Alena: A Novel (8 page)

“I came to say good-bye!” I said. “We’re leaving, Louise isn’t well. We’re flying back today, and I wanted—I didn’t want—” I tried to be calm, but my tears spilled over and my words caught in my throat. I was trembling.

Bernard frowned, putting a thoughtful finger to his lips. “Go downstairs,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the breakfast room. Order coffee.”

“I don’t have time!” I wailed. “We’re leaving the hotel at nine!”

He smiled, the weary, patient smile I’d already come to know. “Better hurry, then,” he said.

In the grand, hushed breakfast room, lush and intricately patterned carpets in blue and pink stretched luxuriously across the gleaming floors, and chandeliers of twisted, watery glass, suspended from the ceilings, caught the morning light and gave it back, honeyed and liquescent. Flowers bloomed in bowls on creamy tablecloths: frilly yellow peonies and carnal purple irises with green-white beards. The very air seemed golden, luscious, faintly narcotic. For a moment, stepping through the door, I forgot everything. So this was what wealth could do: transfigure a fragment of the world into beauty. For the first time a thin spine of envy pierced me. Not luxury, power, leisure: I didn’t care about those. But beauty, every piece of the world made golden. How was it fair that I should be barred from it like the poor relation I was, my face pressed to the window? I sat down in a daze and ordered two cappuccinos from the gleaming waiter who shook the snowy swan in front of me into a napkin and laid it, a linen blessing, across my lap. I looked hard into his handsome, neutral face. Coffee eyes, inky lashes, hair the color of butter. Did they choose waiters here for beauty too? Did the waiters know they were cogs in the machine of the sublime? And if they did, did they care?

The cappuccinos arrived in pale green cups designed to look as though they were made of overlapping leaves. A moment later Bernard appeared, slipping through the liquid air, his hair wet, his face smooth, his skin hidden under scrupulous layers of buttoned cloth. “Now,” he said, “what’s all this about you going?”

I pulled the gilded air into my lungs for strength. “Louise is sick. She needs to go home. We’re leaving in an hour.”

The waiter materialized, perfect as a statue, though I imagined I saw the shadow of a smirk on his marble features as he took Bernard in, murmuring,
“Signore?”
Bernard ordered toast, fruit, yogurt. He looked at me but I shook my head. I was too grief-stricken to eat. When the waiter was gone, Bernard sipped his coffee. “But you don’t want to go.”

“Of course I don’t! I’ve barely seen anything. I haven’t even been in the Accademia, I haven’t seen all the pavilions. I—”

“So don’t go.” He looked away from me, out the long windows toward where the green water slipped invisibly through the steep channels. “Don’t go.”

“But I can’t
stay
! I’m not like you, I can’t just do what I
want
!” So Bernard was just a rich person after all, I thought. A rich man with no notion of life.

“Cara,”
he said, finger to his lips. “Listen. You can stay if you want to. You could stay with me.”

Stunned into silence, I waited for my brain to make sense of his words. “What do you mean?” My voice was like cardboard, stiff and pulpy.

“I’m offering you a job,
cara
,” Bernard said. “At Nauquasset.”

“A job?” Feeling like the butt of a joke I was too stupid to understand, I gaped at him. “What kind of a job?” Was he asking me to be his secretary? His—what—personal assistant?

“I need a curator.”

“Don’t tease me,” I said.

“Tease you? My God, why would I do that?” His sharpness startled me. “It’s not as exalted as it sounds. We’re a small place, a small staff, everyone does everything. But I can’t— I don’t want— It’s impossible for me.”

The waiter appeared again, bowing over a silver tray, placing on the table all the things Bernard had said he wanted, and a few more besides. Bernard tucked a napkin into his collar, picked up a glinting knife, and began spreading honey on his golden toast. The room grew lighter as the day brightened. I didn’t know what to say.

“Of course, I understand if you don’t want to,” Bernard said. “You hardly know me. Why would you throw your whole life over and go somewhere you’ve never seen with a man who . . .” He stopped, a dark note in his voice I hear clearly in memory, but which at the time was drowned out by the brilliant halo that seemed to be falling over us, a general glow like something out of one of those seasons-of-life paintings by Corot.

“But,” I said, instinctively groping for a reason, though God knows I didn’t want to. “I can’t do a job like that. I don’t know anything!”

“Are you listening to me?” Bernard said. “You see things. You look at a work of art and you know what it is. Do you know how rare that is? Do you think I want someone who’s spent decades learning names and prices?”

I felt—how can I describe how I felt? Like a parched field drenched with rain. Like a plant the first time it bursts into flower.

Louise was already in the lobby when I stumbled in, panting, my hair a mess, my sweaty face flushed with joy and doubt. Already I feared I had invented the scene at the Gritti, that I would tell Louise I wasn’t going back with her only to discover that what had happened with Bernard would turn out to be, if not a hallucination, then a crazy misunderstanding. What would I do then?

Louise was packed into a navy suit, and she wore a small navy hat pinned to her head. Her skin looked sallow and blotched, and one side of her face was swollen. She stood fuming under a framed poster of gondolas on the Grand Canal. “Don’t talk!” she said. “I can’t even
speak
to you.”

“I’m not going,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”

She held up a warning finger. “Not a word! Not one word, do you understand me! If I were a different kind of person I would—you don’t even want to
know
what I would do.” She yanked the handle of her suitcase.

“I’m not going,” I repeated a little louder. “I’m staying here. I’ve been offered a new job.” The sound of the words reassured me—solid, plausible. I would be the curator of the Nauquasset Contemporary Museum! I would have an office with a window overlooking the sea! I would buy new dresses and be gracious to artists!
Ms. Sherman, so nice to see you, won’t you come in?

“Stop it,” Louise said. She started for the door but halted when she saw I wasn’t following. “Whatever it is,” she sighed, “we can discuss it on the plane.”

“I’m not getting on the plane,” I said. “I’m staying in Venice. I’ve been offered a new job and I’ve accepted it. Bernard Augustin has hired me.”

She laughed. “To be what? His beard?”

I was still innocent enough that I didn’t know what she meant; I had never heard the term. “To be the curator,” I said. “At the Nauk.”

Louise blinked, her clumpy lashes leaving black stains in the hollows under her eyes. “Nonsense,” she said.

“You’ll miss your plane,” I said.

“Nonsense! Did you sign a contract? Did you negotiate a salary? Did he put anything in writing at all?”

“There hasn’t been time,” I said. “It just happened.” But my hot face grew hotter and a lump bloomed in my chest.

Louise smiled her timeless hag’s smile. “Maybe he was joking,” she suggested with a plausible wink.

“He wasn’t joking.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell. With men like that.”

“He wasn’t joking.”

“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “Maybe he knows what he’s doing. Maybe he wants someone as
unlike
Alena as possible! For that job. She was beautiful, you know.” I knew. “Dynamic, brilliant. Impeccable taste. Clothes looked gorgeous on her, she could have been a model if she wanted. Fluent in three languages! She sailed, water-skied, swam like a fish. And so charming! She could charm the fur off a cat, that’s what people said.” A faint, whining buzz like a mosquito started up in my ears. Oh, when would she go! “Yes,” she went on. “I suppose it makes sense. He wants someone who won’t remind him of her in the slightest.” She tilted her head and looked at me hard, a long look, up and down, as though I were a suit of clothes. I knew what she was doing—comparing every inch of me to Alena. She was giving me a preview of the way everyone would look at me from now on when Bernard introduced me or when I introduced myself.
How unlike Alena,
they would think
. Poor Bernard, what was he thinking?
How could he expect this waif to do? This sparrow, when he had had a falcon.

I did my best to stand up straight, but I could feel myself shrinking into myself, my flesh shriveling under the harsh beam of her gaze. Still, I wasn’t a child. “He says I have an eye,” I said in a fraying, defiant voice. “I see things, he says.”

Louise let go of her suitcase and seized my arm in her claw. She leaned over and brushed a cold kiss against my cheek. “I hope you don’t see ghosts,” she hissed.

Then I was alone in the damp, cramped lobby with the concierge, who winked at me from under his cap.

I
T WAS EVENING
by the time we reached Nauquasset, but so close to the solstice that the sky at that hour was still filled with light. The clear blue overhead fell away in streams of orange and salmon, ragged streaks of pink and scarlet and rose. I thought of all the real and painted skies I had seen in the past few weeks—the watery dome of Venice, the elegant roof of Paris, the billowing clouds of Rubens and Turner’s luminous shifting fogs. We had spent another week at the Biennale, and then—because, as Bernard said, we were already practically there—a week each in Florence and Paris. “It’s not much,” he said. “Not in the scheme of things.” But we saw a lot of art in those three weeks, and other things too: churches, gardens, monuments, galleries. Also promenades, boutiques, hotels, railroad stations, and cafés. Those were works of art too, weren’t they? Made objects expressive of human thought and desire. The question of what art was—especially in the contemporary art world—was slippery enough. The leavings of a happening, the repeated eating of a tuna sandwich, an unmade bed littered with underpants: if such things were recognized as art, how not the Ponte Vecchio or the Luxembourg Gardens or the entire city of Paris at sunset? Art and life, life and art, had never bled into each other so freely as they seemed to during that late June at the beginning of a new century, as Bernard led me through dim rooms and brilliant streets, directing my eye there and there.

Back in America, everything looked strange. Through the airplane window, as we landed, the city of Boston seemed as provisional as a stage set, and once we were on the ground, the buildings and bridges had the jaunty brightness of hastily painted façades. Highways and tunnels spun away in all directions, looping and dividing, changing their names as they separated and joined up with one another, but Bernard threaded the big car expertly through the maze, whistling, his top button undone to reveal a clean undershirt and a graying tuft of hair. Gradually the city fell away, the towns grew sparser. Then we were crossing high over the canal, and I looked down on the toy boats with the abstract benign approval of a minor god. Speeding down the highway on the other side of the bridge, Bernard cracked his window. I smelled pine woods, flower gardens, diesel fumes, the sea. “Just another hour,” he said.

On either side rough-barked pine trees and small gray houses edged the road. Before and behind us, cars were stuffed with suitcases and children, bicycles and kayaks clamped to their roofs, while rattling trailers bearing motorboats or sailboats clanked behind, jouncing on their hitches. “How long has it been since you were last here?” I asked.

Absorbed by the driving, perhaps, he didn’t answer.

“Bernard?”

“Hmm?”

“How long since you were last here?”

He adjusted his sunglasses on the bridge of his big, handsome nose. “Oh, quite some time.”

“This year?”

“I don’t think so. No. Not this year.”

In the humming silence I listened, trying to hear the ocean. My family used to go canoeing in the summers on Lake Michigan; sailing too in a little Sunfish rented by the hour. Oh, those timeless blue and golden afternoons that stretched out for days on end, unbroken by any event save the cool breeze swelling the belly of the sail! At noon the sun stood absolutely still in the sky as though it were painted there. The gnats swarmed like living veils. A week in the quaint, purgatorial cottage with its putty-colored pasteboard walls and curtains printed self-referentially with rows of curtained cottages felt like an eternity.

“Do you have a boat?” I asked.

“What?”

“A boat? You’re right on the bay, aren’t you? At the Nauk.”

“Yes,” he said. “But no boat.”

“Really? I imagined you with one. A white sloop with a little cabin, maybe.”

“I did have one,” he said. “Two, actually. But I sold them.”

“Oh? Why?”

“No reason. I lost interest.” He rolled his window all the way down and rested his elbow on the frame. The wind from his open window flung my hair across my face, and I fished in my purse for an elastic, twisting it back into a knot. He glanced at me sharply. “What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

“With your hair.”

“Just—tying it back. The wind.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. It makes you look . . .”

The wind was chilly on my bare shoulders. “What? How does it make me look?”

He glanced at me, glanced away again. “Old.”

The car whizzed on, past the little huddle of stores—a hairdresser, a real estate agent, a garden center. I remembered the wind on the road to Padua, how I hadn’t minded it then. I pulled the elastic out of my hair. And then we were back in the woods among the bent trees and the smell of sap and the blue-black shadows.

The closer we got to Nauquasset, the faster Bernard drove.

“Tell me again,” I said. “Tell me about the Nauk.” In Venice, and later in Florence and Paris, Bernard had painted the picture for me: the long museum building with its angular wings, its framed views of the blue rolling water. How, because the Cape curled out from the mainland like a beckoning arm, you could stand on the bluff and watch the sun setting in the west over the bay. And the shingled house in the lee of the cliff, with its gravel walkway, its daylilies, its fenced grassy yard for hanging laundry. The house that would be mine.

Bernard pressed his hand to his forehead, between his eyes, as though it ached. “You’ll see it soon enough,” he said.

A few miles farther along, the road forked and we veered left onto the narrower branch. For a while the trees grew thicker, the trunks more hunched and misshapen—nothing at all like the pine forests of Wisconsin with their tall straight trunks like groves of arrows. It was easy to imagine fantastic creatures lurking in the shadows—trolls or fauns peering out with yellow eyes—though I knew the real threats were the hungry, feckless, tick-infested deer. And then, quite suddenly, we shot out of the woods into the wide watery light of the fading day. Here were scrub roses, blooming pink and white among the thorny shrubs, the bayberry and beach plum, the thistle and poison ivy and Queen Anne’s lace. On either side, the asphalt was edged with fine ribbons of sand above which rose the gentle hills, the pale salmon-colored clouds, the yellow twilit sky. Distant gulls, like something a child might draw, floated in the pink distance, while nearer by, other birds—swallows and sparrows—flicked their tails on telephone wires and chattered down at us.

“Look!” Bernard raised a finger but I turned my head too late; all I saw was a diving streak of sooty gray out of the corner of my eye.

“What? What was it?”

“A hawk. Catching a mouse, probably. Or trying to.”

“Oh, I wish I’d seen it!”

“We have owls too. You can hear them at night. And foxes. Rumors of a coyote, but I’ve never seen it myself. Here we are.” He swung the car into the mouth of a rutted lane, stopped, and got out, leaving the motor running. Before us, a pair of weathered wooden gates barred the way, covered with reliefs, like the baptistery doors we’d seen in Florence, only in long rows instead of square panels. A heavy padlock held them shut, and as Bernard fiddled with the combination, I stared at the rows of creatures crowding the surface: graceful starfish and spiny conch, turtles with patterned shells, little salamanders, statuesque foxes, brave rabbits, opossums sleeping with their naked tails across their noses. A peaceable wooden bestiary that made me forget for a moment how tired I was, and how scared. I leaned forward to see better, elbows on the dashboard, but Bernard had snapped open the lock and was already swinging the gates back.

Up we bumped along the narrow lane, Bernard steering carefully through the ruts as the drive dipped and rose. The wheels crunched over patches of shell and the bottom scraped twice, despite his care, against the high hump of packed sand in the middle of the lane. Light and color faded quickly from the rust-red sky, the swaying grasses on the dunes swimming in my vision. And then we could hear the sea.

How to describe the effect of that sound on a child of snowdrifts and searing summer skies? I knew Lake Michigan, as I have said, and I had been to Coney Island, and I’d recently made the acquaintance of the Venetian Lagoon. But none of that had prepared me for this: the hushed, monotonous sucking like the indrawn breath of a beast, and then the distending roar of the wave building, breaking, shattering against the sand. A pause, and then the beast drew another breath. A restless, endless, living sound. For a moment, as it filled my ears with its slow panting, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. And then we crested the second hill, and I could see the bay.

The deep azure expanse was flecked and crested with white, and long streaks of gauzy pink cloud floated across the blazing sun, which just touched the rim of the water. A golden road stretched straight across the deepening blue, the near end apparently just below the bluff we were approaching, so that it seemed as though, if we hurried, we could take a quick stroll across the glittering surface toward the sun before it dropped out of sight. My heart bloomed in my chest, beating hard against the lattice of bone, as it had bloomed in the hot Uffizi as we stood before Botticelli’s Venus on her shell. And there, spread like a mantle across the shoulder of the bluff, the long silvered shape of the museum rose out of the sea of grass like the breaching back of a whale. Nauquasset.

Bernard stopped the car. The evening breeze chilled my bare arms and I shivered with exhaustion, awe, doubt, and a taut, ferocious joy. No wonder Bernard loved it! No wonder he couldn’t stay away. But when I turned to him, I found neither pleasure nor relief in his face. Rather, a new, dark blankness was drawn like a shade over his eyes. He stood for a few seconds looking out over the restless, glittering sea, and then he turned back to the car and popped the trunk. “Let’s go,” he said, tugging my rolling suitcase down the path.

The small house where I was to live, nestled in the lee of a bluff where it was protected from the north wind, smelled of damp, of old wood smoke, and faintly of ammonia. The downstairs consisted of a kitchen and a living room with an elbow for a nonexistent dining table, while the upstairs boasted a bathroom and two bedrooms, the smaller one with a desk and a bookshelf and a narrow daybed covered with a plaid blanket. It was all very plain, very ordinary, the furniture solid and battered. In the glare and buzz of the fluorescent kitchen light, I could see the speckles of age on the walls and on the surface of the refrigerator. Crooked shelves held squat canisters for flour, sugar, coffee, rice. There was a ceiling fan with a chain to pull, and a ceramic sink, and in the corner a washing machine with a scratched glass porthole in its belly. No dryer. Suddenly the function of the little fenced yard with its clothesline, so picturesquely described by Bernard, hit home: I would have to actually hang my wet laundry there. My towels and sheets, my sweatpants and underpants, my heavy denim jeans.

Tugging open a drawer to cover my dismay, I confronted a stack of thin, frayed dishcloths. They looked damp. The whole house was damp—the woodwork, the lampshades, the sofa cushions and rag rugs. Well, we were by the ocean, after all—though you couldn’t see it from the house, which was shrouded in the bluff and faced the wrong direction. Suddenly that seemed remarkably unfair.

“I thought there’d be a view,” I said, looking up at Bernard. He seemed to sway slightly in my vision, as though he were standing on a boat.

“You’ll be comfortable here,” he said.

“I mean, it doesn’t seem right,” I said. “To live all the way at the edge of the world and not even be able to see the ocean!”

Bernard’s jowls were blue with stubble after the long journey, his eyes shot through with red. He said: “You’ll get plenty of the ocean.”

I could feel a shift in the air, like a storm moving in, only instead of rain it would be tears gushing. I slammed the drawer shut. The old wood splintered, the sticky tarnished handle coming off in my hand. I looked up at Bernard. How had either of us believed I was equal to this?

“Roald will be out in the morning,” he said faintly. “He’ll fix it.”

Who was Roald? And how could he fix our essential error? And why was Bernard speaking to me like a well-mannered zombie? “And she lived here?” I said. “Alena?”

He stared at me. “Here? No. What gave you that idea?”

What indeed? I had supposed that a house on the property, untenanted, would have been hers. Bernard dug his keys out of his pockets, ran a hand through his hair. He looked older than he had ever looked in Europe. “Well. I’ll let you get to unpacking. Good night.”

The door banged, the warm dark night swallowed him up. I heard the whine of the engine, the crunch of the tires, and then silence. I was quite alone.