The Seduction of Water (12 page)

“Do they make it?”

“No. Mac Ness orders them to be beheaded. Deirdre throws herself into their burial pit and dies in Naoise’s arms. That’s why it’s called ‘The Sorrows of Deirdre.’ Her sorrows are over having caused so much death. My mother named the main character in her books Deirdre and there’s an evil king named Connachar and a hero called Naoise, but she doesn’t really follow the story. I think, though, that she used the names to allude to the danger of love—what might happen if you followed your heart.”

Aidan is still looking up at the window. The light, coming through the stained glass, casts jeweled shadows on his face—emerald, ruby, and sapphire. When he turns back to me I notice that his eyes are the same sapphire as the glass in the window.

“It seems to me there’s more sorrow in not following your heart,” he says. “So are you coming in?”

I shake my head.

“Then would you like me to take you home?” I notice he says
take you home
not
walk you home
, but I choose to answer as if he said the latter.

“No, Aidan I’ll be fine, it’s a lovely night and I’m almost home.” He shrugs and turns his shoulder so I think he’s heading back inside but instead he leans in and kisses me lightly on the cheek, saying something I don’t quite hear. Then he’s gone. I turn and walk south. I’ve gone two blocks before I realize what he said. “Well, maybe another time then.”

Chapter Twelve

At home there’s a message on my answering machine that sounds like running water. When I turn up the volume a notch it sounds like running water with a Brooklyn accent. Only when I’ve turned the volume as high as it goes do I make out my aunt’s message.

“I’m calling from a cell-yu-lar phone,” she says, drawing out each word as if to make up in slowness what she lacks in volume. “I have some news to discuss with you that I cannot relate over the switchboard. I’ll be in the Hoo-Ha by Sunset Rock precisely at ten o’clock
P.M
. I’m assuming you’ll be home by then. The number is . . .”

I have to replay the message six times to transcribe the number of my aunt’s new cellular phone. By the time I’ve got it, it’s ten minutes before ten.

The Hoo-Ha my aunt is referring to is a little wooden structure with a bench and a cedar shake roof, one of the dozen little buildings built by Joseph over the years. Our guests usually refer to them as the gazebos or summerhouses, which is what they’re called by another hotel to the south of us. Joseph, though, always called them
chuppas
, like the rudimentary shelters used in Jewish wedding ceremonies. My aunt thought our gentile guests would be put off by this designation so whenever she heard Joseph use the word c
huppa
she would pretend to correct his pronunciation and say, “He means Hoo-Ha—that’s what the English call them.” By the time I learned that the British designation for this kind of garden folly is a “Ha-Ha” it was too late to break her of the habit.

This particular Hoo-Ha, the one by Sunset Rock, is on a trail in the woods about a quarter mile from the hotel. I can’t imagine my aunt making this journey in the daytime let alone in the dark. The path she has to take goes across a bridge over a waterfall and along a ledge with a forty-foot drop on the other side. What in the world does she have to tell me that would require this level of subterfuge?

I dial the number and my aunt picks up on the eighth or ninth ring as if she were in a large mansion instead of a three-by-five-foot lean-to. “Hello, Mata Hari,” I say, “this is your niece, code name Hoo-Ha.”

“What? Is that you, Iris?” my aunt yells into the phone as if she’s calling down a deep well. “I don’t think this thing works too well.”

“I can hear you fine, Aunt Sophie.”

“Ah, that’s better. I didn’t want to hold this thing too close to my ear in case it gives you brain cancer, not that at my age a tumor would matter much—”

“Aunt Sophie,” I interrupt, “why are you out in the middle of the woods? What’s up?”

“I didn’t want Janine to hear. You know Janine—a bigger yenta you never met.”

Actually I’ve always thought that Janine, the hotel operator for over forty years, has the discretion of a priest in the confessional. Especially considering all she must have heard over the years. She showed me when I was only ten how to listen in on calls without “the party” catching on, but the only time she divulged the information she had overhead was when, as she put it, she was “privy to information of a dire or life-threatening
nachure
.” When Mrs. Crosby in Room 206 told her estranged husband she was planning to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, for instance, or when she overheard the “millionaire” occupying the Sunnyside Suite for the whole summer discussing his imminent bankruptcy with his lawyer, Janine alerted my father. “For the good of the hotel or the good of the guest,” Janine liked to say. “Otherwise: zip,” and she would draw her lacquered red fingernails across her matching shade of lipstick in a pantomime of confidentiality. But surely my aunt has not braved wildlife and brain cancer to discuss Janine’s character.

“So what do you have to tell me?” I ask.

“Well!” I can tell from the explosion of breath that my aunt would like to draw out this piece of news but either her dislike of being outdoors or consciousness of how much this call must cost compels her to be brief. “The hotel has been sold. A big-shot hotel man from the city has bought the place, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“A hotel man,” I say. “Then it won’t be torn down? The hotel will be open this summer?”

“Open and running at full capacity. Mr. Big-Shot Hotel Man says he wants extra staff put on, everything spruced up, advertisements in all the papers. He wants to see what the hotel can do and then he’ll ‘determine the direction of the Hotel Equinox’s future’ at the end of the season.”

“In other words . . .”

“In other words, we have the best season we’ve had in twenty years or he’ll tear it down and write it off as a tax loss.”

“Well, that should make for a relaxing summer.”

“Relaxing is for the guests,” my aunt tells me, something she’s said to me all my life. “Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m surrounded by geriatric staff. What we could use up here is a little fresh blood . . .”

“I’ll come up,” I say. I could drag it out, I realize; she obviously needs my help more than ever, but I have an image of my aunt in the deep pine woods, peering anxiously into the shadows for rabid wildlife ready to spring out at her. “I want to work there this summer . . .” What I’m about to say is that I want to work on the memoir I’ve just contracted to write, but when she cuts me off—obviously misinterpreting what I mean—it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t tell her about the memoir yet. Why get her hopes up? Why expose my new good luck to her withering scrutiny?

“Excuse me,” she says, “I must have a bad connection. Miss I-have-to-be-in-New-York-City-to-write wants to work in the hotel this summer?”

“Very funny. I’ve even got a maid and a night clerk for you. Two students who need work. If you want them.”

“Are they under ninety?”

“Yes, only I should tell you that the man . . .”

“Any experience in the hotel business?”

“Yes, Mrs. Rivera worked at a resort in Cancún; Aidan was a bellhop at a hotel in the city, but you should also know . . .”

“I’ll hire them. No. You’ll hire them. That’s part of your new job as manager. See if you can find a good carpenter while you’re at it. All these Hoo-Has need to be resanded; I’ve gotten half a dozen splinters in my
tuckis
while we’ve been talking.”

“Don’t you have to okay hiring me with the new owner?”

“Nah. He already asked for you. I told him you’d always refused to work at the hotel but he said he thought you’d feel differently this summer.”

“It’s Harry Kron, isn’t it?” I feel so stupid I could smack myself. Not only for not guessing the identity of the new owner—of course that’s where he was heading on the train today—but for buying into my aunt’s whole “poor me, you probably won’t take the job” shtick. She’d known all along I’d say yes.

“That’s right. We’re the newest jewel in the crown. So when can you get up here?”

I manage to give my aunt a rough picture of my finals and paper-grading schedule and by the time we’ve settled on an end-of-May arrival date the connection really is breaking up.

“Be careful walking back,” I shout into a rush of white noise that might be cellular static or my aunt tumbling into the falls. It’s only when I hang up that I realize I never got around to telling her about Aidan’s questionable credentials.

Mrs. Rivera bursts into tears when I tell her she has a job. Aidan is less demonstrative, but on the back of his final paper he scrawls the message, “You’ve saved my life. I promise, you won’t be sorry.” In the face of their gratitude I feel expansive and generous. I feel, I suppose, like a hotelier.

Jack is delighted that the plans for the book are running so smoothly. We spend a happy afternoon at the Met looking at his favorite paintings. He talks of wanting to paint in the open air, of larger canvases, of limitless skies. He tells me he’s “almost a hundred percent sure” he’ll be able to spend the summer with me at the hotel.

I finish grading my papers in record time and a record percentage of my Grace students—including Aidan, Amelie, and Mrs. Rivera—are passed by the grading committee. I make an appointment with my thesis adviser (who is, understandably, surprised to hear from me after a silence of two years) and launch a proposal to substitute my forthcoming memoir about my mother for my dissertation. She’s skeptical at first, but when I tell her I’ve signed a contract with the agent Hedda Wolfe I see a little light go on in her eyes.

“Have you thought of someone to do an introduction? An impartial scholar in the field of women’s studies to assess K. R. LaFleur’s place in twentieth-century feminist dialectics?”

“I was hoping you would do it,” I say.

Within minutes we’ve settled on a schedule of deadlines and submissions.

Phoebe Nix calls and congratulates me on signing with Hedda Wolfe and asks if I would consider publishing a series of excerpts from the memoir in
Caffeine
. I tell her I’ll have to talk it over with Hedda, but that I like the idea.

“Don’t let Hedda boss you around,” she says. “She’s been know to bully her writers.”

“Don’t worry about me, “ I say, and then, to change the subject, I tell her how grateful I am that her uncle Harry decided to buy the Hotel Equinox.

“Yes, Harry’s quite the knight in shining armor. You won’t recognize your little hotel when he gets done with it. He’s got the Midas touch, Harry does.”

I get off the phone unsettled by that last image. I’ve always hated that story—the little girl running into her father’s arms and turning into hard and lifeless gold. Alchemy gone wrong. I decide that Phoebe Nix can be a bit spiteful—think of that wedding ring engraved with barbed wire! Harry Kron is a godsend. Not only has he rescued the Hotel Equinox but, I learn at my last class at The Art School, he’s also hiring art students to restore the summerhouses at the hotel and sponsoring a competition to design a series of new summerhouses. The contest is called “Follies in the Garden, Whimsies in the Woods.” I spend the last class describing some of my favorite Hoo-Has—Half Moon, Evening Star, Sunset, Two Moons, Brier Rose—and telling the Hoo-Ha/
chuppa
story. I notice that both Gretchen Lu and Natalie Baehr take copious notes and are already sketching ideas as I talk.

I’m inspired after the class to write a note to Harry Kron, telling him about my students’ enthusiasm for his contest and, of course, how glad I am that the Hotel Equinox will be in such good hands. It gives me a chance, as well, to take care of another loose end. I mention in the note that I haven’t told my aunt about my memoir project or the contract I’ve signed with Hedda Wolfe. “I don’t want to get her hopes up prematurely,” I write. Would he mind not mentioning the matter to her?

Sending the note eases my mind for a day but then, like the uninvited fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Phoebe Nix’s warnings about Hedda Wolfe and her prediction of the hotel’s imminent transformation under her uncle’s aegis begin to cast a pall on my leave-taking. As I tick off each chore that lies between me and my departure date—books crated and UPSed upstate,
Times
delivery canceled, mail forwarded—a feeling of unease settles over me, a malaise that not even the end of the rainy season and a run of flawless spring days can dispel. The cool efficiency with which I dispatch all these errands begins to feel like the settling of affairs of a condemned man. It’s like I’m preparing for death instead of a summer in the country.

“Maybe you’re just not cut out for happiness,” Jack says to me one heartbreakingly beautiful May morning when I call him up to confess my second thoughts about the summer. Although I know he doesn’t mean to be unkind, the remark hurts me. It’s what I’ve always suspected my mother suffered from—an inability to be happy. Even when she was laughing with guests or flirting with my father there was always a shadow of unhappiness I’d see whenever she thought no one was looking. Some lingering sorrow that drove her each winter to that feverish typing that sounded to me as a child like an animal trying to tap its way out of a shell.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s going to be a great summer. After all, you’re going to be there.”

In the pause that follows I guess everything Jack is about to say. I don’t really need to hear the details about the residency he’s just been awarded at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire. An eight-week residency.

“But of course, I can come over to the hotel for a few weekends. It’s not far. But you know how much this means to me . . .”

“Of course I do,” I tell him. “I’m really happy for you, things are working out for both of us. But you know, I’d better go, there’s some research I wanted to get done at the library before I go upstate.”

“I didn’t mean to tell you over the phone,” Jack says, “I was going to tell you tonight. I just found out about it yesterday.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Really. I’ll see you tonight.”

I get off the phone and stare at the flawless blue sky over New Jersey, the little whitecaps on the Hudson. I’d made up that part about needing to go to the library, but suddenly it seems like a good idea. Anything to get out of the apartment right now.

I grab a notebook and pen and walk uptown fast, giving myself ten blocks to cry and ten blocks to be angry. By the time I’m in the twenties, though, I can see Jack’s side of it. After all, if I had been awarded a residency at Yaddo or MacDowell I’d certainly want to go. I know that if the situation were reversed Jack would be nothing but supportive. It’s why, after all, we’ve stayed unmarried and childless all these years—so we can take advantage of opportunities like this.

By the time I’m crossing through Bryant Park I feel almost happy. The white-limbed London plane trees, which were just beginning to bud that night I walked here with Aidan, are leafed out now, their greenery filling in the tangle of branches. The back of the library is gleaming in the sun. I’m not like my mother, I think, walking around to the front and mounting the steps past the two marble lions, I am capable of happiness. Why wasn’t she? Standing in the marble foyer of the library I try to think of something I could find out about my mother here. Some piece I can take up to the hotel with me. After all, this is where she started out from. Somewhere in the city. Did she feel the same mixture of hope and apprehension about leaving that I do?