The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  More? he said, pouring himself a hefty, practiced slug. Or I could fix you a cocktail I learned from my ex-ex-brother-in-law. He calls it the meerkat fizz. Brings warmth to the belly.

  More vodka is fine, she said, suspecting he had become a high-functioning alcoholic. It would explain the drab order of his house, the late and ultimately expendable dinner.

  It’s not like you’re driving tonight, the man pointed out, as though she needed further convincing. It’s not like you’re going anywhere.

  Prophetic words, she said.

  Aren’t you gloomy, he said. And if you weren’t expecting me to answer my door, whom were you expecting?

  Dr. Hammer, she said, seeing no reason not to tell him the truth.

  I believe he lives in Colorado Springs.

  I have no idea where he lives, she said. Obviously.

  He’s in Colorado Springs, he said. He works as a physical therapist.

  You’ve been keeping better tabs than me, she said.

  Does that seem crazy to you? he said, somewhat hopefully.

  More pathetic than crazy, she said.

  The man smiled.

  The insult posing as for-your-own-good honesty, the man said. You must have really missed me all these years.

  She didn’t reply.

  I’m just trying to get you to talk, he said.

  Why don’t you talk for a change, she said. Why don’t you tell me about Roz.

  You’re wondering how I know Roz, he said.

  She nodded.

  I don’t, he said.

  She gazed at him ruefully.

  I know Roz through my ex-wife, he said. My ex-wife joined ZAIRE.

  RWANDA, she corrected. You beat your ex-wife?

  Wishful thinking on her part. She just wanted to belong to a group.

  Seems everyone’s joined that group at one time or another, she said.

  Cult is more like it. That Roz is some kind of brainwasher.

  She had the strange urge to come to Roz’s defense. But she remained quiet.

  My ex-wife started to leave messages on my machine, he said. Accusations like “Your ego-driven love style has scarred my wellspring of self-regard.” But occasionally she was more circumspect. “I forgot to tell you about the time we played boccie with a dwarf. I forgot to tell you what a bastard you were in Milan.”

  And you told your ex-wife about me, she said, hastening him toward a logical connection that mattered to her.

  I did, he said. And she told Roz.

  When was this? she asked.

  Just after the trial, he said. I figured what was done was done.

  You figured your life had become unrelentingly dull and you needed some attention, she wanted to say, but didn’t.

  I needed to talk to someone, he offered lamely.

  I’ve found something that might be of interest to you.

  Her heart prickled. He was an idiot, she thought. She wanted to say to him: You are an idiot. But she wanted to grind his face into his idiocy by spelling it out.

  And what better person to tell your story to than your ex-wife, she said, your ex-wife who was involved with a therapist who knew me and my family—is that what you were so innocently thinking when you “needed someone to talk to”?

  The man sipped his vodka meditatively.

  You’re extremely cynical about people’s motivations, he said. You know that, don’t you?

  Actually, she said, refilling her own glass this time, I cling to an extremely simplistic and infantile way of viewing the world. I’m a grudge holder. This is because I haven’t properly separated from my mother. Or so I’ve recently been told.

  She realized, afterward, that she sounded more bitter than she’d intended. More self-pitying. But maybe she was bitter and self-pitying, and if she was, what was the harm in behaving that way? He was a stranger. She didn’t need to keep up appearances for his sake.

  I’m sorry about your mother, he said. Her death must have come as quite a shock.

  Her mother. And there she was again, her mother, a genie summoned from the fake hearth, a propane sprite available at the flick of a light switch. Her mother. Again she tried to conjure the evening when her mother had rung the man’s bell. That must have come as quite a shock, she wanted to respond. And then what? Probably the man was impressed by how much her mother looked like her and yet how much not like her. As though she and her mother had once been identical twins, but she had been raised in a vatful of warm milk and her mother on an uninhabited coastal rock among puffins. Since her mother wasn’t one for stalling, she would have asked the man, point-blank, if he knew her daughter. I am dying, she would have told him, but not out of any need for pity am I telling you this. I want you to feel badly if you lie to me.

  She searched the man’s face for confirmation of these unspoken suspicions, but the man’s face belied nothing. He was an empty person, he’d always been empty and that was why she’d chosen him. He was easy to fool. He wouldn’t be able to see that she was as empty as he was.

  She was overcome by the most unexpected urge to kiss the man.

  Before I forget, the man said, I have something for you.

  He disappeared into the foyer. He returned, holding something behind his back.

  I didn’t get a chance to wrap it, he said. Close your eyes.

  Annoyed, she obeyed. He stood at a distance from her, she could tell without seeing, reaching only as close as he needed to in order to place the unwrapped object in her hands.

  Open them, he said.

  She stared at the familiar cover.

  Miriam: The Disappearance of a New England Girl, by Dr. E. Karl Hammer.

  Very funny, she said.

  It’s a great read, he said. Though I admit also a bit of a letdown. I didn’t recognize myself in K.

  You’ll just have to fake-abduct a more reliable narrator, she said. The night is still young.

  It’s a great read, the man repeated.

  I wouldn’t know, she was about to say, I’ve never read it. But the book had fallen open to the endpapers.

  For “Miriam,” she read.

  Her vision reeled and she realized that she was suddenly, irreparably drunk. She slid out of her chair and extended her body along the warmed hearthstones. A fake log glowed next to her head.

  I have beds, the man said.

  No no, she said, I just need to lie down.

  You’re welcome to sleep here if you want, the man said.

  I just have a headache, she said. Where did you get this book?

  Can I offer you some peas? he said, ignoring her question.

  I’m not hungry, she said. But the book—

  —for your head. Nothing like a bag of frozen peas to help a headache.

  He hopped out of his chair, seemingly relieved for the excuse to leave her. She lay motionless on the carpet, listening to the hiss of the gas. Above her, the unpainted rafters cast spooky whalebone shadows across the ceiling. They are pulsating, she thought. She was inside a whale, swallowed and afloat in its capacious middle on a cushioned shred of flotsam. Her hand had drifted toward the coffee table, on which she’d left the book. The book that, she had to assume, her mother had given the man. How else would he come to have it? She remembered as a teenager touching the spine, feeling that complicated thrill of shame, pride, magic, radiating from the cover. It was true—she had never read the book. The cover showed a photo of a girl with brown hair and bangs, the presumed Miriam, prettier than she was, or at least she appeared prettier from the fraction of her face that was visible as she strained toward a diffuse light source overhead. Her hair blew about, a loose strand here and there, like snakes from Medusa’s head. Wind was implied. Heaven was implied, or salvation, or abduction by probably friendly aliens. The overall whiteness of the world threatened to erase her.

  The man returned with a bag of frozen peas. He kneeled by her shoulder and draped the bag over her forehead. She smelled the metallic vegetable odor of a long-unthawed freezer.
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br />   Thanks, she said.

  I don’t want you to think I’m pathetic, he said, sitting back on his heels.

  Because of the peas? she said.

  Because I still think about you, he said. There are times when a person is susceptible to human meaningfulness. When I met you, I was susceptible.

  Again, she was overcome by the urge to kiss him. This urge was not sexual, this urge was taunting and mean, it initiated from a vicious place. She turned her head toward the glowing ceramic logs; her lips felt blistered from the heat.

  It helps that you never saw me again, she said. The need to kiss the man was momentarily supplanted by a migrainous confusion—wincing and debilitating.

  That’s true, the man said. But seeing you now, I’m not disappointed in you.

  Thanks, she said.

  You were a person worth remembering.

  I was a person worth imbuing with an unwieldy amount of meaningless symbolism, she said. Flash flash flash—life-changing encounter.

  I’m going to say it again, the man said. You’re being cynical.

  She managed an awkward sip of vodka. Her knees parted, her mouth grew sloppy. Kiss me, she thought. Shut up and kiss me.

  The man withdrew from her and sat on a mushroomy ottoman. He lit a match and extinguished it with a violent flick. He did this repeatedly, tossing the used matches toward the fake fire.

  Stop it, she said.

  Sorry, he said. Bad habit. Do you want to hear more about Roz Biedelman?

  I want to hear about my mother, she said bluntly, tired of the conversational foreplay. The man, even though she wanted to kiss him, was really just a means to an end. He was a means of communicating with her mother who had always, whether alive or dead, been a mute inhabitant of another world.

  Your mother, he said. What do I know about your mother.

  Don’t play stupid, she said, the vodka and the headache flaring her impatience. Really, don’t do it. It will make me hate you.

  Hate, he said. You’re not made for hate.

  Nothing like a sweeping pronouncement about one’s emotional incapacities to lessen the hatred impulse, she said.

  She raised herself onto her elbow, her shirt falling open to expose the edge of her bra; in trying to arrange herself, she knocked Miriam from the coffee table to the floor; the book sprawled indecently in a wide split, spine so floppy from overwork that the extended pages lay flat against the rug.

  So my mother came to see you, she said.

  If you say so, the man said.

  What did you tell her, she said. Her knees wove back and forth. She propped her temple on her palm, her fingers mussing her hair into a girlish tangle. She was asking for it, she certainly was.

  The man remained impervious.

  What would you have told her if you were me?

  Fuck you, she said.

  The man filled her glass with more vodka. To do so he had to lean over her body. His closer-up smell yanked her backward, through her present self to a limpid, more dangerous time.

  If you want to play, we might as well play, the man said. You haven’t asked, but I still suffer from chronic, incurable insomnia. My night, as you already pointed out, is still young.

  I don’t want to play, she said.

  That’s too bad, isn’t it, the man said, smiling. But the smile was a false smile; behind it the man was tense, even furious. Because I want to play, he said. And I know something you want to know. And besides, he said, softening slightly, this is for your own good.

  Is it, she said.

  At the conclusion of my ex-wife’s ZAIRE involvement, he said, she was told to write down everything she remembered about her life with me so that she could move on. “If you write it down yourself,” she told me, “then it belongs to you.”

  Am I supposed to be writing this down? she asked him, praying he’d sink beside her on the floor, curl himself around her, and allow her to disappear into sleep.

  I’ll give you the beginning, he said. The girl’s mother received a letter. From a certain doctor. “I’ve found something that might be of interest to you.”

  This is stupid and I’m drunk, she said.

  Indulge me, he said.

  Fine, she thought. One last story. One last golden-spun piece of bullshit. What was the harm in it?

  She hates the doctor, she said. She’d rip the letter up.

  But let’s say she didn’t rip it up, he said. Let’s say she read the letter and put it in a drawer. Until she became sick.

  Until she became sick, she agreed.

  And? he said.

  Overhead, the whalebones wavered. She exhaled, irritated with him for trying to force the evening back into a claustrophobic ski cabin where their lives could no longer fit.

  As with many sick people, she said, she admitted only to herself that her curiosity was finite and would soon be reduced to a hard lump of carbon, unable to absorb anything new. To all outward appearances she behaved no differently than she ever had; looming extinction would not pressure her into altering her exterior. Is this what you had in mind?

  But inside she felt differently, the man said. Inside, she had to know. So she contacted the doctor.

  She contacted the doctor, she said. The doctor, being a doctor, proceeded to doctor her. The girl’s mother, though she wouldn’t admit it, began to enjoy the conversations with the doctor. She tried very hard to continue hating the doctor, because hating her had become an identity for the girl’s mother. But the doctor was strangely helpful and understanding. Finally, the doctor handed the girl’s mother an address. Beneath the address the doctor wrote, “He will want to see you.” The girl’s mother’s time was running out. So she went to see the man in the middle of the night.

  Did he want to see her?

  Yes and no, she said. His life, he liked to believe, had taken him past this incident, and he had no need to revisit it. But a part of him felt confused by the girl, and this confusion had evolved into an unresolved hurt. Her mother represented an opportunity for him.

  He was using the girl’s mother, he said.

  It was a mutual using. So he invited her inside his house.

  And they talked, said the man.

  They talked.

  What did the man tell her, asked the man.

  I…I don’t know, she said, her imagination rearing back to the threshold. This was wrong, she thought. Wrong wrong wrong.

  Maybe the girl’s mother didn’t talk to the man, she said. Can I change the beginning?

  Of course, he said. It’s your story.

  She rang his bell, not in the middle of the night, but in the daytime. When he answered the door she handed this copy of Miriam to him. Then she left.

  Without talking to him, he said.

  No, she said. No, she talked to him. She said, “Give this to her.”

  Why would she do that? he said.

  Because she was a terminally ill conflict avoider, she said, her voice tightening. Did I tell you that she refused to see me before she died?

  But why would she give me the book? the man said.

  Because, she said, if I managed to find you, then I would know.

  You would know that she had found me, the man said.

  I would know that she knew about you, she said. And the book would mean that she forgave me.

  She started to cry. She didn’t feel ashamed. She stared again into the fire, the tears running sideways over her cheek and spooling their tickly way into her ear. He didn’t speak and neither did she. In the middle of this silence, she sensed his mood change. For some reason, who knew the reason, maybe because she was crying. The man felt badly.

  I’m sorry, he said. I thought this might be fun. But now I realize, I’m being cruel.

  You’re not, she said.

  No, I am, the man said.

  Tell me what you told her, she said. I did what you asked. Now you have to tell me.

  The man didn’t respond.

  Tell me everything, she said again.
Her tears became less urgent as her composure began, once again, to seize her insides. She glanced at the book jacket, at the girl with the snake hair, and thought: YOU. You are turning me to stone. She shoved the book away. She wanted to prolong this moment of watery messiness. She wanted to cry more and more and more.

  I didn’t tell her anything, the man said.

  You could have, she said. I wouldn’t have minded. You could have told her everything.

  I really couldn’t, the man said.

  Because you feel guilty? she said. There’s no need—

  No, the man interrupted. No. I couldn’t tell your mother anything because I’ve never met her.

  She raised up on her elbow.

  Stop it, she said.

  He stared into his vodka, avoiding her.

  I did what you asked me to do, she said, starting to cry again. I did what you asked.

  And I said I was sorry, the man said. But I’ve never met your mother.

  A wild violence gripped her. Honestly, she thought, if she had a knife she would plunge it into his chest. When would he stop with the stories? When would he realize that lying was pointless, that even very bad lies were founded in some way on the truth? Her heart raced as if she were under attack and she spun through ways to protect herself: Speak her mind? Stab the man? Kiss him? Leave? But this decision lost its urgency. Her chest filled with that altitude-dropping queasiness she experienced on turbulent planes. She could tell by his face—he wasn’t lying to her.

  He had never met her mother.

  I’m sorry, the man said a third time.

  He had tricked her, she thought. He had tricked her. She laughed. A short, self-mocking laugh. If she weren’t drunk and exhausted she might have had the energy to be furious with him, but instead she found herself overwhelmed with admiration. Good for him, she thought. He had succeeded where everyone else, including herself, had failed. He had tricked her into revealing to him her most private hopes.

  She dried her face brusquely on her sleeve. A fucking fool is what she was. Her mother was dead. What she failed to tell Mary while she was alive is what Mary would always fail to know from her. But there are other ways of knowing things, she reminded herself. There are other ways. She just couldn’t come up with any more ways. She had run out of possibilities.

  Why are you sorry? she said. It’s hardly your fault.