Sweet Water (3 page)

T
he woman from the Sweetwater courthouse said she thought I could get good money for the land.

“That’s a pretty piece of property your granddaddy’s left you. Developers have been itching to get their hands on it for years,” she said. Her name was Crystal. Her voice was slow and sweet. “We’re not exactly a booming metropolis, but people come and go.”

“What’s the house like?”

“Well, it’s not much to look at, but the location’s great. About five minutes outside of town, running parallel to the highway. Easy to get to. That’s why I say you won’t have any trouble getting rid of it. They can chop it into three or four subdivisions, pave roads all through it, and even the farthest houses won’t be more than ten minutes from town.

“But I don’t imagine you’ll get much for that old house. They’ll probably tear it down and start from scratch. Too much of a pain to work around it. I’ll tell you what, though, you ought to get somebody to help you if you’ve never handled land before. You’ll get swindled if you’re not careful.”

It was quiet in the gallery, a typical weekday morning. A blond, Nordic-looking couple in their thirties were the only visitors. I smiled at them politely, cradling the phone on my shoulder with my chin, and wrote down the names Crystal was giving me. To my surprise, the list included my uncle Horace, a local real estate developer.

My grandfather had left me sixty acres.
Sixty acres
—I couldn’t
even visualize it. The land stretched across my imagination like a continent, a universe of dying grass and scrubby hills, with an old abandoned house at the center. Crystal, who seemed to know everybody, told me that Clyde, my grandmother, hadn’t wanted to live there. She thought it was inconvenient, too remote and old-fashioned. She lived in a modern housing development closer to town, with electric garage doors and access to cable TV. Horace and Elaine, my mother’s siblings, lived with their spouses near shopping malls. Their children were grown and out of the house.

“I wouldn’t call your uncle first on this one,” Crystal was saying. “To be honest with you, it was a surprise to everybody that old Mr. C. left you that land. Not that you don’t deserve it, seeing as you’re Ellen’s daughter and all, but I think people had just plain forgot about you.”

In his will, my grandfather had said he wanted to leave his three children sixty acres each but since my mother was dead her share would be passed on to me. From what I could get out of Crystal, it seemed that Horace and Elaine had thought it would be theirs to divide.

It occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what the property was worth. Thousands of dollars? Five, ten, fifty? Crystal said she had no idea either. She gave me a name to call for an estimate. “And after you talk to him, take some time to think it over,” she said. “You don’t have to decide what to do right away. That land ain’t going nowhere.”

When I hung up the phone, the blond woman looked over at me. “Such an interesting collection you have here,” she murmured, tapping one long fingernail on the wall next to a dark abstract acrylic. “Vietnamese. Quite unusual, no?”

I handed her a flier about the artist, and she rolled it up and used it to point out features of the painting to her friend.

I looked around the gallery. The place seemed absurdly small, despite all the work Adam and I had put in trying to make it feel larger: eggshell walls, track lighting, bare, polished pine floors. Geometrically
arranged paintings and drawings, each separately lit, lined the walls. The current exhibit—attenuated wire sculptures that resembled cyclones—hung from the ceiling on long wires or rested on butcher-block pedestals we had retrieved from a defunct meatpacking plant. Brochures were stacked on an old wooden desk near the entrance next to an open guest book and cards that read:

with the hours and a phone number.

In the seven years I’d known him, Adam had always wanted his own gallery. In college he studied Asian languages and art history; his mother was a collector of Vietnamese art, so he had a ready field of interest. When he came into some family money in his early twenties, all the groundwork had been laid.

I was with him from the beginning. The two of us spent countless hours finishing the floor and arranging the lighting and seeing to hundreds of details. On opening day we worked through the early hours of the morning, completing final touches as the opaque slice of sky outside the window became transparent: gray, then misty yellow tinged with rose. At five o’clock, as the sun was edging around the corner of the building and spilling in shards across the canvases, over the sculptures, he reached for me in the stillness and we made love for the first time, on the hard wood floor. I remember the smell of paint and polish, the sounds of us echoing in the high-ceilinged room. I thought at the time it was like making love in a church.

That was a long time ago. I can barely recall, now, what drew me to him in the first place. I think it had something to do with the fact that unlike most of our friends, he had a plan for himself and seemed bent on achieving it. He was witty; he was smart. And working for Adam, I knew, would be valuable experience. When it got so that we
were barely communicating except to talk business, I repeated those words to myself—
valuable experience
—like a mantra.

Somewhere along the way, I suppose I must have fallen in love with him. When he reached for me that first time, that early morning in the gallery, it seemed inevitable. The air around us had been charged for weeks. And for a while he was so sensitive to me, so gentle, that I confused the touch of his fingers with love, though a whispering voice in the back of my head warned me not to trust him, even then. So when I found out that he had been seeing other women, I was devastated at first and then philosophical, as if they too were somehow inevitable.

I continued to work with him and even, occasionally, to sleep with him. But as time went on I began to feel a strange silence breeding inside me, a void as tangible as anything I could devise to fill it. I could feel it hollowing against my ribs, inching higher and higher, corroding into itself like a hill of sand.

    The blond couple signed the guest book before leaving. I could hear them conversing in some guttural language as they clomped down the stairs to the street. At the bottom of the stairs they paused, letting somebody in, and I cocked my ear to listen. This was what I liked least about being in the gallery alone: you never knew who might be on the way up; you just had to wait, defenseless.

It was Adam. “Oh, hey,” he panted, coming into view. He was lugging a large canvas. “Help me here. Meet Veronica.” He tilted his head toward a tall hazel-eyed woman following behind him. “She’s cataloguing this stuff.”

“Don’t get up. I’ll help him,” she said in a posh English accent.

Adam raised his eyebrows at me. “Did that couple buy anything?”

“No. They looked around for a while, though. They took a card.” I pretended to straighten some papers on the desk. “If you don’t need me, I’ve got some errands to do.”

“Well, actually—”

“Let her go,” Veronica said. “I’m happy to stay.”

I smiled evenly at her. “Great.” I went back into the office and got my bag. When I returned, Adam and Veronica were deep in conversation about the oil painting propped against the wall.

“I think it’s quite marvelous, really,” Veronica was saying, nervously glancing at Adam. She waved her hand in front of the canvas. “All that … movement.”

“You think?” He sounded dubious. He was silent for a moment, his hand on his chin, and then he said, “No. It hesitates. Nok could
see
it, but he couldn’t
do
it.”

“Hmm.” She stepped back, squinting.

“Maybe he should’ve settled for being a gallery owner, then,” I said.

    Outside, the West Village was crowded with people heading for lunch, meetings, health clubs. Despite the heat, the air was damp. As I walked along the mazelike dead-end streets, I thought about the winding streets of Venice I had wandered the summer before; there were so many of them, and they all seemed to lead nowhere. But in New York, unlike Venice, people walked with a sense of purpose. They had appointments to keep, problems to solve, deals to make. Just thinking about it made me tired.

I drifted up Hudson Street, buying a salad from a Korean grocery along the way, heading toward the concrete playground where Hudson and Bleecker intersect. A homeless woman followed me, and I gave her my change. After that I was approached three or four times, and every time I turned away I felt a part of me harden and steel itself. This happened every day, and every day the process was the same.

I felt that familiar hollowness, the gnawing space inside me that seemed to be growing. I thought about the gallery, the flawed painting, Adam’s hand on Veronica’s back.

All at once I was overcome with anxiety at the narrowness of my routine. My days had become numbingly predictable. Every morning the clock struck seven and the alarm drove me toward it—back
to the city, into each day, the minutes ticking one after another, time that loitered but wouldn’t stand still. Up and showering, soap, shampoo, orange juice by the sink, scanning the paper for fatalities in the neighborhood, hesitating over my umbrella—would it rain? Applying lipstick, nude, the color for summer, at the mirror in the hall. Locking the door behind me once, twice, three times. Swinging shut the iron gate out front, walking in the sun or wind or rain and descending into darkness, tokens, the smell of urine. On the subway folding screens—the
Daily News,
the
Times
—hid blank faces the shades of New York: boredom, mistrust, ennui.

As the clock struck nine we’d be open for business, for pleasure. Hot Brazilian coffee and bagels delivered by Julio, tip included. Inventory. Phone calls. Mail: exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery, opening at Elena’s; the Philadelphia Museum requesting a piece for its collection, but the artist and his work were nowhere to be found.

Time would speed up for a deadline, quickly slow down again: the clock would strike one and it’d be time for lunch. Adam seducing a collector on the phone in the office, me eating turkey on rye, reading the
Voice.
As the day heated into afternoon, Adam might leave for a late lunch with a dealer, and suddenly the gallery would be full: twelve Japanese tourists who speak no English and want to take pictures of the pictures; a couple with three little children; two skinheads who tell me they’re from Milwaukee. A headache pounding against my brain. Three o’clock. Four. Adam would return smelling of bourbon and cigarettes.

Evening overpowered afternoon. Long shadows would fall across the butcher block as we shuffled papers, locked the office, straightened the desk. At seven the street was eerily deserted, trash dancing across the gutter. At eight I’d be in the White Horse Tavern with Drew, nursing a seltzer with lime.

The silence consumed me like a parasite, making me high-strung and nervous. Nothing was happening. Tomorrow would be the same. In the bar I’d eat a bowl of olives and watch the lights come on. Nine o’clock. Ten. Then we’d be out on the street: perhaps now
it was raining. I wouldn’t have my umbrella. My hair would be plastered down in strips around my face. The rain would be soft, radioactive, bringing the refuse of the city back to itself. We’d split a taxi to Brooklyn, and Drew would tip the driver. It would already be tomorrow. I was almost twenty-seven. The silence whispered in my head. Other faces in other taxis turned and looked at me, and I looked back; I saw myself. The silence grew.

    At the park I slipped off my shoes and sat on a bench with my knees up and my arms wrapped around them. All of SoHo and all of the Village probably didn’t amount to sixty acres.

I
was never good at much besides being a teacher, but I was real good at that. When I married Amory I couldn’t cook to save my life or anyone else’s, and I didn’t like to clean. I was not adept at organizing bridge or fixing the house for Christmas. My children were always a kind of mystery to me.

But when I was inside those four walls of a classroom, with a book or a piece of chalk in my hand, I knew exactly what to do. I knew that I could get up there in front of the class and for fifty minutes I could be whoever I wanted; I could tell them almost anything, and they’d believe me. And then they would disappear, melt away until the same time tomorrow, when they’d be sitting there the same as today, waiting for me to start telling stories. I taught English; all of it was stories. I heard that behind my back they took to calling me Miss F’rinstance because I told stories about everything.

I’d only been inside a few classrooms on my own when I had to pack my bags and leave the college, but I had the thrill of it in my blood and truly thought I’d be coming back. Amory seemed to be enough for a while; we’d be eating supper or lying in bed and he’d listen to my stories and laugh at the punch lines. But soon he got busy, and whenever I started to tell one he’d act irritated, get a glaze over his eyes, and that took the fun out of it. Then I tried with the children, but at first they were too young, and when they were older they acted like I was just rambling. Like they were impatient to get away.

Both of my brothers in Chattanooga finished college, and they sent
me books to read, thick hardback books with small type, not those paperbacks with the bosoms and burning houses on the covers. Real books. Oh, I read the other stuff too, when my attention was short and the babies sapped my energy. I took words when I could, any words; I wasn’t picky.

Words never came easy in our house. I’d fight for them, coax, plead. I kept a dictionary in the front room by the Bible, and if I ever heard a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down on a napkin or a scrap of paper and save it to look up. I taught the children to do that too, but Amory didn’t set a good example, and Ellen was the only one who stuck to it. She mined words like gold.

“The sky is iridescent, Ma,” she said once when she was five, and Amory turned on me in a rage: “What the hell are you doing, teaching that girl to talk so we can’t even understand her?” He knew, of course, exactly what I was doing.

I don’t read much anymore, and I keep my stories to myself. But even now the smell of chalk makes me dizzy, and the feel of a new book makes my heart drop.