Enchanted Night

by Steven Millhauser

  Under the Spruces

  The famous moment has come, the young lovers naked under the spruces, moonlight, summer, and all that. He is amazed by his good luck, by her willingness, by the burst of serious feeling in himself, as if the dark blue summer night has entered him and is somehow working through him. As he moves slowly toward his ecstasy, approaching it but not quite there, not yet wanting to be there, he wonders suddenly, with surprise, what will break the heart more: the memory of the strangely grave lovemaking itself, on a summer night, under the spruces, or the memory of the way she swung out of shadow up into moonlight rippling across her legs and all at once let go: then she seemed to hang in the air, moonglowing, mysterious, an emanation of the moon-dazzled summer night, before she moved downward, earthbound, heavy with love; the smell of the spruces; her head flung back; her hair; wild laughter under the moon.

  Dance of the Dolls

  In attics streaked by moonlight, the dolls begin to dance. Some dance with partners and some dance alone, at first slowly, then more rapidly, turning and turning, each in its fashion: the elephants dance an elephant dance, the tigers a tiger dance, the Raggedy Ann doll a floppy ragdoll dance, the one-eyed cuddly bear a cuddly bear dance, the porcelain-headed doll with blue glass eyes and black straw hat a stately minuet. A soldier in black busby and red jacket dances with Columbine, who flutters her eyelashes and looks away. Suddenly Pierrot springs from an old chair to the floor beside them. His loose white tunic with big white buttons and billowy sleeves flutters slowly to rest and hangs to his knees above his white pantaloons. His cheeks are flour-white, his eyes brilliant black. Drawing a toy dagger with a retractable blade, he plunges it into his heart. With both hands he seizes his chest, staggers a few steps, drops to one knee, gazes at Columbine, crumples to the floor. With a pert toss of her curls she dances off with the soldier, while Pierrot, lifting himself onto one elbow and resting one long hand languorously on a raised knee, gazes after her with bitter longing.

  Song of the One-eyed Cuddly Bear

  I wuv woo. Does woo wuv me?

  The Garbage Can

  The mannequin in her peach-colored dress and dark green sunglasses walks along the railroad embankment on the moonlit side of the alley. She is exhilarated by her freedom, by the smell of the night, by the touch of the night air on her throat, and as she walks she swings her svelte arms, breathes deep through her narrow nostrils, and takes in, between the long and carefully curled lashes of her almond-shaped widespread eyes, every detail: the small flat stones on the slope of the embankment, the diamond-shaped spaces in the moon-glimmering fence, the black wires against the dark blue sky, a crushed blue-and-silver beer can gleaming among the stones. Once she stops to pick a dandelion on a tall stem. She carries it with her, twirling it in her slender fingers, inhaling its sharp, bracingly bitter fragrance. On the dark side of the alley, clusters of curving pipes stick out of the building near the ground. A shape is visible, and as she draws closer she sees it is a man. It is the man at the window, sitting against the wall beside a garbage can. His eyes are closed, but as she approaches they begin to open. He places one hand on top of the garbage can as if to push himself to his feet, while he continues to stare unmoving. The mannequin crosses the alley from moonlight to shade and stops in front of him. She looks down at the startled face looking up. Obeying a sudden impulse, she bends over and slips the stem of the dandelion into his coppery hair just above the ear. The man begins to struggle to his feet, pushing against the lid of the garbage can. His cheeks are streaked with tears. Standing at last with his back against the wall, he stares at her in confusion. She sees that he is shorter than she is. The dandelion hangs loosely from his hair. She reaches out a slender hand and touches his face.

  She has never touched skin before, soft and silky over bone: her own hands and cheeks remain glass-hard. She takes his hand and they begin to walk slowly along the shadowy side of the alley. She can smell the leather of his jacket among the dark green scents of the embankment. When they step from shadow into moonlight she seems to feel, in her slender shoulders, the soft, silken weight of the moonlight sifting down.

  Dark Party

  Summer Storm, rising and clutching her pocket knife, sees that the lady is a little off. The signal to flee dies in her arm; she remains standing, wary, waiting.

  “No lights,” she commands.

  “Of course not! On such a night! And look—the moon, in the window there. Oh how does it go? Why look, the moon ta tum ta tum … I can’t remember …”

  The girls are ready to get out of there, but they are also thirsty, and Summer Storm waits for the old bat to renew her offer. She seems to have forgotten all about them.

  “You mentioned lemonade.”

  “Yes, I did, I certainly did. Don’t you go away now. Lemonade for one two three four five yes. A very fine drink for a summer night.”

  From the kitchen they hear the sound of ice cubes dropping into glasses, liquid pouring, clinks of glass on glass.

  She returns with a tray of glasses that she carries from girl to girl. She is smiling, this lady in the pink bathrobe with the crazy flower in her hair.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she says to Summer Storm, who shakes her head and remains standing as she takes a cool glass.

  “And now I would like to say: welcome, young people. I was just taking a walk in the back and thinking how nice it would be, how very nice it would be. But you know, I’m a little out of practice, living out here and all, and if I’ve said or done anything wrong, please, I hope, I hope you will forgive me.”

  “Hey, it’s all right,” says Black Star.

  “And now let me just put something on the Victrola.”

  In the dark she bends over a cabinet and removes a record. Summer Storm wonders whether it’s time to leave. The woman puts the record on the record player and stands motionless beside it as the tone-arm drops with a faint hiss. From where she stands, Summer Storm can see the record turning, the edge glittery black. The music takes her by surprise: it sounds like the kind of music you might hear on a merry-go-round, a sad and jaunty music, a wooden-horse tune shot through with the smell of cotton candy and the distant clatter of rides. In the moonlit dark living room she watches the loony lady begin to turn slowly, her arms outspread, her eyes half closed, her mouth smiling as she turns and turns on her bare feet on the dark rug with its pattern of peacocks.

  Pictures in a Gallery

  As he enters the small woods behind the junior high, the man with shiny black hair is calm and excited. He is calm because he knows he will find her there, the young girl who should not be out alone so late at night, because didn’t your mother ever tell you that it is not good no no to walk the streets at night in jeans so tight they are bound to attract the attention of strangers—the young girl destined to become part of his gallery. He is excited for three reasons: because he has already added two pictures today, because the third promises to be extremely stimulating, and because the hunt itself always has in it elements of excitement. Today in the library he felt certain that the blond-haired man in the tan trench coat lurking in the aisles was a detective trying to keep him from collecting exhibits, and even so he had collected two. In the oversized art books at the bottom of the Fine Arts section he kneeled down and saw, through the narrow, jagged space at the top of the books, a high school girl in black flats resting on her heels, facing him, looking for a book. She had thick yellow hair that came down over one shoulder of her white blouse and she wore a cream-colored skirt stretched tight across the tops of her big tan knees. One knee was slightly higher than the other. As she moved a little in search of a book, reaching, throwing her hair back with one hand, the two knees would come apart and suddenly press together, now you see it now you don’t, open and shut case, little yellow hairs on her legs, what did she think she, teasing him, taunting him, the little slut. Later, kneeling at the bottom shelf in Biography, he saw a heavyset sickly-pale girl with black down on her cheeks sitting on the floor of the
aisle opposite, facing him with her back against the shelves. Studious type: absorbed in a book. She sat with raised knees pressed together—so demure!—ankles apart, black skirt pulled tightly over pale knees, revealing a vista of fish-white underthighs and a pink bulge of underpants while she twirled a hank of black hair round and round a plump finger. These were fine exhibits, but the blond-haired man in the tan trench coat was making him nervous and he left the library shortly after. Now, as he enters the woods, he is certain that the girl in skintight jeans, who should not be walking alone in deserted places, even on a fine summer night, will provide him with more leisurely, more irresistible pleasures.

  Coop and his Lady

  It’s all the same to Coop whether he’s hallucinating or not: his lady has come down to him, and they’re walking hand in hand along the railroad embankment, on this summer night. There’s nothing at all except the now of this night. Come morning he’ll chalk it up to drink and dream, but now it’s all as real as the tilt of her hat and the scratch of gravel under his heels. She’s alive but not flesh-alive, not skin-and-bone alive, and he likes her that way: she’s perfect in her mannequin beauty, flawless, lofty-cool. He loves her but doesn’t desire her, or rather he desires her but doesn’t need to fulfill his desire—he desires only to continue desiring her, this night-lady with her glass-smooth arms and the glint of moonlight on her neck. Her dress, which looks soft as tissue paper, shakes over her long legs as she walks. Her small and perfect breasts look firm as polished stones. He wonders whether the breasts of mannequins have nipples, he once read something somewhere, and as he tries to imagine the smooth, cool, unnippled breasts of his lady, he no longer knows whether he’s attracted by the little-girl innocence of her ice-smooth body or by its exotic, corrupt seductiveness. He wonders what she’s wearing under there, maybe bra and panties so silky-delicate that the mere act of looking at them would tear them. He’s having strange thoughts, old Coop is. He feels way up there, lifted out of himself, crazed. He sees that what really moves him about his lady isn’t her sudden touchable nearness but her untouchable, out-of-this-world thereness, her unshakable unreality. It strikes him that his fleshiness is probably interesting to her, as it might not be if she were entirely human. This thought, which might have disturbed him on some other night, deeply pleases him on this night that’s like no other; and with a burst of pleasure he pulls her closer, inhaling her subtle perfume that reminds him somehow of summer snow.

  An Encounter

  Haverstraw, stepping out of moonlight into the shelter of the trees, has the sense that he is eluding pursuit. He isn’t soothed, precisely, but for a moment he feels safe from the mockery of the moon. Creep out of sight: never come out. He has to make his way carefully here, else he’ll trip over a root, hit his head on a branch for sure. Conk his coconut. Bonk his bean. He makes his way cunningly, Chingachgook, through darkness broken by bits of moonlight. This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the—. He hears something up ahead like a crackle of footsteps and sees a figure moving through the trees. He thinks of calling out, but holds back: it’s around three in the morning and there’s something about the shadowy form he doesn’t like. The other isn’t really walking through the moon-spotted dark, but seems to be creeping slowly forward. Haverstraw thinks of the cat he saw earlier in the summer, creeping up on a grackle. It occurs to him that he might end up with a knife in his gut. Is that what he’s been looking for? Disaster, death, the end of desk-sorrow. Smash it up, bash it up. Even so he moves cautiously. The figure is a man, angular, smallish. Haverstraw, no fighter, is big-shouldered, soft, and tall. He creeps after the creeper: hunters in a wood. The creeper crouches down suddenly, parts a branch. At that moment Haverstraw sees a clearing, moonlight, something lying there: a girl, asleep or dead.

  “Hey!” calls Haverstraw, stepping forward. He raises Jennie Gerhardt over his head, ready to hurl it like a rock.

  The man jerks his head over his shoulder, leaps up, half falls, runs stumbling through the trees.

  The naked girl is screaming, trying to cover herself with her hands.

  “He’s gone,” Haverstraw says, violently averting his face, stepping into the moonlight.

  He turns his back, puts down the book, tears off his windbreaker. He holds out the jacket stiffly behind him, tosses it in her direction.

  “I’ll stand guard. It’s all right. Calm down. That creep didn’t see you. Easy. Shhh. He’s gone. It’s all right now. Really.”

  Behind him he hears a crazed scrambling. He wants to comfort her, but how? Don’t look. He hopes the small man comes back, he’d like to smash his head into a tree. Somehow the man had known she was here. A young girl, taking off her clothes. Crazy stuff. He himself saw her for a second, thin and white, little breasts. Ah, her shame!

  “I don’t think he’s coming back,” Haverstraw says. “You all right?”

  When he turns around he sees that she’s gone. Of course! A vision in the night. He feels a sharp burst of disappointment. In the grassy clearing, bright in the moonlight, his dark blue windbreaker lies with one arm straight out, like a policeman in an old movie. Something small is resting on the jacket.

  He steps over and picks up a half roll of Life Savers. The open end is crumpled, the silver paper torn; the striped paper covering the rest of the roll is smooth and glossy. He can imagine a number of explanations—it might have fallen out of her pocket, for example—but he prefers to think of it as her gift to him. He continues to study it in the light of the moon, then puts it in his shirt pocket and gives it a pat.

  For thirty minutes by his strapless watch, which he holds in one hand, Haverstraw stands guard in the clearing, pacing in the moonlight, looking in all directions, listening. Then he picks up his windbreaker and Mrs. K’s book and heads for home.

  The Piper in the Woods

  Dark and sweet, dark and sweet, the night-notes draw the children deeper into the woods, past tree trunks fat as elephant legs, under branches that run like ink against the blue night sky: runny ink branches and elephant trees, and the scrapy roots and the scritch-scratch leaves. The moon is cut by little black twigs. The moon’s a cracked dinner plate. Whisperers move behind every tree. That tree’s a skeleton: it’ll hug you to death. Look! A witch tree. Dead man’s tree. What’s that? Shhh. Who’s there? Sharp and deep, sharp and deep, the night music calls. Through the moony woods move the mum children, dark children rippling with spots of moon. Louder, clearer: the rising and falling sharp-sweet music brushes against the skin of their cheeks, touches their hands and faces, passes through them and comes out the other side. An opening in the trees, and there in the clearing, on a small rise, standing in the ankle-deep grass, turning, bending his body, playing a dark flute, a strange man with naked chest and sharp ears, hairy flanks and prancing goat-legs. He turns and turns, bending almost to the grass, rising high, a moon-dancer, a flute-dreamer, as the children gather in the clearing to listen to the dark, sweet music of the piper in the woods. They must have this music. It’s the sound of elves under the earth, of cities at the bottom of the sea. In the clearing the children listen, their lips slightly parted, their eyes veiled and heavy-lidded.

  Danny Waking

  Danny, waking, looks for the chair with the shirt over the back and the window with the BB hole. He can’t understand the towels hanging down, the dark blue air, the hardness under him. It all comes clear. He sits up, rubs his neck. He remembers lying down in the yard, the shadows of the two towels. The shadows have moved, they’re almost up to the side of the garage. Time to go in and sleep. His neck hurts, his back is stiff, but he feels better—his little moon-nap has done him good. Dim memory of a white dream, fading, ungraspable: vanished. He’d better get up to his room, crawl into bed before his parents catch him out here, another crazy teenager, lock him up. Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped off his head with my own ax. He can hear the trucks on the thruway and the hum of insects and somewhere another sound, a faint electrical crackle, tsst tsst, probably
from the streetlight below his front window. Danny recalls the library breakin, the words with Blake—it all seems long ago. He’s feeling really pretty good. Things will work out. He loves the summer, warm nights stretching on forever, long walks alone, the yellow windows, girl-thoughts, streetlights shining through leaves. Patience. His time will come. He stands up, takes a deep breath, looks up at the moon. As if someone is watching him, he places a hand on his stomach and grandly bows. Lady moon, we thank you. Keep up the good work. Danny turns and heads for the front porch.

  A Little Change

  Hand in hand she walks with him along the railroad embankment, past telephone poles with aluminum numerals screwed into the wood, past milkweed pods, past storebacks and garbage cans. When they pass under streetlights their shadows stretch out longer and longer in the pools of yellowish light but never disappear entirely: another shadow, a moon-shadow, creeps out from the first, at another angle. She feels the change at first in her arms, not as a stiffness or coldness, but as a slight loss of ease, a motion in the direction of her mannequin nature. So it has come. She looks up over the store roofs and sees a faint streak of gray in the sky. On the embankment side, the sky over the chainlink fence remains radiant deep dark blue. Secretly she has known it must come. She must return to her window, she must again assume her pose, the pose she can already feel within her, working its way outward toward fulfillment: one arm slightly raised, the fingers gracefully extended, the eyes half closed behind her fashionable sunglasses. But now, as she walks between two worlds, on this summer night when the moon has released her, she is shaken with gratitude.

  Young

  He has covered her with his shirt, he is kissing her hands, the lovely one, the heartbreaker, and still the night goes on, the impossible summer night that can never end, for this is the way it has always been, here in the secret place, under the spruces. For the night that is once is the night that is always, and now is the only eternity that will ever be. Oh god, she’s having wild thoughts, dream thoughts under the summer moon. She can feel the night working through her, she is a daughter of the night and the moon and her hair is streaming in the branches of the trees and her breath is the night sky. She is happy, happy, she wants to cry out with happiness. But already in the center of her happiness Janet feels a faint distraction, a tug of day-thoughts: must be going in before too long, hair appointment at eleven, beach at two. She thrusts the pesky voice away and breathes deep, as if she is trying to breathe in all of the summer night with its smell of spruce needles and the cry of the crickets and the soft sound like a rustle that is the sound of the trucks on the far thruway. Like a prince he came to her, asleep in her tower. Well not asleep exactly, but anyway. He is kissing her hands, even now. Gravely she thinks: this is what I will remember. Through the spruce branches she can see a glowing piece of moon. She has the odd sense that she’s up there, looking down, remembering. She is remembering that summer night long ago when he kissed her hands under the spruces, back in the days when she was young, when she was wild, when anything was possible in the night never ending.