The Seduction of Water Read online

  So Margaret pulled him out of the well and gave him her cloak. She sprinkled the dirt from her garden in a circle around them and even though the fairy queen screamed and raged there wasn’t a thing she could do. Tam Lin and Margaret went back to her castle (she turned out to be princess) and . . . well, you can imagine the rest.

  I think you can figure out too why I picked this story. I’ve been here at Rip Van Winkle for seven years—I was twenty-two when I was convicted—and now I’m up for parole. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of here, but now that I’m going to be free I can’t help thinking about what it’ll be like outside.

  I think that sometimes when you get used to a bad thing—like being in prison or getting kidnapped by the fairies—it’s better to live with that bad thing than trying to change it. Because what if you get a chance to change things and you mess up? What if it’s your last chance?

  I mean, right now, I feel like I’d do just about anything to keep from coming back here, but I see these guys, they get out and then they’re back on the street in their old neighborhood and they can’t get a decent job because who’s going to take a chance on an ex-con? So they fall in with their old crowd and whatever got them in here in the first place—drugs or guns or stealing cars—and pretty soon they’re back in. And that’s it for them. That’s what their life’s gonna be like from then on. In and out of prison like a revolving door. So I wonder. What’s the point?

  But then thinking about Tam Lin has made me feel better. Because Margaret believed in him. She held on to him even when he looked like a snake or a lion. Even when he burned her. She held on tight. So I think maybe someone will believe in me even though I’m an ex-con. Maybe someone will take a chance on me. What do you think, Miss Greenfeder?

  I drop Aidan’s paper to the desk as if it were the burning brand in the story, only there’s no well here to douse it. The direct question—my own name—has startled me out of the lulling familiarity of the fairy tale. It’s as if the knight on the cover of the Celtic fairy-tale collection Aidan gave me had turned to me from the green-and-gold cover and winked. I feel as if I am being watched, exposed in this circle of lamplight.

  I reach across my desk and switch off the mica-shaded lamp and close the window. Something about Aidan’s story has chilled me. It’s not a story that my mother ever told me, but it reminds me of my mother’s novels. Her books are full of shape-shifters, animals who shed their skins to live among people and beasts whose true human natures are cloaked by false pelts: women who turn into seals and men who sprout wings on their backs. Over the years I’ve tracked down most of the fairy-tale origins of her creatures. It’s the subject of my dissertation: “Skin Deep: Strategies of Dis-clothe-sure and Con-seal-ment in the Fantasy Fiction of K. R. LaFleur.” The creatures who are cursed to shed their skins again and again, never finding their true skin, are clearly derived from the Irish selkie legend. The men cursed to live as swanlike birds are drawn from a combination of sources including The Mabinogion and Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Wild Swans.” I’ve never connected the shape-shifters in her stories, though, to the story of Tam Lin who changes shape three times before he escapes his enchantment.

  I should be grateful and excited for this clue Aidan Barry has given me, but still I’m unnerved by his appearance at my apartment. Surely he’d know that his sudden appearance on my doorstep would startle me. It’s definitely inappropriate—aggressive, even. And yet, when I think of how he looked, chilled and wet, waiting for me in the rain, I can’t help but think how vulnerable he seemed. And afraid. The way he describes the perils of parole have truly touched me. It’s as if he’s afraid of his own nature, which he can’t trust not to revert to some primitive throwback. He’s like Tam Lin, asking for someone to hold on to him so he won’t turn back into a beast, or worse, an inanimate thing that burns.

  But what can I do for him, what does he expect from me?

  Again I have that sense of being watched even though I have turned out the light. I reach up to draw the shade over the window to the left of my desk, but first I scan the street below. From this window, I can see the sidewalk and a narrow strip of the cobblestone gutter lit up by the street lamp on the south side of Jane. A shadow stretches over the sidewalk, but whatever casts that shadow is too close to this side of the street for me to see. I can’t even tell if it’s a shadow cast by a person or by something inanimate, a pile of garbage on the north side of the street, some discarded piece of furniture perhaps. I listen for footsteps, but all I can hear is rain and traffic from the West Side Highway and, faintly in the distance, the Hudson flowing toward the sea.

  Chapter Five

  I send “The Selkie’s Daughter” to Caffeine and within a week I get a call from Phoebe Nix saying that not only does she want to publish it, but she wants to put it in her Mother’s Day issue. The few times I’ve gotten a story accepted I’ve had to wait months—sometimes years—to actually see it in print. Twice the journals that have accepted my work have gone out of business before my piece could appear. Now Phoebe is saying that my essay will be on sale by May 1, just three weeks from today.

  “I think it’s very exciting that you’ve decided to explore these issues about your mother,” Phoebe says. “Perhaps you’ll want to do a follow-up piece?” Phoebe Nix’s voice lilts upward on the words follow-up piece in a way that produces a flutter in my throat, something rising inside me like joy. Follow-up piece just might become the next chorus in the song I’ve been singing, edging out possibly publishable as my favorite phrase.

  “Well, I have been thinking of something else along those lines,” I lie.

  “Maybe you could write more about what it was like to grow up in a hotel—that must have been interesting. After my parents died I practically grew up in hotels . . . I was trying to remember if I was ever at your parents’ hotel . . .”

  “My parents didn’t own the Hotel Equinox—” I start to correct her, but she interrupts me.

  “And you said your mother’s maiden name was Morrissey? That name is certainly familiar. I think my mother might have mentioned it in her journals. Maybe our mothers knew each other?”

  Although I think it’s extremely unlikely that my mother knew the great poet Vera Nix I make a sort of noncommittal murmur.

  “Anyway,” Phoebe says, “why don’t we have lunch when the galleys for ‘The Selkie’s Daughter’ come in? Did I tell you how much I love the title?”

  I’m so happy that I break our no-calls-during-the-day rule and phone Jack. He’s so pleased for me he diverges from our Wednesday-Saturday-Sunday routine and asks me out to dinner that very night—a Tuesday. We agree to meet in Washington Square Park, midway between my apartment and Jack’s loft on the Lower East Side. Walking through the West Village I’m not sure what I feel giddier about: Phoebe Nix’s response to my story, the warmth my good news kindled in Jack’s voice, or the way the unseasonably warm weather has coaxed the trees into bloom all down Bleecker Street.

  When I get to the park I remember that it’s only been a few weeks since I walked back from my class at The Art School and stopped to watch the snow falling through the arch. I remember thinking that the snow was a sign of something, but not being sure of what. Now I know. The snow foretold this good fortune, this early-spring evening and the way the last sun hits the slow drift of white petals so that they seem suspended in midair. The park is full of NYU girls in midriff-baring tops and boys skateboarding in circles around them. A crowd has formed around a pair of street dancers and the air is sweet with the smell of the white-blossoming trees and marijuana. What a magical transformation! Like a fairy-tale kingdom released from its spell of winter.

  I look for a bench in the southeast corner of the park to sit and wait for Jack, but he’s already there. Another surprise—he’s usually late. He’s changed out of his usual paint-splattered T-shirt into a soft blue denim shirt—faded but clean and ironed. Is it the shirt that makes me notice—for the first time in years it seems—how bl
ue his eyes are? Or is it that I hardly ever see him in the daylight anymore? How long has it been? What time he has left over from his teaching schedule at The Art School and Cooper Union he spends in his studio painting. His best working hours—and the best light—are in the early morning. He likes to wake up in his loft and start painting right away. So he comes over to my apartment Wednesday and Saturday nights, but never stays the night even though we see each other again on Sunday night. Sometimes he cooks me dinner in his loft (Jack’s a great cook and in the summer he grows his own tomatoes and basil on his roof), but I’ve never spent the night there.

  Aunt Sophie says I’ve done a Lee Krasner, subordinating my art to his. Which is pretty funny considering Sophie gave up her own studies at the Art Students League to join her brother in upstate New York when the hotel desperately needed a bookkeeper. Or maybe that’s exactly why she’s so anxious I not repeat her mistake.

  What she doesn’t understand, though, is how well our arrangement suits me. I’ve always felt that we were just the same and, since we met ten years ago in a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” class at the Omega Institute, lucky to find each other. How many men would put up with my erratic work schedule and understand the time I need to write? How many would understand the hours I spend in the late afternoons, sitting at my desk, staring out the window and waiting for the muse to wing over from New Jersey?

  But as Jack rises to greet me—shifting a green paper cone in his arms (Why, he’s bought me flowers!)—I think two things at the same time. One is that there is something odd, even vampirelike, about a relationship that is always conducted outside the light of day, and two, How handsome he is! How much I love him!

  “Hail the conquering hero,” he says presenting the bouquet—white irises, my namesakes—with a sweeping flourish. When he leans down to kiss me I notice specks of light in his hair, which I think are paint splatters, then petals, and then, I finally realize, are just streaks of gray. Honestly, how long has it been since we did something as simple as meet in the park?

  “I thought we could eat at Mezzaluna,” he says. It’s our favorite restaurant in Little Italy, but it’s been so long since we’ve been there that I’m not even sure it’s still in business. We head south on Thompson, though, and continue on West Broadway. Usually walking through Soho annoys Jack. He can remember when the area was abandoned warehouses and a few health food stores. Now it’s overpriced clothing stores and trendy galleries geared toward a tourist mentality. I expect him to rant about the various gallery owners and artists who have “sold out,” but instead he asks me about the story that Caffeine is going to publish.

  “It’s an essay really, a memoir about my mother.”

  “Memoir?” he says suspiciously. “Since when do you write memoirs?”

  “Well, it’s not a memoir about me.” I know Jack’s opinion about the spate of self-absorbed memoirs to hit the bookstores in recent years. “It’s really a retelling of a fairy tale that my mother—and then Aunt Sophie—used to tell me. I asked my students to write about a favorite fairy tale and so I did too. You know, as a model.”

  “Well, I’m glad something useful came out of those classes you teach.” Another of Jack’s saws: any time not spent doing your art is wasted time. Teaching is a necessary evil. I used to tell Jack that I actually liked teaching, but I gave up, not so much because he didn’t believe me as that the more I tried to convince him the less I believed it myself. “I just hope you’re not going the memoir route because it’s commercial.”

  “I didn’t write it because memoirs are commercial,” I tell Jack. We’ve come to Mezzaluna, but we pause outside the restaurant while Jack waits for me to presumably tell him why I did write it. Because obviously he’s not buying the idea that I wrote it for my students. That would be like him doing a painting to match a client’s decor. And suddenly I’m not sure how I did come to write “The Selkie’s Daughter”—did I write it to model an assignment or did the assignment come after?

  “I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot lately,” I say, “the way she told those fairy tales and then the fairy tales became part of her novels. I was wondering if I went back to her books and looked at all the fairy tales she used if I could figure out what would have come next. I mean, why she didn’t finish the third book in her trilogy. Maybe there was something about that third book that made it too hard for her to write—the way John Steinbeck stopped writing the King Arthur stories when he got to the part where Lancelot and Guinevere kiss.”

  “So you think if you figure out her writer’s block you’ll break your own?”

  It’s the closest he’s come to being mean tonight, but when I look at his face I see that he really didn’t intend to hurt me. Jack can be brutally honest, but only because he thinks it’ll help in the long run. Still, he must see the tears in my eyes because as he escorts me into Mezzaluna he whispers into my ear, “Maybe you’re right. It’s already worked hasn’t it? After all, you’re writing again.”

  I turn to him, but the maître d’ is approaching us with two menus in his hand and Jack is smiling and greeting him by name. By the time we’re seated and Jack has ordered a bottle of wine, I think I’ll change the conversation. Ask him about how his paintings for the faculty show at The Art School are coming. But Jack still wants to talk about my work.

  “I mean it. You look different. I can always tell when you’re working. You get a certain glow.”

  I blush. The truth is that I haven’t written anything since I wrote “The Selkie’s Daughter”—I’ve had all those fairy-tale papers to grade—but I do something that I’ve never done with Jack before. I lie. “Yes,” I tell him, “I have been writing. Something new. I think it’s going well.”

  “That’s great, Iris. To tell you the truth I was a little worried, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

  I smile and pick up my menu. When Jack and I first met I thought it was wonderful to find someone who loved me for my writing, but then I started wondering what would happen if I stopped writing. Would he stop loving me?

  “Tell me,” I say, desperate now to change the subject, “what’s your favorite fairy tale?”

  Jack laughs, spraying a few crumbs of the bread he’s been chewing. “Can’t you guess?” he asks.

  I shake my head and take a sip of the wine that the waiter has poured for me.

  “ ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ of course.”

  “Oh, come on. That can’t be it.”

  “Really. ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ ”

  “Just because of your name?”

  “Yeah, maybe at first. Why, what’s wrong with ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’? Is it because it’s not as creepy as your tortured-maiden tales?”

  “I don’t know—it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? And then I’ve got the Mickey Mouse version stuck in my head and that vine always struck me as obscene . . .”

  “It’s a good story—clever boy makes good—tricks the bad old giant and escapes with the magic harp—cuts down the beanstalk and lives happily ever after.”

  “Oh, I see, the mean old giant is the art establishment.”

  “Hey, I didn’t psychoanalyze your fairy tale.” Jack looks genuinely hurt.

  “Sorry. You’re right. It’s your fairy tale. At least it doesn’t have a mean old witch in it.”

  “Yeah, and it’s got gardening.”

  Of course. Jack’s an avid gardener, not an easy feat living in New York City. But Jack is one of those New Yorkers who goes about his daily life as if he’s living in rural Nebraska. He has his coffee and eggs at the same local diner every day (where he gossips about art auction prices instead of feed prices), shops at the Greenmarket in Union Square twice a week, and grows tomatoes on his rooftop in old discarded tin drums. In his faded denim shirts, paint-splattered jeans, and the kind of boots you can order from JCPenney, he looks more like a farmer than an urban artist. He even has a pickup truck.

  “. . . I’d like to do some real gardening,” Ja
ck is saying. “You know, like in the ground, not five stories above concrete.”

  “Oh, come on. What are you going to do? Move to Long Island?”

  It’s long been a tenet of Jack’s that outside the city limits lurk all the traps that can ensnare the artist. Two-car garages, mortgage payments, lawns to mow on Saturdays, nine-to-five jobs, kids to feed and send to college . . . we agreed a long time ago that such a life would be death to at least one of our artistic careers. Jack had generously pointed out that it was usually the woman’s career that suffered first.

  Jack shakes his head. “Not Long Island, no way. But I have been thinking it would be nice to get out of the city for a while. I don’t know if I can take another summer here. It might be nice to go upstate for a while. What do you think?”

  Is Jack asking me to spend the summer with him out of town?

  “I think it would be nice,” I say cautiously, taking a sip of my wine. I already have a vision of us in some little cabin in the woods, where Jack can paint and I can write, a creek nearby where we skinny-dip, a wide brass bed covered with a faded quilt where we make love in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Well, let’s think about it,” Jack says. Our food comes—linguine and mussels in garlic—and we drop the subject for now, but that vision stays with me so that when we make love that night back in my apartment, the streetlight that filters through my windows and bathes my narrow bed feels warm as sunlight.

  The next day I’m still basking in the glow of Jack’s enthusiasm—from the subtle shift I feel in our relationship—and I decide to share my good news with my aunt Sophie. As soon as I hear her voice—Ramon, the desk clerk, has transferred my call to the laundry room where she is inventorying the linen and I can tell from the snap and rustle in the background that she is still folding sheets while taking my call—I know I’ve made a mistake. Good news and Aunt Sophie don’t go together. If good news is a light source, Aunt Sophie’s a black hole sucking all its rays into her gravitational orbit and extinguishing them. I tell her about Caffeine taking the story—I tell her it’s for the Mother’s Day issue and I’m planning to send her a copy, hoping to kindle her maternal instincts—and I hear that little pocket of silence where there should be exclamation points. I listen to the rustle of heavy linen, as of wings beating the air, and then comes the inevitable question.