The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  A rumor began to circulate that had purportedly started at the funeral home. It was said that when Martin’s body was being prepared for embalming, the bandage on his left hand was removed and that Lily’s name had been carved into the skin of his hand below the knuckles. Bert told Lily one morning in the cafe to stop Boomer from spilling the beans first.

  Lily said nothing. She looked at Bert for a moment, then turned away and stared at Division Street through the window.

  Bert touched Lily’s arm from behind. “He’s dead, Lily. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Since Martin’s death, Bert had left groceries for Mabel and Lily, had baked pies and cooked casseroles and delivered them without waiting for thanks. She had called Lily every day to “shoot the breeze” and had pretended that Lily was holding up her end of the conversation.

  “It will blow over, Lil’,” she said.

  Lily looked down at her apron. “There’s something wrong with me, Bert. I can do everything—work, eat, sleep, talk—but I don’t want to do any of it.” Lily didn’t look at Bert’s face, but she grabbed her friend’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s like they smell the corpse on me, Bert. Sometimes, I think I smell it.”

  Bert looked down at her own hand.

  Lily felt a shudder go through Bert’s fingers, and she let go.

  Later that day, the day she heard about Martin’s hand, Lily covered the mirror in her room. She didn’t explain this act to herself, but she draped her bathrobe over the mirror and left the medicine cabinet open in the bathroom so she didn’t have to see herself there. She didn’t spend a lot of time in her own apartment anyway except to change her clothes. She lived with Mabel now, although neither of them had said this in so many words, and she avoided Mabel’s two mirrors rather easily. They were both small.

  One evening, Mabel lifted her manuscript off her desk and told Lily it was time she read it to somebody, and that was how their nightly reading began. Mabel’s book was much simpler than Lily had imagined. It began: “My first memory is of my mother. She is squatting on the floor with her arms open and I am walking toward her.” Mabel’s first memories were isolated fragments that she told in high detail—a tablecloth with green glasses on it, her brother naked in the outhouse and a dead cat. At about seven, her memories became more continuous, and she began to tell the story of her childhood in South Dakota and to recount early dreams she could remember. Lily liked the dream Mabel read to her about flying over a city and rescuing her brother from a witch who lived in a shack that was covered with newspapers.

  Lily discovered that the reading was her favorite part of the day. Sometimes they read in bed. Mabel would sit up with pillows behind her, and Lily would lie with her head down and listen to the years go by slowly or quickly, depending on the events recorded. In the book Mabel often poked fun at her younger self, and she and Lily laughed together. Lily thought it odd that she could laugh at what was written in the book but found nothing in her own life funny anymore. When Mabel arrived at the page that told of her mother’s death, Lily cried for the first time since the day she had found Martin in the cave.

  The two women had gotten used to the business of sleeping together. At first Lily had held herself tightly against the edge of the bed, conscious even in her sleep of the old woman’s body, but that awareness disappeared, and often they would wake up entangled in each other—an arm or a leg thrown over the other—and after the first few times, they didn’t bother with apologies.

  As it turned out, Mabel had been keeping a secret. The woman read the passage that revealed it in the same voice she had read every other page. In Chicago, when Mabel was eighteen years old, she had found herself pregnant, poor and alone after she had left Owen Hartwig at the courthouse. She gave the baby away—a little girl—and she had never been able to find her. She didn’t know whether her daughter had lived or died or what her name was. “It’s such an old story,” Mabel read to Lily, “an old, familiar story, told over and over again, but that doesn’t make the grief of it any less. I never gave away the things I salvaged from that room—the table, the keys and the bird’s nest. That was where the woman from the adoption agency gave the speech that persuaded me to give up my daughter. It was a bad speech, full of clichés and tired rebukes. Even then, I knew how stupid it was, but I memorized it and have never forgotten it. As she talked, I fixed the words onto the various objects in the room and burnt them into my mind. It wasn’t a long speech.”

  Lily turned over in bed and looked at Mabel. “What did you name her, Mabel?”

  “Anna,” said Mabel. “Anna Wasley.”

  “Isn’t Wasley your married name?”

  “I was a bluestocking, Lily,” Mabel said. “I never changed my name.”

  * * *

  By the second week of July, Lily realized that she hadn’t menstruated. Ed had not written or called. His disappearance was so absolute that he no longer seemed real to her. Mabel told her that he had paid the July rent at the Stuart Hotel and that she expected him, but Lily did not. Still, there had been days when she had wanted to call him, when she believed he wanted to hear from her, days when she hoped. She had his telephone number and address on a little piece of paper that she kept on her night table, and once she had gone so far as to dial the number. But after listening to a single ring, she had hung up. Lily had been afraid Elizabeth would answer. She had started a letter to him as well, but when she had read it over, she hated every word she had written and threw it into the wastebasket. She felt her belly often, examined it for signs of some change, some indication of fetal life, but she couldn’t tell. Although she stayed away from mirrors, she looked at her arms and legs and feet often and felt them with her fingers. Sometimes when Mabel read to her, Lily stroked her arm over and over or rocked herself in the bed. Mabel brushed Lily’s hair before work and laid out her clothes. Once she put out lipstick and a small mirror on the table. Lily knew it was a hint, but she ignored it. She didn’t go to the doctor. If she was pregnant, she wouldn’t change it anyway. That was for other people.

  Lily read the police log twice a week as soon as the Chronicle came out. She was waiting for someone to find the doll, but nobody did. There were three unusual sightings during the month of July, however: a UFO over Dundas, a ghostly cowboy running in the direction of the public pool and another angel. The angel was spotted in the Klatschwetter field, maybe by Mrs. Klatschwetter herself, although no name was mentioned, and it caused a rash of angel jokes in the cafe for about a week. Lily didn’t believe a word of these reports, but it seemed to her that somebody out there was making fun of her. When Lily mentioned the angel to Mabel, she paused for a moment and said, “I think you should go to the cemetery and see Martin Petersen’s grave, Lily.”

  “What?”

  “Just as I said. I’ll go with you if you like.”

  Lily didn’t answer Mabel, but she started thinking about Martin’s grave. Did it have a stone yet? Would there be writing on his headstone or just his dates? Had they put him beside his mother? Lily hugged herself and shut her eyes on Mabel’s sofa. She remembered Martin talking about the doll as a thing “between.” Why did she feel that his grave was between, too, that it was between her and Martin.

  “They’re casting for My Fair Lady at the Arts Guild, Lily. Auditions are in two weeks.” Mabel’s sharp voice cut Lily off from her thoughts. She looked at her.

  “You should try out for Eliza Doolittle.”

  Lily eyed Mabel but said nothing. The woman seemed to age a little every day: her wrinkles looked deeper, her face more skeletal. She even seemed to have less hair.

  * * *

  The morning following that conversation, Ed walked into the cafe. Mike Fox paused from his Kents. Pete Lund looked up from his coffee, and Vince and Boomer stood watching behind the kitchen door. But Lily hadn’t known he was there until she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around and saw Ed standing beside the cash register. She remembered him with a sudden, violent rush of familiarity. He l
ooked the same. But Lily had an urge to scream, the way people do in movies when they think someone is dead and it turns out they’re alive.

  He started talking to her in a low voice and tried to take her hand, but she held it back from him.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know until just now when I ran into Stanley and he told me what happened. You should have called me, Lily. You should have written me. I would have dropped everything and come…”

  It’s too much for me, she thought. Seeing him now. I’ll crack. What does he want?

  Lily heard Vince clearing his throat behind her. She felt her face moving uncontrollably. She opened her mouth and shut it. She blinked and felt a gob of mucus in her throat.

  Then Vince was behind the counter, Vince, who had been unnaturally nice to her since Martin’s death. He was waving an accusatory finger at Ed, and Lily heard him say that maybe Ed should have bothered to check in with her, that she’d been through hell, and where the hell had he been all that time? Lily backed away from both of them until Vince threatened to “deck” Ed. She staggered forward and stood between them, looking from one to the other. “Stop it,” she said, and as she looked up into Ed’s face, she asked herself who he was, this man who had come and gone and then come back again, and why he thought he could pop in and out of her life like a jack-in-the-box. I’m really mad at you, she thought all of a sudden. Lily didn’t look Ed in the face. “You never called me,” she said. “You never called me once.” She clenched her fists at her sides and grit her teeth. It seemed to her that if she strained every muscle in her body, she could hold herself together. “I’ll come and talk to you after my shift,” she whispered, addressing Ed’s hands.

  Vince, who had stepped back several feet, said to Lily that he’d get Bert to cover for her if she wanted, but Lily turned to him and in the calm, loud voice she had used for Hermia told him that she had promised she would never walk out on him again, and by God she was going to stick to it.

  Vince, looking very red in the face, retreated, and after he had disappeared into the kitchen, Lily heard Boomer give a long, loud whistle.

  * * *

  Before she walked across the street to the Stuart Hotel, Lily went into the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. The face she saw was younger, prettier and paler than she remembered, and she was glad she had looked at herself, because she wanted to know what Ed was going to see.

  At Ed’s, Lily saw a suitcase lying open on the floor, and she recognized his T-shirts and jeans spilling out of it. She had worn some of those clothes. The room smelled of paint, smoke and other nameless but familiar things, and when she sat down in the canvas chair, Lily felt afraid of those smells. They had come to mean Ed’s body and sex with him in the little iron bed, and she wondered if she would dare to let him touch her again.

  Ed sat across from her, but Lily found it hard to look at him, so she studied her hands.

  “Stanley didn’t say it in so many words,” Ed said. “But he basically told me I’d been a shit when I ran into him downstairs. He stood there shaking his head and avoiding my eyes. ‘You should have been in touch with that girl.’ He said that several times. I’m sorry, Lily. I’m terribly sorry…”

  “Why did you come back?” she said.

  “Look at me, Lily,”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Don’t look at me. What you’ve been through is terrible. I wish I had known…”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “It’s over with Elizabeth. She didn’t really want me. She found out about you, and that’s when she started pushing me to try again, but it didn’t take me long to realize that nothing had changed. It felt like a sham.”

  Lily looked at the painting of Mabel, which was still standing in the center of the room with its empty story boxes, and asked herself why Elizabeth seemed so unimportant now. The word “sham” seemed to leave a trace in her ear. She repeated it aloud—“Sham.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She knew he was. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. It wasn’t an apology. It was more like a comment on the world in general, the way things happen or don’t happen.

  Ed seemed to understand this, because he didn’t say anything. She looked at him and noticed that although his body remained still, his face looked grim and set. He stood up, walked to the suitcase, and after riffling through some of the clothes, pulled out a sketchbook and brought it to her. “I drew Martin,” he said. “I started drawing him after he left that day, and I’ve been doing sketches for a while. I want you to have them. You can do whatever you want with them—burn them, throw them away. I don’t care.”

  She could hear the decision in his voice—the stubborn will that she remembered. He opened the book and handed it to her.

  Lily looked down at Martin. There was no background, no floor, no place in which he was standing in the picture. His body seemed to float on the page, and in his right hand he was holding a cowboy hat. He looked very young—like a boy. She closed her eyes. “You wanted to paint him,” she said, understanding all at once what the sketches meant. “He was going to be the fifth one.” She was whispering to keep away the tears.

  “I thought about it,” Ed said. “But I had decided not to. That’s the truth.” Lily noticed that Ed was jiggling his knee.

  “Martin was afraid you were going to paint me, but you wanted to paint him. It’s funny.” Lily made a sound, half laugh, half sob, and handed the sketchbook back to Ed. “He … he…” She put her hand over her mouth so Ed wouldn’t see her lips trembling.

  He leaned forward. “I love you,” he said. “I’m not sure that makes any difference now, but I want us to be together.”

  Lily sat back in the chair and waved him off. After he had pulled away from her, she met his eyes but didn’t answer him. What are you saying? she said to herself. What do you mean? And then as she continued looking at him, she thought, I used to watch you early in the morning before the sun came up. I used to go to the window just to look at you, because I wanted to see you, no, because I had to see you. Why? she thought. Aren’t you saying now what I dreamed you would say to me from the very beginning? It’s strange, Lily thought. Everything is strange in the world. And she looked toward the window and without knowing why she remembered Oberon’s speech near the end of the play: “I then did ask of her her changeling child; / Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent / To bear him to my bower in fairyland. / And now I have the boy, / I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” And Lily felt her chin begin to shake, then her neck and shoulders. She didn’t try to stop the shuddering. It seemed all right now, like a seizure that had been a long time in coming. It wasn’t just that Ed was telling her that he wanted her or that she realized how terribly she had missed him. It was also that Vince had been ready to punch him and that Stanley had yelled at him, and it was the afternoon light coming through the window, and the happiness in Mabel’s face on the painting. It was her own brown legs in Ed’s chair and the warm tears falling on them. And it must have been Martin, too.

  “I want you to come to New York with me,” he said. “I want you to live with me.”

  Lily shook her head. She wasn’t saying no. She just felt overwhelmed.

  “If you don’t want to live with me, I’ll help you find an apartment. You can take acting classes there, and we can see each other every day. If not every day, as much as you want to. I’m not going to give you up, Lily.”

  Still she couldn’t say anything. She looked at the floor and went on crying.

  But she let him kiss her then, and she cried off and on through the hours they spent in bed together. Later, when he sat up and started reaching for his clothes, she stopped him.

  “I want you to go to the window,” she said, “and just stand there looking at me.”

  Without asking any questions, Ed walked quickly across the room. And then Lily lay on the bed and looked at him standing naked in front of the window and sev
eral long minutes passed before she told him it was all right to move.

  * * *

  Mabel told Ed about her lost daughter by describing the pictures he had to draw in the narrative boxes. In the first was a pregnant girl and the adoption agency woman in the room in Chicago. Mabel remembered the room in such detail that Lily found it uncanny. In the second, the girl sat in the same room alone staring out a window. In the third an old woman sat in the same position in Mabel’s living room across the street. In this last room, the window was on the other side. She gave him these drawing instructions in the evening, and when she had finished telling him what she wanted, Lily felt that the room was drained of everything except stillness and twilight and Mabel’s unseen grief.

  During the days that followed, however, Mabel exhausted Ed with those boxes. She criticized his drawings ferociously. This thing and that were all wrong. She insisted he change the chair’s seat and the table’s legs until they satisfied her. “It’s not naturalism,” he told her. “I’m not drawing from life, don’t you see? It’s the story that counts.”