Bitter Water Opera – Nicolette Polek

[Graywolf Press; 2024]

She is the type of figure who lends herself to mythmaking, both through her own self-mythologizing and the actual facts of her existence.

An entertainer, dancer, and artist, Marta Becket and her husband were driving through Death Valley, California, in 1967 when they stopped to fix a flat tire across from an abandoned hotel. She found a doorway, peered through its holes, and saw an empty theater. This would become her theater. The couple leased the complex (hotel and theater) and Marta devoted the rest of her life to the place. She revived it and covered it in murals, even with her own likeness. Every week for the next four decades, she starred in performances. Unsuccessful and overlooked as a performer in New York, here she was determined to be the artist she knew she could be. She would create her audience of whoever lived in or passed through the town and also through illustrious murals of rapt crowds. She would force her own legacy.

With her 2024 novel, Bitter Water Opera, Nicolette Polek jumps into Becket’s legacy-making. While the life of Becket was very much real, Polek offers a work of fiction. Becket might have approved: an artist allowing another artist to take artistic liberty. Becket might have disapproved: an artist fully wanting to control her own image and legacy.

The book opens with the narrator, Gia, sending a letter to Marta Becket. It has no address—just an illustration, a childhood photograph, and “something like a prayer.” Becket soon after appears at her door. By the next page, we learn that Becket died years earlier.

Gia is in a state of existential ennui. She has recently ended a romantic relationship, disturbed by her own infidelity and deception. She is still meeting up with her ex, hoping to explain herself. She is on leave from her job in the film department at a university. She is avoiding texts from her mom. Her work friend quit. All of these relationships hover beyond her. Not much grounds Gia in her own life. She conjures Marta and asks her to “attend” to her life.

Polek has written a book about Marta Becket and not about her at all. This is Gia’s Marta. Many relationships are this way: we see someone else for who or what we need or want them to be. When I finished the book, I wasn’t sure whether Marta was a real or fabricated figure. She felt as if she could be real. Online, I found news articles, a documentary, and even an autobiography. But Polek’s version is real enough. And Marta herself, no matter how real, is also a fiction.

Gia’s attraction to Marta (and the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel) derives first from an interest in small-town unusual landmarks and is followed by archival research. She admits that Marta also reminds her of her own mother. Marta becomes an obsession, or “fanaticism” to use Gia’s word. We are watching one woman looking at another. What is she looking at in her? She says, “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.” Marta’s solitude, even with romantic partners and with audiences, draws in Gia. Self-important Marta would certainly not care to be admired for her aloneness, even if this quality is perceived as powerful. But Gia reflects on her own sense of loneliness, since she was a child, and finds power in Marta’s embrace of it. “I felt singed by panic. I could’ve had Peter—but I couldn’t have, because I desired someone else, and with them I would desire yet another.” She admits a perpetual dissatisfaction, what she terms “my limerence,” always looking at the past or the future, never the present; always looking at another person instead of the one in front of her; always desiring what is not: “between two sides of ruin, as I used to live—forward and backward—between the despairing anti-possibility of my past, and the possible despair in my future.” Looking outside to seek a solution to her inside. Gia herself is living in her own fiction: sending out unaddressed letters, conjuring up deceased artists.

Early on, Gia recalls a colleague who wanted to break up with her boyfriend because she thought he was cheating on her. Day by day, she removed one object from their home until, one day, he opened the closet and there was nothing left. She hollowed out their home. Gia no longer has a relationship with that woman, but this anecdote summarizes Gia’s state of being. A hollowness that she seeks to fill.

Polek embodies this hollowness by selectively withholding details and specificity. In Gia’s replaying of her infidelity, she writes:

There was a row of crab apple trees at the top of the trail, sturdy and mangled with age, and I climbed onto one of the lower branches to look out at the vista. He turned toward me to say something and as he did, I caught his hand. I didn’t understand why. A thrilled impulse. He moved closer, as though this was intended all along. In an instant, the levity from our walk extinguished under irreversible fog. We stayed there pressing each other against the crab apple tree, until the bark dug into my back and the sun fell from dark orange to gray.

Like so many of the plot details of Gia’s life, Polek holds back. What another author might spend pages on, Polek moves through in one paragraph. The memory itself is vivid with some very specific details: the crab apple trees, the sun’s shifting color, the sensation of the bark. But what happened? Was there more to this affair than the pressing of two bodies? This is the incident that leads Gia to leave her boyfriend. This is the main event that shatters her sense of self and thwarts her ability to interact with her those around her.

Bitter Water Opera is Polek’s second book and first novel. Her first book, Imaginary Museums (2020), is a collection of flash fiction. Bitter Water Opera may be a novel, but the brevity and concision of that earlier form and style persist. Almost every memory or scene is just a couple pages, if even. Polek knows how not to linger. Her flash fiction is also filled with evocative and sensorial details circling an unspoken darkness at the core. More so than Bitter Water Opera, that undercurrent is often sinister or violent—fear of other people, abandonment, drowning, lying.

Bitter Water Opera is a pilgrimage story, a woman traveling to the locale of the woman she worships. The book is also a roadtrip story, since she has two other stops along the way—a cabin in the wilderness and a daytrip from Amargosa. It is about a journey and a destination. Gia needs this destination to be her salvation. 

Ironically, the locale is Death Valley—a landscape known for its unbearably harsh conditions—and Gia is searching for reasons to live. On a trip from Amargosa, visiting the lowest point in the country, she has an experience of spiritual transcendence. She prays out and is shaken by a presence. Between this and the first reawakening in the woods, Gia might be starting to slowly find herself. This journey becomes less of a pilgrimage, and more of a roadtrip. Will the journey, rather than the destination, be the salvation?

At Amargosa, Gia encounters a group of preservationists who are attending to Marta’s legacy. Marta too, it seems, needs saving. They meet in hushed tones every day to figure out how to save the decrepit building with Tamarisk roots bursting through the carpet. Gia wanders in and around the hotel. She chats with the one other guest. For being so obsessed, her behavior there is surprisingly lackadaisical. Neither Gia nor the reader are totally clear what she is looking for. She seems to want, to need, someone to breathe something into her—some direction, some antidote to the loneliness, a contrast to that “limerence.” Upon arrival, she says, “I imagined that Marta had requested that I meet her at the junction in order to consume me. But the beckoning didn’t feel like it was from Marta. All I knew was that I needed to be there, for a showdown with something unknown to me, before something brilliant could happen.”

When the other guest requests a tour, Gia finally sees the famed theater. She barely sought it out. The murals unfold: “nuns, prostitutes, noblemen, Marta’s cat with a litter of kittens.” The preservationist reveals Marta’s prickly personality, erased faces when people who promised to fund the opera house did not pay up. One of the preservationists delivers a strong speech to the visitor who, to them, is not taking this place seriously. Gia then goes to sit beyond the stage, and wonders, “and with that, things felt as if they had reached their natural end. I had turned over the details of the opera house for so long that to visit it became an act of remembering, the act of remembering an act of forgetting, the act of forgetting an active motion.” Finally, Gia’s engine is revving back up. She has faced the object of her obsession.

Gia leaves Amargosa and the book winds towards its end. To the reader, the now dissipated unnameable ennui is still impenetrable. For one-hundred-and-twenty-two pages, Polek has gestured at it, circled it. This ennui pervades the book, and yet what exactly is it? Only once we have moved past it can we look our problem in the eye and name it.

By the last page, Gia speaks no longer of being in the dulled and distanced state. She goes home. She goes to her mom’s house. She mentions a new job. She has a potential date. She states, “Joy completed and doubly felt.” The hope and joy and clarity that were perpetually beyond her, have found their way to her. The transformation in this final scene is not quite convincing, newfound enthusiasm stated but not conveyed. Maybe here, too, is another journey she must embark upon: how to embody salvation once found. Martha could not save herself. The preservationists are trying their best to save her. Gia at least seems to be on her way.

Sophie Golub is a writer, artist, editor, and museum-worker based in Brooklyn, New York. She publishes an interview series focused on emerging artists in which each artist recommends her to the next. She was most recently the department manager of publications at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.