In Nicolette Polek’s ‘Bitter Water Opera,’ Finding Yourself Is a Spectral Affair – The Village Voice

“If thou hast gone aside, being under thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee besides thy husband … the priest shall write these curses in a scroll, and he shall blot them out into the water of bitterness. And he shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that causeth the curse; and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her and become bitter.” This is the titular “bitter water,” a Jewish trial by ordeal discontinued around 70 AD. Among Rabbinical scholars, the fate of the women cursed is a subject of debate: perhaps it caused a false pregnancy, or maybe an abortion, or even death. In her debut novel, Bitter Water Opera, Nicolette Polek, an acclaimed short story writer and recent graduate of Yale Divinity School, suggests that, for an artist, the bitter water might bloat into artistic ambition. 

Polek’s novel follows Gia, a film professor at an unnamed college (Polek has taught at SUNY Purchase and Bennington), who has lain with other men — first, a colleague on a walking trail, and then other “odd, discrete entanglements with acquaintances and on dating apps,” and even one memorable sexual bonanza in a “large, spotless kitchen with an extensive display of fish knives.” In light of this prodigious infidelity, the curse enters her. This is, of course, metaphorical; Gia’s ex-boyfriend, Peter, is neither religious nor vengeful. He has withdrawn quietly, without accusation or blame, leaving Gia to curse herself. He was also her partner in documentary filmmaking: She loved Les Blank, he loved Errol Morris, she shot the footage, he edited it. The crisis is logistical, too — not only does she have to consider how she’ll live without him, but also how she’ll work without him. 

The novelist Sigrid Nunez once told The Paris Review, “When I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.” Bitter Water Opera suggests something more complicated: Creativity is held back by stultifying relationships, but maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing. Liberation from the confinement of another can, from a different perspective, be emptiness. What if the artistic Yahtzee that Nunez experienced is not so different from a curse? Could the outgoing charge of sadness contain not just supernatural power but also an artistic current? Polek thinks yes. Gia’s response takes the form of a ghost, Marta Becket.

Gia wanted to produce something strange and entirely her own; instead, she gets visited by the ghost of someone who did.

Personifying the “opera” in Bitter Water Opera, Marta Becket was a real person, if a strange one: a ballet dancer who appeared on Broadway and left New York with a traveling one-woman show. The traveling stopped in 1967, when she encountered a modestly appointed theater on the edge of Death Valley and performed there until her retirement, in 2012. She renamed the building the Amargosa Opera House and redecorated it extensively in her own style, painting murals and hanging corduroy curtains. The whole thing was a curious mix of Fitzcarraldo and The Swiss Family Robinson, half Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and half Daniel Johnston’s alternative, lo-fi, cassette tape aesthetic, an artistic statement both unabashedly ambitious and personal, private and inscrutable. In the early years at Amargosa, Marta performed for herself, with no audience. Later, after a career-making Life magazine profile, she became popular among an odd sort of tourist, often artistic types who saw themselves in her, people like Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, and David Lynch (who featured the place in his film Lost Highway, as the Lost Highway Hotel). Marta Becket died in 2017, at 92. 

For Gia, who in an introductory letter to Marta (left unaddressed in her mailbox and resulting in the arrival of the contacted spirit) laments, “I cannot bring myself to leave the things that make me small,” Marta’s “accessible, grand gesture” is aspirational. The opera house is also Gia’s favorite of a type, other nonpareils include “A lawn ornament in someone’s yard ‘that bleeds, then weeps, then smiles,’ according to its owners”; “a palace of pebbles constructed by a French mailman”; and “an underground citrus orchard.” Gia wants to produce something strange and entirely her own; instead, she gets visited by the ghost of someone who did. This is an analog: the bloating of the bitter water versus a real pregnancy, not possession by artistic genius but haunting by it. What does it mean that Polek doesn’t see the curse as fatal, but fruitful?

Instead of killing Gia or causing a grisly miscarriage, the curse sets her off in a stuttered forward motion. With Marta, Gia paints a fresco of her artistic influences: “Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Jacques Rivette, Chopin, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Mother Maria Skobtsova … ” She does other, Yoda-like activities, but mainly she and Marta have a good time together, going to the ballet, watching The Red Shoes, eating “impractical elysian foods.” But ultimately, Gia literally gives up the ghost (for a failed reconciliation with her ex), and Marta returns to the ether. The delusion is gone, but the grandeur remains. Gia is no longer grieving, she’s left with inspiration, but as with Marta’s opera house, big projects take time — and she’s got to do some remodeling.

The rest of the novel is all process, no product. No art comes to light. (Gia is, after all, cursed.) But it’s hardly a waste of time, less a curse than a mixed blessing. In failing to work out her artistic problems, Gia gets her life together. She does this by reconciling herself to people and things she hasn’t been dealing with. The first is her mother, a contrasting figure to Marta. Where Marta is dead, Mom lives. Back when she wrote her letter to Marta, Gia’s phone was full of unread texts from Mom. Where Marta built an opera house in the desert, Mom “tends a small garden but considers it a gift.” Grand ambition versus modest satisfaction. Gia is no longer sure she’s all Marta — maybe part of her is fine sweating the small stuff. The second is happiness, goodness, and blessings. Gia starts to pray. If Marta was a curse from ancient times, faith is an unexpected modern aftereffect.

Gia finds God in, appropriately, the desert, on a post-visitation reconnaissance in Amargosa. Marta’s magic castle is beautiful, but like the mural in the lobby, it’s a trompe l’oeil. What Gia finds there isn’t grandeur but humility. Not an opera but a hymn. “What felt real in this dollhouse in the desert were things I couldn’t see. A prayer felt stark and concrete, full of movement, like a kicking in the belly.” Early in the novel, Gia quotes an unnamed artist: “The only real depression is a depression of individual ingenuity.” What she finds in the mural is more complex — the need to open yourself up to something larger. To see the emptiness left behind by a departed lover not as an invitation to become a larger, more unique person (as Nunez or the monumentalists seem to suggest) but, perhaps, to let something go and open yourself up to something bigger than yourself. “I thought I had nothing, but after long enough something emerged from bitter water a mysterious thing that precedes itself, and continues past itself, a master of ceremonies who stands outside the beginning and end.” Gia discovers that individual ingenuity isn’t about closing yourself off from the input of the world, material or spiritual. Even when Marta performed for an empty theater there were still tickets on sale, and Polek, whatever her relation to Gia, has raised the curtain too.  ❖

Gideon Leek is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

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