Alena: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY RACHEL PASTAN

  Lady of the Snakes

  This Side of Married

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

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  Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Pastan

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pastan, Rachel.

  Alena : a novel / Rachel Pastan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-14160-5

  1. Art museum curators—Fiction. 2. Women—Fiction. 3. Cape Cod (Mass.)—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Du Maurier, Daphne, 1907–1989. Rebecca. II. Title.

  PS3616.A865A43 2014 2013030316

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Anna and Bess

  Contents

  Also by Rachel Pastan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  It was as though she who had arranged this room had said: “This I will have, and this, and this,” taking piece by piece from the treasures in Manderley each object that pleased her best, ignoring the second-rate, the mediocre, laying her hand with sure and certain instinct only upon the best.

  —DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Rebecca

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  —SYLVIA PLATH, “LADY LAZARUS”

  1.

  LAST NIGHT I DREAMED of Nauquasset again. It was dusk. Somewhere beyond the scrubby hills, full of brambles and beach plums and pine trees bent and twisted by the sea wind like old men, the sun was going down over the bay. From where I stood on the sandy shoulder of the two-lane highway I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the damp chill take hold of the afternoon. The light faded from clear gold to misty gray, the way everything fades there: the shingled houses, and the wooden docks, and the leathery skin of the Cape Cod women who live their lives in an abrasive broth of salt and sun. Whose brows furrow early from so much squinting against the light.

  There I stood on the edge of the road, blue-black asphalt holding the heat. I could smell the tar melting, smell the pines and the brine of the sea, the restless, pungent, ever-present sea, primordial source of life and cause of so much death: floods and riptides, shipwrecks and suicides. Suddenly the gates began to swing from the two great weathered posts, the lovely gates by Simeon Wexler that Bernard commissioned right at the beginning. Each plank of silvery wood was carved with reliefs of animals, stratum by stratum: starfish and conch along the bottom, fish in the row above, deer and foxes, cats and porcupines at chest level, and along the top, six feet up, the birds of the local woods and seashore, ospreys, finches, swallows, and sandpipers, along with many other species I didn’t recognize. I was never much of a naturalist, having early on turned my eye to art. (Though this has changed in recent years, along with so much else, so that today I can follow a path up a Napa hillside and turn to note a swallowtail butterfly or a red-shafted flicker, and even Bernard can be persuaded to admire a hummingbird balanced in midair above the swaying bee balm in his own small garden.)

  Those gates were the first thing I loved about Nauquasset, the first night Bernard brought me there, and in the dream I was jubilant at seeing them again. I put out my hand, half to run my fingers along the contours of an alert field mouse carved into the wood and half to push open the gate. But as I touched it, I saw that the shadows had tricked me. The gate sagged, splintered and defaced, from weary posts held together with iron chains. I cried out in sorrow even as—it being a dream—I passed like water through the barrier and found myself on the other side, walking, as I had so many times, up the rutted lane.

  The first quarter mile or so was paved, though the color of the old asphalt had faded to a pale gray. Cracks and potholes fragmented the surface so that it looked in the gathering dusk like a road of rippled water cutting through the pale scrub and dune grass and poison ivy, like a mockery of the bright path moonlight makes on the bay. Then abruptly the shattered pavement ended and the lane changed to crushed shell glinting white against the dull beige of the sand. Even when the Nauk was at its peak, the lane, rising and falling among the dunes, was kept primitive and rough like most of the roads leading out to the bay. When it rained, huge muddy puddles gaped, and visitors in BMWs skirted them gamely—or else wished they’d thought to take their Range Rovers instead. Even in fine weather the pricey underbellies bumped and scraped, and sand got into the upholstery. Repeat visitors learned to leave their cars in the dirt lot by the road and walk. The way rose and fell, rose and fell. After the second rise you could hear the sea. It poured itself onto the breast of the shore and then drew back—gave itself and drew back. It would not stay, and it would not keep away, so that the unhappy shore could never possess, could never forget. Or maybe it was the shore’s pale indifference that drove the sea wild, so that every so often she whipped herself into a hurricane or a nor’easter, wreaking her vengeance indiscriminately. Just so, an artist, ignored too long by a callous world, may break into brilliance, or flame up into cynical stuntsmanship, or drop herself like a stone down the dark well of despair.

  Once contained by gardeners and muscled maintenance men, the scrub was growing wild. Long arms of bayberry reached in every direction, and the thick trunks of the low pines were as wide around as a man could reach. The sprawling, spreading brush encroached on the road, and the arrowwood and the rugosa roses had grown in my absence to a monstrous size, massing in two high walls of dense foliage. The restless wind rattled the dry leaves, and the crickets sang their elegy to summer. On I walked, my feet slipping in the sand, the grass that grew along the central hump in the lane tickling my bare legs, the sound and smell of the sea leading me on. Pinpricks of stars broke out suddenly in the sky, then were covered over by scudding clouds and strange shadows that might have been night birds or just-awakened bats. And then I rounded a bend and ascended the final rise, and there was the Nauk before me: the long shingled building with its great windows facing the sea. For half a moment time seemed to coil inward like a spring, present and past, dream
and reality coming together so that I felt I was seeing the place for the first time again: its serene yet lively beauty, its strange angular shapes made almost natural by the vernacular shingle, the copper weathervane in the shape of a mermaid with a spoon and fork for arms and pert triangular breasts, pointing steadily out to sea.

  Then the moon sailed out from behind the tattered clouds, and I saw that the place was abandoned. The roof was stove in, the glass shattered, even the walls blown away in places, revealing the studs and beams. The building looked like a wrecked ship sitting high up on that long dune, a rich merchant vessel perhaps, whose cargo of spices or gold had been doomed from the start.

  Of course, Nauquasset has been lost to me for a long time now, if it was ever mine. It has been years since I stood looking up at its silvered shingles, its sloped roof, the blue bay and the paler blue sky beyond extending the picture, framing it, so that on a sunny day or a quiet, moonlit night you felt there could be no more peaceful place in the world.

  These days Bernard and I run a little gallery in Russian Hill: estate work mostly, with a focus on the Bay Area Figurative School. Not for us any longer the drama of the living artist with her hopes and dreams, her anxieties and insecurities and unpredictable demands. We deal exclusively in the work of the dead. You can buy a moody Elmer Bischoff from us, or a tender Diebenkorn, or a bold Joan Brown. I live in a small apartment with a view of this very different bay, and Bernard has a bungalow in Sausalito. Even after all that happened, he likes to take the ferry to work. He has recovered his fondness for boats.

  In the mornings I stop at the French bakery halfway up the hill and pick up café au lait and rolls, and we have breakfast together in the office before the gallery opens. Bernard has grown stouter. His head is completely silver now, and he has acquired a moustache. His resemblance to a walrus is striking, but he seems happy enough. As am I: happy enough. Happier, perhaps, than I have ever been.

  If Bernard has lovers, he keeps it to himself. As for me, I have a man I see from time to time. He travels a great deal for his job, but when he’s in town, he calls and I make him dinner, which we eat on my little Pacific-facing balcony, and then we go to bed. As love affairs go, it’s not remarkable, but it suits me. I’m always happy when his name pops up on my caller ID, but I’m equally glad to wave good-bye in the morning and head up the hill, where Bernard will be cursing at his email. I’ll look over the papers and read out to him any item of interest from the Chronicle or the Times. We particularly enjoy reading about the bad behavior of our colleagues: suspected of trafficking in suspiciously acquired art, or carrying on too public an affair with the wife of a famous painter. An article about tax fraud can cheer us for a whole morning. For ours is a world of sharks and scorpions, and we are a pair of dull, ethical fools who—everyone says so—could make a lot more money than we do. Which is no doubt true. But what would we do with more money? Bernard, after all, spent most of his life practically drowning in wealth, and I have everything I want. Truly I do. I have escaped that naïve, idealistic, anxious young woman, my former self, neurotically devoted to Art like a novice nun to God. Debasement and ambition are two sides of the same heavy coin, but I have changed currencies. I have shed my chrysalis and become—not a butterfly, but a happy moth, fluttering my brown wings peacefully through the dusk. And here is Bernard with me, though too heavy to be a fellow moth, perhaps. Make him a possum then, ambling along under the yellow moon while I flit just above his ear. It’s a peaceful, pleasant, predictable life, as long as we avoid the hypnotic dazzle of the freeway lights.

  And, of course, we both follow the auction prices. We keep a special eye out for those names who used to show at Nauquasset, some of which now belong to superstars within the hermetic, looking-glass world of contemporary art. And then at ten, Scarlet jangles open the door, music leaking from her earbuds, wearing something outrageous we can tut over admiringly: a low-cut sheath of fuchsia lamé, a high-necked vintage dress of patched and faded lace, a form-fitting asymmetrical jumpsuit studded with safety pins and chains. I used to think she frequented secret midnight boutiques and underground seamstresses, but now I know she buys it all on the internet. Every month or two, as well, she radically rethinks her hair, altering its color and its shape, still young enough to believe a person can actually change. Or maybe she’s just enjoying herself.

  Best of all is when she has a new tattoo to show us, an addition to the bright menagerie spreading across her back. We cluck and scold at the irrevocability of what she’s doing to her young, beautiful body—as though that weren’t exactly the point—but we always admire the work. She has a fetching, bright-faced monkey on her shoulder blade that made me take the name and number of her tattooist—tattoo artist, she says—but of course I never called. Scarlet keeps us entertained. She makes us laugh. In return, we pet her and fuss over her and give her advice to which she pretends not to listen. She’s wonderful with the customers. What does she think of us, two eccentrics growing slowly older in a business better suited to the young? Does she suspect we might have once done things, wanted things—things for which we were willing to risk everything? How does she describe us to her friends, those hipster graffiti artists, vegans, performance poets, and app designers with whom she texts all day?

  Probably she doesn’t talk about us at all.

  2.

  FOR A LONG TIME when I was growing up, I thought I could do anything I wanted. I was a bright child, good at school, and my parents—well-meaning people, a farmer and a former schoolteacher—encouraged me in the belief that if I only set my mind to a goal, I could achieve it. Passion and hard work were the stars I was taught to steer by. When, in college, I announced my intention to study art history, they just nodded. My father, who had done some watercolor painting when he was young, was pleased that I was interested in art. My family assumed I would marry and be supported by my husband, so it didn’t matter how much money I would make. What mattered was that I find something I loved and, of course, the right man. In this way my happiness would be assured.

  Certainly I loved art history. It amazed me that sitting in a darkened room looking at slides of Madonnas and Venuses and bowls of oranges counted as work. I loved the colors, and the way forms floated in perfect balance in the picture plane. I loved the way you could trace the evolution of perspective, how it was perfected in southern Europe over centuries, and then stretched and tested and discarded over more centuries until it became a quaint anachronism, like a whalebone corset or a doublet and hose. There was no law against a man wearing hose, but you didn’t catch anyone doing it. And although I was taught they didn’t matter, I loved the stories of the artists: Michelangelo on his back under the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Gauguin running away to his island and dying of syphilis in self-imposed exile. Their passion sparked my passion, their imagination my imagination, their labor my labor. Because it wasn’t all dreaming away in dim lecture halls, of course. I spent most of my time at my small Midwestern college in the library, and when after four years I emerged, blinking, into the light, I had a magna cum laude degree and a place in a Ph.D. program at NYU. In my whole life, I’d never been to a city larger than Milwaukee.

  I decided to head out to New York early, in the middle of June. I had waitressed every summer since I was sixteen and figured I wouldn’t have much trouble finding a job. A girl I knew from college, a year ahead of me, was living in Hell’s Kitchen and needed a roommate. All the pieces were falling into place as though the hand of destiny were arranging them. So on a cool June day I boarded a Greyhound bus with one suitcase and a shoulder bag and three hundred dollars in twenties in a zipped pouch around my neck. Twenty-four hours later I emerged blinking once again, only this time it was into the noisy spectacle of Manhattan. How bright and alive the city looked! It was as though my whole life up until then had been one long half-dream in which thoughtful but disembodied voices had drifted through the dimness as colored images flashed by in slow succession. In that
classroom—my early life—all was order, reason, gentle instruction. Even the crazed visions and terrible poverty and cultural rejection of the artists I’d studied had been tempered and mediated by time into something acceptable, digestible, dignified.

  New York City was none of those things. I arrived on the first day of summer, the city in the middle of a heat wave. Sweat soaked my cotton blouse and hand-knit cardigan as I dragged my suitcase up Eighth Avenue amid the blare of cars and the rush of trains under the pavement and the jostling impatience of the crowds surging up and down the sidewalks. I passed half-naked teenaged girls with caramel skin chewing gum and laughing, wrinkled Chinese women pushing metal carts, blind men with canes, black policemen in uniforms as stiff as armor, and muscled men in skimpy nylon shorts crooning to small dogs on leashes. The air smelled of urine and of burning. A fizzing started up inside me like bubbles rising in a beer bottle when you prise off the cap. It wasn’t fear. Or rather, it wasn’t only fear. It was amazed delight, excitement, glee, and a thrilled, horrified prickling as though my skin were being scoured off, leaving me raw and new. The world was so much bigger and stranger than I had suspected! It made me feel that I could be bigger and stranger too.

  That summer I worked at a coffee shop on Sixty-third Street, breakfast and lunch, wearing a white apron stitched with someone else’s name. I took orders and poured coffee and carried trays of eggs and meatball heroes. I got bawled out by the manager and hit on by the sleazy line cook. But I didn’t care. At three o’clock the apron came off and I slid away into the streets.

  Art was everywhere in that blazing, blaring city. On Fifth Avenue, venerable institutions stood shoulder to shoulder, each one overflowing with beauty and strangeness from every era and culture and corner of the globe, each one a gigantic mouth swallowing entire afternoons. Again and again in those tall chambers I encountered paintings I had learned about in school—paintings about which I had written papers and exams. Each one was a surprise, a shock, full of unsuspected depth and the vibrating brashness of life, so that it was as if I’d never seen it before at all.