The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  Lily looked down at Martin. The cloth lay beside him now, and she saw that the zipper of his jeans was half open. For a moment she imagined his penis, testicles and pubic hair underneath the denim, and his sex seemed real to her for the first time. After rocking back and forth a couple of times before he spoke, he said, “W-why don’t you come to my house now. We can talk for a while. I-I-I have something to show you.” He paused, and when he spoke again, Lily detected barely audible music in his voice. “I think you want to come now. The woods are just behind the house.”

  She stared at Martin and then at a purple velvet cape that lay in a heap behind him and said, her eyes still on the velvet, “Why did you say that about the woods?”

  Martin quoted Oberon’s lines to Puck when the fairy king sends his squire to find the herb that will enchant Titania. Every time she heard it, she imagined it the same way: Cupid’s arrow flying in a great arc until it hit its mark in an open field. Martin didn’t stutter at all. “It fell upon a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound: / And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness.’” He looked at her steadily and boldly. He didn’t sound like Martin Petersen at all. The quote was a dare.

  “Why not?” she said to him. She shook her hair on her back and looked directly into his eyes.

  If he was surprised, Martin didn’t show it. He stood up, stuttered something about his truck, and Lily followed him outside. Walking behind him, she knew she was making a mistake, but it was a mistake she wanted to make. If it weren’t for Ed, she wouldn’t be going home with Martin. If she was at Martin’s, she couldn’t be with Ed, but if she was home, she might not be able to keep herself away from the Stuart Hotel. At the same time, she felt drawn to Martin and curious about the house she had been forbidden to visit.

  Sitting beside him in his pickup, Lily watched the road ahead of them as Martin drove in silence past the Dilly Home and Courtland Hill and onto the highway. The seats had a vaguely chemical smell. Lily put her elbow out the window and moved close to the door to be as far away from Martin as possible. She let the wind blow onto her face and looked into the night. For a few seconds she didn’t know Martin was starting to speak, but then she turned to him and heard him sputter, “Do you know what the ‘little western flower’ is?”

  “No,” Lily said.

  Martin paused.

  Lily didn’t look at him, but she felt the effort he was making to say the next word.

  “A p-p-pansy.”

  “Really?” Lily said, and then she remembered her mother’s pansies lined up in trays before she put them into the ground, some had white petals with deep violet or blue splotches at their centers. “It makes sense,” she said. “I can see it.”

  Martin nodded. Lily looked at his profile in the light from the dashboard. He moved the clutch into second. Lily leaned back against the seat and thought that sometimes experience was good for its own sake, that Martin Petersen was at the very least an interesting character, and that this too might be an adventure.

  He drove fast, not crazy fast, just fast, and Lily sensed urgency in him. They passed the Bodlers’, and Lily saw a single light burning in the house upstairs, and she looked at the tall junk heaps, black against the wood behind them, and felt a sudden pang of anticipation. Martin turned onto the gravel road that passed beneath an arch of trees and stopped in front of the tiny house. It was completely dark.

  When the motor stilled, Lily heard crickets in the grass. She opened her door, and Martin cried, “W-w-wait!” Lily was so startled she waited, watched Martin run around the front of the truck, appear at her door and hold out his hand to help her down. Lily played along.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” she said.

  Once she was standing on the ground beside him, Martin bowed and made a flourish with his hand.

  He flicked on the porch light when they reached the house. Lily looked around her and noticed a dying plant on a small table—its leaves so withered it was unrecognizable. Martin opened the front door, and Lily stopped behind him. The odor she had smelled in the truck was stronger in the house, glue or some chemical. They walked straight into what must have been the main room. Martin turned on the light. A worn sofa, a couple of straight-backed chairs and a table were the only furniture. Martin was telling her to sit down, and Lily walked toward the sofa, asking herself why the room made her feel bad. She remembered that Martin’s father had had lips with almost no flesh to them, and for some reason she had a sudden image of him with a rifle trudging across a field, although she couldn’t remember where it came from. The room had no bookshelves, but there were books in piles everywhere, and after she sat down Lily read some of their titles: Gray’s Anatomy; Stalin: A Biography; The Many Uses of Molds; Drawing the Human Figure; The Third Reich; The Future Eve; The Numberless Planet. She also saw a pile of science fiction and detective paperbacks and at least one romance called Baxter Manor. In the nearest corner she noticed a heap of two-by-fours and a toolbox sitting on the floor beside a pile of old clothes or material, a large pair of scissors, bits and pieces of foam rubber, spools of thread, tubes of paint and several knives laid neatly in a row. The overhead light didn’t illuminate the corner fully, and in its obscurity Lily also saw the vague shapes of things she couldn’t identify. The knives unsettled her, but she told herself that in daylight they would probably look innocent.

  She turned away from them to the opposite corner of the room, where she noticed a rocking chair with a large black piece of material draped over its arm. Taped to the wall was some kind of collage pasted onto a world map. The map looked hand drawn and reminded Lily of the map Martin had given her. On and around it were newspaper clippings, color pictures from magazines; some of them looked torn, others neatly cut. Lily stood up from the sofa, walked toward it and heard Martin grunt behind her, but she pretended not to hear. Stopping in front of the collage, Lily noticed that the center of the collage was blank—no pictures, no drawings, nothing, but because it was surrounded by so much stuff, the emptiness seemed significant. Then she looked at a picture of a starving child, most likely taken from an advertisement for an aid organization like Save the Children or CARE. Beside it Martin had taped a photograph of a young model from a fashion magazine in an evening gown. The juxtaposition was obvious and awful, but as she looked more closely she saw that the simpering model and the miserable child had expressions on their faces that were weirdly similar. She looked from one article and picture to another—an old photograph from Vietnam, articles about John Wayne Gacy, Jack the Ripper, June Putkey, the Webster girl who stabbed her mother a couple of years ago, an article with the headline, “Thousands Visit Statue of the Virgin Alleged to Have Healing Powers,” and a grainy photograph of death camp victims in open graves, more ads for clothes, beer, cigarettes, images of gardens with fountains, flowers and trees. She saw a number of clippings from tabloids including, “Man Has Head Transplant and Lives,” “My Baby’s Father Is an Alien” and “Satan’s Burial Ground Discovered in Utah. Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Horned Skulls.” Just beside a magazine ad for toothpaste that showed a young woman with snow-white teeth, Lily saw a star beside Bergen Belsen and beneath the star Martin had drawn a box that looked similar to the box Martin had drawn for her but narrower. Lily closed her eyes for an instant. The muscles in her shoulders tightened. She could feel Martin behind her and turned quickly toward him. “What is this, Martin?”

  He regarded her evenly, his lips tightly shut. She saw his head shake slightly, saw his tongue, his teeth. He stuttered unintelligibly.

  “How can you stand to have this up, to see these things all the time?” She rested her hand on the back of the rocking chair and felt it sway under her touch. The black material hanging over it brushed her leg. She stepped back.

  Martin pointed to an ad for the telephone company that showed a mother embracing a child in a green backyard. “Th-there are nice pictures, too.”

  “I know, Martin, but beside the rest, they look like a joke, and
all those pretty models and the flowers. I don’t know.”

  Martin turned away from her. She heard him sputter through the first consonant and then his words came fluently but with that same lilt in his voice she had heard before. “It’s a mix, this and that. What is. And it’s all got a name. Everything’s called something, even”—he paused and pointed to Auschwitz—“even places that shouldn’t have one. I read about a lot of things. I see stuff on TV.” He moved his head toward an old set with vinyl sides painted to look like wood grain. “Black and white. I don’t want color.”

  They were silent for several seconds. Lily didn’t like the smell of the house. She turned her head toward the bedroom door, which was standing open. She could see an unmade bed covered with loose papers, a desk and a few inches of a dresser. “What did you want to show me?” Lily said. “I have to go home soon.”

  Martin walked past Lily into the bedroom. She heard a drawer open and close. He returned with a piece of newspaper and asked her to sit down again, which she did. “It’s this.” He gave her the old, yellow piece of newsprint.

  Lily looked down at a small photograph of a child, a girl no more than two or three years old with short dark hair. She was smiling broadly. “Who is it?”

  “Becky Runevold.”

  “I don’t think I know who that is,” Lily said.

  “Her father killed her sixteen years ago.” Martin paused. “T-t-today. She would’ve been our age.”

  “Today?” Lily said. “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “But it was a long time ago. Where did this picture come from?”

  “The Pioneer Press. Mom cut it out.”

  “Your mom knew the family?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “So why do you have it?” Lily’s voice sounded shrill.

  Martin took the little square away from Lily and stared down at it. “You see it, don’t you, Lily?”

  “See what?”

  “It, it looks like you when you were a little girl.”

  Lily pulled the picture away from Martin. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Martin faced Lily. He nodded slowly. “Yes, it does.”

  “I should know better than you,” Lily said.

  Martin shook his head. “N-no, usually it’s other people who see it, not the person.” He stretched his lips, nodded and said, “It’s like you grew up for her—in a way.” Martin tugged at the picture in Lily’s hand, and she let go of it.

  Lily stared at Martin. “No, it’s not,” she said.

  “Didn’t happen in the Cities. Outside Farmington. Drowned her in the bath.”

  “Why?” Lily whispered the word.

  Martin shrugged. His expression as he moved his shoulders was calm but fixed, his eyes absorbed in a distant thought. Then he said, “It hath no bottom.”

  “You really love the play, don’t you?” Lily said.

  Martin squinted at her as though she were yards away. “N-no,” he said.

  “You’re always quoting from it.”

  Martin stumbled over the next words. “It’s easier,” he finally said, “than saying it myself.”

  “But you wanted to be in it,” Lily insisted.

  Martin nodded.

  “And the map, Martin. Why did you want me to have that?” Lily wanted to ask about the box but stopped herself.

  Martin turned away from Lily. He looked straight toward the window and chanted like a kid on a playground. “She’s out there right now.”

  “Who?” Lily said.

  “She’s not alive.”

  Lily caught her breath. She had turned several corners since she had agreed to accompany Martin back to his house, and she decided this was the last. “I want to go home,” she said.

  Martin stood up immediately and began to walk to the door. For a second, Lily didn’t understand what he was doing. He opened the screen door and moved quickly across the porch without turning off the light. Lily followed him, and when she stepped out onto the porch, she saw him standing beside his truck holding the passenger door open for her.

  Without saying anything, Lily climbed in. Martin drove the whole way in silence. Lily couldn’t tell whether his silence meant anger, sullenness or resignation. His face showed nothing. But Lily didn’t want to talk. She sat close to the door and watched the road, paying attention to his every move. While he drove, she imagined sudden skids and collisions, the truck swerving into the wrong lane and speeding into oncoming headlights. When Martin stopped the truck on Division Street in front of the cafe, Lily turned to him. He looked very young to her at that moment, with his soft face and unfashionable short hair. Lily looked through the windshield and said, “Bye.” Martin leaned toward her, but Lily pulled at the door handle and jumped down into the street. Martin moved to the passenger seat and stuck his head out the window. “You won’t let him paint you, will you, Lily?”

  She opened her mouth and stared at him. She knew what he was saying, understood he meant Ed, but she said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I-i-it’s important that he doesn’t paint you. Not you.” Martin paused. “F-for your sake, Lily.”

  She looked away from him. “Good-bye, Martin,” she said. Lily walked up the alley toward the back door that led to her apartment and watched Martin’s truck pull away. Then she looked across the street into Ed’s window. She saw two figures in the light—Ed’s and Mabel’s. They were seated across from each other in the room’s only chairs. Lily saw Mabel lift a hand and gesture toward the ceiling. Still talking, she said to herself. Lily watched the two of them for at least a minute before she closed her eyes and held her breath. Her longing to rush to Ed and throw her arms around him was so great, she shook from the tension of holding herself back. Then, after counting to one hundred to give herself enough time, she pulled on the back door, discovered somebody had locked it, dug out her keys, opened it and went upstairs to bed.

  Before she fell asleep, Lily thought she smelled something burning—a distant fire, maybe, its smoke carried into town on a wind. It can’t be the shoes, can it, still stinking from the fire? She remembered the map and the pictures on Martin’s wall, and then the empty space in the middle. Was he going to fill that in? Somehow it was that blankness that stuck in her mind now, more than any of the images or words she had seen all around it. She’s not alive, Lily thought. He must have meant that little girl—Becky. Lily put on a tape to forget about Martin and the dead girl and Ed and Mabel. She listened to The Best of Aretha Franklin twice and while she listened, she imagined herself on stage in a green, sequined dress. She was singing out the words “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and in the fantasy she had a voice like Aretha’s, a voice that seemed to come straight from heaven.

  * * *

  The moment Lily put her hand on the doorknob to enter the cafe, she heard the jukebox click and a song begin: “Do You Believe in Magic?” Lily opened the door and saw Vince dancing and singing alone in the space between the booths and the counter. His back was to Lily, and she watched his hips sway as he jiggled his fingers like a flapper. She saw the bald spot on the back of his head orbit as he rolled his shoulders, and then he toe-heeled his way over to the coffee machine. Lily smiled. The fat man had grace, lightness. She watched him dip and sing, “… in a young girl’s heart.” He made a pivot, caught sight of Lily, and without missing a beat of the song, held out his hand and said, “Join me, doll.” Lily took the outstretched hand, and they danced—bobbing, bumping butts and wailing out the refrain together.

  When the song died, Lily said, “You’re in a good mood this morning.”

  Vince was breathing hard and a vein stood out on his forehead. “You, too,” he said. He shook his head. “You look beautiful, positively fresh and dewy. I guess that new guy is treating you right.” Vince paused, wiped his forehead, hesitated, then blurted out, “Isn’t he a little old for you, honey? As an old man myself, I feel I ought to warn you off.” He smiled. “Age doesn’t make you better.”<
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  Lily blushed. “You know, Vince, you don’t really decide. It just kind of happens.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Again he hesitated, scratching his upper arm vigorously. “Hank’s been hanging around the cafe lately, and I figured you ought to know.”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s been coming to see me in the afternoons, and early last night I bumped into him outside the Stuart.”

  “Hank?” Lily said.

  “He’s in a bad way.”

  “Hank?” Lily repeated.

  Vince moved his head back in false surprise. “Yes, Hank. Remember him? Tall, good-looking guy. You dated him for about a year.”

  Lily clicked her tongue. “Vince.” She groaned the name. “Last night?”

  “That’s right. I stayed late doing the books, and when I left, there he was sad-sacking around in the alley, mouth drooping to his shoes.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Hank,” Lily said.

  “He knows about—” Vince moved his head in the direction of the Stuart Hotel. “I took him home with me, gave him the standard talk over a bottle of bourbon—the no-woman’s-worth-it load of crap. He went to work snockered.”

  “That was nice of you, Vince.”

  “It’s none of my business, Lily, but I think you should talk to him.”

  “It won’t change anything.”

  Vince took Lily’s right hand and patted it. “I know that, but Hank’s problem is that he can’t believe it. He just can’t believe it.”

  Lily looked into the street and sighed. “The funny thing is, Vince, that anything can happen. I mean, breaking up with Hank is ordinary. All kinds of really crazy stuff is going on all the time. You’ve got to expect it.”

  “Hank hasn’t learned that yet. He goes by the book. College, graduate school, good job, pretty wife, smart, happy kids.” He looked closely at Lily. “I don’t suppose he ever saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “What I saw right away—the dissatisfied, hungry devil in you that jumps in front of trains and laughs it off.”