Alena: A Novel by Rachel Pastan

stepped back, tilted his head, squinted, sighed. “These make me think of Celia Cowry,” he said. “But they’re completely different.”
    “I was thinking exactly the same thing!” We looked at each other, suddenly near hilarity. “I didn’t think anyone but me had heard of her!” I said.
    “I’ve known her for years. She’s from my part of the world.”
    “Cape Cod.” No wonder she was interested in shells. “Have you shown her at the Nauk?”
    The moment I said the name, I knew it was a mistake. Without moving, Bernard withdrew. His eyes grew distant and his nose seemed to grow straighter, keen as a blade. He looked at his watch, feigned surprise. Or maybe he really was surprised, maybe he had stepped out of time and the squawked syllable from my lips had sent him tumbling back into it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to meet someone.” Maybe he really did.
    I went back to the Hotel da Silva.
    As I went up in the cramped, clanking elevator, dazed and thrilled by what I had seen, and at my own daring at having seen it, dread sent butterflies fluttering up and down my veins. The fourth-floor hallway was quiet. I had trouble fitting my key into the lock, and my sweaty hand slipped on the small brass knob. Inside: silent chaos. My exhausted eyes took it in slowly, the rucked bedclothes, the crumbs and damp spots on the carpet, glasses everywhere, some with cigarette butts floating in dregs of wine and gin. The stink of smoke, the striped chair overturned, and—most disturbing—in the bathroom a ring around the tub, the tap dripping with the forlorn sound of superfluous water flowing back into the aquifer of a drowned city. The connecting door was ajar, but no sound came from Louise’s room. I dared to hope she might be absent—or if not absent, at least sleeping, drunkenly or otherwise, after her day of debauchery. But when I peered through the crack, I saw she wasn’t.
    Even more than my own, Louise’s room seemed to have been shaken like a snow globe by a giant hand. Furniture, bottles, glasses, shriveling lemon slices, stained and crumpled napkins, wine corks, the tops of gin bottles, a couple of scarves, a collapsed umbrella, damp towels, and bags of mostly melted ice lay in shadowy confusion all over the room. Only the bedside lamp, over which someone had thrown a red silk scarf, was turned on, and in its Martian glow I could see the erect figure in the middle of the ravaged bed. Tousled locks of hair twisted in every direction, and her eyes burned with drunken desolation.
    “Do you have any idea what time it is?” she said in a raw, dull voice, and for a moment I felt I was back in LaFreniere on that stifling summer night, sneaking in the kitchen door after awakening in Tommy Starankovic’s car beside the potato field. What was Louise going to do—spank me?
    I looked at my watch. “Eight,” I said brightly. “So—everyone left? Are you feeling better?” Absurd questions, but what could I have said that wouldn’t have been absurd under the circumstances?
    “Eight-thirty!” she seethed. “Do you know how long you’ve been gone? My God, without a
word
? Without a
hint
? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Or that I wouldn’t care?”
    I clutched the doorjamb harder, trying not to flinch. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you needed me.”
    “Needed you? No, no—listen! Listen. It’s not a question of whether
I needed you
, it’s a question of courtesy. Common politeness. Gratitude!”
    I had known she would get around to gratitude before long.
    “It’s not that I’m not grateful,” I said.
    “Oh?” she said. “What is it, then?”
    I thought about what I could say. Not any of the true things, the sentences floating like lucid dreams in my head:
It’s that you’re a controlling witch. It’s that I despise you. I’m sick to death of gratitude!
I waited for words that could be uttered to come into my mouth, and then they did.
    “I wanted to see the art,” I said.

5.
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