Alena: A Novel by Rachel Pastan Page B

lobby—to the glass wall beyond, out which blue waves rolled in foam-capped ranks toward the invisible beach. Standing there, bracing myself to go in as though to dive into that cold blue water, I felt for the first time the strange tension I would later understand the spot was designed to evoke: the peaceful garden stasis of the green grass, the pink roses, the trimmed fragrant yew hedges blocking the wind, confounded by the haunted sound of the ocean waves behind the building. The restless, relentless roar and suck of the sea.
    Bernard opened the door.
    In the cool, airy lobby, the glittering ocean through the wall of glass surged and lolled, not blue from this vantage but gray: a gun-metal gray and dirty white prairie stretching away to the horizon. My breath caught like a fishbone in my throat. My ruined shoes leaked sand across the terra-cotta. I felt sure a whale would surface from the deep as I watched, or a proud luffing galleon glide into view from out of the frame, beyond which lay the sixteenth century, perhaps, or the beginning of time.
    “It’s beautiful,” I breathed, dislodging the fishbone. Beautiful! The most banal and meaningless word in the language, catchall for everything from the decorative to the compellingly grotesque.
    “It’s an instructive view,” Bernard said. “If the art doesn’t make you feel something at least approaching that, what’s the point?”
    “And one day, of course, it will swallow us all.”
    I turned to see who had spoken. A woman I hadn’t noticed stood near the reception desk. She was large, tall and overweight, wearing a black, low-cut, calf-length dress. Her hair, an unnatural, glassy, pink-streaked black, made her pale face look even paler than it was, pale as a fish belly, or a scrim of frost. How did she manage that, living here? Her lips and fingernails were painted crimson, and her lobeless ears were studded up and down with holes, most of them empty except for the two long curtains of red stones and gold filigree that rippled and swung whenever she moved her head. A gold chain hung around her neck, disappearing down the top of her dress to lodge invisibly between her breasts, which looked hard and potentially dangerous, like a pair of torpedoes.
    “Hello, Agnes,” Bernard said.
    “Hello, Bernard. How nice to see you back at the Nauk.” Her voice was cool and smooth, like the underside of a stone. Neither of them made a move to kiss or shake hands.
    “It’s good to be back,” Bernard said.
    “You look tan. Europe suits you.”
    “Nothing suits me like home.”
    She made no comment, instead turning her stone-gray eyes to me. She bowed her head, then tossed back her fine jet hair. “So you’re the new boss.” She paused, looking me over with a bright red frown, her eyes chilling me everywhere her gaze settled.
    I tried to step forward and offer my hand, but I was frozen where I stood as though struck with a spell. Anyway, she would have seen it tremble.
    “I’m Agnes,” she said. “The bookkeeper.” Something in the way she said it made me think that the words held concealed meaning, as though the entries she kept in her book were not, perhaps, merely financial.
    “Agnes is the business manager,” Bernard explained. “Office manager. Keeper of budgets and schedules. She has one of those minds, what do you call it, Agnes? A photographic memory?”
    “Eidetic,” Agnes said. “Eidetic memory.”
    “The Nauk couldn’t run without Agnes,” Bernard said. “She’s been here since the beginning.”
    “I worked for Alena,” Agnes said. Her eyes darkened like stones darkening with rain. “She brought me here when the museum opened, and I’ve been here ever since.”
    “They knew each other since they were kids,” Bernard said.
    Out the window, the waves gathered and broke, roaring and hissing. I knew I should say something—that my muteness was ridiculous, embarrassing to Bernard as well as to myself. “Well,” I managed. “I look