RATHER THAN BE DRIVEN HOME by Chris Passoa, Bernard came back with me to the little house under the dune. We walked together down the sloping path, and when Bernard stumbled I took his arm to steady him, and we went on like that under the brilliant stars. Something felt different—odd—and after a minute I realized that the crickets were gone. There was no urgent chirping to counterpoint the monotonous dirge of the sea.
We went into the kitchen with its Formica table and warped cabinets, its wallpaper decorated with teacups and roosters. I got the gin out of the pantry. We drank it, iced, out of juice glasses, the only light coming from the flickering fluorescent tube over the stove. “It’s over,” I said. “It’s been awful, especially tonight, with McManus, and the video, and Old Ben, and the notebook. But now it’s over.” My voice shrilled like a teakettle in the damp kitchen. Bernard drank his gin as though it were water. “Stop,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can say that helps. I know—I know even though you disagreed . . . How you felt about her.”
He banged his hand on the table. “I said stop! You don’t know how I felt about her. How could you?”
My face grew hot, my eyes stupidly wet. “You’re right,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry.” I wiped my eyes. “I just feel so bad for you.” It was true that I felt bad for him, but mostly I just felt bad. I almost wished Alena wasn’t dead. How much worse competing with a ghost than with a living woman!
“Bad for me!” Bernard laughed. “Bad for me! I’m the luckiest man in the world.” His face began to color, blood rushing to it until it was dark red like a polluted moon. He said, “Do you want to know why?”
I stared at him—at his cooked lobster face and his sunken bloodshot eyes and his big bony hands tented around his glass. “Why?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Tell me.”
He finished his gin and poured himself a refill. Then he scraped his chair back across the linoleum and got up and began walking around the room, crossing from the stove to the door that led to the laundry yard and back. As he walked, he began to speak, not looking at me, holding his glass in front of him like a candle through a dark hall.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I hated sports. I was that quintessential skinny, faggy boy who couldn’t hit a baseball or shoot a basket, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to do any of that. I loved music and drawing and dressing up. My grandmother used to sew costumes for me. My favorite was an Indian brave, a fringed leather tunic and beaded moccasins and feathers. I used to change into it the minute I got home from school and run all over the house, whooping.
“And then, when I was nine, my parents sent me to summer camp for a month in Maine. It was a primitive place, up near Moosehead Lake, with no electricity or hot water. There were sports every afternoon, and so, in order to avoid baseball, I signed up for archery.” He stopped. The only sound in the room was the buzzing of the fluorescent bulb over the stove. “You can’t hear the ocean from here,” he said in surprise.
“No.”
“So restful. Sometimes I think if I hear one more wave breaking . . .” He started walking again. “Right away I loved archery. I was good at it. Have you heard of instinctive shooting? Our instructor, a young man with a little beard—his name was actually Robin, if you can believe that, or he said it was—taught it to us. Instinctive shooting is about being in harmony with the bow, feeling the flight of the arrow in your blood. It’s about breathing and stillness and not-thinking. He used to come around and place his palm on your chest as you drew to make sure you were breathing correctly. There would be his hand on my bare skin, and I would pull the bow back, aiming not with my eye and brain but with my whole being. And he would make me hold it, drawn like that, the arrow cocked on the taut string, saying, ‘Breathe, Bernard, breathe!’ And then, at last, he would say, ‘Now!’ And I would let my arrow fly. My very first time I hit the gold.” He stopped again, and this time he turned to me with a hard, dark look. “Do you know what gold is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s the color of the bull’s-eye in target archery. The center of the target. If you’re scoring points, that’s a ten.” He waited, letting the buzzing silence fill my ears like water. Then he said, “And the outer circle of the target. Do you know what color that is?”
“No.”
“But if you had to guess?”
“White?” I whispered.
“Very good. Excellent. And how many points do you think white might be worth?”
“One?” My lips shaped the word, but my breath could barely push it out.
“One,” he repeated. Then he began to walk again, up and down the room, which felt to me like a sealed capsule, cut off from the world, hurtling through the darkness of a starless universe.
“After that summer,” he said, “I started to compete in tournaments. My mother would drive me to archery competitions all over New England and down into New York and Pennsylvania. For a couple of years I dreamed of being an Olympic archer. But then I hurt my wrist falling off my bike, and by the time it healed, I had lost so much practice.” He drank again, the glass nearly empty so that he had to tilt his head back, exposing the pale skin of his throat. He was right behind my chair, and I could smell him: salt and bitter orange and alcohol. He put out his hand to steady himself, placed it on my shoulder for the barest instant as he regained his balance. Then he sat down across from me again. “And then, when I was in seventh grade, we moved to the Cape year-round. I had always been happier here than in Boston, and even though we moved because my father was sick, I was thrilled. I had always liked sailing, but now I was obsessed with it. I was always out, in almost every weather, from April to October. I had my own boat, named after my dog who had died, the Caspar. My first boat.
“My father died my senior year in high school. I went to Middlebury for college, where he had gone, mostly because my mother wanted me to. They didn’t have a real sailing team, though, so I joined the archery team and started shooting again.
“I met Alena during freshman orientation. We were in line for something or other, me and all these other nervous kids, and there she was. She was standing right in front of me in a white dress and a Cleopatra wig and gold lamé sandals. We started talking. She had seen an exhibition of Joseph Cornell boxes that summer at MoMA, and as it turned out, I had seen it too. That was enough. We became inseparable. Everyone at school was in love with her—or else they scorned and despised her—but she didn’t care about that. As long as they noticed her, as long as they talked about her, that was what she wanted. She turned out to know quite a lot about art, mostly through reading. A lot for an eighteen-year-old, anyway. I did too. My mother had taken me to the MFA and the Gardner when I was younger, and we went to New York frequently—my parents kept an apartment there—so I had spent a lot of time in museums. But I can’t say art was my passion before I met Alena. For her it was a mystery, in the sense of a religious mystery. She knew about all kinds of artists I’d never heard of—Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Allan Kaprow. Joseph Beuys. People who were pushing art in new directions. It was thrilling to me, and learning about it through and with Alena made it twice as thrilling. Sometimes on weekends we would take the bus to New York and go to openings and performances she knew about. I had the key to our apartment, which made it easy.
“When summer came, I invited her to Nauquasset with me. My mother was thrilled I was bringing home a girl. I didn’t tell her Alena was just a friend. Well, of course, she wasn’t—she was much more than that.
“That summer I taught Alena to sail. She was good at it immediately. She had a natural sense for the wind, and she was strong, and nothing scared her. She had studied ballet, so she had balance and agility. But ballet was too old-fashioned for her. Too rigid. She had started making up her own dances, and then she decided she should have props—scarves and umbrellas and papier-mâché masks. She would take things from the beach to drape over herself—seaweed, and strings of shells that she would spend hours tying onto fishing line. She started doing these performances on the beach. I invited my high school friends. She would make her entrance from the water, which meant she had to basically lie down in the shallows with only her face up, trying to look inconspicuous while the audience arrived. And then, when it was time, she would come out of the ocean and dance, leaping and crawling across the sand, draped in dead man’s fingers and jingle shells.
“I had to keep up my archery, for the team. Alena wanted to learn that too, and I tried to teach her, but either I was a bad teacher or she didn’t have a talent for it. Either way, she gave up, but she would hang around when I was practicing in the meadow behind our house, where I had set up a course with bales of straw and a target. I had gotten pretty good again. One day I hit five bull’s-eyes in a row. Alena took the apple she’d been eating and balanced it on her head, and she said, Let’s play William Tell. She said it would make a wonderful finale to one of her shows.
“Of course, I said no. It was crazy, no one was that accurate, certainly not me. But she wouldn’t stop talking about it. She kept bringing it up. She teased me, saying I was a coward. Why should I be afraid if she wasn’t? She said it didn’t have to be a real apple. To make her point, she made a big model of an apple out of papier-mâché. It was about two feet high, and she made a kind of stand for it that fit like a crown on her head. She put it on and ran down to the end of the course. Fraidy cat, she called, when I wouldn’t shoot. As though we were children. Which, of course, we were.”
The level in the bottle had dropped alarmingly. This time Bernard poured, his hand steady as a hand of ice despite everything he had drunk. He filled both our glasses up to the rim so the viscous liquid curved up over the lip. I bent my head to drink, but he sat down and lifted his to his mouth, not spilling a drop.
“There was something else too,” he said. “A boy. A surfer. I’d met him at the beach, and he’d offered to teach me to surf. He was older than me. He had done a year of community college, then dropped out and gotten a job somewhere and rented a room over the paint store. I said no at first, but then I wished I hadn’t, and when he asked me again, I said yes. He took me surfing, and then we went back to his room, and he taught me about sex.” That was all Bernard said, but I felt I could see it: the crooked room with its stained shag carpet; the lumpy bed, its striped sheets wrinkled and gritty; the yellowed window shade always pulled down to hide the view of the alley; the boom box on the floor with a pile of cassette tapes overflowing a cardboard box. On the bed, one boy arched over the other—Bernard’s slim body braced yet pliant, fierce and alive, his amazed face buried in the musty pillow, his hair a mane for the surfer to grapple in his calloused hands.
“After that, I refused to go to the beach,” Bernard said. “I wouldn’t go into town. I was afraid of running into him, even though of course I was desperate to run into him too. Alena could see something had happened, but I wouldn’t tell her what. I couldn’t talk about it. And then one night, when my mother was out, she got a bottle of vodka and we went up to my room and drank it, and she made me tell her what had happened. She was like that—she was relentless, and seductive, and she placed her hand on my chest and stared into my eyes and said, Tell me. And so I told her. How she laughed! I don’t know what I thought would happen—I guess that she would be appalled—but of course she didn’t care. She just couldn’t believe that this beautiful surfer boy wanted me and I was hiding in my room. She tried to make me go see him right then—she wanted us to go into town and find him. She said I was a coward—a fraidy cat again—a sissy. I’d been called that before, of course. I said I wasn’t a sissy, and she said I was, I was afraid of my own desires, and I wouldn’t even shoot a two-foot-high papier-mâché apple off her head! She was back to that again. You have to do at least one, she said. And so I got my equipment, and we walked down to the beach.
“It was a chilly night, but thank God the wind wasn’t blowing. The flags were limp on their poles. She put the apple on her head, and I paced out thirty steps along the beach, and then I turned back and drew the bow. It felt effortless, the way Robin had taught us, though probably it was the vodka. And the rage, of course. I was so angry at Alena, and at the surfer, and, of course, at myself, that I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care if I killed her, it would serve her right. I could almost see it—the arrow flying, burying itself in Alena’s heart, and the stupid apple falling off as her body dropped to the sand with the arrow sticking up, quivering, like a stake in a vampire at the end of a movie.
“But if that happened, what would I do with her body? I decided I would get a tarp from the boat shed and wrap her up tight with some rocks, and take her out in the little boat we kept on the beach, out to the Plunge. That’s a place we used to fish. A kettle. A kind of well in the bottom of the ocean floor.”
“I know what the Plunge is,” I said.
“I would dump her overboard,” Bernard said. “And no one would ever know. So you see, it was all planned out a long time ago.” All the time he was speaking, Bernard had one hand clenched loosely around his glass of gin and the other hand on the Formica surface of the table, moving it slowly, so slowly I couldn’t see it move, but every time I looked, it was closer to mine until at last the tip of his middle finger nudged up against my own. For a moment we sat without speaking, connected like that. Even with just that tiny bit of him touching me, I seemed to feel his whole heavy weight, as though he were a drowning, flailing body I was trying to rescue in deep water.
“Go on,” I said.
“I didn’t miss. I drew the bow, and I loosed the arrow, and it shot right through the center of the apple and split it clean in two.
“Alena and I were closer than ever after that. I had passed her test, I suppose. And she had freed me, because it was true, I stopped being afraid. After the surfer, there was another boy, the son of some friends of my parents. And after him, there were always boys, or men.
“Alena kept doing her performances. They got stranger, and more complicated, and she started inviting more people to watch. Grown-ups too, not just kids. Everywhere she went she met people. In coffee shops, on the beach, or just walking around town. She was practicing her charm, starting conversations with strangers. And now she was using all kinds of props—dead birds she found, and little paper cups that she would fill with paint or Kool-Aid and pour over herself. She started using the ocean not just as a backdrop. She would run in and out of the water, catching the surf in glass jars and setting them out in patterns, making little fires out of driftwood and burning origami fish that she had folded out of silver paper that made green sparks when it burned. Sometimes she burned real fish too, or dead birds, which made a terrible smell. These performances—masquerades, she called them—were part dance, part witchcraft, part burlesque. And they were utterly hypnotic.
“And then she got another idea. She would get into the water and ask someone to call out a number, and then she would have the group count to that number while she went under and waited for them to finish counting. We had to count very loud so she could hear us and know when to come back up. And after a while, people started yelling out higher and higher numbers, and once someone yelled out a hundred and fifty, and I tried to make the counting go faster, but I couldn’t, and she made it all the way to the end, but then she just lay on the sand, half dead, and couldn’t finish the masquerade.
“I made everybody go away.
“In the fall we went back to school. Both of us were studying art history. Alena claimed to be bored with the Roman architecture and the Italian Madonnas and the Dutch still lifes, but I loved all of it. Still, she kept bugging me to go away more and more often. One weekend we went to Philadelphia, where she had some friends in art school. We went to the art museum and stumbled on the Duchamps. And then one of the art students told us about the ICA, where they were having a show of Paul Thek, and we went to see that. We both got obsessed with Paul Thek: the casts of body parts, but also the complex small sculptures with lights and shells, and the paintings, and of course the meat. The work was so raw, and also so beautiful. It got Alena interested in objects again, which was a relief to me, after the masquerades. We started to fantasize about having our own gallery—or better yet, our own little museum, only not an ordinary museum. It would be small, intimate, devoted to the work of one artist at a time. Neither of us knew the word Kunsthalle then, but that was basically what we were dreaming up.
“And eventually, a long time later—I’m skipping over many things, of course—we opened the Nauk. I paid. Well, I could afford it. My mother had died, and Barbara and I had inherited everything. After college I worked at Christie’s in New York for a while, and Alena worked for a couple of galleries, Janis Saunders and later Gagosian.
“In almost every important way, the Nauk was hers—Alena’s. She chose the land, she worked closely with the architect, she designed the interior herself. She picked the artists she wanted to work with. We talked about all these things together, of course, but for the most part I followed her lead. She had an extraordinary eye—an instinct for what was interesting, a sense of which artists were about to take enormous leaps in their work. I was happy to be a part of it, and to see her happy.” He paused, letting the word—happy—ring out. His eyes blazed with darkness, and the quiet of the room seethed.
“Go on,” I said.
“I can’t.” Panic fluttered in his voice like a bat caught in a drape. “I can’t. I shouldn’t have told you any of this.”
“You were happy . . .”
“Yes. We were happy! We lived happily ever after. The end!”
“Bernard.” I pressed the tip of my finger against the tip of his. “Finish the story.”
His tanned skin was chalky and his eye sockets looked too big for his face: dark pools someone might fall into and drown. He got up from the table and began opening all the cabinets. “Don’t you have anything else to drink?”
“There’s rum above the broom cupboard.” The rum had come with the house, a sticky, half-empty gallon of Captain Morgan.
“I hate rum,” he said, pulling it down.
I tried to smile. “And I thought you were a sailor.”
“Sailors only drank rum because it was all they had.”
“I think you really missed sailing these last two years,” I said. “Chris told me how much you loved to sail.” It felt strange saying his name, and I stumbled over it. I wondered if Bernard noticed. I wanted him to. I couldn’t remember, anymore, why I had wanted to keep any secrets from him.
“Chris believes Alena committed suicide,” he said. He stood drawn up in the corner where the broom cupboard was, the jug of rum hugged to his chest, his limp hair as gray as dust in the pulsing light.
“Yes.”
“Do you think he really does? Really believes that? Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and believe something else.”
“Sit down,” I said.
“I should go home.”
“Bernard,” I said. “Sit down.”
He looked at me doubtfully, like a dog eyeing a newspaper. Then he crossed the frayed linoleum and sat, pouring an inch of rum into both our glasses. It smelled like cough syrup and rancid butter. We drank. Then he laid his hand back on the table where it had been, where mine still was. Again our fingers touched. And he went on.
“It wasn’t until we had been open for maybe a decade that things began to change. Alena began to be more and more interested in working with a different kind of artist. People who were doing things that were darker, more violent, more extreme than artists we had shown before. More to do with the body. Of course, the art world has always had room for that strain of work. But the new generation—people like Galindo working with blood, or Ron Athey’s S&M spectacle, or Daria Angel’s knife dances—it started to seem to me that it was the extremity alone that interested them. And what interested Alena. Maybe it had to do with getting old. She was approaching fifty. Well, we both were. Alena had always enjoyed showing off her body as though it were a valuable possession, but suddenly the value of that possession had plummeted. That was intriguing to her, even as it was dismaying, and I think that was part of what rekindled her interest in the body, her own and other people’s. She wanted to do a show of Iris Vertigo, and I didn’t want to, and we argued, but in the end we did it. And then she wanted to do a show of Kira O’Reilly, and we argued again. And then we were arguing about every show. It seemed to her, she said, that I was smothering her creative impulses. And it seemed to me that all she wanted to do was to push me, to propose shows I didn’t want to do because she knew I wouldn’t want to do them.
“And then we seemed to be back where we had been so long ago, with her calling me a coward. You’ve lost your edge, she said. You just want to play it safe. You want to live in your comfortable house and keep everything clean like all the other rich people!
“It was around this time that Alena met Morgan McManus. I was relieved at first. Before that, I had noticed that Roald, who’d worked for us for years, had started looking at her differently—as though he were cold and she were a fire. Well, lots of men have looked at her like that. But Roald! I was angry at her. I could see the way she kept touching him, whispering to him. I told her to leave him alone, but she just laughed. And then one day he called and said he wouldn’t be at work, he’d had an accident.” Bernard shut his eyes, his long lashes stiff and bristly as straw.
“So I was glad at first when McManus showed up to occupy her. He started stopping by the Nauk, hanging around. You couldn’t help noticing him. Alena was intrigued by him—how he could have a different body, basically, every time he showed up. I didn’t see it that way. I used to say he was just changing his clothes.
“Alena did a studio visit with him and encouraged his work. She saw him emerging from the tradition of Paul Thek—which superficially he was, I guess, but without, in my opinion, the depth or vision Thek had. We argued about that. About McManus. By then, after so many years, it was established between us that she was the one with the eye, and I was the money guy. She had the daring sensibility. I was amenable. That had been our shtick for a long time, and when it was a shtick, it was fine. But somewhere along the line, it had hardened. It had become, for all intents and purposes, our reality.
“And then there were the drugs. We’d both done a lot of experimenting, of course. LSD, Ecstasy, mushrooms. And then cocaine, increasingly, as the eighties wore on. At a certain point we both cut way back. We had seen too many people, artists especially, disappear down that dark hole. Alcohol was good enough for us, we agreed, or grass. I didn’t even smoke pot for years, though Alena liked to, she had a steady supply. But McManus was into all kinds of drugs. He was in tremendous pain all the time, Alena said—real pain and phantom pain, though I guess phantom pain is real enough. He took Vicodin and OxyContin and phenobarbital. He liked cocaine, and he dabbled in meth, and he did heroin sometimes—just now and then, Alena said, when the pain was unendurable. But how many people take heroin just now and then?
“And then Alena started showing up for work high on one thing or another. Agnes would cover for her, saying she had called and was running late, or that she was sick, but half the time she had no more idea where Alena was than I did. If she was downstairs in her rooms, Agnes could go wake her up and try to get her dressed. After a while, she was doing that almost every day—going down there and dragging Alena out of bed, pouring coffee down her throat, running the shower. But if Alena wasn’t there—if she was at McManus’s, or somewhere else—well, there wasn’t anything to do.
“One night Alena showed up at my house and said she was giving McManus a show. That’s what she said—she was giving him one. I said no, she wasn’t. We weren’t. I had never said that quite so baldly before. I had tried to argue her out of doing certain exhibitions, but if she insisted, I always acquiesced. But not McManus. Not those recorded agonies and fake bits of gore and derivative corpses. No.
“And so, again, we had the old argument. That dull, exhausting, endless wrangle about risk and edginess, bravery and cowardice, and about, always, the next thing. What it would be.
“We were in the living room, I remember, and the doors were open, and we could hear the waves rolling in. We were leaving for Venice the next day, for the Biennale. I had been looking forward to that—to getting away from the Nauk for a week or so. Getting Alena away. We always had a good time at the Biennale, and I thought it would be good for us. But now she told me that she had changed her ticket so we weren’t traveling together. She had a friend she wanted to see in Paris, she said, and there were a couple of shows. A couple of performance pieces. She said—I hardly noticed that she said this, she slipped it into the conversation when I was already angry, but I’ve thought about it often enough since—she was thinking about going back to performance herself. She had an idea that had been going around in her head, and she thought if she saw these particular pieces, it would help her think it through. She would stay a day or two, then get a flight to Venice. Or, if she couldn’t get a flight on such short notice, she would take the train.
“I told her I was disappointed. I said I hoped she’d come to Venice soon. And she said, why should she come when I wasn’t going to want to have any fun. She meant drugs, parties. She was taunting me, telling me again that I had gotten old, that I’d lost whatever daring I’d once had. She took out the little silver vial where she kept her coke, and a silver tray, and she laid out a couple of lines. You won’t even do a little coke, will you? she said.
“Well, I did the coke. Why not? It was an easy enough gesture to make, and I missed the energy it gave me. The sense that everything was within reach. I used to feel that way a lot, even without coke, but it seemed to me that night that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt it. And of course, we’d had a lot to drink. I thought—it was stupid of me—but I thought once I did the lines she’d shut up about the rest, about edginess, and cowardice, but that wasn’t what happened. That was just the beginning.
“She started to go on about McManus. She said what a great artist he was, and how the Nauk show would make him an art-world star, and how anyone who couldn’t see it had scales on his eyes! Maybe she was just trying to work me up. I told her she was wrong, that she was the one who was blind, that McManus had her fooled. He was a charlatan, she was in love with his ruined flesh, his freakishness. I wish I hadn’t said that, but I did.
“And she said—Alena said—You’re not the man I knew! You’re not the man who shot the apple from my head. The brave archer. I’ve always remembered that, she said. That beautiful night. That grand gesture! I have never felt so alive, she said, as standing on the beach that night as you drew your bow.
“And, after a while, I gave in.
“The night was overcast, no stars, but the clouds formed a milky dome over the beach that seemed to cast its own eerie glow. A good night for ghosts, Alena said. Maybe we’ll see Maria Hallett, she said. Alena had always wanted to see Maria Hallett’s ghost.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, I said.
“There was no papier-mâché apple that night, just a real apple Alena had taken from the kitchen when I went to get my bow. It had been a long time since I had drawn it, but it felt good in my hands. It felt right as I strung it, like an old friend I was meeting again after a long absence. I felt—it’s terrible to say it—young again, and I thought maybe Alena was right. Maybe, I thought, we could go back to the beginning—that this could fix things between us. This act. This one bow shot.
“From thirty paces, standing in the cloudy dark, Alena was beautiful. She wore a white dress embroidered with tiny red beads, and those pink plastic go-go boots she loved, that she had bought on eBay, and that were good for the beach because you could hose the sand off them. She was smiling, though I remember that I thought even then that it wasn’t the smile I had expected. It wasn’t joyful but rather a smile of calculated satisfaction, the smile not of the bride but of the mother of the bride, watching the wedding go like clockwork.
“And then I drew. I was picturing already how we would walk back to the house together, and maybe open a bottle of something, and talk. I remembered that she had said she was thinking about a performance, about creating a piece, and I thought I would ask her about it, not realizing we were already in the middle of it.
“I lined up the shot. It felt effortless, intuitive, just the way it was supposed to feel. But as I let the arrow fly a noise startled me, a sort of cry. Something white disappeared into the dunes—a cloud of hair, maybe. And when I looked back, Alena was on the ground with the arrow in her throat.
“I ran down the beach. Already the sand was dark with blood, and a terrible sound came from the hole in Alena’s throat. Almost anywhere else I could have hit her would have been better than that. In what seemed like a few moments, though I don’t know, really, how long it was, she was dead.
“Of course—I should have called for help. Of course! She might have been saved somehow. But I doubt it. And anyway, I panicked. The boat was right there, on the beach where it always was, and the tarp was in the boat shed, and there were rocks scattered on the sand. The plan was already in place. It had waited in my head all those years for its moment, and now that moment had come.”
Bernard shut his eyes. He put his head down on the table. I sat, unable to speak, as if I too had an arrow buried in my throat. My finger was numb where, unfeelingly, it still touched his. I wanted urgently to take my hand away, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that if I moved it, if I took myself away from him, Bernard would collapse right there in the kitchen, a man of ash.
I covered his hand with my own. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “It was what she meant to happen.”
He head was still on the table, but he moved it back and forth, indicating no.
“It was,” I said. “It was her last grand gesture! Her great performance. And if McManus had gotten her message in time, if he had come earlier, the world would have seen it. A terrible stunt, or a great work of contingency art—who knows? But he wasn’t there. You did what you did, and no one saw. No one but Old Ben, who can’t tell the present from the past, fact from imagination. Chris Passoa thinks she killed herself. In a way, she did kill herself. You were just the instrument she chose.”
His voice was muffled by the table. “No.”
“Yes. It’s over. You can get up tomorrow, and come to work, and start again.”
He sat up slowly. His eyes were black stones in his gray face. Vacancies. “It’s too late,” he said. “Alena was right. I’ve lost whatever courage I once had. I can’t start over. I tried. Finding you, bringing you here. I thought it could be done. I felt all right in Venice, showing you the Scrovegni Chapel, seeing the light in your eyes. The dawning of something.
“But once we got back here, I could see it was a mistake. She was everywhere. Alena. In every room, in every view, in the sound of the waves. I even thought, not for the first time, of turning myself in, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it, I had to leave. That’s why I ran off almost as soon as we arrived. I kept thinking about her out there in the Plunge, her body devoured, her bones caught in their plastic shroud, maybe drifting free. Assuming I even had the place right in the dark. Assuming no storm stirred up the ocean floor, changed the geography. But that’s what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Yes, the storm came up. The bones washed up. None of it matters. It was an accident! It was suicide by proxy. You might as well have been driving a bus she jumped in front of!”
“She didn’t know she was going to die.”
“She left it to chance. That was how she wanted it. You read the quotation. She died as part of a piece of art.”
We were quiet, thinking about that. And then Bernard said, “It’s so strange how you can’t hear the ocean from here. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”
“I hate it,” I said. “I’ve hated it all summer.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Oh, what does it matter?”
“We could have exchanged houses. Every time I hear the ocean, it’s like hearing her voice. It’s as though she’s been diffused into Cape Cod Bay, so that every time a wave washes up, she’s back again.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not like that at all. She’s gone! For two years you’ve held her inside you, she’s been burning through you like acid, destroying you. But now that you’ve told me, it won’t be like that anymore.” I took his hand and tugged at it, that cold shred of flesh. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you. It will be all right. Let’s go down to the beach right now. There are no ghosts. I’ll show you.”
He let me pull him heavily to his feet, let me drag him across the linoleum to the door, steady him over the threshold and down the crooked steps.
The night was cold, clear, still, like a night in a paperweight. A million stars pricked the blackness with their icy tongues. As we came around the side of the house, the sound of the bay rose up out of the darkness, and Bernard stopped where he was as if frozen, a man not of ash but of frost and rime, arctic-hearted, snow-blind. A glacial prince.
Off to the east, where the Nauk hulked on its dune, an orange glow spread across the low horizon. “Is the Nauk burning?” Bernard asked. Hope rasped in his voice like a wasp in winter. Every instant the color of the sky shifted, lightening from shade to shade like a clarinet rising through shimmering octaves.
But it wasn’t fire, or music, or any other human fabulation stippling the world with beauty.