The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  She crawled over Dick’s legs and got off the bed. The moment her feet touched the ground, he returned to his rocking and noiseless laughter. Lily saw her image wave in the dark mirror ahead of her, and she turned her head to avoid it. When she looked around, she saw Dolores giving Dick’s leg a friendly pat as she moved to the edge of the bed. Dolores’s dress caught the mattress, slid up her thigh and revealed the top of her stocking and garter. Lily remembered then that Dolores hadn’t been wearing a garter the other night.

  Lily shook hands with Frank and resisted a momentary impulse to wipe her palm on her jeans. Then she noticed Dick waving at her, and she understood that he, too, wanted to shake hands. She reached out to him. He took her hand, and Lily felt his warm, oily palm against hers, and when she looked at him, she saw recognition in his eyes. He must be mistaking me for someone else, she thought.

  Drained of curiosity and somehow wounded, Lily stared at the Folgers label on the coffee can near her feet. Seeing the brothers and listening to Frank had picked at some old sore inside her, and although she felt the pain of it clearly enough, she didn’t know what had caused it. She left the room behind Dolores, and walking through the second room, she noticed the peonies through the window. One fat, fading blossom was pressing against the dirty glass.

  On the stone step outside the door, Lily blinked in the sunlight and noticed a dragonfly hover near her knee, then fly to her right toward a junk heap. When she turned to Dolores, she saw that the woman looked different outside. The wind blew the pink dress against her thighs, and the fine wrinkles in her face were plainly visible.

  “You got a car?” Dolores said.

  “No, my bike,” Lily said, pointing at it.

  “Go and get it. I’ll give you a ride. We’ll stick the bike in the trunk.”

  Lily didn’t answer. She felt immobile and stared at a wheel in a pile of junk. Then she lifted her eyes toward the telephone wires strung along the highway and looked at a line of sparrows sitting on the wire: a row of small dark bodies. One turned its head abruptly to the left, alert to some invisible sound or motion, and then, an instant later, every bird spread its wings and flew up into the sky.

  “Go on,” Dolores said. “Get the damned bike.”

  Dolores drove fast, and Lily heard her bicyle bump in the trunk behind them. She stared out the window and thought about the girl’s shirt under Martin’s desk. It’s hers, she thought. She smelled skunk from the road and turned to Dolores. Every time I lay eyes on her, she’s different. It could be the booze, but you can’t pour personality out of a whiskey bottle, can you? Lily studied the woman’s lap, looking closely at her thigh under the dress. She tested her feelings, but she felt nothing, nothing at all.

  “You’re spooked,” Dolores said suddenly. “I can see it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say. You’re spooked.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Lily lied to the road.

  “I would,” Dolores said. “Only Dickie ain’t quite in his right mind. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “He’s a strange person,” Lily said. “But then so are you.”

  Dolores opened her mouth and after a moment, she laughed. “Me?”

  “Ed said you were unusual or extraordinary or something like that. He doesn’t know quite what to make of you.”

  Dolores smiled at the road. “That ain’t the same as strange, honey. He’s an odd duck himself, don’t you think?”

  “Ed?”

  “Yes, Ed.” Dolores mimicked Lily’s intonation of the man’s name, and this little cruelty put Lily on guard. “Most of the time, that man ain’t here, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” Lily said. But she was lying.

  “He lives in them pictures of his. You must’ve figured that out by now. Then, once in a while, his pecker drags him away.”

  Lily stiffened. “So that’s what you think, is it?”

  “I do. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “He was pretty worried about you the other night, and I don’t think it had much to do with sex. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d have woken up in your own puke down by the river.” Lily’s voice shook as she spoke.

  “I’m on the wagon, case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I noticed. I was there, too.”

  “I know.” Dolores said. She smiled at Lily. “All I’m saying is, if I wasn’t in paint, I don’t think he’d give a damn.”

  “I’m not ‘in paint’ and he cares about me,” Lily said.

  Dolores smiled. “How old are you, honey, eighteen?”

  “Nineteen,” Lily said.

  Dolores nodded. “And our painter friend, he’s ’bout thirty-five, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “That man’s got tricks up his sleeves you ain’t even dreamed of yet.”

  Lily sat on her hands and looked out the window. She spoke slowly. “That day in Ed’s room when you said he ‘plays rough,’ what did you mean?”

  “If you don’t know, I sure as hell won’t tell you. That’s not my job, for Christ’s sake.”

  They drove in silence for a minute or two. Lily studied the fields under the big sky through her window, and then she said, “Why did you hide from your mother when you were a little girl?”

  “Guess he told you that,” she said.

  Lily nodded. “Was it a kind of game?”

  Dolores’s foot pressed the gas pedal and the car moved faster. “Told you ’bout that, too, did he? Guess it was foolhardy of me to think he’d keep that to himself. Game? We played the game, all right. I’d lose myself, and he’d find me. I’d hear him stomping around and get real hot—”

  Lily cut her off. “He didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that.” The pain in her voice was obvious, and Lily regretted it.

  Neither of them spoke for about thirty seconds.

  “Don’t take it too hard,” Dolores said finally. “There’s a whole lot worse in this world than that kind of game playin’. There’s a lot of men right here in town who’ve got a game no one’ll play with them. I oughta know. It don’t do nobody no harm, an’ it’s a comfort to them. I ain’t ashamed of it.” She paused. “The funny thing ’bout it is even weirdos run in types. There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. Kinda makes you wonder.” Dolores lifted a hand from the wheel and flapped it.

  “But hiding’s your game, Dolores, not Ed’s.”

  Dolores slowed the car. “It takes two to play, honey.”

  But Lily saw the woman’s face go slack with emotion. She’s better-looking when she’s mean, Lily thought. Dolores drove across the railroad tracks slowly, and Lily pressed her nose to the window. When she turned back to Dolores, the woman’s face looked pink and moist with what may have been tears, although Lily couldn’t see any drops in her eyes.

  When they turned onto Division Street, Dolores said, “I didn’t take money, you know. Only for the modeling.”

  “Right,” Lily said. The car stopped in front of the Ideal Cafe, and Lily remembered she didn’t have a job. I’d better try to make it up with Vince, she thought, opened the door and slammed it shut. “Thanks,” she said to Dolores, who was slumped over the wheel in a posture as dramatic as it was irritating. “What’s the matter with you?” Lily spoke in a sharp voice.

  Dolores lifted her head and looked at Lily with large, sincere eyes. “Tell the old lady thanks for the food and stuff.”

  “What?” Lily said.

  “The stuff she brought over to me Sunday morning. It was real neighborly of her. I was pretty low at the time, so I didn’t say much, but she’s a good woman, and I’d like you to tell her so. Tell her I’m glad she told me what she did. She’ll know what I mean.” Dolores smiled sweetly. Then she tossed her long hair over one shoulder and said, “See you around,” her voice lilting with false femininity. She tugged her dress down to her knees, wiggled her buttocks into the seat and turned the key. Lily moved back from the window and would have let Dolo
res drive off with her bicycle if she hadn’t seen it in the partly opened trunk. “Stop!”

  Lily’s screaming at Dolores and the subsequent ordeal of untying the rope and lifting the bicycle out of the trunk didn’t go unnoticed. It wasn’t clear whether Dolores felt the customers in the Ideal Cafe staring at them or whether she saw Beulah Bjornson stop dead in her tracks outside Tiny’s Smoke Shop to watch them. If she did, she didn’t show it, and Lily couldn’t help admiring her obliviousness even if it was just an act. She took her bicycle by the handlebars and said, “Thanks, Dolores.” Then she added, “I mean it,” because for some reason she did.

  Wheeling her bicycle toward the cafe window, Lily looked inside. Two middle-aged women in Martin’s booth stared back at her, and before Lily had time to squelch the impulse, she had dropped the kickstand on her bike and was making goggle eyes at them. She stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers. It was a silly, childish thing to do, but looking at those two astonished faces through the glass, Lily couldn’t help feeling it was worth it.

  3

  Walking up the stairs, Lily heard scraping noises from Mabel’s apartment. She should be at Ed’s now, Lily thought. Something’s gone wrong. Mabel was sweating when she came to the door, and Lily realized that she had never seen the woman perspire even in the worst heat, but now drops of sweat stood out on her upper lip, and her forehead shone with moisture. She was wearing a big white shirt rolled to the elbows, and her thin white arms were trembling.

  “Mabel,” Lily said. “What’s going on?”

  “I moved it back.” She gestured at the room with a limp hand and sighed. “The whole room.… I didn’t know where I was anymore. It was so stupid of me. I thought it was time for a revolution, you know, a new order, but I found it awful, just awful.… I was so unhappy with the sofa over there.” She pointed. “It was like trying to learn Russian at fifty-seven. I did try that. My brain had calcified by then, and I simply couldn’t do the cases, much less those sounds. It should have been a lesson to me, but oh, no, I had to be clever and bold and disrupt it all. My nerves simply couldn’t take it, and pushing all that heavy furniture around…”

  “You moved the furniture? When did you move the furniture? Are you crazy? You should have asked me to help you.” Lily looked at Mabel’s hands. The knuckles were red and swollen. She studied Mabel’s face. “Dolores says thank you for the food, and she said that I was supposed to tell you she’s glad you told her what you did, that you’d know what she meant.”

  “You’ve been to see her, too, have you?” Mabel looked closely at Lily.

  “No. I ran into her at Frank and Dick Bodler’s.”

  Mabel looked puzzled. “You don’t mean those men with the bags who look like they just crawled out of a mine?”

  “Yup,” Lily said and folded her arms. Then she said softly, “Why did you go to see Dolores?”

  “I wanted to ask her about Ed and, and the portrait.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him?”

  “I wanted the other side. And I wanted to know about the ghosts.” Mabel wiped her upper lip. “I have to sit down.” She sank into the sofa and sighed, her legs straight out on the floor in front of her.

  Lily sat down beside her. “What did she say?”

  “Not a thing. I talked. I guess she heard me. I wasn’t sure.”

  “She’s fresh as a daisy now,” Lily said.

  “The portrait’s bothering me, Lily.” Mabel rubbed her cheek gently, as if it were another person’s skin. “I don’t know what to do. You should see it now. We worked today. It’s, it’s, oh, I don’t know, when I look at it, I feel upset. I’m well aware that no one’s going to care one way or the other about the identity of the old lady in Edward Shapiro’s painting, and yet I feel that I’m being pulled into a crisis a part of me willed and another part resists. I’m not sure Ed fully understands it. I’m not sure he even knows what he’s doing, but there’s something in him that’s aggressive, not his manner, you understand, but the work—he strikes the heart.” Mabel swallowed. “He painted his wife. Did you know that?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “It ended the marriage.”

  Lily didn’t say anything.

  “I guess it started out all right, and then something went wrong. He didn’t go into it in detail, but you know what he said?”

  “No.”

  “He said he saw her, really saw her.” Mabel looked into Lily’s eyes.

  Lily moved her eyes away from Mabel to the window. She wondered what Ed had seen, and why she found it upsetting, but she said, “It’s just a painting, Mabel. You’re all worked up over nothing.”

  Lily stared into Mabel’s white face and she spoke to her softly. “Is it the story in the boxes?”

  Mabel turned away. She didn’t nod or speak.

  “Partly,” she said in a soft voice.

  Then a suspicion took sudden hold of Lily. “I’d be careful what you tell Dolores. You shouldn’t trust her, Mabel. She could easily blab anything you say to the girl who does her nails down at Miriam’s, to Willy at the shoe repair, to anybody!”

  “I’m not sure that’s who she is, Lily.” Mabel smiled with her mouth closed. Her eyes looked shiny as she pushed away a wisp of hair from her forehead.

  The two women sat on the sofa beside each other without talking for a long time. Lily thought about being fired and about rehearsal and that Martin would be at the Arts Guild, and then she told Mabel about Martin. It was a partial confession because she omitted details that had become part of the story, even though they weren’t really a part of it—Helen Underdahl Bodler and the shoes she had stolen and burned and buried, Dolores in the grass, and Dick and Frank in that house. But Lily told her about Martin’s note and the map, about Becky Runevold and the rocking chair. She told her about leaving work and snooping in Martin’s house and finding the T-shirt. Mabel listened intently. She listened so hard her small body tensed all over, and when Lily finished, Mabel lifted her chin, stared at a blue wooden egg that lay in a bowl on the coffee table and said, “There are any number of explanations for that shirt,” she said. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

  Mabel’s words echoed in Lily’s head after she had said them. She remembered touching the blue fabric, remembered feeling it was tainted, the sign of an unspeakable thing. Why had she been so sure that it had belonged to the girl people were seeing? Why hadn’t it entered her mind that it might belong to somebody else: Martin’s sister or a friend? Lily looked into Mabel’s face. “Yes,” she said. “But I feel there’s something…”

  The woman folded her hands in her lap and said, “Yes, there is something. A mind burning holes in the world.”

  Lily didn’t answer this, and yet she didn’t deny that the enigmatic sentence made a kind of sense to her.

  “Would it be okay if I sat in on rehearsal tonight?” Mabel said. “I would like to watch anyway, but perhaps if I saw him…” She didn’t finish.

  “I think that’s a good idea.” Lily needed an ally, and she didn’t want to face Martin alone. “He acts like he’s got something on me,” she continued, “like a blackmailer or something.” Lily stopped talking. It was you, she said to herself and stared at the floor. The possibility, mad as it was, that she might have lost time and consciousness, that she might have remembered wrong or forgotten a crucial event played like a little tune in the back of her mind. It wasn’t that she accepted what Martin had said as the truth, but she acknowledged uncertainty for the first time, and she felt it as an annoying melody of doubt, like a stupid chorus from a television commercial or pop song that you hum almost without knowing it, and every time you try to get it out of your head, you can’t.

  * * *

  Martin’s cuts must have been healing well, because he used the hand freely both onstage and off-. Mabel sat in a folding chair in the second row throughout, and Lily worried that there was nothing for the woman to see—in Martin, at least. Watching him herself, Lily saw an unobtrusiv
e, cooperative young man who made a good Cobweb. He stared a little too much and blinked too little, but so what? Everybody was used to that. Lily began to wish he would do or say something to reveal himself. She hoped he would send her another note she could show to Mabel or that he would make a scene in front of the cast. While she was pretending to sleep at the rear of the stage and had opened her right eye just enough to see Martin patting Bottom’s Ass head, Lily heard Mabel laugh loudly, and she daydreamed that Martin suddenly broke out of his role as Cobweb, turned to the audience and confessed. She didn’t invent the exact content of the confession, but in the fantasy he shocked the audience. She saw him red-faced and stuttering, his arms flailing. By the time the fairies left the stage, the story had progressed to a point where the cast had jumped him and was hauling him off to the police station. After that, Lily decided to push her luck.

  She took her chance once rehearsal ended and Martin walked past her carrying three costumes over his arm. He was headed for the stairs, and despite the fact that they were not alone—Jim, Denise and Oren were talking just beyond the doors—Lily moved close to Martin and said in a strained but quiet voice, “I know what you’ve done.”

  Martin stopped and faced her. He stared, but his face didn’t move.

  “I’m telling you I know,” she repeated.

  Martin nodded at her but didn’t speak.

  Behind Martin, she saw Mabel. Her eyes met Lily’s, and in that instant Lily understood what she had done. She wasn’t only lying. She was pretending to know what she didn’t know, and it occurred to her that this ruse could put her in jeopardy. Martin appeared to be looking through her as he prepared to speak. His mouth moved, and his bandaged hand clutched at the blue material of the costumes. He motioned with his head for her to step aside with him and began to talk, stuttering badly over the first syllable, but the words were clear enough, and after hearing them Lily felt as if she had been kicked hard in the stomach: “So you’ve been to the cave and seen her.” He paused. “I mean, it.” Martin moved his head to one side. “D-d-did you expect me to deny it?” Then he looked down at his shoes. “You didn’t move her, did you?”