “Hey—this is better than the stuff upstairs. You should charge people money and let them come down here!”

Another voice floated up toward me. “I thought you were a man of simple tastes,” it said. It was Bernard’s voice, though stretched and made echoey by the shape of the stairwell, giving it a ghostly sound.

“No. Just modest means.”

“You could always start taking bribes.”

“How much are you offering?”

“Me? Why—did I do something?”

I hurried down the remaining stairs and stepped into the long, low room with its carpets and carvings and fringed silk scarves, its heavy textured wallpaper and haunting smell of jasmine. “I don’t know,” Chris said lightly. “Did you?”

Bernard lay stretched out on one of the velvet sofas with a cigarette between his lips, the smoke catching the light from a single lamp burning on a polished side table. I had never seen him smoke before. In his tuxedo, with his full lips and his dark eyes and the elegant sweep of his wrist as he dangled the cigarette over the edge of the sofa, he looked like a movie star from the thirties, the kind who was most handsome when dissipated. One ankle was crossed over the other, and his shined and tasseled loafers winked in the light, the crimson tip of his cigarette reflected in the patent leather. A fluted glass sweated on an inlaid table within arm’s reach. Seeing me, he struggled to sit up, then changed his mind and fell back again into the cushions. “
Cara!
I apologize. I’m not discharging my duties very well.”

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”

“Drinking and smoking. As you see.”

Chris fiddled with a cloisonné box. “That’s what they’re doing upstairs too.”

“But without the same concentration,” Bernard said.

Chris opened the lid, raised his pale eyebrows, and shut it again. I leaned against the wall, running my fingers over the seaweedlike ridges in the wallpaper. It was clear enough to me why Bernard was here: it was the closest he could get to being with Alena. I thought how they must have snuck down to this room together during the openings of the past, tossing back a quick drink before reemerging, fortified by intimacy and gin. How they must have laughed together, compared notes, shared triumph or exasperation—maybe shared a cigarette too, or a joint. I could see them passing it back and forth, her violent lipstick making its way, via that burning conduit, to his mouth.

Bernard exhaled streams of smoke through his nostrils. “You want some bourbon?” he asked Chris.

“Actually, I’m working.” There was a pause, and something seemed to shift, the way the ocean floor shifts underwater after a storm. Then Chris said, “I wanted to let you know. The boot we found matches a description of one that belonged to Alena.”

I want to say a silence descended over the room—that was what it felt like—but really the world clanged and clamored on as noisily as ever. The ocean crashed; the crickets trilled; the sounds of the party drifted toward us as though from another country. Still, there was that sensation: as though the volume on a film had been suddenly turned down.

“Who told you that?” Bernard’s voice was like a shiny glaze on fired clay.

“She had distinctive things, didn’t she? This boot, it’s pink plastic. Translucent. Studded with stars. Some designer, apparently, I forget the name. Plastic holds up pretty well in seawater, as we know from those sad pictures of sea turtles crippled by six-pack rings.”

Bernard stubbed his cigarette out in a green glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me.” He directed his words at the primrose-yellow ceiling. “We agreed a few days ago, a swimmer wouldn’t be wearing a boot.”

“Well, maybe she wasn’t swimming,” Chris said.

“What would she have been doing, then?”

“I thought you might be able to tell me.”

Bernard swung his legs around and sat up. He stared at Chris, his eyes pale and cold. “How would I know? I was in Venice.” He pulled a cigarette case out of his pocket. It was gold, sleek, engraved with his initials: B.O.A. I realized I had no idea what the O stood for—what his middle name might be. I didn’t know Bernard, not really. Not at all. Waiting for him to answer, I started running through possibilities in my mind: Oscar, Oliver, Owen, Oswald. The long blunt-tipped fingers dipped back into the tuxedo pocket and emerged with a lighter, also gold. He spun the wheel, producing a gold-colored flame. Even the cigarettes themselves, longer and slimmer than the Marlboros my father smoked, were goldish in hue—the color of sunflowers in autumn. Bernard lit one and let the case clatter onto the table. He drew a long pull of smoke into his lungs and it drifted out through his flared nostrils, diffusing the harsh, haunting smell of burning tobacco into the jasmine air.

Orlando, Omar, Otis.

“I just thought,” Chris said, “you might have some idea. Who she gave things to. Or whose boat, say, she might have gone out on. I know she didn’t have one of her own.”

“If she’d disappeared from someone’s boat, wouldn’t they have reported it?” Bernard said.

“Or maybe she took a boat out by herself.”

“Then where is it now?”

Otto? Obadiah? Or maybe it was a family name—Oakes or Ogilvy, Osmond or Olson—in which case I’d never guess it, not in a million years.

Chris leaned forward and picked up Bernard’s cigarette case. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it sank. I don’t know anything, really, except that things were different than we thought before. Maybe Alena swam out alone and got caught in a current, and maybe she didn’t. I came to ask if you could help me. I know it’s difficult.”

“I’d like to help,” Bernard said. “I wish I could.”

“Why don’t you tell me about Venice,” Chris said. “Let’s start with that.”

Bernard’s cigarette had burned down and his glass was empty. His fingers toyed with the edge of his pocket in a way that made him look old, like an old man worrying his bathrobe. I didn’t like it, seeing him like that. I crossed the thick Sarouk carpet and sat on the sofa next to him, and I took his hand. It was cold, as though he had been out gloveless in the snow. I thought of my grandparents’ stories about carrying hot stones or baked potatoes in their pockets during the bitter Wisconsin winters. Bernard could have used some of those.

“We were supposed to meet at a party,” he said at last. “A grand reception. But she never came.” His voice sounded different now that I was sitting so close. Less hollow. It sounded flatter and scratchier, like an old record, like he had something unclearable caught in his throat.

“And?”

“And, nothing. I thought she must have missed her connection. Or that the flight had been delayed. When I got back to the hotel, I asked at the desk, and they said she hadn’t checked in, so I figured it was that, a problem with a flight, and I put it out of my mind. And then the next day, I kept thinking she’d show up. Probably I called her cell and got no answer. Obviously. But I wasn’t worried. Things come up. Alena was impulsive. The reason we weren’t traveling together was that she’d decided to visit some friends in Paris first. She’d switched her flight. I thought she might have decided to stay on longer there and not bothered to tell me. It was the sort of thing she might do.”

In my corner of the sofa, I held my breath. I’d thirsted for information about Alena the way a plowed field thirsts for rain, and now the first drops were scattering from the darkened skies.

“Did you call the friends?”

“I didn’t have their number.”

“Did you call Agnes? Or anyone at the Nauk?”

“No. Not for a few days.”

“Why not?”

“Because Alena was in Paris.”

Chris shrugged. “You thought she’d changed her plans and stayed in Paris, but you didn’t think she might have changed her plans and never gone there at all?”

Bernard hesitated, thinking about that. “No,” he said. “In my mind she was in Paris.”

“Still, Agnes might have heard from her. They were so close.”

“I think Agnes had gone away too,” Bernard said. “I think her mother was dying.”

Chris nodded. He didn’t have a notebook, or if he did, he wasn’t using it. I thought he must already know where Agnes had been when Alena disappeared. I remembered now that Agnes had told me she’d gone away when Alena went to Venice, that her mother had been ill. Dying, Bernard said. How terrible for Agnes to lose her mother and Alena at the same time. I found that I felt sorry for her.

“And then?”

“And then nothing. I called her phone a bunch of times. I believe I was annoyed. I thought she was being irresponsible, having fun in Paris, or, I don’t know, maybe she had gone on somewhere else. I was angry that she wasn’t returning my calls.”

“But you did eventually call the Nauk, a few days later. Tell me about that.”

“I called Sloan and asked her if anyone had happened to hear from Alena. She said no, but that Agnes had called asking the same thing. Agnes had emailed Alena, texted her, and hadn’t heard back.”

“Agnes was worried. Were you?”

“No.” Bernard’s scratchy tone hollowed, harshened. “I’ve never known anyone who could take care of herself better than Alena!”

“Well,” Chris said mildly. “But apparently not so well, after all.”

“Look,” Bernard said. “After a certain point, I threw my hands up. I could picture her, sitting in Paris or wherever, seeing my name come up on her phone and not answering. Counting up my messages to see how many there were. One thing about Alena, she craved attention. She liked you to think about her before you thought about anyone else. I was getting tired of it.”

“Of course,” Chris said. “But I still don’t really understand. It’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have shown up in Venice—the Biennale is
the
art-world event, right?—and you wouldn’t have been worried about her, even a little? Even if she could take care of herself. Even if you were annoyed at her. Unless maybe you’d had an argument?”

Bernard didn’t answer right away. I waited, perched on the velvet sofa, my fist pulsing like a heart inside his hand. Then he said, “We had disagreed. That’s true. About the direction the Nauk should take.”

“Disagreed how?”

Yes, I thought, how?

“About what kind of art we should show. Alena was increasingly interested in more extreme art than I was.”

I could almost hear Chris Passoa thinking: More extreme than piles of candies having something to do with AIDS?

“What, specifically?”

Bernard’s voice was still flat, but an acid derision seemed to leak up around the edges, eating away at his impassivity. “Body art. Performative stuff. She had experimented with that—doing it, I mean—before she was a curator. You were talking about her masquerades the other day. But this was different.”

“Performative?”

“Like Marina
. Vito Acconci. Michel Journiac. Have you heard of any of them?”

“No.”

Bernard looked at me.

I said, “Michel Journiac is best known for giving out pieces of blood sausage, made from his own blood, during a mock Mass. For Marina
’s most famous work, she lay down next to an array of seventy-two objects, including a feather, a gun, a rose, honey, scissors. The audience could use these things to do anything they wanted to her. And they did.”