Alena: A Novel (7 page)

In one panel, Joachim and Anna, haloed and passionate, met in a kiss, the arch of their leaning bodies echoing the arch of the Golden Gate. In another, a bearded Magus kissed the holy infant’s feet while tall camels looked joyfully on and a fat orange star blazed overhead. In a third, a flock of angels, avatars of lamentation, filled the purple sky above the bone-white body of Christ in his grieving mother’s arms. I had seen slides of these frescoes in school, I had answered exam questions about Giotto, I had memorized his dates and the names of his influences. I would have said, if anyone had asked, that I loved Giotto; but nothing in my life had prepared me for this. My skin tingled, flooded with warmth, and a sweet golden honey seemed to slide through me—molten sunshine—melting me and lifting me, making me stand up straighter, desire and delight mingled, the hot sweetness filling me like breath. My heart blazed like the golden star of Bethlehem in the painting of the Adoration.

A voice floated through the quiet.
“Ecco, ecco, è tempo,”
someone said. Around us, feet shuffled, the crowd shifted. I looked at Bernard.

“Time, it’s time,” the voice said in singsong English. A man in a black uniform decorated with gold braid stood in the middle of the room, repeating his line in three or four languages. Though we had just gotten in, he was motioning us out.

“They just give you fifteen minutes,” Bernard whispered, “but don’t worry.” He went over to the guard and began to murmur, softly, surely. The guard interrupted with a blast of Italian. Bernard took a paper from an inner pocket and showed it to him. The man frowned at the paper. He picked it up and held it to the light, then tapped it with a sausagelike finger while Bernard murmured some more. By now, everyone had exited the chapel but us and, of course, the winged lamenters and the pale Christ and all the characters from those ancient stories who, struggling through their difficult lives, could have had no idea that they were shaping the history, hopes, terrors, habits, and morals of half the world.

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds—the revelation—have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn’t it art, I thought—as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire—that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word. Bernard folded the lire and passed them to the guard. The man’s eyebrows twitched as he tucked the packet of bright paper into the recesses of his uniform.

At our red-brick Methodist church in LaFreniere, everything—the pews, the altar, the garish windows, the hulking candlesticks, the leather hymnals—had been ugly. Why was that? What if the congregation had engaged real artists? Did such a thing happen anymore, anywhere in America? Why were artists considered heathen, dangerous, heretical, sly? Since when? Since Andy Warhol? Since Paul Gauguin? Since Manet and his
Olympia
—was it the fault of the French?

Another group of tourists filed in. Bernard came back to me and put his hand on my arm, its pressure conveying the thrill of the suave, illicit transaction. “We can stay as long as you like,” he said.

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek with my burning lips.

A
ND HERE
I
WAS AGAIN,
rising through the dark in the clanking elevator—my ungrateful heart, too, clanking—to face my benefactress. It was almost midnight. When we finally left the Scrovegni Chapel, we had walked through Padua, seen the cathedral and the university, the green parks and the Orto Botanico. We had dined at a small restaurant specializing in Venetian cuisine—risotto with peas, fish with olives,
baicoli
(from the local word for the sea bass these biscuits are shaped like), and zabaglione—then driven back to Venice in the soft black night. On the boat up the Grand Canal from the Tronchetto, the floating city shimmered like a city in the clouds, shifting and unreal.

In the fourth-floor corridor, however, reality returned. The hallway was dim and still, smelling of old carpet and cleaning fluid, the striped wallpaper faintly damp to the touch. In my room, the light on the phone was blinking. I had three messages, increasingly vexed, all from Louise. Well, she had the right. She had no doubt expected me back for dinner, though she hadn’t actually said so. Still, I was indignant. Listening to her angry recorded squawk (so like my mother’s scolding perorations), my body still reverberating with the thrill of the day, my fear of the consequences of my disappearance was tempered by the cold disdain that rose in my throat like bile. I stood at the connecting door, knocked, tried the knob. It turned.

The room had been neatened since the morning. The bottles and glasses had been cleared away, the floor vacuumed, the scattered clothes folded out of sight. A lamp on the desk cast a small circle of light by which I could make out a suitcase in the middle of the floor, half full, and also the shadowy shapes of three women huddled together like witches, the one lying in the tidied bed and the other two in chairs pulled close to either side of it.

“At last!” Sarabeth said.

“Where on earth?” April broke in.

“They found a body floating in the canal,” Louise pronounced slowly, her voice hoarse. “It could have been you.”

“No,” I said loudly into the silence. “That was a prostitute.”

“How do you know that?” Sarabeth demanded.

I thought. “I heard some people talking.”

“I would have felt responsible!” Louise cried. “What would I have told your poor mother?” The other two nodded ritually.

“I’m sorry if I worried you,” I said. “You said I should go out, so I went out. It never occurred to me—”

“She didn’t think you’d be so
late
!” Sarabeth said.

“The least you could have done was
called
!” April said.

“It’s not as though you have a lot of experience traveling,” Louise remarked. “Anything might have happened.”

It was as though my mother, about whom Louise claimed to be so concerned, had been split in three, each part with its own mouth and pair of thrilled, indignant eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make me sound more childish, so I said nothing.

Louise put her hands to her head. She groaned.

“What is it?” Sarabeth asked, while April, still fixing me with her laser stare, noted aloud, “Louise is ill.”

“I know,” I said. “She told me.”

“No, really ill. Feverish. She sees lights burning, like fires in the dark. She has to go home. She’s had it before, her own doctor knows what to do.”

I squinted at Louise through the gloom. It was true that she was pale, her eyes glittering and hollow, greasy strands of hair sticking to her forehead. Her chest rose and fell visibly, effortfully, with a kind of mechanized shudder like a machine running down. Still—didn’t Italy have doctors? At first I was merely annoyed by her attitude, and then, as though a cold wave had washed over me, I apprehended what it meant. We would be going. We were supposed to stay till Tuesday, but we would be going now. The suitcase on the floor. The purple necktie she had stroked like a pet. I’d had no idea how much I counted on staying—it was only three more days, after all—but oh, how my life had altered in the last three! Italy, Venice, the Biennale, Giotto. The rich coffee and the green canals and the hot timeless piazzas. And Bernard. My heart stumbled at the thought of not seeing him again. What was it I felt? Not love exactly; not desire exactly. But a diffuse erotic longing twinkling like a sparkler. In LaFreniere on the Fourth of July we used to inscribe our names on the dark with sparklers, hurrying to finish before the spitting wands burned out, leaving us with a hot metal scrap smelling of sulfur. If I never saw Bernard again, I felt, my heart would be like that: a black, burned-out, foul-smelling stump. Maybe there was something else as well—some wiser, more sober seed of what I would become that recognized something in him that was recognizing me. A likeness, a kinship. I’d like to think so. But actually it was probably closer to a crush, the infatuation of a girl for a charismatic teacher. “When do we go?”

“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You’d better pack tonight. April changed the tickets. Since you were AWOL.”

AWOL—that summed it up exactly. The senseless orders, the routine humiliations, the exaltation of rank: working for Louise was like being in an army of one commanded by a vain general whose uniform had been designed by Prada!

I excused myself and turned to go, feeling the building pressure of tears.

Louise’s voice, rising out of the darkness, was thin and steely. “Where were you all day?”

Was it a trick? Did she have spies? “I was looking at art,” I mumbled.

“Nobody saw you. Not anywhere. No one I spoke to.”

I thought about saying I had gone to the smaller satellite projects, I had taken a walk and gotten lost, I had run into some people I knew from New York and gone to a party. But then I changed my mind. It wasn’t that I thought I owed her the truth—I didn’t. I wanted to see the look on her face when I said it. “Actually, I went to Padua with Bernard Augustin, to see the Giottos. He invited me.” The words, as I spoke them, filled me with light. I felt I was glowing in that dim room, a bright moon in the midst of their darknesses. Louise’s face went blank for a moment, and then she smiled icily.

“Funny,” she said. “Very clever. Well, if you don’t want to tell us, I can’t make you.”

For a moment my lived experience seemed to crack under the pressure of her disbelief.

“Better get packing,” she advised. “Unless Jeff Koons is taking you to a disco.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. It was hot. I lay in the narrow bed with the windows open, hoping for a breeze. Outside, the sky was a cloudy, shifting black through which noises traveled obliquely, as though from no particular direction: a shout, a boat engine revving, a clatter of footsteps, distant music with a harsh, throbbing beat. Bernard had said he would call me tomorrow, but tomorrow I would be gone. He would dial the hotel and ask to be connected to the room. The phone bell would ring out four times, six times, how many jangling bleats shivering the silence before he gave up? Maybe he would think I’d stepped out or was in the shower, and so he would call again a little later, and then perhaps he would ask the front desk to take a message, and the clerk would glance at the register and say,
Sir, the young lady has checked out.
I would be gone—vanished, disappeared.

Earlier that night, toward the end of dinner, stuffed full and sleepy, brash with wine, I’d asked, “Why did you come to Venice?”

“For the Biennale, of course. Why did you?” Bernard smiled benignly, speaking to me as though to a child, a farm girl, a lamb. I didn’t like it when he spoke to me like that.

“I came because I was invited,” I said.

“Oh? And do you accept every invitation issued to you?”

The waiter cleared away our dessert plates and Bernard ordered two espressos.

“I would have thought—” I began. “It’s just that, after what happened . . .”

His courtly, formal expression sagged. He knew what I meant. I should have stopped—I knew I should stop—but I couldn’t. I was a rogue baby carriage rolling downhill. I was a heavy stone gathering moss. I was a runaway train.

“Is it true her body was never found?” I said in a hushed squawk. Words perched on my tongue like vultures, and his face seemed to recede from me down a tunnel of black feathers. I leaned forward, eager and abashed, gripping the edge of the table. “I heard she liked to swim alone, that there are currents . . . It must have been terrible for you, you were so close!”

“Stop!” He spat the word across the table.

I stopped. I was trembling with the dark euphoria of my transgression. He had been nothing but kind to me.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I came to Venice because I collect art. I love art! I love Venice. Why should I give that up? I decline to. I always come to Venice for the Biennale. I
always
stay at the Gritti. I
always
spend a day in Padua! Do you understand?”

The thrill of my wild questioning sank beneath the glassy surface of silence. I nodded. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t.” The waiter brought the espressos. Bernard lifted his cup to his lips, then set it down again soundlessly. “You don’t understand anything about it.”

It was true—I didn’t understand. But I wanted to. And not just because it was a thrilling story, though no doubt that played a role. I wanted to understand him—to understand Bernard. I felt connected to him by a bright thread, yet we could not have been more different. He was rich and I was poor. He knew everyone and everything, and I knew no one and nothing. What was I doing with him here in a restaurant in Padua? Why had he asked me? Was it pity? Whimsy? A game? What did he see when he looked at me? What did I look like? He could have chosen anyone. He’d had Alena. And now he had me.

After a long time the sky began to lighten: black fading to a gray that, after growing misty pink, suddenly revealed itself, like a handkerchief turned inside out, to be a clear pale blue. I got out of bed, put on my clothes, and took the elevator down. It was just before seven o’clock when I made my way through the quiet streets to the Hotel Gritti Palace, host to princes and divas, on the Grand Canal. Bernard had told me his room number, which happened to be the same as his birthday, so I went straight up in the elevator. But alone in the hallway, standing at the door, I lost my nerve. What right had I to wake him? No, better to leave a note of farewell and explanation, just so he knew what had happened, where I had gone. Perhaps I could append my phone number, my address, and someday if he happened to be passing through the city he might . . .

I pressed my cheek to the cool, hard wood and, my eyes aching with exhaustion and desire, sent a silent appeal through the door. I visualized the thread connecting us, spun out from my heart like spider’s silk, navigating the whirling atoms of the door, arcing through the unknown space of the room to terminate just above the lapels of his pajamas. (I was picturing him clad for bed like a movie star from the forties—Clark Gable, perhaps, or Cary Grant.) Then, quite unexpectedly, I heard the sound of paper rustling, a stream of water, a window being thrust up. My heart flared. I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again, louder.

The door opened and there was Bernard, dressed not in ironed pajamas but in gray silk boxers with stars on them, his fish-white jaws rough with stubble, his hair spiky with sweat, his body big in the shoulders and chest like a swimmer’s. It was a shock to see him like that, almost naked. He looked younger than I thought of him, more physically vigorous. He stepped into the hall. As he shut the door behind him, a flicker of movement inside the room caught my eye: a young man, perhaps my age, lounging on the rumpled bed. “What’s wrong?” Bernard said as the door clicked shut.