Free Alena: A Novel by Rachel Pastan

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