Alena: A Novel (3 page)

“Lose your way?”

“There was a line.”

“Having brought you all this distance, I don’t think it’s too much to ask you not to disappear for half an hour at a time.”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t half an hour.”

“It’s a great opportunity I’m giving you, after all.”

“It is. I’m very grateful.”

“No, no, no—a great opportunity! Do you understand?” Glaring, she took the glass and sipped, her purplish lipstick staining the rim. “I would have thought a girl like you, from your background, would be thrilled to be here. Absolutely thrilled!”

It was hard to keep repeating the same assurances of gratitude. Sometimes it was better, with Louise, to change the subject.

“Who’s that? The one by the pillar with the enormous—”

“Don’t point.” (I wasn’t pointing.) “Surely even you know who that is!”

I shook my head. “Please tell me.”

“Heiress to the largest railroad company in Europe. Gigantic collector! She had a long affair with the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, now they can’t be invited to the same parties. And the woman in the cape, that’s Gisella Bonaventuri. Oh! And that’s Bernard Augustin, the one who— You must have heard that story?”

“Story?”

“He started that museum on Cape Cod, that one where the curator disappeared. The Nauquasset Contemporary Museum. Very small, a sort of vanity museum, like the Vista in Taos, or the Brant. He funds it with his own money and shows what he wants. People come from Boston, from New York. From the Hamptons and Provincetown in the summer. It was all due to her, of course—Alena. She had the eye.”

“And she disappeared?”

“She was supposed to meet him right here, at the Biennale, two years ago. But she never showed up. It turned out she’d never even gotten on the plane!”

“What happened to her?”

“Nobody knows for sure. There was a tremendous search, but it turned up nothing. The presumption was that she died. She liked to swim at night, apparently. Alone. And they have terrible currents out there. The body never washed up, so nothing could ever be proved, but what else could have happened? A tragic accident!”

I couldn’t help staring at Bernard Augustin, tall in his winking tuxedo, his grizzled hair razored close to his head, dark smudges, glowing faintly green like the inside of mussel shells, under his eyes. He was listening politely to a younger man with a surfer’s flop of blond hair who had a hand on his arm, but at the same time I had a sense of him standing apart, as though he were alone in that crowded, noisy hall with its Carrara marble floors and dazzling chandeliers, their pendants shattering the light. “Maybe she committed suicide,” I said dreamily. It seemed a more interesting and tragic scenario, swimming out with no intention of ever coming back, like the woman in
The Awakening
or James Mason at the end of
A Star Is Born
.

“What a horrible idea! There was no suggestion of that. After all, she had everything to live for.” Louise goggled in Bernard’s direction. “Poor man, doesn’t he have a tragic look? They were very close. Friends since childhood, he and Alena. Of course, it was a bigger shock to him than to anyone. They say he’s never gotten over it. Perhaps I’ll just go say hello.” She handed me her empty glass. “You stay right here—I don’t want you disappearing again.” And off she went, cutting her way through the crowd like a boat through water in her cherry-red suit that, despite having been designed by Chanel, somehow managed on her to look Midwestern. Without waiting for the blond man to finish speaking, she claimed Bernard Augustin’s attention with a hand on his other arm. I could hear her voice, as loud as a tornado siren, as she said, “Bernard? Bernard Augustin—is it you! We met at the Lowensteins’, but you won’t remember. Louise Haynes, from the Midwestern Museum of Art. We had a long chat about Donald Judd and Smithson, and why so many artists are drawn to desert landscapes. I remember you compared the desert to the sea!”

The blond man had vanished. Bernard Augustin turned toward Louise, over whom he towered, his head bent and his brow furrowed as though he were genuinely trying to remember. “Was it Manhattan, or up in Maine . . . ?”

“Manhattan! Such a lovely home. And, of course, the collection! Yet it doesn’t feel artificial, does it, the way she’s arranged it? You always feel you’re in a home, not a gallery.”

“Mmm.”

“And that magnificent Twombly in the dining room—not everyone would have the strength of character to eat in the presence of that! But Elaine always had nerves of steel.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know them well. You obviously—”

“No, not
well
,” Louise interrupted. “I wouldn’t say
that
.” And on she chattered, like a squirrel on a fencepost, occasionally throwing back her head to release that braying donkey’s laugh. Despite my direct orders, I moved farther into the crowd for a respite from the sound of her voice. I felt ashamed on behalf of my native soil that Louise was its representative here in Venice. I had fled the infinity of cornfields and the tyranny of five o’clock dinners as soon as I could, but there was a part of me that still loved the Midwest. The smell of thawing earth in spring, and the vastness of the sky at noon, and the faint Norwegian lilt caught in people’s voices as though their Viking-blooded ancestors still ghosted inside them, playing the filaments of their vocal cords like harps.

O
N THE THIRD DAY,
at breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Louise complained of a migraine aura and took a pill. The starched cloths on the tables hurt her eyes, and the penetrating smell of the spotted orange lilies in their vases made her turn her head away. Still, nothing would prevent her from keeping her appointment to meet friends at the German pavilion. She sat stoically on the vaporetto, her hands pressed together in her lap as we growled down the wide green waterway. It was hot, the crown of the sun blazing in the aching sky, and the sour smells of rot and muck threaded up from the water and the slimy stones and the dark, dank corners of the luminous city. How odd it seemed, the façades of the palaces there before my eyes but entirely remote, so that it was almost as though I were still sitting in a darkened classroom looking at slides projected on a screen. Were there people in there? Sleeping, eating, bathing, talking? It was impossible to imagine; it was unreal. Reality was Louise pressing her hands to her head and saying, “I don’t know why I didn’t bring my Oscar de la Renta. Oh, if only it weren’t so humid!” while the stink of diesel fumes curled around us, and the boat rocked up and down. Nearby a fat American couple argued about tipping, and farther away a thin couple argued in Italian about who knew what. “Did you remember that bottle of water?” Louise asked.

It was the first I’d heard of a bottle of water. “I can go buy one.”

“Oh, never mind!”

Stepping onto dry land, Louise sighed as though she’d been holding her breath. The Giardini was already buzzing, people ducking in and out of pavilions looking dissatisfied. The rank smell of the boat clung to us as we walked slowly toward the German pavilion under the heavy blue sky.

Inside, the light was muted. Away from the sun and dust, Louise seemed to revive. Presumably there was art on the walls, or perhaps on plinths and in vitrines scattered across the echoing floor, but with the crush of people talking in a dozen languages, calling out to one another, admiring one another’s clothes, criticizing Venetian disorganization, making scathing comments about certain artists and obsequious ones about others, it was hard to be absolutely sure. Dark glasses firmly in place, Louise pushed me through the buzzing crowd looking for April and Sarabeth.
“Scusi, scusi!”
she bleated.
“Mi dispiace!”
We found them at last in an alcove with a starburst chandelier studded with paper money—dollars and mark notes and pounds—amid which pfennigs and pennies spun on threads of translucent fishing line.

“It’s always like this,” said Sarabeth, a tall, redheaded ostrich of a woman in a black Armani suit. They were all three wearing black, in fact, like three witches—but then so was everybody else. “I always swear to come later in the summer when the crowds die down! But then for some reason I don’t.”

“There’s practically no point even being here,” said April. “They’ll want to know what I saw, and I’ll have to say I saw Ellsworth Dietz slip his hand down Margy Donovan’s waistband as they were waiting for the vaporetto!” “They” were her clients, agribusiness magnates mostly.

“I heard she paid just over a million for that Hockney,” Louise said, meaning Margy Donovan. “The smudgy one.”

“No, not a Hockney, it was a Chetwith.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Oh, Chetwith!” April said. “I heard his show at Gagosian bombed, they hardly sold anything.”

“No, no,” said Sarabeth. “Bernard Augustin bought up the whole show. Betsy Green told me, and she should know.”

“Not the
whole
show—not of Chetwith!” April was appalled.

“Those chain-link pieces that sort of sag on the wall. He thinks Chetwith is the new Damien Hirst.”

“But why is he buying at all?” April asked. “I heard he shut up the whole museum. The Nauk. After . . . you know.”

“Can’t he still
buy
?” Louise demanded. “For his own
pleasure
?”

“Drowning his sorrows in art,” Sarabeth said. “Art therapy.”

“I don’t understand,” April said. “I thought he was gay.”

Louise fanned her hand in front of her face. “Yes, he’s
gay
, of course. Just look at his ties. But they were close. They were like brother and sister!”

“He couldn’t run the place without her,” Sarabeth said. “It was all her, the Nauk. Her taste. He just wrote the checks.”

“I heard he warned her against swimming alone,” Louise said. “But she was a free spirit!”

“Look,” Sarabeth said suddenly. She was taller than the rest of us and could see, a bit, over the crowd. “There he is.”

We swiveled our heads in the direction hers, periscope-like, pointed. For a moment I saw the big head with the cropped salt-and-pepper hair floating like a grim moon over that surging sea of well-dressed humanity. He looked like a man who had lost his way and found himself in a rank jungle full of monkeys and mosquitoes.

“I don’t feel . . .” Louise said. She leaned heavily against me, so that I teetered and almost fell against April.

“Let’s get her some air,” Sarabeth commanded.

I took one arm and Sarabeth took the other, and somehow we half guided, half dragged Louise, who was sweating and greenish, out into the dusty heat. She threw a hand across her face to shield her eyes, already behind dark glasses, from the glare. “If I could just lie down for a moment,” she said, alarming us with her apparent intention of depositing herself on the dusty Giardini path.

April spied a bench behind us in the blazing sun. “Let’s just get you over there,” she said.

Louise nodded. She took a step and stumbled over nothing. Her solid, black-clad body slumped sideways like a blunt needle on an instrument dial slipping suddenly to zero. Then she was on the ground. We knelt around her.

“Louise!” April cupped her shoulder.

“She’s fainted,” Sarabeth said. “Go get help!” She was looking at me.

“How?” I cried. Oh, what were we doing in a city without cars! What did they do in emergencies? Did amphibious vehicles roll up out of the murky water? Did uniformed men appear bearing litters? I looked around for a policeman, a guard, someone in uniform, but there were only well-dressed citizens of the world buzzing from pavilion to pavilion like flies.

“There must be an office! A guard booth. Go and see!”

I stood up and looked wildly around. Which way to go? Should I run back down to the busy vaporetto landing? Into the pavilion? I was just turning toward the steps when Bernard Augustin stepped out the door into the white hot day.

“Mr. Augustin!” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He was walking fast in our direction, his eyes fixed vacantly on nothing that I could see.

Sarabeth and April rose. Louise lay slumped, a black humped shape like a seal. Bernard noticed her in stages—you could see him register first an obstacle, and then an anomaly, and finally the fact of a body on the ground. He stopped, staring fiercely into our faces. “What happened?” he demanded.

“She fainted,” Sarabeth murmured, suddenly demure.

Bernard knelt beside Louise, then rose again and began calling out loudly in Italian, the knees of his expensive suit soiled. Louise made a sound and opened her eyes. Suddenly everyone was looking at us, moving toward us. We had been invisible, and Bernard had materialized us. Two officials in black brass-buttoned jackets and stiff hats were suddenly present, making a fuss, producing bottles of water, talking into cell phones. Apparently Bernard had materialized them too.

Louise sat up. She looked dazed but not displeased to find herself at the center of this little fuss.
“Grazie, grazie, mille grazie,”
she sighed.
“Non è niente.”

“Which hotel is she staying at?” Bernard asked Sarabeth.

Sarabeth looked at me.

“We’re staying at the da Silva,” I said.

“You’re with her?” Bernard turned his face to me like a searchlight. It was my first close look at him: gray-white skin, handsome nose, dark, darting, impatient eyes with those mussel-shell shadows. He seemed angry, formal, almost electric, as though if you came too close you would get a shock. He seemed to take up a great deal of space. He looked me up and down: my blue knit dress, my frightened face, my bare smudged knees. “Come on, then!” he commanded.

Five minutes later the three of us were in a water taxi, skimming back up the canal. “What happened?” Louise asked me groggily, but I wasn’t sure. Time seemed to be passing very oddly. Suddenly we were stepping off the boat, which disappeared without anyone seeming to have paid for it, and then we were walking slowly up the hot street, Bernard Augustin on one side of Louise and me on the other, and then abruptly we were inside the hotel, and he was speaking to the man behind the counter who dispensed the keys. Fragments of phrases kept escaping Louise’s lips: “You shouldn’t have,” “I’m very,” “No reason,” “Now and then,” none of which our escort responded to with anything more than a hum. And then we were getting out of the dark, groaning elevator, just the two of us—Louise and I—and as the doors closed she leaned against me and asked, “Did you tip the elevator boy?”

Had she mistaken Bernard Augustin for an elevator boy?

In her room, Louise asked me to call room service for tea, lemons, ice. “Please shut the blinds,” she moaned, sitting heavily on the bed.

“They’re shut.”

“Tighter.” She laid her head on the pillow, the thick strands of hair making me think of leeches in the pond on my grandparents’ farm. She let her shoes slip off, and her scrunched skirt rode up her pale thighs. I felt bad for her, but I also thought now I would have some time to myself. Maybe I could wander over to San Marco while she lay in bed with the blinds tightly shut. When room service came, I poured the tea.

“Just leave it on the table,” she said.

“All right.” I moved toward the connecting door.

“I’ll call if I need anything.”

Hmm. What were the chances of that? “If I’m not there, I’m just down having an espresso in the bar.”

“You should have ordered one when you called room service,” she said.

“I didn’t think of it.”

She was feeling well enough to give me a look.

“Sugar?” I asked.

“Yes. No. Do they have Splenda?”

“I don’t see any.”

“God, the Italians! How do they stay so thin?”

I went into my adjoining room and sat on the bed. It was a single bed with a white spread and small blue decorative pillows. A child’s bed, a virgin’s. In hotels in America you never saw a single bed, did you? I didn’t know, I hadn’t stayed in many hotels.

What should I do? Would she call? Could I—should I—sneak away? I might not be in Venice again for years, or ever. Didn’t I owe a debt to Art larger than the one I owed to Louise? And anyway, she had taken another pill, she could sleep for hours. Why should I stay like a nanny to watch over her? It was ridiculous. It was wrong. She just wanted to stop me from enjoying myself.

I stood up and walked softly to the connecting door, turned the knob as carefully as a thief in a movie, peered into the darkened room. If she was awake, I could say I just wanted to check on her—which was true. But she wasn’t awake. She lay as I had left her, a loose, lumpy package on top of the spread, snoring in light, congested bursts like a little dog.

Outside, the sky had changed, gone smoky flat and white. As I crossed the street, a few drops of rain spotted the pavement and chilled my arms, giving me goose bumps. Armed with my Fodor’s and unnecessary sunglasses, I wormed past a family of American tourists, some noisy Germans, and a school group with matching T-shirts, my heart thumping as I breathed in the smells of rain, ancient grime, dank stone, coffee. I was in Venice! I turned to look back at the shuttered handsome face of the Hotel da Silva to see if it reproached me. I counted up to the fourth floor, remembering to start at zero. If Louise had awakened and come to the window, she would see me escaping—or rather, she would see me hesitating, standing like a fool in the rain, which was falling a little harder now, making umbrellas flower all over the narrow street. Somewhere someone was singing in Italian. The clear, aching sound drifted over the wet flagstones as it might have a hundred years before—two hundred years—a thousand years. What was my life or Louise’s life in those terms? A wink, a cough, a single note in a long symphony. I turned my head up into the rain, caught a sour drop on my tongue, and fled toward San Marco.

By the time I reached the piazza, the rain was coming down harder. The water puddled in hollows, spreading out across the stones. Rivulets formed, connecting puddle to puddle, and soon a network of little streams gurgled and hissed across the slippery, gritty pavement, where dark huddled pigeons shifted like living shadows. A long line of people hugged the columned arcade, crowding under umbrellas or shielding their heads with sweatshirts and newspapers. Above them rose the froth of marble, the glistening arches and cupolas running with rain, the gray, glowering sky. A line! Of course there would be a line—of course the ordinary tourist hordes were here in Venice with their knapsacks and their cameras, their sneakers and guidebooks and baseball caps. What if I went to the front and explained that I was a curator (curatorial assistant) on her first trip to Italy, that I had only a couple of hours? Would they let me in?