The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “Morrissey,” he repeats. “Interesting.”

  “Well, you’ll have to read Iris’s piece in Caffeine, Uncle Harry.” I’ve almost forgotten that Phoebe is still standing there.

  “Oh, I will, I will.” I can tell it’s more than a polite lie and I’m ridiculously flattered by the idea of this urbane man reading my piece. “A writer living in a hotel. I think that’s most interesting. Where in the hotel did your mother write? Was she like Jane Austen, writing in the parlor and then hiding her work in a drawer when people came in?”

  “Oh no, she wrote—” I’m interrupted by Aidan Barry who’s come up with Natalie Baehr in tow.

  “Professor Greenfeder, you’ve really got to see what Natalie’s done—it’s small so I’m afraid you’ll miss it.”

  I hold up a finger to signal to Aidan I’ll be right with him, but Harry Kron smiles magnanimously and stretches his arms out as if to embrace me and Aidan and Natalie. “I’ve monopolized you far too long, Miss Greenfeder. Please, let’s see your student’s work.”

  I’m pleased, both for me and Natalie. After all, Phoebe said her uncle was a patron of the arts. Maybe he could do something for Natalie.

  We walk over to a glass case in the corner of the room. Aidan’s right. Natalie’s display is so small and tucked away that I would have missed it. And I wouldn’t want to miss this. Suspended on wires within the case—so that it seems to float—is a circlet of crystal and pearls so fine it seems spun out of dew. The piece could be worn as a necklace or headpiece, but floating as it does it seems to be something more than just a piece of jewelry, something elemental. In fact it seems to partake of all the elements: water frozen, shaped by wind, sparkling like fire, tethered to the earth by a single green teardrop. Natalie has crafted the wreath described in my mother’s version of “The Selkie.”

  “Natalie, you made my mother’s necklace,” I say, so touched I barely trust myself to speak.

  Harry Kron, who has taken out a pair of reading glasses to read the index card on which Natalie has typed the part of my story that describes the Selkie’s necklace, turns to stare at me, his eyes disturbingly magnified by the lenses of his glasses. “Your mother had a necklace like this?”

  “Oh no,” I say, laughing, “my mother hardly wore jewelry at all—just some fake pearls.” Just as before I’d had an image of my mother touching the hotel walls now I almost hear the sound my mother’s pearls made when she leaned over me in bed to kiss me good night. “She described it in her books—the net of tears, she called it, but I think she got the idea from the selkie legend . . .”

  I falter. Did she? Actually, now that I think of it, I’ve never seen a version of “The Selkie” that mentions any necklace at all.

  “Or she added it to the fairy tale when she was writing her books,” I say. “She did that. She took fairy tales and then changed them and created a whole fantasy world based on these altered fairy tales. I’ve always thought that the places where she changed the fairy tales might be where she’s talking about herself, about something that happened to her . . .” I trail off. This had been the thesis of my dissertation and I’ve never been comfortable articulating it. Which is probably why I’m ABD.

  “You’ll have to explore that in your memoir,” Phoebe says, “the intersection of your mother’s life with her art.”

  Harry Kron nods, looking back at Natalie’s necklace. “Yes. I’d very much like to know the real-life inspiration for this.”

  I stay another hour and drink three (or is it four?) tumblers full of sour, greenish wine. By the time I walk home my head is spinning. I haven’t even looked properly at the magazines Phoebe slipped into my book bag before I left. I stop at Abingdon Square under a street lamp and pull out a copy of Caffeine.

  The sight of my name on the cover has the unexpected effect of making me feel lightheaded. Or maybe it’s just the wine. I should be pleased. My name comes first on the list of contributors. The drawing Phoebe’s chosen for the cover even refers to my piece. It’s a pen-and-ink drawing of a naked woman sitting on a rock, her long hair spread out around her like a fisherman’s net. Caught in her hair is a naked man. In the borders of the picture, enclosed in Celtic spirals, swim sinuous seals. It’s the same illustration that’s on the cover of the book Aidan gave me. What an odd choice for the Mother’s Day issue, I think, but then I notice the caption at the bottom of the cover. “Rewriting Our Mother’s Lives: Cutting Loose the Ties That Bind.”

  I can scratch the idea of sending this to my aunt Sophie for Mother’s Day. I’ll have to go out tomorrow and buy her a nice cardigan to go with the MOMA address book I’d already gotten her.

  By the time I get home the mood of exhilaration I’d felt at the party has evaporated and turned as bitter as the smell of cooked greens that permeates my one-room apartment. I’m replaying every conversation, looking for the missteps like hunting for dropped stitches. How could I have referred to the Crown Hotels as a chain? Or gone on and on about how my father emulated Harry Kron’s management techniques? Although he’d politely told me that he’d be “keeping an eye on me” it was Natalie Baehr he’d singled out and given his card to.

  “I’ve been thinking of revamping the logo of the Crown Hotels,” he told an awed and speechless Natalie. “I think I could do something with this extraordinary tiara you’ve created.”

  Well good for Natalie, I think, unfolding my futon couch so violently I catch my hand in the wooden slats. I should be glad for her. I should rejoice in my student’s success.

  Lying in bed, though, thinking of the odd mix of my students at the show, I kick at the sheets and thrash uneasily. What a mistake! Harry Kron wasn’t the only one to give Natalie Baehr his number. I’d seen Aidan and Natalie exchanging telephone numbers. How was I going to explain to Natalie that Aidan was an ex-con!

  I flip over and try to think of something positive from the evening. Some of my Grace students looked like they were having a great time. Mrs. Rivera struck up a conversation with several textile majors about Mayan embroidery. I’d rarely seen her look so carefree. But then I noticed Mr. Nagamora. Only minutes before I left did I realize he had been standing in a corner, smiling and nodding at the groups of people who were, on the whole, ignoring him. I told him again how much I’d loved his telling of “The Crane Wife” and offered to walk with him across town, but then Phoebe came up with those issues of Caffeine and when I turned back Mr. Nagamora was gone. I scanned the room for him, but he’d fled as abruptly as the bird in his story, leaving behind the same trail of bloodied feathers.

  I close my eyes and moan aloud at the picture waiting for me there—the papier-mâché geese suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, their ruptured bellies disgorging white down.

  I get up, walk to my bathroom, and throw up. A sour greenish bile that looks like dirty seawater. Feeling slightly better, I remake my bed and try to sleep. Just as I’m drifting off, though, I hear the question Harry Kron asked that I never got to answer. Where in the hotel did your mother write?

  The answer is that she wrote in every room of the hotel, between the months of October and May when the hotel was closed. She wrote everything in longhand first, usually on hotel stationery—which of course made my aunt Sophie furious because it was so expensive. It wasn’t bad enough that she used the paper, Aunt Sophie used to complain, but she was always stealing it out of the drawers in the guest rooms so that my aunt had to always check and replenish the supply before the hotel reopened. Even when my father ordered her a stack of the same paper she left that stack untouched until it was time to type. She preferred to wander from room to room until she settled on one she wanted to write in. Then she would perch at the desk, slip a sheet of letter paper from the drawer and take out the fountain pen she always kept in her pocket, and she’d write until she’d exhausted that supply of paper in the drawer. Then she would move on, sometimes leaving the thin sheets of handwritten pages behind her or carrying them so carelessly to the next room that some would slip fro
m her grasp and flutter down the long empty halls, the loose white sheets trailing behind her like the feathers of a molting bird.

  My father or aunt, or later I, would gather them and return the pages to her, which she would shuffle haphazardly into a pile that slowly grew over the winter like a snowdrift, until sometime near spring she would come to roost in one of the rooms and then, after a period of silence, we’d hear the typing begin: a steady, rhythmic beat that sounded like rain falling on the roof.

  It was hard to imagine a finished novel coming out of those haphazard wanderings—and yet two books had. Only after I was born had something gone wrong. The pages had accumulated, the typing had begun, but years went by and no book appeared. It was as if she were weaving on an empty loom.

  Sometime in the middle of the night it begins to rain and it’s that sound that finally lulls me to sleep and follows me into my dreams. In my dream I am walking through the halls of the Hotel Equinox, not fleeing the sound, but following it, trying to find its source. As I walk up the main stairs, I run my hands along the walls, feeling for the vibration. At first I feel only a faint tremor, but then the walls begin to shake with the concussive beating and I realize I’m getting closer. The chandelier on the second-floor landing is shaking so hard its crystal drops sing like window chimes. This violent clatter, which shakes the old hotel like an earthquake, is coming from the room at the top of the stairs, the door of which is vibrating on its hinges.

  Only when I touch the cut-glass knob do I remember that this is a room I’m not supposed to enter—it’s a suite reserved for very important guests—but it’s too late, the door is swinging open, the awful sound is stilled, leaving an even more awful silence behind it. Something turns to me from the black cage at the window but then there’s a great rush of wind that hits my wide-open eyes and blinds me for a moment. When I can see again the room is empty, only the stir of breeze from the open window a reminder of those wings that have grazed against my damp face.

  When I open my eyes it is morning. The window above my bed has come open in the night and the rain has soaked my sheets. The phone is ringing. I answer it and hear a voice that’s more like a croak and for a moment, still half asleep, I think of the giant bird suspended above the old black typewriter. In my dream the bird was pulling feathers from its breast and feeding them into the typewriter’s smooth black roller. Someone on the phone coughs and I switch the receiver to my other ear.

  “. . . feder?” I catch only the last bit.

  “Yes, this is Iris Greenfeder,” I say.

  “This is Hedda Wolfe. I was your mother’s agent. I want to see this memoir you’re writing about Kay.”

  Chapter Nine

  “The Wolf? Hedda Wolfe, the literary agent?” Jack asks that night. When I called and told him about Hedda Wolfe’s call he said he’d come right over even though it was a Tuesday.

  “The same,” I say. “I read an article in Poets & Writers that said her workshop is called ‘the wolfshop.’ Some say she devours writers.”

  “Or makes them,” Jack says. “I hear she got a six-figure advance for some twenty-year-old’s first story collection.”

  I’m surprised that Jack—usually so outwardly disdainful of commercialism in the arts—knows and cares about a six-figure advance. I dip an asparagus spear in the hollandaise sauce I decided to make when Jack showed up at my door with a bundle of pale thin asparagus spears and an armful of lilac boughs. The sauce is lumpy because he’d come up behind me while I was stirring it at the stove and leaned his cool cheek against the back of my neck and folded himself into the curve of my back. This is new, I thought, as I switched the gas off under the saucepan and turned in the circle of his arms like something tightly rolled unfurling. I kept that feeling while we made love, of something wound close uncoiling slowly, but with an urgency I had thought we’d lost a long time ago. We had it once, I remembered when Jack, too impatient to fold out the futon, lifted me onto the wide window seat.

  When we’d first met we were both dating other people—he, an art student at Cooper, me, my Medieval Lit professor at City University—but his ardor had totally swept me away. I remembered the first night I brought him back here and we made love standing against this same window ledge, so recklessly that the glass shivered in the panes, and then again, in the bed. And then in the middle of the night I’d woken to find him stroking me. As soon as I opened my eyes he entered me and came, quickly, without waiting for me, without apology. I hadn’t minded, but felt instead awed by his need of me. It never happened like that again. He’s been a courteous, generous lover for these last ten years but I sometimes feel that that third time we made love on our first night was the last time he wanted me more than I wanted him. That some extra edge had dulled then, a slight shift of desire that left me the one always wanting more.

  Lover and beloved. Didn’t there always have to be one of each? I’ve felt like the lover for close to ten years now, but tonight I feel a slight shift, something subtle as the fine mist of rain that seeped through the screens and soaked my back at the window, a shift in how his eyes followed me when I went to the stove and finished stirring the hollandaise sauce and steaming the asparagus. A shift in how he watched me put down the plates on the bed as though I were some powerful sorceress and this lemony butter sauce steaming the air around us a spell I’d woven. Even the lilacs, which had been cool and disappointingly odorless when Jack brought them, have opened in the warmth of the apartment, opened in the heat of our lovemaking, and released their heady purple scent—that smell of flowers that bloom briefly and only once—into the air.

  It’s only when we’re eating the asparagus and lumpy hollandaise sauce that I wonder how much this change is attributable to my newfound success and I feel compelled to confess my reservations about Hedda Wolfe.

  “My mother had a falling-out with her,” I tell him.

  “Do you know what it was about?”

  “I overheard my mother say to my father, ‘She’d have me give up everything for writing—even my family.’ ”

  “What do you think she meant?”

  “I think she told my mother not to have me. I imagine she thought that having a child would be bad for her writing career.”

  “And she was right.”

  I laugh so Jack won’t see how hurt I am by this remark. Also, it is kind of funny. Hedda Wolfe—literary arbiter, maker and breaker of authors—nearly blue-penciling me out of existence thirty-six years ago like an ill-conceived metaphor or a wordy passage.

  “Thanks, Jack,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. “In other words you think it would have been better if I hadn’t been born . . .”

  “You know I don’t mean that, Iris, but I do think that your mother’s story is about the consequences of giving up your art. It’s a cautionary tale.”

  “Well, maybe a cautionary tale against staying in cheap hotels with illicit lovers . . .”

  “What drove her there? Do you really think she’d have been in that hotel if she’d kept writing? Would she have had to look elsewhere for satisfaction if she had finished her third book?”

  It seems an unlikely explanation, but this is the first time I’ve heard Jack profess a belief in monogamy and marital fidelity as the badge of the fulfilled artist. It’s an appealing thought. Maybe this is what’s kept him at arm’s length from me all these years—a sense that I was incomplete as an artist. Maybe there will be more than a six-figure contract to come out of this book.

  “I’d have to do a lot of research,” I tell him. “I hardly know anything about my mother’s early life. I might have to spend some time up at the hotel this summer, especially since it looks like this will be the Hotel Equinox’s last season.”

  “It’ll be good for you,” he says stroking my hand and then moving closer to me and touching my face. His hands, I notice, smell like butter and lemons. “I’d like to get out of the city when classes are over.”

  “I think my aunt would let us have the attic rooms,”
I say, sliding down beside him, pressing into his hands. “The light is good, the views are amazing.”

  Jack doesn’t bother to tell me, as he usually does when I mention the famous view from the Hotel Equinox, that he’s not a landscape painter. He’s too immersed in the landscape of my hip, the small of my back, the hollow behind my knee. That slow unfurling I’d felt before becomes a flutter now as if what I’d thought was something green and root-bound had been, all along, the beating of wings against the chrysalis of my flesh.

  Walking to Hedda Wolfe’s apartment the next morning I carry with me the memory of the night with Jack like some secret hidden power: X-ray vision or the ability to fly. I’ve become one of my mother’s superheroes, those creatures she wrote about who hid their wings between their shoulder blades and possessed gills pleated between their breasts. I even imagine that I smell lilacs, and then realize that of course I do—the florists and Korean grocers on Washington Street are full of them. Great nodding heads—like dopey, long-eared spaniels—of the purple blooms are at every corner. Where do they come from, I wonder. They’re not a flower that’s grown in a hothouse or nursery. I remember the shaggy bushes that lined the hotel’s drive and bloomed for only a week or two in May. Hardly worth the trouble, my aunt Sophie would say and try to convince Joseph to uproot them and plant something tidier like box hedge or yew trees. But Joseph knew that the lilacs were my mother’s favorite and wrapped their roots each fall to help see them through the cold winter. What would become of them if the hotel was sold and closed? For that matter, what will become of Joseph, who must be close to eighty now.

  When I turn on 14th toward the river the scent of lilacs is replaced by something metallic and acrid. I pass a large open stall where a man is hosing down the sidewalk. White shapes hang in the shadows and I quickly look away, toward the river, where the low buildings afford an unusual view of open sky and sunlight. I notice a new café on the corner—modeled after the open-air market cafés of Paris—and the sleek white facade of a new clothing store. I check the address Hedda gave me and hope I haven’t copied it down wrong. Although this part of the meatpacking district has boutiques and restaurants now, I didn’t think it was zoned for residences, and she made it clear on the phone that she was inviting me to her home.