The Seduction of Water (3 page)

As I shuffle papers from my bag the men in front of me shift from full slouch to a slightly more vertical posture. It’s less disrespect than the confinement of their desks that makes them assume this posture. The desks in the classroom are the old-fashioned, grade school kind. If my men sat upright their knees would ram into the underside of the kidney-shaped writing surface. Simon Smith is so big he can only sit in the desk sideways. I’ve asked the warden if we could have different seating but the desks are nailed to the floor. The only movable piece of furniture in the room is the lightweight plastic chair behind my desk (also screwed tight to the floor) where I’ve been warned to keep it whenever I dragged it around the desk so I could sit closer to my students. Now I just sit on the edge of the desk instead.

Emilio Lara, my oldest student this term, asks if there’s anything he can pass out for me. He’s my courtly one, always offering some gracious gesture within the limits of his confinement. I think if it were allowed he’d carry my heavy book bag, he’d walk me across the courtyard, he’d open all the doors for me. And then keep on going through them. He claims to be “in” for counterfeiting, but I mistrust the romantic crimes these guys invent for me, while being charmed that they bother to come up with alternatives to the likelier murder, rape, and drug dealing.

Take Aidan, for instance. He says he’s here for gun smuggling for the IRA.

“Me too,” Simon Smith, my three-hundred-pounder from the South Bronx, said the first time Aidan volunteered this information. “Kiss me, I’m Irish.”

Today Aidan’s blue-green eyes skittishly avoid me. Is there a paper due that I’ve forgotten about? I don’t think so. I usually have these guys write in class. I figure they don’t have the most conducive environment for homework (although they do, out of all my students, have the most time on their hands). Something else must be up with Aidan. He’s got that kind of coloring—white skin, black hair, dark lashes fringing pale eyes—that my aunt Sophie called black Irish. (For years I thought she meant there were black people in Ireland.) Usually the effect is striking, but today his milk-white skin is so pale he looks as if he’s about to melt into the chipped and peeling plaster. Those heavy black lashes are drifting down. He’ll be asleep before we’re halfway through the next grammar lesson. So that’s what makes me decide. Later I’ll claim it was also because my only other choice for how to spend that rainy morning in prison was my lecture on the perils of dangling participles. But I know it was really because I wanted to wake up Aidan.

“Aidan,” I say, “have you ever heard the legend of the selkie girl?”

I’m gratified to see a little blood stir behind Aidan’s pallor.

“Silky girl?” Simon Smith asks. “Knew a dancer named Silky once.”

Emilio Lara makes a shushing sound and bares his teeth, revealing one gold tooth, but he says nothing. Courtliness has its limits and Simon is truly big.

“The selkie girl is an Irish legend,” I tell Simon, “a folktale. That’s what we’re going to do today.”

“You’re going to read us a fairy tale?” Simon asks.

There’s a general rustling of limbs in the classroom and the bumping of knees into wood. I think I even hear, from outside in the hall, an incredulous sigh. Now I’m in for it, I think, but then I see that the men are settling in, their attention more focused than I’ve seen it for weeks. Their bodies seem to lean forward and I think that if their desks weren’t screwed into the floor they would inch their chairs closer. And even though they can’t move, I get the feeling I’ve become the center point in a circle. They could be children waiting for a story. And then I realize. They are the perfect audience for my story.

Chapter Three

Ultimately, though, my students aren’t audience enough. By the time I board the train at Rip Van Winkle I am thinking that the piece might be possibly publishable. I carry this phrase back into the city, along with the rain that follows me down from the mountains, across the Tappan Zee and into the brackish tides at Inwood Park, down to the docks of Hoboken and Chelsea Piers: a cool infusion that will swell out of Manhattan harbor, past the Narrows and the beaches of Coney Island, and finally into the Atlantic Ocean.

Possibly publishable,
I sing to myself for the next few days as it continues to rain. I go up to the main library at 42nd Street one evening at dusk to check to see which of the obscure literary magazines that have published my work in the past are still in print. Most are not, but I’m not discouraged. I walk back home through Bryant Park where the raindrops have spun crystal nets around the bare branches of the London plane trees. The streetlights on Eighth Avenue are reflected on the wet pavement. The sound of traffic is not so much muffled by the rain as transformed into something more liquid. Cars sluice through the inch or two of water pooling in the gutters. Horns sound far away, as if carried over a long stretch of water. Usually when it rains in the city you smell either the sea or the mountains. Tonight I seem to smell both. A heady mix of pine and salt, snowmelt and decay.

The raindrops on my umbrella ping out my new favorite song:
possibly publishable
. Henry James’s
summer afternoon
can eat grass;
possibly publishable
is the most beautiful phrase in the English language. It doesn’t matter if those other magazines have gone out of print; I know whom I’ll send it to: Phoebe Nix at
Caffeine
. When I met her at an open poetry night at the Cornelia Street Café a few weeks ago she told me she liked the poem I read.
Have you thought about writing more about your mother?
she asked. I shrugged and told her I hated that idea of relying on a parent’s fame—or in my mother’s case: once-fame-now-near-obscurity. I told her I’d spent most of my life trying to recover from my mother’s writing block. People usually laugh when I say that, but Phoebe had looked dead serious. Since she also looked about nineteen I attributed her reaction to a lack of maturity.

Later, when I was standing upstairs in the restaurant with Jack, she handed me her business card, which identified her as editor in chief of
Caffeine
—the new literary magazine I’d seen in bookstores and cafés around town.

“Do you know whose daughter she is?” Jack asked out on the street.

“No, is she somebody famous?”

“Vera Nix,” he said, a poet who was as famous for her suicide as her poetry.

“Shit,” I said and told Jack about the
getting over my mother’s writing block
comment.

“It’s like you have a radar,” Jack said, shaking his head, with something almost like admiration, “that picks up possible success and steers you the hell away from it.”

Still, I sent her some poems. From one writer’s daughter to another, even though mine hadn’t killed herself. Not exactly. She wrote me a nice note, declining the poems, but encouraging me to submit again.

I put Phoebe Nix’s note in my “submit again” box—my father’s old humidor, which I kept on my desk. Whenever I opened it the odor of Cuban cigars wafted out and for just a moment it was as if my father were in the room. Or had just left the room. It was how I’d find him in the hotel when I was little—by following the smell of his cigars from the lobby to the Grill, back into the kitchens, up the back staircase to the linen closets, to his office on the second floor. I had this fear that if I opened the box too often the smell of cigars would someday dissipate and so I opened it sparingly.

I thought of my “submit again” notes as having the same kind of expiration date. My experience—over twenty years of submitting to literary journals—told me that once I snagged a line of encouragement from an editor I had about three tries. If they didn’t take anything in three submissions they’d probably give up. The glow of promise would fade. My SASE would return with no encouraging scribble, merely a poorly Xeroxed rejection slip. Like a magic amulet given in a fairy tale, the notes possessed a finite power and must be used wisely.

By the time I reach the steps to my building I’ve resolved to cash in Phoebe Nix’s note—I can almost smell Cuban tobacco on the damp wind blowing east from the river. I close my eyes, one hand on the wrought-iron railing as I climb the steep steps, to concentrate on that scent and trip over someone sitting on the top step. I draw back, expecting one of the neighborhood street people sheltering from the rain, but then relax when I realize it’s someone I know. My relief quickly fades when I realize where I know him from. It’s Aidan Barry.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, Professor Greenfeder,” he says, rising to his feet. “I wanted to give you this.”

He’s holding something wrapped in a blue-and-white Blockbuster Video bag. It doesn’t look like a gun, but I back away from him and nearly trip backward down the steps. He reaches forward quickly and catches my arm to keep me from falling and I gasp. I look up and down the street to see if anyone is out, but even in clear weather my corner of Jane, right next to the West Side Highway and the river, is not well populated. Now in the rain, there are only the headlights of cars on the highway. It’s Friday. Not one of Jack’s nights to come over.

Aidan drops his hand from my arm, looks down and shakes his head. I notice that drops of water glisten in his dark hair. “I guess I shouldn’t have come over here, but I was working on Varick Street and I saw from your address on that story you gave us that you lived close . . .”

“What do you mean working on Varick Street? Aren’t you . . . I mean aren’t you . . . in prison?”

Aidan laughs. “I was put on work release last month, Prof. I’m up for parole. I’m supposed to transfer into your class at Grace next week. I thought they told you that stuff.”

I shake my head. I bet they tell tenured faculty at Grace when their prisoner-students are released. Or maybe the tenured faculty never teach the prison classes. “Did you say you saw my address on the essay I gave you?”

He draws a sheaf of folded paper from the Blockbuster bag and hands me the Xeroxed copy of “The Selkie’s Daughter” I gave my classes. In the upper-left-hand corner is my address, phone number, and e-mail: my standard form for magazine submissions. I hadn’t even noticed I’d left it on the first page when I copied the piece for my classes. I’ve given my home address to all my students, including a dozen inmates of the Rip Van Winkle Correctional Facility.

“Shit,” I say, shaking the paper at Aidan. “Tell me my phone number isn’t scrawled on the men’s bathroom at Van Wink.”

Aidan smiles and shakes his head. Drops of water roll from his hair and dampen the collar of his denim jacket. A drop hits me and rolls down the back of my neck making me shiver. “Hey, don’t worry,” he says, “Emilio noticed you’d left your address on the essays and we asked the guard for some Wite-Out. The guys in that class like you. They won’t give your address out or anything. I guess I shouldn’t have kept it—just, that story you read about your mother reminded me of this book of fairy tales I had growing up and I thought I’d try to find it so I could write my essay on it.” Aidan is still holding out the blue-and-white plastic bag. I take it from him and look inside the bag. There’s a book and another sheaf of folded paper.

“You’re delivering your paper to me? I said I’d give you time to write in class next week.”

Aidan shrugs, and then shivers. The denim jacket he’s wearing is too light for the March night and it’s soaked. In normal circumstances I’d invite him in, but even though I’ve gotten over my initial shock at seeing one of my prisoners out loose on the street, I’m not ready to invite him up to my apartment. “I had some time on the train,” he tells me, and then, looking at his watch, says, “Actually, I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my train back up. I’m staying at a detention house near the prison. They don’t like it when you’re late. I didn’t think you’d be out so late. Big date, huh?”

I think of the hour I’ve just spent in the Periodicals Room at the library and I hate to disappoint Aidan. When was the last time I was out on a big date? Would you even say that the Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday nights I spend with Jack are dates at all? “Yeah,” I tell Aidan, “a big date.”

Aidan pulls the collar of his jacket up and shoves his hands in his pockets. “So where is the lucky guy? You didn’t have a fight or something?”

“I was hoping to get some writing done,” I say, looking into Aidan’s blue-green eyes. It’s the first time I’ve seen him outside of the sickly glow of fluorescent prison lighting. Even streetlight is better. I notice that his long dark lashes are glistening with rain and even the T-shirt under his jacket is wet. He looks like he’s shown up on my doorstep from the river rather than just Varick Street. “Now I guess I’ll try to read some papers.” I take out the folded pages from the bag Aidan has given me. They’re handwritten I see. Inside the plastic bag is a smaller brown paper bag with the name
BOOKS OF WONDER
printed on it, a children’s bookstore on 18th Street.

“Hey, I love this store,” I tell Aidan.

“Yeah, I tried five stores before I found one that carried the same book I remembered.”

I slip the book out from its paper covering and see that it’s an old edition of Irish fairy tales. The binding is pale green cloth embossed with golden lettering, the letters springing from the sinuous hair of a woman sitting on a rock. The same hair billows out below her, ensnaring the figure of a man swimming in the waves beside the rock.

“Aidan, this is beautiful, it must have cost a lot, I can’t accept this.”

“Sure you can, Prof. Where would I keep it? What do you think my fellow parolees would make of me reading fairy tales?”

I look at the book and notice that the woman is naked. The man swimming in the ocean is also naked; the selkie’s hair twines between his legs and wraps snakelike around his arms. I feel myself blushing and hope that Aidan doesn’t notice in the dull gleam of the streetlights.

“Well, I’ll keep it for you for now. But when you find some other place to stay . . .”

“Sure,” he says, moving down the steps, his back still to the street. “In a month or two I’ll be able to take my own place—if I can find a steady job. I hope you like the book . . . and my paper. I worked really hard on it. I hadn’t thought about those stories in years.”

Aidan’s got one foot off the sidewalk into the cobblestone street when he turns back to me, casually, as if he’s just remembered something. There’s something in the deliberate casualness of the tilt of his head that makes me think he’s going to ask for money, a place to stay, some favor . . . “So tell me,” he says, “if your mother was Irish and your father was Jewish, what were you brought up as?”

I’m surprised by the question mostly because he is the only one of all who’ve read the piece so far to ask it.

“As nothing,” I say. “No religion. You’re only Jewish if your mother’s Jewish, and my mother had given up Catholicism . . .” I pause, trying to think why it was again that my mother had rejected the church, but like so much else about my mother, I have no direct evidence, only a puzzling silence. Once, when I was about six, I found, in among my mother’s costume jewelry, a slim gold disc embossed with the face of a beautiful woman holding a rose. Something about the woman’s face drew me in a way that the glittery beads didn’t and I put it on. It was a few days before my mother noticed it on me.

“Give me that,” she told me, yanking it from my neck, “before your father or aunt sees it.”

The chain bruised my neck when she tore it from me, but worse than that was the look in my mother’s face. I’d never seen her look like that and I couldn’t imagine what had made her so angry. “She never minded before when I wore her beads,” I sobbed to my father while he put ice on my neck.

“Yes, but this was different. It was a saint’s medal—something Catholics wear—and your mother promised me that except for being christened she wouldn’t raise you as a Catholic. Not that I had any objections, but maybe she thought it would offend me or Sophie.”

“She had me baptized,” I tell Aidan, anxious to offer him something besides the bare lack of religion in my life.

“Oh well, she wouldn’t want you to end up in limbo, would she? Even the most lapsed Catholic mother wouldn’t want that.”

“Yeah, but she waited until I was three. Apparently she wasn’t in such a rush to save my immortal soul.”

“Three!” There. Finally I’ve shocked this good Catholic boy. This good Catholic convict, I remind myself. For some reason it fails to satisfy me; instead I feel vaguely embarrassed, whether for me or my mother, I’m not sure. “She waited to take me to the same church in Brooklyn where she’d been baptized—St. Mary Star of the Sea?”

Aidan shakes his head. “I grew up in Inwood and most of my relatives live in Woodlawn. I don’t know Brooklyn.”

“When the priest saw me walking down the aisle to my own baptism he had a fit.”

Aidan chuckles. “I bet.”

I smile, warming to the story.

“ ‘What were you thinking waiting this long?’ the priest said to her. ‘She’s here now,’ my mother told him, ‘do you want to baptize her or not?’ ”

“And he did?”

“One more saved soul.”

“Your mother sounds like something,” he says. “My mother would never stand up to a priest that way, she was that afraid of them. Now my gran . . . but I talk about her in my paper. You’ll see.” Aidan crosses his arms across his chest and rubs them, obviously chilled. “Well . . . ,” he says.

I still have no intention of inviting him up—I’m not an idiot—but for a second I think we’re both aware that if the situation were different this would be the moment when I would. I picture my apartment—I have the corner apartment on the top floor, which includes a hexagonal tower facing the river—like an empty boat drifting over our heads. He’d like the view. It’s the view he’d have from the prison if not for that wall.