The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  2

  Lily could see Ida’s hair but not her face through the glass door of the Stuart Hotel. For almost a minute she had been telling herself to open the door, but every time she reached for the handle, she stopped. It’s now or never, Lily said to herself, and decided to count to ten, but when she got to seven, Ida Bodine looked up from the book she was reading, and Lily opened the door and walked into the lobby.

  Ida cocked her head and opened her eyes wide. A spider plant was hanging above her, and its myriad offshoots framed her face like a mad wig.

  “Hi, Ida,” Lily said. She heard false friendliness in her voice.

  “Isn’t it a little late to come callin’?” Ida’s face stiffened into a mask of vivid makeup.

  “Depends on the hours you keep,” Lily said and headed for the stairs.

  Lily looked straight ahead. She held the railing as she walked, feeling she needed it for steadiness. Halfway up, she peeked at Ida, who had returned to her book, a story that must have been engrossing if it kept Ida from snooping on Lily. The woman was leaning forward in her chair, the book propped on the edge of the desk. Its pink cover, embossed with gold lettering, showed a swooning woman who had fallen over the arm of a man with a scabbard and sword around his waist. The sleeves of her gown had slipped down over her shoulders to reveal breasts that looked like they’d pop out of the dress any second.

  When Lily arrived at the second floor, she stared down the long hallway. She’d never seen it before. All these years I’ve lived in Webster, and I’ve never seen the second floor of the Stuart Hotel. Well, it’s just as dumpy as I thought it’d be. What remained of a brown carpet had buckled away from the walls, and a smell that reminded her of the high school cafeteria filled the air—the smell of pallid green beans and mashed potatoes on a tan plastic tray. A single light illuminated the hall—a peculiar fixture shaped like an elk head with a weak bulb screwed into its scalp. Lily counted doors to orient herself. She stopped in front of the fourth, lifted her fist and prepared to knock, but she didn’t. I can’t, she thought. Lily breathed so loudly, she worried that the man might hear it. Stay calm. You can do it. But Lily lowered her hand to her side. Then, after a couple of seconds, she knocked. When she withdrew her hand, it felt very cold.

  The door opened. Edward Shapiro looked out at her and smiled.

  Lily tried to smile back but found she couldn’t. Her mouth had stiffened with anxiety.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Lily could smell him—paint and cigars. His eyes had long, very black lashes, two tiny ones at their inside corners, and she saw that his irises were mixed colors—green, gray and ocher. He was wearing a white T-shirt streaked with paint, and blue jeans.

  “Hello,” Lily said. Her voice sounded normal.

  “Would you like to come in?” He smiled again.

  Lily didn’t try a second smile. Instead she swallowed loudly and stepped inside. The room was smaller than she had thought, and when she looked toward the paintings, she saw that they had been turned to the wall.

  “We haven’t met formally,” he said and extended his hand. “I’m Edward Shapiro.”

  Lily put her hand in his, and after his warm fingers had closed around hers, she saw a spot of blue paint on his third knuckle. “Lily Dahl.”

  “Well, Lily Dahl, would you like a glass of wine?”

  She nodded.

  He waved at a canvas chair. Lily sat down on it, and staring at her bare legs under her cutoff jeans, she noticed a faint bruise near her kneecap. Her legs were newly shaven, however, and she felt glad that she had repaired her toenail polish that afternoon after deciding to wear sandals. She crossed her legs and watched the man bend over a tiny refrigerator. Quickly, she pinched her cheeks to redden them. He turned around, handed her a glass of white wine and said, “You like your job at the cafe?”

  “You saw me there?” Lily said and felt herself blush.

  “Of course I saw you.” He looked at her evenly and sat down in a chair opposite her.

  Lily looked at the floor. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “It seems like a nice place—the real thing.”

  “How do you mean?” She looked up at him.

  He smiled and reached for a cigar tin that lay on the floor. “Well, I guess I mean it’s a real small-town cafe—unpretentious.” He lit the cigar.

  Lily laughed. “The whole town’s pretty much like that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  He looked at her but didn’t speak. He brought the cigar to his mouth and blew the smoke to his right.

  Lily sipped the wine. It had none of the sweetness she expected. She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she said, “Everybody’s talking about you.” She hesitated. “In town, they’re all talking.”

  The man leaned back and smiled. “Is that so?”

  Lily took a breath. “Well, it’s natural to gossip about a stranger.”

  “I’m still a stranger, huh?”

  “Well, compared to most people, sure.”

  Edward Shapiro lifted his glass and motioned with it toward himself. “To the strange,” he said. Then he tipped his glass toward Lily. “And the not so strange.”

  Lily lowered her glass to her knee. She stared at her fingers around the stem. “I didn’t mean strange like that.”

  They were silent. Lily didn’t look up. She saw where his jeans ended and examined the tops of his bare feet in a pair of moccasins.

  He spoke then, his voice just above a whisper. “I think we should drink to Division Street at night, to its silence and its music, to its darkness and its light.”

  Lily lifted her eyes to his, and they clinked glasses. Lily spoke slowly and carefully. “I didn’t mean to say that you were strange, but that people around here are curious about a person they don’t know.”

  He nodded. His eyes were attentive.

  Lily sipped her wine and spoke more quickly. “You see, in Webster there are folks who yak their heads off all day to anybody who’s bored enough to listen, and they’re not all that concerned about what’s true and what isn’t.” She leaned forward a couple of inches. “Some of them, the worst ones, might even blab to the police.” Lily gave Edward Shapiro a meaningful nod.

  The man cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. Lily watched his ash drop to the floor. Then one side of his mouth moved up in an expression of amusement. “Are you referring in your own discreet way to my friend downstairs, Mrs. Bodine?”

  Lily nodded.

  “And Mrs. Bodine has been so distressed about my music that she’s called the police?”

  “Not the music.”

  “Not the music,” he repeated with mock gravity. “What then?”

  Lily looked at him. “Dolores.”

  His eyes wrinkled as he said, “Dolores Wachobski?”

  So that’s her last name, Lily thought.

  The man made little circles near his ear with his right hand, a signal for her to get on with it. He held the cigar stub between his thumb and index finger, and Lily watched the smoke dance.

  “I don’t really know how to say this,” Lily said.

  He widened his eyes in encouragement.

  “Well, Dolores has kind of a bad reputation.” Lily looked out the window. “She takes money.” She paused. “From men.” Then she turned back to him.

  All humor had left the man’s face. “I see,” he said. “I know Dolores. I’m painting her.”

  Lily stared at him. She bit her lip as it quivered for an instant under her teeth.

  “Let me show you,” he said. “I haven’t finished, but it’s getting there.”

  Lily looked away. She heard him stand up and felt his hand on her arm. She had to brace herself against his touch because she felt an urge to collapse into him. She let him guide her toward the wall without looking up at him or speaking, but she felt his hand move to the small of her back, and when they neared the paintings, he reached across her to take hold of the canvas and his thumb grazed the button of
her jeans. Lily breathed in through her nose a little too loudly, she thought, and stepped backward. He turned the large painting toward her.

  A life-size Dolores Wachobski stared straight out at Lily. The woman straddled a stool, her hands gripping the seat between her parted legs. Dolores leaned forward with a face that was both fierce and sober. She wore a black-and-white polka dot dress, cut low enough in the front to expose at least half of her formidable breasts. Across the top of the canvas was a series of three boxes with drawings inside them that reminded Lily of the funny papers. The figures inside them looked drawn rather than painted, and when compared to the realism of the portrait below, they seemed even more like cartoons. Lily took several steps toward the painting, stood on tiptoe and examined the boxes. In the first box, she saw a little girl crouched behind a small shed or outhouse. It was night, and above the child was a crescent moon, drawn so simply, Lily thought it should have a face. “What’s this part?” Lily asked, pointing at the boxes.

  “It’s the story part,” he said. “Everyone I paint chooses a story to tell with pictures inside the portrait. You see, I always collaborate with the person I’m painting. We talk during the sitting, and before it’s all over, he or she decides what story to tell in the narrative series.”

  “The little girl is Dolores?”

  “Yes.”

  Lily peered at the second frame. The child was sleeping behind the shed with her head on her arm. In the third box, a woman had appeared and was grabbing the girl by her shirt with one hand. The other hand was extended as though the woman was about to smack the child. “Who’s that?” Lily pointed at the woman.

  “Her mother.”

  Lily didn’t say anything for several seconds. “Was she afraid of her mother?”

  “I don’t think so. Dolores used to hide from her though. I think she liked being found.” He spoke in a low voice, deliberately pronouncing each word.

  Lily searched his face, but she saw no clear emotion in it.

  From outside Lily heard a car, hoots, and then the sound of rattling metal. The car screeched and then skidded away down the street, its sound dying slowly. Lily stared at the child in the last frame, huddled against the imminent blow. “She must trust you,” she said. “It’s pretty private.”

  She heard the man sigh. The sound aroused her. “And the others?” Lily said, looking at the three remaining canvases.

  He walked to the next one and turned it around for her.

  Lily gave a long whistle and grinned. “Holy moly,” she said. “It’s Tex.”

  The man, all six feet and several inches of him, stood before her—stark naked. The red hair on his head repeated itself in his pubic hair. His bloated white belly was speckled with moles. Lily looked closely at his penis. It looked like any other. Standing on tiptoe, she tried to get a better view of the three boxes above the man’s head. In the first box a man waved his hat from a bucking bronco.

  “I didn’t know Tex rode rodeo. I used to go to the local shows, and I never saw him.”

  “Actually, I don’t think he does. You see, the stories don’t have to be true. It’s what he wanted, so that’s what he got. I don’t interfere.”

  “How come he’s naked and Dolores has her clothes on?”

  Shapiro grinned. “He wanted to reveal his ‘true self.’ That’s a quote.”

  “You think that being naked is any more your true self than having clothes on?” Lily didn’t turn to look at him but kept her eyes on the boxes. After she had said it, she blushed.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  In the second frame, a male figure stood above a female figure who was kneeling on the ground. The man held a gun to the woman’s head. “Oh,” Lily said. It wasn’t so much a word as a vowel of exclamation. She faced Shapiro.

  The man looked at her. “I think it’s another fantasy, more sinister than the first.”

  “Is the woman someone special? I mean…”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “But I thought you said you talked to everybody when they’re posing for you.”

  “I do, but he wouldn’t say. He just told me what to draw.”

  In the third box a dead man was hanging by his neck from a tree. “Is that him, too?”

  “Yes, I think it is, but when he talked to me, he explained every particular in the drawing, but he never used the word ‘I.’ He said ‘he.’ I think we both knew ‘he’ meant ‘I.’ What I admired about him was his certainty. He knew. Howard never wavered.”

  “Howard?”

  “Howard Gubber.”

  Lily smiled. “Wow! That’s a wuss name if I ever heard one. I bet you’re the only guy in Webster who knows his real name, except his mother, and she’s probably pushing up flowers in Urland Cemetery.”

  Lily pointed at the third canvas, and Shapiro obediently turned it toward her. It was smaller than Tex’s.

  “Why, there’s Stanley,” Lily said. “Stanley Blom. He eats at the Ideal quite a lot. He’s a sweet guy.” Lily moved her head to one side as if she could see him better that way. The little man sat on a chair and looked straight out. His bent body was somewhat disguised in that position, and he was dressed in a suit he must have saved for church. He certainly didn’t eat breakfast in it. His narrow, wrinkled face was unmistakable, however, a mass of brown spots and cysts. Lily looked at Stanley’s boxes. In the first there were two boys running together, one ahead of the other. In the second was a large, long house with lots of windows. “Who lived here?” Lily said.

  “It’s a sanatorium,” he answered and stepped close to her. “That boy”—he pointed to the second child in the first frame—“was his brother. He died of tuberculosis in 1925. ‘I’ve only got one big story,’ he told me, and this is it.’ His brother’s name was Henry.”

  Lily turned her head to the last picture. It showed a room with a window and an empty bed. The baseboard of another bed could be seen in the frame, but the bed with nobody in it stood at the center.

  Lily felt the man’s hand on her shoulder. “Henry died before one of the family’s visits. When Stanley and his parents walked into the room, the boy was gone.”

  “You mean they didn’t get to see him?”

  “Not that day, not alive. The empty cot was the way he knew his brother was dead, and that’s how he tells the story.”

  Very gently, the man turned her toward him. She looked up at his eyebrows and large eyes, the straight nose and small mouth, and she thought, God, it’s a beautiful face. Before he kissed her, she said, “How old was he? Henry, I mean.”

  “He was nineteen.”

  Lily’s shorts were unsnapped and the man’s shirt was off before she remembered she was menstruating. She knew she had to say it. She clamped her fingers around his wrist and said in a tense voice that embarrassed her, “I have my period. Does it matter?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Lily watched her nearly bloodless tampon disappear down Edward Shapiro’s rust-stained toilet. Blue, green, yellow and brown paint streaked the sink basin. Before she left the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet. Inside, on a filthy glass shelf, lay a slender black razor—nothing else. Lily checked her face in the mirror. She thought it looked a little red, but otherwise good. When she shut the bathroom door, she consciously acknowledged that she had no doubt. She felt nothing that might make her hesitate.

  He wasn’t shaven, and his whiskers rubbed her cheek when he kissed her, and she smelled turpentine from his hands, but what she liked was that he didn’t seem to worry about himself. She could feel the relaxation in his arms and legs. He wasn’t passive, but he wasn’t in a hurry either, and Lily had the sudden thought that both Peter and Hank had watched themselves making love to her, and this man didn’t. She felt the coarse hair on his chest, and she moved her fingers to his navel and touched the skin around it, and then she kissed that spot and felt the muscles in his thighs that she had looked at so closely through the window.
She touched his knees and his calves, and he kissed her neck and shoulders and back, and he kissed her behind her knees and he kissed her ankles, and he didn’t touch her genitals for a long time, and Lily thought that if she hadn’t loved him before, she loved him now. Then he surprised her. He gripped her inner thighs with his hands and pulled her toward him, and she thought, It’s like he knows, knows all about me, and she let her head fall back on the mattress. Through the thin sheet she could feel a small hard button pressing into the back of her head as he lowered his body onto hers. He fumbled with a condom for a couple of seconds, but she closed her eyes and listened to him breathe. She clutched his back tightly. They were both sweating on top of the white sheet, and Lily imagined herself in the window as though she were looking at herself with his eyes, and again she saw herself pulling down her shorts, and she bit his neck, not hard, lightly. While they made love she talked to herself silently, telling herself what they were doing, and this aroused her more, and when she felt her orgasm, she yelled out, but she didn’t know how loud she was and didn’t care, and seconds later, she looked up at his face and saw the pupils of his eyes move upward toward his lids and felt the faint tremor of his orgasm and then the weight of his body on top of her. She smelled his hair—shampoo and cigars. In the dim light, she looked at the skin on his shoulders, at the tiny bumps and discolorations. She ran her finger over them and thought that he was like nobody else.