Bitter Water Opera

By Nicolette Polek

Graywolf, 128 pp.

By Lucy Posner

In her debut novel, Nicolette Polek weaves a slim, haunting tale of millennial revelation. Told through first-person vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia – a film professor on leave. After a breakup, Gia is disillusioned with academia, family, and general existence. She sleeps constantly and ignores calls from her mother, spending “days trying to dissolve into rooms, and then into a small pit at the center of [her] head.” That is until the ghost of real-life, late-blooming ballerina, Marta Beckett, shows up at Gia’s door in a pair of lime-green shoes.

Having come across Marta’s pictures in a library archive, Gia develops an unceasing fascination with the “once great ghost-town dancer, painter, actress, writer, musician, performer, one-woman show.” Beckett, a former Broadway actress born and raised in New York City, was vacationing in Nevada with her husband when, as the story goes, they awoke one morning in a windstorm to a flat tire on their trailer. Venturing in search of help, Marta came across an empty “white adobe complex with an abandoned hotel, offices, a café [and] a theater, with kangaroo rats and a water-warped stage.” Marta claimed the structure for herself. She gave it a new name: Amargosa Opera House. Amargosa, Spanish for ‘bitter.’

“I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of my life,” Marta says, describing the first time she laid eyes on what would become her new home. “The building seemed to be saying, ‘Take me. Do something with me. I offer you life.’” At Amargosa, Beckett lived and worked in solitude. “She filled the theater with her favorite things, often performed alone – strictly her own choreography– and died.” Beckett spent five years making a mural, depicting theater balconies filled with a two-dimensional audience – “mother superior, a guest drinking wine out of a high-heeled shoe, her cats.” The woman and the ghost go on walks. They chat casually. They spend an evening at the ballet. At one point, Gia turns to the phantom dancer and confesses: “Marta” she says, “I feel like an octopus in a matchbox.”

Gia knows the ballerina’s life story like the back of her hand. To the ex-professor, Marta is an ideal. Gia, too, has driven herself into self-imposed exile. At Amargosa, Marta’s world “became unsexual, abstract, and closer to what she imagined heaven to be like.” Gia, who has “long looked to fix [her] life through other people,” decides it’s time to try “fixing it alone.”

And so she hits the road. She holes up in a former colleague's mansion in the woods and rides out the summer, spending her days alone, scrutinizing the natural world, and wishing for an instantaneous death – a death like a “snipped balloon.” Gia hopes that her exile will lead to some kind of redemption. Marta redeemed herself through her art; her nightly dances, often performed to an audience of zero.  What Gia needs to be absolved from is never explicitly revealed. An erstwhile act of infidelity with an older colleague torments our narrator, even in her newfound singlehood.

Whenever she thinks of her ex-boyfriend, guilt hounds her and Marta’s ghost appears “carrying a dishrag, or a box of colored pencils, or a pomegranate to deseed.” But Gia’s condition is spiritual – something much loftier than the trivialities of human relationships. She offers a self-diagnosis of sorts. “It was my limerence for other people that afflicted me,” she writes, “limerence for stew when I was eating pie, a limerence so strong I was always in a world that didn’t even exist.” One afternoon in bed she “curls up so completely she [feels] she [can] look herself in the eyes.” The next day, she sets out towards Death Valley Junction, determined to explore “the unknown side of visible things.”

The forest gives way to the desert. Gia arrives at the Amargosa Opera House and sees Marta’s mural for herself. Revelation finds her one morning, not in Beckett’s theater but at Badwater, the lowest point in North America. 282 feet below sea level, it is as though God points at The Being That Is Gia with the tip of His finger and, “awash in a mix of terror and grace,” she feels her “entire body squinting at love.”

Through Gia as her channel, Polek attempts to scrape at the ineffable with lush prose and ultra-specific detail. Her debut novel is Annie Dillard meets Clarice Lispector, with a dash of millennial despair. In its brevity, Gia’s depths remain unexplored. Her character arc is an ancient one – a predictable one – and maybe that’s the point. Embedded in the story are gems of peculiar anecdotes: everything from biologist Carl Linneaus’ botanical clock, to true tales of bereaved children using sandboxes to process grief. A meditation on Womanhood and Consumption, Nature and God, Bitter Water Opera is a truly delightful treat of a book you’ll want to devour in a single sitting.

Lucy Posner was born and raised in New York City. She holds degrees in media studies and creative writing from Vassar College.