Alena: A Novel Read online

  More extraordinary still were the encounters with the kinds of things I hadn’t learned about in school, which included pretty much all art made after 1965. Some of these were paintings—vibrant and violent scribbles on gray canvases, tightly controlled boxes of color, shimmering grids, people with strange faces picnicking on beaches, photographs of lawn mowers and of tables heaped with sand—while others were three-dimensional boxes, leaning boards of colored fiberglass, neon phrases, webbed tangles of melting resin, stones hung on strings. And that was just at the museums! Galleries abounded uptown and down, common as pizza parlors. Each one had its own gravity, bright things glittering inside like fishing lures, so abundant Manhattan couldn’t contain them all and they spilled out raggedly into Brooklyn and Queens. One broiling Saturday, I took the 7 train to Long Island City, where Alanna Heiss had famously transformed an old public school building into an expansive aviary of new art: rubber flowers blooming out of chaotic canvases, videos of bodies moving like shadows against white walls, typed pages of partly redacted text surrounded with pictures like contemporary illuminated manuscripts, rough sculptures of road barriers and traffic signs, orchestrated oratorios of light. I attended late-night dance performances at the Kitchen, where women in red blazed and flickered, never moving their feet, and poetry readings where words, bypassing sense, sang to me in pure sound. If what I’d seen in Elvers Hall had awakened me, these new visions took that awakened self and shook it up, seduced it, scared it, made it laugh out loud. This art unzipped me and turned me inside out. Like a snake, I shed the old rag that had been my skin.

  September rolled around, but I never registered for classes. My roommate moved out but I stayed in the apartment, got another roommate. She had just moved to New York from Boston to get a master’s in curatorial studies.

  “Curatorial studies—what’s that?”

  Sadie was tall, her long blond hair very dark at the roots, a small tattoo of a sunburst on her ankle. “As in curating,” she said. “The people who organize shows?”

  Of course I knew what a curator was. It just hadn’t occurred to me that you could go to school to become one, like becoming a doctor or an accountant. And, in fact, the idea of such a degree was fairly new. In the past, curators usually had degrees in art history but chose museum work instead of the academy. Many still do. It’s possible that I might have become a curator eventually even if I hadn’t met Sadie. But she certainly sped it all up for me. Six months later, I entered her program. Two years after that, I got my master’s. I had hoped to stay in New York, but all of us from the program applied for the same few jobs. I didn’t get one of the desirable positions in town, but I was offered a curatorial assistantship at a decent museum in the Midwest. It was a start.

  My job, at what I will call the Midwestern Museum of Art, was in the contemporary department. It was not a department to which the museum gave much priority. There was a curator, a woman named Louise Haynes, who was occasionally permitted to organize an exhibition, and even less occasionally to acquire art for the permanent collection. There was a wing in the museum called the Haynes Wing, which presumably had something to do with her presence, though no one ever quite said so. I was never sure why she was given a curatorial assistant, since there wasn’t much work to do. Maybe it was just that she had made a fuss and they were hoping to quiet her down. She had a loud, strident voice and a louder braying laugh and a very un-Midwestern habit of putting her hand on your arm or shoulder when speaking, holding you in place. She wasn’t old, maybe fifty, but she had the look of someone held together by cosmetics and control-top panty hose, like a blowsy flower collared in a narrow vase. Not having much work to do, she spent prodigious amounts of time on the telephone doing what she called “cultivation,” meaning that she spoke to wealthy art collectors who might lend to a show if a show ever materialized, or who might possibly leave their collections to the museum. “Rich people are so fragile,” Louise liked to say. “They need constant attention or they wither up and die.” I guess she felt that part of her job was to keep them unwithered. I could never work out how much money she had herself—a fair amount certainly, but maybe not as much as the prospects she cultivated? Certainly she was comfortable in their world. I got the feeling she didn’t have to work. I suppose you could say that it was admirable she chose to. Or at least that it was interesting.

  In a way, my job was to give her the attention she craved—to keep her from withering.

  Louise had a wide and shifting circle of acquaintances who were more or less in the art world. Rich women, staff from the municipal and science museums, couples who ran fancy art galleries featuring oil paintings of the blue Mississippi. She chattered away with these people daily, gossiping and making lunch dates. I did a little filing, had slides copied, or went over to the library to xerox articles about artists she thought we might show. Every so often she drove to Chicago for a few days to look at art, and occasionally she flew out to New York. But the highlight of Louise’s life was the Venice Biennale, to which the museum did not send her but which they encouraged her to attend—on her own dime—no doubt in part because it was restful having her away from the office. I started working at the museum in October, and the following spring Louise announced that she had a treat for me. She invited me into her crepuscular office, thickly hung with framed exhibition posters from her shows, and pinned-up invitations to openings, and dusty shawls, and a special rack where she kept several pairs of expensive shoes, and she announced that she was taking me with her to the Biennale.

  “You’ve been to Venice? No? To Italy? Heavens, and you an art history major! What a crime—never to have seen the Giottos.”

  I felt such contradictory feelings—the thrill of the idea of Venice (Italy, travel, glamour, the Biennale) and the sting of her false sympathy that was really scorn. Dismay at all the time I would be forced to spend with Louise, dread of the obligation I would be put under, shame that I didn’t have anything decent to wear. But mostly the thrill. I was twenty-five years old and I had never been on an airplane! I would have to get a passport. I would step into a gondola in the golden light and watch the fabled façades drift by. I would dazzle my eyes with the riches of St. Mark’s and stroll down narrow byways overhung with flowers where a handsome Italian with a cigarette would follow me with his smoldering eyes.

  And so I found myself, in the last week of June, in a small room adjoining Louise’s large one in the Hotel da Silva in Venice—crowded, hot, smelly, bedazzling Venice, city of water and glass. We spent the first days of that trip in a whirlwind of parties and pavilions. Never having been to Venice—never having been anywhere—I would have liked to spend a day in St. Mark’s Basilica, to visit the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. But of course, we were here to see the Biennale, which, along with the other exhibitions, programs, and special events that spring up in its shade every odd-numbered year, spreads its tentacles out from the Giardini and holds the city tight in the grip of glitter and celebrity.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the way all of Venice was possessed by the passion for art, for the new, for the most outrageous. I had seen a lot of strange, disturbing art in New York, of course, but in Venice the work seemed bigger and stranger: giant insectlike forms hulking in marble rooms, heavy canvases thickly smeared with what looked like bloody footprints, video projections showing images of glaciers cut with bodies crowded into hovels, crystalline constructions shattering the dazzling light, monoliths made of counterfeit money, collages of naked superheroes tumbling through space. There was no quiet art in sight—no understated painting, no delicate sculpture of spun thread, no place the eye could find rest. Or maybe it was partly the crowds, the echoing cries as people greeted one another, the constant jockeying and air kissing and insincere murmuring and sizing up.

  Louise knew everybody, though the compliment wasn’t always returned. It wouldn’t be fair to say she didn’t look at the art at all, but it seemed to me
she looked at it only in order to have something to say about it later. I half expected her to ask me to make the rounds of the pavilions and then type up a report to save her the effort. That would have been preferable, actually, to what she did want, which was for me to stick by her side every moment as a kind of lady-in-waiting. “This is my assistant,” she’d say. “It’s her first Biennale. Her first time in Italy, actually, if you can believe that! I’ve half a mind to send her off to Florence this very minute!”

  But she never did send me. Instead, I stood in her shadow and took in what I could: names, faces, titles, styles. We went to parties with fantastic chandeliers like glowing palaces and marble buffets offering pale goblets of champagne like women’s breasts and great piles of Russian caviar shining like black pearls. We spent considerably more time at parties than looking at art.

  Sometimes Louise would send me off to get her another glass—not in my job description, but I was happy to go. Away from her sharp eye and her possessive talons for a few minutes, I could gawk more freely at the golden gowns with emerald ruffles that made their wearers look like great lizards, and the tiny black dresses that made their wearers look like lingerie models, and the shoes that seemed designed more for trussing pigeons or scooping eggs from their poaching baths than for moving from place to place. But if I lingered too long, I might pay when I returned, especially if the wealthy collector or museum director to whom she had attempted to attach herself like a barnacle had managed to escape.

  “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.

  3.

  ON 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.”