Alena: A Novel (19 page)

“There’s a kind of shack in the dunes. Sometimes he sleeps there.”

“Oh!” I said. “Maria Hallett’s shack?”

McManus barked a laugh. “Women love that story. It has everything. Forbidden love, the fair-minded outlaw, a hint of the supernatural, and a tragic ending.” Awkwardly, I raised the stub to his lips, but he shook his head. We were through the town now, the Jeep purring smoothly. Not sure what to do with the roach, I just held it, moist from his mouth. Still hot. Then I thought, What the hell, and I raised it to my own lips to see if it would draw.

“Did Alena like it?” I asked, trying not to choke on the harsh smoke. “The story, I mean.”

“Alena? Alena ate it up,” he said. “Who would have thought. She wasn’t usually sentimental. She liked to say she saw Maria’s ghost walking on the shore at midnight, when she went for a swim.” I waited for more, and after a moment or two he added, “I could never tell if she was making it up on purpose or if she believed it.”

“So it’s true?” I asked, looking at him sideways, feeling how tight my muscles had been as they began to relax. “She liked to swim at night? Alone?”

“It’s true.”

“She must have known it was dangerous.”

“That’s why she liked it. Sometimes I went with her, and then she would show off, swimming out till she was just a glimmer on the horizon. I’m awkward in the water, if she got into trouble there wouldn’t be much I could do. Then after a while she’d swim back, make circles around me. Oh, she was beautiful in the ocean! White and silver, her hair like black seaweed, her breasts floating on the surface, salty and silken as oysters, glowing like moons.” He looked to see what effect he was having on me.

“I guess she was a strong swimmer,” I said.

“She used to say she couldn’t drown if she wanted to. Not that she would want to.”

“But she did,” I said. “Drown, I mean.” I paused. “Anyway, that’s what I heard.”

He said nothing.

“You don’t believe it?” I looked at him: the handsome crooked face and the thick black hair; the flesh arm and the totem arm; the threadbare denim cutoffs hiding the seam between skin and shine. And what about the rest of what that denim might hide? Was that intact, or blasted away like his ear? My eyes slid down, but it was impossible to say.

“I have a different idea,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember what we were talking about. Oh, Alena.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Can’t prove it,” he said. “No point spreading rumors.” For a while he was quiet, but then he said, “It wasn’t as though there was a storm that night. Big waves or strong currents. And oh, she could swim! She was a
rusalka
. Do you know what that is?”

“No. What?”

“A Russian water sprite. A spirit of the water. The ocean was her element. She might swim for an hour or more, and I mean
swim
, not just float. And then, when she was done swimming, she would get out and stand on the beach, water streaming down her body, and dance herself dry, naked under the stars. You could almost hear Old Ben in the dunes rubbing his paintbrush! She was more alive than anyone I’ve ever known. She relished everything—art, sex, clothes, pain. Beautiful things, ugly things. She would try anything. She was always waiting for the next thing, the new thing. The thing she’d never seen or done before.” He turned and looked at me for longer than I liked, given that he was driving. Driving under the influence, even. Then he said, “She called me the night it happened, but I was out. She couldn’t reach me. She left me a message saying she wanted to show me something, but she didn’t say what. I’ll never forgive myself for not being home.” Then he jerked the wheel, hardly slowing as he swerved into a driveway where a mailbox, shaped like the head of some kind of beast, was nailed to a weathered fencepost, and roared to a stop near a dusty clump of rose of Sharon bushes, white flowers with blood-red throats. Using the little hook on one of the paddle appendages, he removed the key, tossed it in the air, and caught it with his hand. “Here we are.”

McManus’s studio was a long, ugly, flat-roofed building made of cinderblock and aluminum siding. The concrete floor was spotless, the ranks of low metal shelves along the wall filled with cans and tubes, jars and bottles, rolls of tape and boxes of tools. There was a big table saw and a lathe, and a lot of other equipment, only some of which I recognized. A heavy curtain of clear plastic divided the room in two, and on the far end I could see a rank of computers and tape recorders, monitors and projectors.

McManus had walked from the Jeep to the studio—he could walk quite well on his prosthesis—but once inside, he dropped into a low wheelchair in which he zipped around the room with the speed and agility of a big cat. “I thought we’d look at some slides first,” he said. “Older work. All right with you?”

“Whatever you like.”

We went into a kind of office off the main room. An old metal desk held a laptop, a telephone, a metal basket of papers, a cluster of pill bottles, a big bottle of whiskey, and an out-of-date calendar with photographs of buxom surfing amputees. “Pull up a chair,” he said.

It was a mistake to have smoked, even just the one toke. My mind didn’t seem quite tethered inside my skull, as though it might go floating away at any moment, like a balloon clutched by a child.

“This is some of the work from my last show,” McManus said, powering up the laptop. On the screen, images like the one Sloan had shown me clicked by: brightly colored bits of things that seemed at first abstract—patterns, smears, blobs—or like extreme close-ups of life under a microscope. Except that, as you looked more closely, you began to find yourself identifying some of the parts. A fingertip. A bit of hair clinging to a bit of scalp. Those were clear. Also, more mysteriously, names drifted up from my brain and attached themselves to things I knew I’d never seen: ligament, kidney, kneecap. Or who knew? Maybe I’d seen pictures—illustrations—in some high school biology textbook. Not that there was anything illustrative here. These images demonstrated nothing useful about the kneecap except that it was better to keep it, if possible, inside the knee.

“Of course, you can’t really get a sense of the scale,” McManus said. “But this is an installation image, and you can see the person standing in front—there. So that gives you some idea.”

My God—the pictures had to be ten feet high! Better not to imagine it. I cast about for something to say. “How did you make these?”

“Different ways. I used Photoshop to collage a lot of the individual images together, and to manipulate the elements in various ways. To make them brighter, or change the color, or to make the outlines sharper. The raw material, I got some of it from the internet, and some from guys I know. Combat photographers, but also just guys who are over there with phones. They save things for me. They know what I like.” He wheeled closer in the dimness, the little laptop wheezing. He was like an air mass, I could feel the pressure of his closeness in a tightening band around my head. “You see that?” He pointed to a ragged pink thing on the screen with something round and whitish protruding from it. “You see what that is?” I shook my head. He tapped the keyboard to enlarge it, and then I saw. It was an eyeball, swimming in a ragged sea of flesh. “Sometimes you get a gift like that,” McManus said.

“A
gift
?”

“The man it belonged to is dead. It doesn’t matter to him whether I use it or not. The eye is a miraculous organ. You, more than most people, should know that.” He reached out and touched my eye, the tip of his finger coolly tracing the brow, the lid, the hard ocular bone. I felt sure, had I not closed it, he would have touched the jellied eyeball itself. “I bet you’ll never look at an eye the same way again,” he said softly.

I pulled away, blinking. But I knew it was true, what he had said. “That’s not enough. It’s not enough to make someone say they’ll never look at something the same way again. You have to do more.”

“More, like what?” His breath made currents in the air I could almost see, as though he were blowing smoke through water.

“Transform it. Make it yours. It can’t just be the material, it has to also be you.”

He took my hand from my lap and pulled it toward him. Gently, he placed it on his left arm and closed it around the border where flesh met prosthesis. “What about that?” he said. “Would you say that’s the material and also me?”

I ran my fingers lightly across his arm, the soft and the hard. What had Celia Cowry said? If you could make a sculpture the texture of skin . . . But you couldn’t, it wasn’t possible, not if you tried for a million years.

Now he leaned forward again. His hair grazed my ear as he reached across me for my other hand, then took it and laid this one on his thigh, again straddling the flesh and the nonflesh. It was as though we had invented a new form of dancing. “Feel it,” he said, pressing my hand into his leg. “Sculpture is made to be touched.”

I pressed my palm into the seam, feeling the give on one side, the resistance on the other. I stared down at our hands, mine touching the cloth, rubbing it, the broad oblong of his covering mine, and I thought: This is the place where life and art meet! Literally!

And then I thought, I’ve got to get ahold of myself.

I let go of his body and stood shakily up. I folded my two reclaimed hands in front of me. “What else did you want me to see?” I said.

He looked up from the chair, grinning. His totem arm rested in his lap at such an angle that all the wide-eyed faces seemed to gape at me. “It’s an installation,” he said. “It’s called
Battlefield III, with Screams
.”

“Where is it?”

“You sure you’re ready?”

“Just show me it,” I said.

Back in the main room, he pulled the dividing curtain open like an impresario. A section of the space was marked off with black electrical tape, forming a sort of stage. At the back of the stage, on the wall, was a photograph, eight feet high and perhaps twice as wide.

My first thought, as my mind scrabbled to postpone recognition, was to wonder how he had mounted it. And then the picture careened into focus, the images slamming into my mind.

The photograph showed a battlefield: a wide dusty-beige expanse of ground under a dusty blue-white sky. It was like a hundred of the works I’d just been looking at stitched together into a single coherent scene. Bodies, mangled or burned, lay in impossible positions, ripped open, missing vital parts, visible in stunning detail. A shattered and bloody arm hung in a bush. A foot with part of a leg was propped on some rubble. There was blood—raw streams and dark lurid puddles of it—crimson and rusty, a study in red—and what I took to be guts, though I’d never knowingly seen human guts. Some of it, thankfully, was concealed by oily smoke that billowed and ballooned across the brown dirt and the flat sky like charcoal scribbles in a Cy Twombly.

And then there were the faces. The parts of the faces.

The objects lying on the studio floor were easier to look at only because you knew they were false—made by hand or machine from plastic or foam, paint and glue and God knew what else. At least, despite the real forays into flesh by Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and others, I presumed they were fake. Even so, they were revolting—pink and oozing, blackened and bilious green with specks of yellow and white. A bloated, blasted torso extruding slimy strings of viscera. A leg split open from thigh to ankle, with the bone sticking through. A pink seashell-like ear. A white hand. My eyes skated across the surface, unwilling to settle.
Look,
I told myself.
Look!

That was my job.

“Wait a sec,” McManus said. He spun himself to the sound wall and hunched over it, pressing buttons, turning dials. From all corners of the room, like a sudden wind from hell, the sounds of human wailing and groaning swept through the space, increasing in volume, pain, number, and intensity like a vise tightening or a migraine blooming. Wanting to run, I stayed where I was, the sound clinging to me like an odor, abrading my skin, invading my synapses so that I couldn’t think. McManus was watching me: his handsome mask, his totem arm, his shiny leg, and his leg of flesh. Here was a man who had lifted himself from the ashes and literally remade himself. I stood still, pretending attention. Was this art? Was it obscenity, propaganda?

Was it a hostile, manipulative scam?

“There you go,” he called. “The full sensory experience! Every channel engaged, every receptor on the body enthralled. The pores on your skin blazing with sensation.” He wheeled himself over to where I stood, drenched with sweat as if I were melting. It was true, it was a
full sensory experience
. My body was a drum, my heart a fist pounding on a locked door, my breath a ragged sheet flapping on a line. The noise was so loud it was hard to breathe—my pursed lips sipped air like a rabbit sipping water from a bottle—and like a rabbit, caught in an open meadow by the yellow eye of a hawk, I stayed very still and prayed to be invisible. This was lightning, this was acid. It was a single engulfing flame.

The cool metal of McManus’s chair grazed my thigh. I could smell him—him and his work, indistinguishable: perspiration and burning plastic, hard steel and salt and pot. The pungent oceanic stink of whale’s breath. “I doubt you saw anything like this at the Midwestern Museum of Art.”

“Is all your work about war?” I asked, taking a step sideways.

“War is just an occasion,” he replied, “not a subject. My work is about the human body. It’s about abjection. You know. The gossamer line between beauty and decay.”

T
HE MOMENT
I
GOT BACK
from his studio, a droning started up in my head—a steady buzz of narration refuting McManus’s work point by point in favor of Celia Cowry’s. Where he was bombastic, she was modest. Where his work was brutal and merciless, hers was characterized by restraint. His work literalized pain while hers transfigured it, opening to personal response, ambiguity, grace. If there was something else, something in what he did that stirred me, I pushed it away like a spiderweb or a dream. I kept my back to it as I sat at my desk researching Celia Cowry online, full of curatorial purpose. Busily I sketched the galleries on a pad and made notes. In my mind’s eye, certain works materialized to fill certain spaces. When I looked up, Agnes was standing in the doorway dangling a key from a rabbit’s foot, a silken oblong of fur fitted with a metal cap attached to a chain. I had won a similar trinket at the Vernon County Fair when I was ten by tossing a Ping-Pong ball into a goldfish bowl. “Here’s your key.” She crossed the room like a fat black chess piece gliding across a board. “I apologize for the delay.” She dropped it onto my desk where it clanked against the metal surface. Four little leathery stubs lurked in the dull ivory-colored fur.

I reached out a finger and touched the severed foot. “It’s real.”

“Alena got it from a fortune-teller a long time ago.”

The long lifeless fur was softer than skin, softer than silk. Faintly electric, it was warm to the touch in the cool room. I stroked it, thinking of the human hand in
Battlefield III
, paper-white. I imagined Alena’s hand stroking this dead rabbit’s paw in years gone by. Was it a rear paw or a front paw? In my mind’s eye I saw a rabbit standing up, wearing a dress, like Peter Rabbit’s mother. In my mind’s eye, Alena’s hand shimmered the same ivory color as this fur, her fingers long and sensitive as a puppeteer’s. “Alena believed in fortune-tellers?”

“Only the real ones,” Agnes said. “She could always tell.” She peered around the edge of the computer screen. “What’s that?”

“Just browsing.”

Agnes leaned in. “That’s Celia Cowry, isn’t it?” On the screen, the ceramic shells looked lifeless, like real shells taken up from the beach and dried out.

“I had a studio visit with her. I’m following up.”

She nodded, her hair, now maroon-inflected, bobbing forward and falling smoothly back into place as if it were a helmet of fine metal. “And today you had a studio visit with Morgan McManus. What did you think?” She stood over me like an iron Hofstra sculpture of a woman, and though the light from the window cast her shadow behind her across the rug, I seemed to feel a chill.

“He doesn’t suffer from an excess of subtlety,” I said.

She looked at me with her cold eyes. “War isn’t a subtle subject.”

“It’s not. But maybe a shout isn’t the best way to handle a subject that’s already screaming.”

“If Celia Cowry took war for a subject,” Agnes said, “probably the only way to tell would be from the wall text.”

“Thank you for the key,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. It’s my job.” She turned to go. On the bright expanse of the desk top, the rabbit’s foot lay like a drowned thing washed up on a blazing shore.

“Agnes.”

She paused.

“How did McManus lose his arm and his leg?”

“He fought in the first Gulf War.”

I wanted a more detailed answer, but I nodded. “And is that all he ever makes art about?” I asked.

Her fleshy black shoulders stiffened. “Some things you don’t get over,” she said. I knew she was talking about herself as well as him, drawing a closed circle around them—and Bernard too—from which I was excluded. I longed to be old enough for something irrevocable to have happened to me.

When she was gone, I got up from the desk and went to the door, which she had left open. Sloan, staring into space in her sleeveless yellow dress, looked up, and we both startled. Her spine straightened and her fingers reached for the keyboard: the spine that had bent so her hair fell across McManus’s chest. The fingers that had caressed his stump. I shut the door.

Crossing to the desk, I picked up the telephone and dialed Celia Cowry’s number. In the long interval while the phone rang, I had plenty of time to arrange my words. Instead I sat numbly, listening to the regular buzzing that we call a ring even though there is nothing bell-like about it. Maybe she was out, or napping—maybe trying to nap, wishing she had unplugged the phone. Maybe she was working, her hands slippery with clay, the buzzing—ringing—phone driving her ideas out of her head, so that the very fact I was calling was detrimental to the art I wanted to support.

Then a click. Her clear voice leaped into my ear. “Hello?”

I grasped at my words, managed to mention my name, hers, the museum’s, then blurted it out: I wanted to do a show.

Celia’s voice was queenly and pleased. “I could tell you liked the work,” she said.

I sat up straighter in my chair, tugged at my skirt. Was this what artists said when curators called offering shows? Surely not. But what did I know? “So you’re agreeable?”

“It’s appropriate. You’re a museum by the sea, and I’m an artist of the sea. Of calms and currents and hidden depths.”

“Good!” I said. “Wonderful!” I managed to tell her about the timeline, how short it was, how we would need to get started immediately.

“Come whenever,” she said. “I’m here. Predictable as the tide.”

A jolt of terror and delight went through me as I hung up the phone. I picked up my new key and rubbed my fingers through the rabbit fur, slipped it into my pocket. The room felt too small to contain me, so I went to the door and flung it open, to announce what I had done.
I’m organizing a show of Celia Cowry!
I would say.
Please prepare the contracts!
Or maybe,
I’ll need the contact information for her gallery
.

Her gallery. Should I have called them first?

There Sloan sat, typing in her yellow dress, frowning slightly as though I were not there.

“Sloan,” I said.

Slowly, making a show of her reluctance, she looked up, her nose twitching, her eyes bored. I couldn’t see Agnes, but I imagined her in her office, listening.

I should tell Bernard first, I thought. Before I tell anybody else. “Is the newspaper here?” I asked.

“It didn’t come,” she said. “Do you want me to call?”

“That’s all right. I can read it online.”

“I can go check again if you want. Maybe it showed up late.” Her cool tone gave the lie to her obliging words.

“That’s all right,” I said again. I shut the door. I looked out across the shark’s-fin desk to the blue bay beyond the dunes.
An artist of the sea.
Did people really say things like that about themselves? It seemed they did. Could that, perhaps, be the title of the show?

Or maybe
Celia Cowry: Hidden Depths
—was that better?

I had to call Bernard. He would be glad, proud. His approval would sing in my ear. I picked up the phone.

Of course, I probably should have discussed Celia Cowry with him first—
before
I called and offered her the show.

Suddenly my arm was heavy. I should have called him. Of course I should have. The knowledge poured through me, cold and slow as vodka from the freezer. I put the phone down. I wanted to scuttle out of the building and disappear somewhere, but Sloan was sitting outside the door like a warder.

Slipping my hand into my pocket, I felt the rabbit’s foot. Out the window, the ocean lay as placid as a quilt. I had to calm down. What, after all, had I done? Just my job! I hadn’t killed anybody. Surely Alena hadn’t checked all her decisions with Bernard.

And anyhow, what did he expect, disappearing like this when I was so new, leaving me to be juggled among Agnes and Sloan, Barbara and Willa Somerset? Between Chris Passoa and Morgan McManus? And it was true that the time was short, that we needed to act more or less immediately. I had acted. Bernard had hired me, and I was moving ahead. I touched the key, squeezed the silky paw, my new talisman. Now that I had begun, the only thing to do was to keep going. Bernard would be here tomorrow, I would talk to him then. In the meantime, I turned to the computer, careful to keep my back to the invisible shadows, and began to type.

For Immediate Release

The Nauquasset Contemporary Museum is pleased to announce its official reopening with the presentation of
Celia Cowry: Hidden Depths
, the first mid-career survey of the work of this acclaimed Cape Cod artist.

Cowry (b. Kansas City, Kansas, 1965; lives Falmouth, Massachusetts) works with the natural forms of the land she has made her own: the sea and shore of Cape Cod, which has been her home for two decades. Exquisitely rendered and deceptively simple, Cowry’s work in ceramic sculpture uses the curved geometries of shells—their whorls, spirals, and concavities—together with mirror images—imperfect doublings—to suggest the liminality and exigencies of human relationships. Deeply sensual, alert to the particularities of texture as well as form, this art is also deeply and complexly political, suggesting the ways race informs identity, family life, Cape Cod history, and the American experience. Cowry’s small, deceptively quiet sculptures demonstrate that politics in art can be both subtle and emotionally rich, and that beauty still functions as a generative value in the work of today’s most passionate artistic producers.

When I checked the outer office again, Jake was sitting on the couch with his legs stretched out across the carpet, his cornrows bouncing, talking to Sloan, who slouched at her desk, and Agnes, who stood in her office doorway with one hand on her ample hip. “That’s cold,” he was saying. Press release in hand, I had been headed for the copy machine, but as the three faces turned to me at once—freezing a little as if I were the one who was cold, as if I had a chilling effect—I changed my mind.

“Hey,” Jake said. “How was your studio visit with McManus?”

They were looking at me, Cerberus-like with their three heads. “He’s obviously very talented,” I said.

“So you’re going to give him a show? I mean, the guy is a legit hero! And his art is totally radical.
Guernica
for the war on terror.” Jake’s knee, lightly furred with golden hair, jounced with conviction.

“You’re comparing Morgan McManus to Picasso?” I said.

If my question took him aback, it was only for a second. “I’m just saying,” he said.

“I’m not as enthusiastic as the rest of you,” I said. My press release had grown damp in my hand. I took a step backward, shut the door. On the other side I could hear Jake say, “He’s going to be pissed.” I stayed very still, but I couldn’t hear anything after that. Perhaps the women, understanding the office acoustics better than he did, had shushed him. Still, I was sure that they were scheming. I could feel their collective will like a weather system moving through the office, pressing against the door. On one side, me and my press release; on the other, the trio of them with their shared history and their local expertise and their clear sense of what they wanted. Their sense of what the Nauk owed McManus, of what Alena would have done.

I sat at my desk—at Alena’s desk—with its dull gleaming surface. My flushed body buzzed, it was hard to sit still. The Arno prints on the walls and the Akari light sculpture on the floor and the shell arrangements by Andy Goldsworthy on the table pulsed, communicating silently among themselves. Alena had organized every detail here, her spectral presence hung in the air like a scent. I laid my press release on the surface and smoothed it with my palm. It wasn’t much, but it was what I had.

It’s painful, even now, to recall being young enough to think art that glimmered as quietly as a glowworm—no matter how good—was the right choice to relaunch a small museum that the world had already mostly forgotten. Poor Bernard, what a shock it must have been! From where I sit now, in our little office, I can hear him chatting up an energy-drink magnate in the next room. His voice rises and curls, a warm current of air in the bright gallery where we have mounted a show of work by a young painter: naked men crossing bridges and riding on the backs of helicopters, men turning into birds or angels, their muscles and arteries visible beneath the scrim of skin. The painter isn’t gay, but his collectors mostly are, and Bernard allows them to make their own assumptions. It’s just business. If someone offers you a $10,000 check in exchange for a two-by-three-foot piece of canvas marked with pigment—that is, for a literalized dream—wouldn’t you do your best to keep them from waking up? It’s our job to perpetuate the dream of art, not to go around sticking pins into balloons.

In Venice, that palimpsest of experience, Bernard chose me for my innocence. That fact should make it easier for me to forgive myself, but I don’t. I might have been brought up in LaFreniere, Wisconsin, surrounded by new cornstalks pushing themselves out of the earth, but I had lived in New York City. I had a master’s degree. I had revered Andy Warhol, but apparently I had learned nothing from him, nothing at all.