The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  A crowd quickly gathered up and down the highway shoulder and gawked at him from a safe distance. He’d struck his head against the windshield when he slammed on his brakes; blood ran sideways over his temple, pooling in his ear, flowing over his earlobe and coagulating, finally, in a stalagtitelike drop. One of the gawkers was a physician. He kneeled by the heap of rolled rug and felt for a pulse. He rose to his feet with no urgency whatsoever.

  The man was dead. The man had killed a man.

  For less than thirty minutes, he contemplated the fact that he’d become the person his ex-wife claimed, in not so many words, to wish she’d married. He’d been cutting garlic for a salad dressing when she announced that she was leaving him for good. He turned quickly and without thinking, knife pointed outward, the point jabbing in and out of her arm—just a fraction of a millimeter—with the invisible quickness of a sewing machine needle. She bled a pinprick’s worth of blood.

  She met his gaze daringly. “Go on,” she said. “Stab me again if you want me to stay.” She didn’t say: You timid, depressive cipher. She didn’t say: At least a man who stabs his wife gives a shit about something. She didn’t have to say these things.

  He returned to chopping his garlic.

  And so if he were honest with himself—he tried mostly to be—he’d have to admit that the initial numb horror he felt at killing a man was reprehensibly counterbalanced by an intoxicating sense of freedom, even of victory. Yes he’d suffered a mild concussion, yes he’d been in shock, but still this did not excuse the fact that his first impulse, as he stood watching the medics cover the dead man with a tarp, was to call his ex-wife and tell her: I have killed a man.

  When it emerged, after a quick medical exam by the ambulance medics and an ID check by the police, that the man he’d killed was suicidal and mentally ill—he had escaped from a home south of the highway—he did not feel entirely relieved. He felt, instead, the deadweight of his boulder self redescend. He felt the strangulating tightness of his own skin. “Wrong place, wrong time,” said the sympathetic officer who had, thirty minutes earlier, locked him in cuffs. “We understand your need to reassess after the tragedy that’s befallen you,” his partners wrote in response to the memo he sent, announcing his indefinite leave of absence from the firm. “This would only happen to you,” his ex-wife said.

  And so he found the girl refreshing. He found it refreshing to contemplate that he might be hiding a less pitiable victim of a person inside of himself. Of course, it was all a silly game. He reasoned that he could only find refreshing the possibility that he might have molested a young girl if the possibility were, in fact, impossible. He knew it was impossible. He’d spent his afternoons outside Semmering Academy reading his newspaper in his car because after he’d killed the suicidal man he’d thought: I could be anybody now. Once a man has killed another man, even if unintentially, a world of options is open to him. I could be a molester of young girls. He thought it wrong to cut himself off from this possibility, a refusal to fully self-realize, and so he’d stationed himself in a place where he would be most tempted. Sadly, he’d learned, he didn’t much care for young girls, not at least as objects to desire. It was their noises he preferred; their screeches and their laughter so maniacal at the edges. They lived with the daily cognizance that they had no idea, despite their careful schooling and safe families, what they would become. Miserable lawyers? Adulterers? Alcoholic mothers? The future seems rife with failure when you’re primed to succeed—this he recalled keenly from his own upbringing. When you are primed to succeed your failure looms like a certainty, at which you maniacally laugh as you skip class to smoke cigarettes in the cemetery. He felt comfortable amidst their pigeon squawking, which receded as they passed his car in search of a mausoleum behind which to crouch and prepare for their black futures. Failure was easier to accept, he knew, if there were seeds of its promise one could locate in an earlier time. There, you see. There is where it all began to go wrong.

  Thus, he allowed himself to enjoy this girl in his passenger seat, because what was the risk? Certainly her imaginative rendering of his past made him a more intriguingly dark person than the version delivered to him by his ex-wife—now an active member of a women’s encounter group—who had involved him in her urgently ridiculous need to reclaim her own story, as though he’d ever been the one in control. He accompanied her on trips revisiting their former house, their former vacation spots, their former favorite restaurants, while his ex-wife narrated her experience of being married to him into a handheld tape recorder. If he tried to correct her account, she’d raise her voice and state imperiously: “This is my story now.” Generally speaking, her version of him could be summed up as follows: socially reticent, well-meaning, and killingly bland litigator afflicted by food allergies engages for years in loveless union with woman he finds repulsive but doesn’t have the guts to leave.

  It was not so terribly far off the mark.

  He peered sideways at the girl, her feet on the dash, her chin resting between her knees and bouncing as he drove over the potholed road.

  You’re going to bite off your tongue, the man said.

  Wouldn’t you like that, the girl said.

  No, in fact, the man said.

  So, Mr. Amnesia, do you remember where my house is? the girl asked.

  Which house? the man asked. The first house or the second house?

  What do you mean, the first house, the girl said.

  The house where we were neighbors, the man said.

  The girl smiled into her knees.

  And so it was that the man found himself actively awake at 9:55 p.m. and driving toward Boston in the company of a strange girl. This so-called Ida. She didn’t feel like an Ida to him, any more than she felt like a total stranger. He allowed himself to consider; maybe he had been following her for a reason. Maybe she did know something about him—was it so outlandish a notion? Not what she’d claimed, of course, but perhaps she possessed insight into him as a more fascinating person; like the suicidal man who chose him from a road’s worth of death options, she too privileged other ways of perceiving him.

  Soon the woods on either side peeled away to reveal office parks and malls, their brilliantly lit car lots empty of cars. These gave way to industrial wastelands of shipping containers and railway tracks, then warehouses and the first shabby beginnings of the habitable city.

  Do you remember where you’re going? the girl asked.

  The man nodded. He’d been to this house with his ex-wife too many times recently as part of her reclamation therapy, his unimaginative past shoved in his face in the name of her cure.

  Good, the girl said. Because I haven’t been here since I was little.

  Are you scared? the man asked.

  Are you scared? the girl asked.

  A little, the man admitted.

  No you’re not, the girl said. You’re excited. It’s all that coffee you drink. You’ve always been a big coffee drinker.

  I’ve become a big coffee drinker, he said. Since I have insomnia, it’s nice to be alert.

  You were always a coffee drinker and a smoker, the girl said. You sucked Sucrets so your wife wouldn’t know. You hid a lot from your wife.

  Could you blame me? the man asked.

  The girl smiled sweetly. I’ve never blamed you, she said.

  The man exited toward Storrow Drive, pinballing through the rotaries toward the house where he used to live. It was almost 11 p.m. by the time they pulled up outside the brownstone that he and his wife had sold in the late seventies for barely what they’d paid for it. Implicit in this fact, when recounted to him by his ex-wife, was this: He had been bad with money. He had been bad with investments. He had, due to his dislike of new people and new routines and his all-round timidity toward life—and this was confusing—bullied her into buying near their old apartment in the city (bad investment) rather than in the newly fashionable suburbs (good investment). He had forced her to become an angry and aggressive person; it
was her only defense against becoming like him, against drifting out of existence as quietly as their money.

  He pulled up in front of his former bad investment and put the Mercedes in park, leaving the engine running. The streets gleamed like a petroleum spill in the parchment yellow of the streetlamps. Brakelights and headlights bled red and white through the sheeny black, everything running together and jarring his sense of perspective and horizon until it was hard to tell where the ground was, where the sky.

  This is it, the girl said, her chin still resting on her knees, eyes tilted up at the world, or what they could see of the world through his windshield.

  She pointed at his old house.

  But that’s my house, he said.

  I know, she said. Just testing you.

  This time she pointed to a brownstone across the street.

  I thought your house burned down, the man said. He’d been expecting a new glassy house slid between the brownstones like a vein of quartz through granite.

  Burned down, the girl said, is a figure of speech. We sold the shell to a couple that wanted a fixer-upper. They were from Texas. Dad said they had a lot of giddyap and go.

  The girl chewed on her sweatpants.

  You seem nervous, said the man.

  Just tired, the girl said.

  It’s late, the man said. After eleven. And it’s a school night.

  The girl fiddled with the Mercedes’s lighter, pushing it in and then yanking it out, turning the dead heating coil toward her face.

  This is broken, the girl said. Do you have any cigarettes?

  I don’t smoke anymore, he reminded her.

  But you used to, the girl said. I bet there’s a straggler in the seam of this seat.

  She lifted her hips high, her field hockey skirt riding above her waist, her sweatpants pulling downward to expose the elastic band of her underwear.

  Voilà, she said. She held up a flattened cigarette, the filter dangling by a tiny hinge of paper. She tore the filter free and dropped it onto the floor of the Mercedes.

  Got a light?

  No, I…the man fumbled.

  You don’t smoke, the girl said. Some advice: a lighter is a good prop for picking up women at bars.

  I don’t go to bars, the man said.

  You just hang out across the street from an all-girls high school.

  She was smiling as she said this.

  Joking, she said.

  Not funny, the man said.

  Not funny but true, the girl said. I bet you have matches in this car.

  She checked the glove box, underneath the floor mat. She found a book in the door pocket, wrapped in a desiccated woman’s leather glove. His ex-wife’s glove? Whose glove? He didn’t have a clue. He felt suddenly threatened by the amnesia he’d only pretended to have.

  One match left, she said. Should you do the honors or should I?

  I’ll do it, the man said.

  There’s a lot of pressure here, the girl said, holding up the last match. Think you can handle it?

  The man removed the matchbook from her fingers, careful his skin didn’t touch hers.

  The flint had been scraped bare.

  He struck the match on the first try. His hands were steady as he cupped the flame and extended it toward the girl’s mouth.

  She inhaled. Smiled.

  They sat in silence.

  There, she said, finally, pointing to a small window on the third floor of the man’s former home. That’s where it happened.

  The man looked at the window, a bland and unsuggestive porthole into a past life that wasn’t his.

  Your wife was at work. You’d taken me rowing in the Commons. We were cold. You made us tea. Or maybe it was hot chocolate.

  He watched as her eyes glazed over, her mind spinning and spinning, hooking images in far-off corners, pulling them forward and making them into words, sentences, a story for his benefit. He thought to himself, a not particularly original thought: What is the difference between one’s memory and one’s imagination in the end? What, really, is the difference?

  Did you tell anyone, the man said.

  The girl shook her head. No, she said. No, who would believe me?

  Was it so unbelievable? the man said. Sadly it has happened before. Probably on this very street. Maybe in that very house. This is New England, after all.

  The girl looked at him quizzically.

  A joke, he explained.

  There’s nothing funny about implied child abuse, the girl said. I’m not implying. You’re implying.

  I’m not implying, she said. I’m accusing.

  I thought you said you’d never blamed me, the man said. I didn’t, she said. I don’t.

  You could if you wanted to, the man said. I can handle it. How could I blame you? the girl said. After all, I enjoyed it.

  West Salem

  NOVEMBER 9, 1999

  Mary pedaled the two miles back to Rumney Marsh in the rain. She’d stripped her damp sweater and jeans and was boiling water for grief tea when Regina and Gaby returned from the art appraiser’s. The two of them blew into the kitchen along with some errant dead leaves and a jointly generated bad mood. Regina unwound her scarf and plucked leaves off her ballet flats, flinging them onto the linoleum floor where they stuck with a wet slapping sound. Gaby lugged the portrait of Abigail Lake by the piece of electrical tape that secured the pink bedsheet in which the painting was unlovingly wrapped. She banged the bottom corner against the door frame, she grimaced and groaned, kick-carrying Abigail Lake to the far side of the kitchen.

  The bottom of the bedsheet was soaked. Clearly someone had propped Abigail Lake in a puddle while searching for meter money or the car keys.

  “How was it?” Mary asked, biting back an impulse to criticize the handling of Abigail Lake. After all, she hated the painting too.

  “Waste,” Gaby said. She pulled the sickle-shaped remnant of a soft pretzel from her coat pocket. She tapped it with a fingernail, determining it inedible. She tossed it onto the counter.

  Regina wiped her wet face crossly with a dish towel.

  “It was not a waste,” Regina said. “Mr. Bolt said the painting was ‘an interesting novelty item.’ ”

  “An interesting novelty item worth $100,” Gaby said. “Not quite enough to cover his appraising fee and the ticket we got on Newbury Street because Regina parked in a handicap spot. What’s for lunch?”

  “We were grieving,” Regina said. “We were handicapped by grief.”

  Gaby opened a cupboard door and faced off against the unopened jars of pickled onions, pickled fiddleheads, dilly beans, cornichons, olives.

  “Gross,” she said.

  “But he who is weak eats only vegetables,” quoted Mary.

  “If she’d chosen to be embalmed, we could have saved some money,” Regina said. “She’d been self-embalming for decades.”

  “I’m surprised we’re not all anorexic,” Mary said.

  “We’re not not all anorexic,” Gaby said, shutting the cabinet in disgust, then reconsidering, opening it, withdrawing a jar of pickled onions.

  “I have poor circulation,” Regina said. “I also have a high metabolism.”

  “You don’t eat anything,” Gaby said. “How would you know what kind of metabolism you have?”

  She opened the jar of pickled onions. The lid came loose with a wetly suctioning pop! sound. The kitchen filled with the needly stink of vinegar.

  “So,” Regina said to Mary, “any chance you came across my white ski hat with the blue-and-red pompon?”

  “From high school?” Mary said.

  “That one.”

  “I didn’t,” Mary said.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Regina urged. “Mum stole it. She asked if she could borrow it. I said no. The next day it disappeared.”

  “When was this?” Mary said.

  Regina pushed on her cheekbone with her finger.

  “Late eighties,” she said.

  “She was punishing
you,” Gaby said through a mouthful of onion.

  “When we were at the beach last summer she touched my hair and said, ‘I bet your head’s cold, darling. Your head’s been cold all these years.’ ”

  “She meant that she finds you emotionally and creatively frigid,” Gaby said.

  “She meant me to have my hat back,” Regina said.

  “Speaking of lost things,” Mary said, casually, “do either of you know where Mum put my signed copy of Miriam?”

  Gaby stared at her blankly.

  “Don’t blame Mum if your silly book is missing,” Regina said.

  “I’m not blaming her,” Mary said.