The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick lingered in the driveway. They didn’t speak to or even look at each other. They stood inert and blank for a long time. Lily had hoped they would climb into the truck and drive away, but she understood that wasn’t going to happen when she saw Dick wander over to the fire. He reached up, picked a soft bundle from the nearest junk mound and dropped it into the bin. Whatever it was, it excited the flames and they rose high. Dick lifted his chin and stepped away from the heat, but when the blaze subsided, he moved close again and repeated what he had done before. This time, when he backed away from the leaping fire, Lily saw that he was laughing or that his expression suggested a laugh, but she heard no noise. It could have been that the crackle of the fire in combination with the wind hid the noise from her, but Lily was surprised that she heard nothing at all. He lifted his shoulders, threw his head back and opened his mouth wide as his head bobbed in silent hilarity. Then he drew something white from his pocket and threw it into the fire. The white thing had little effect on the flames, but Dick laughed the noiseless laugh anyway, as though a burnt bit of cloth were the most uproarious thing he could think of. Lily saw Frank shuffle toward his brother, stop beside him and raise his fist above Dick’s head. She braced herself for a blow, but instead of hitting his brother, Frank let his arm fall slowly in front of Dick’s face. Then Frank turned toward the house, and his brother trailed after him. The screen door slammed and Lily thought to herself that it was now or never.

  She made a run for the garage. When her feet hit the driveway, she heard the gravel shift under them and thought, I’m making too much noise, but she didn’t stop until she arrived panting inside the garage, where she backed against the wall to hide herself. She listened for the house door. Nothing. She moved quietly in the direction of the suitcase. She remembered exactly where she had left it and guessed she could open it, return the shoes and shut it in a matter of seconds. Standing in the middle of the garage, she crouched down to reach out for the suitcase, which should have been wedged between two rain barrels, and found that it wasn’t there. She pushed aside cans, boxes and an old rake, expecting to discover it, but the suitcase wasn’t in the garage anymore. Lily paused, clutched the bag with the shoes in it to her chest and wondered what to do. Then she heard the screen door slam and the sound of footsteps. She ducked behind a large wooden crate and squatted on the floor. Through the slats of the crate she saw Dick shuffle past the garage toward the fire and stop beside the bin. Lily looked at the dark, motionless figure, his face blurred by the rising smoke, and waited. Behind him, she could see the Klatschwetter barn and silo. She noticed that the sky had clouded over and that the sun had sunk lower than she would have thought. Suddenly she worried about making rehearsal on time. But Dick was in no hurry. Lily sat down. She removed the shoes from her bag and laid them on her lap. She would have to leave them here in the garage. What choice did she have? The damp earth floor began to seep through her jean shorts and underwear, and she lifted her buttocks off the ground to adjust her position. As she moved, the shoes slipped. Lily turned to grab them, smashed her nose into the edge of a rusted wheelbarrow behind her, and then, reaching for her face, slammed her forehead into the tine of a garden rake. With a short gasp, she put her fingers to the spot, and removing her hand saw that it was covered with blood. “Oh shit,” she whispered to herself. She touched the gash in her forehead; it wasn’t deep. Then looking down she noticed spots of blood on her thighs. It’s my nose, she thought, and pinched it hard, but the blood leaked out anyway. She let go and began to wipe the blood from her legs, but it smeared on her skin and mingled with the dirt from her hands. The bad light made it hard to see, but she knew the blood was coming fast and hard. When she looked down for the shoes, she saw she had bled on them, too—a large red spot on one heel and three drops on the tip of the other. Lily grabbed her canvas bag and began to rub the shoes with the material. She spat on the cloth and rubbed, but as she leaned close to the shoes to clean them, she saw more blood drop onto her legs. Still, she didn’t give up, but held her nose with one hand and tried to clean with the other hand, but she could feel herself beginning to panic. The shoes were getting ruined. The white leather had turned rust-red and filthy with her attempts to clean it, and suddenly she wanted to cry. I can’t leave them here now, she thought. She watched as more blood dropped onto the toes, and covered the laces with her hands. Lily looked up and out through the slats of the crate toward the smoking can and saw that Dick had disappeared. Now, she thought, and carrying the shoes in one hand she made her way to the garage doors and stuck her head cautiously into the light. Without examining her hands very closely, she saw that the blood on them appeared much redder now that she was outside. She looked toward the house and saw nobody. Then she looked in the other direction, but neither Dick nor Frank was anywhere in sight.

  Lily looked at the smoke rising from the can and thought, I’ll burn them. There’ll be nothing left of them. It was the perfect solution. She sprinted toward the fire, dropped the shoes into the ashes and then, feeling a surge of relief, fled toward the ditch and threw herself headlong into the grass. For several seconds she didn’t move. Then she turned around to look at the smoking bin. She saw no flames. They’re not burning, she thought. They’ll come out in the morning and find them, and they’ll see that they’re covered in blood. What if they’re hers? What if they took the suitcase inside for safekeeping because it belonged to her? Lily jumped to her feet, ran back to the fire and looked into it. Sure enough, the shoes had been charred and scorched, but not burnt up, and when she bent toward them to pick them up out of the ashes, she smelled something sweet and putrid that made her stand back for a moment. Then she plucked the shoes out of the fire. The hot leather burnt her fingertips, but she held on to the shoes and took off toward the ditch, where she threw herself into the grass for a second time and let the shoes fall to the ground. Then she looked at them and laughed—one short, miserable laugh at her own stupidity. When she picked up the two charred things to put them into her bag, they weren’t hot anymore, just warm. As warm as somebody with a high fever, she thought, and then she pushed her bicycle up the ditch into the road. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but her thumbs and index fingers throbbed as she gripped the handlebars. When she looked up, Lily saw that the sun had disappeared entirely under thick, gray clouds, an ordinary shift in weather that nevertheless caused her some amazement. She pedaled hard with her head down against the traffic and hoped the increasing gloom would hide her.

  Halfway home, Lily saw a turquoise-and-white Pontiac come speeding toward her, and when the car was only yards away, she noticed Dolores at the wheel. She was driving with the windows open, a Loretta Lynn song blaring from the radio as the car’s headlights shone on Lily for a second or two. In that brief moment Lily saw Dolores look directly at her, but the woman’s face gave no sign of recognition. Maybe it’s her night with the twins, Lily thought. Rehearsal must have started without me. And thinking of the Arts Guild, Lily understood all of a sudden that she missed Hermia, as if Hermia were a close friend of hers. She felt a drop of rain on her neck as she drove past the Webster city limits sign. Then she felt another, and another.

  * * *

  When Lily opened the back door and looked up the stairway to the landing, she saw Mabel step out into the hall and look down at her. The bare bulb shone down on Mabel’s gray hair and whitened it. “I’m glad it’s you, Lily,” she said, and then, focusing her eyes, she said with a little cry in her voice, “You’ve had an accident!”

  After that, Mabel was all business. Her anxiety of only hours before had vanished, and Lily saw that she moved like a different person. Efficient and brusque, she ordered Lily to come to her apartment to get cleaned up and fed, and after Lily threw the bloody bag with the burnt shoes into her closet and called Mrs. Wright at the Arts Guild, who accepted her lie about falling off her bike, she obeyed.

  Lily sat down on Mabel’s sofa and listened to the sound of water running in the bath
room. While she waited for Mabel, she looked for the Japanese couple but didn’t find them. Then Mabel was standing in front of her with a basin of water and a washcloth. She drew a chair close to the sofa, set the bowl on the floor and without another word began to wash Lily’s face. Mabel patted the cut on her forehead gently, lifted Lily’s hair and moved the warm cloth along her neck. Then she wiped Lily’s legs and dried them just as they were beginning to itch from the wetness. Even as it happened, Lily knew the washing marked a change between her and Mabel that could never be undone, and yet she didn’t resist it. The woman’s touch, the way her hand moved with the cloth, was so tender that Lily felt her throat tighten with emotion. When Mabel lowered Lily’s hands into the basin, the warm water aggravated her burns and she gasped. Mabel took both Lily’s hands in her own and turned them over—both thumbs and two of the fingers on each hand had blistered at their tips. Mabel looked up at Lily, her eyes steady, but she said nothing. She left the room and a few moments later returned with a fresh basin of water.

  Then Mabel started to talk. She didn’t preface her remarks, didn’t give any reason for her sudden desire to tell Lily what she had never told her before. She just jumped in and said, “My father loved me, but he had no gift for affection. He rarely touched me, and when he did, his body was wood. I pity him now. It was my mother who held me and rocked me, me and my brother, and she had hands, Lily, that when they touched you, you felt the calm of every calm thing in the world, and when she died—I was younger than you, seventeen—it was as if all that was good and light had been snuffed out of my life. I left my father and my brother one day in the spring, after a year of plotting and planning. I ran off with Owen Hartwig, a freethinker from the Aberdeen Weekly, to get married.”

  “But I thought your husband’s name was Evan,” Lily said.

  “It was. I left Owen Hartwig at the altar, or rather at the courthouse.” Mabel paused. “I couldn’t stand the way he looked close-up, you know, nose to nose. It sounds ridiculous but I don’t believe it was, really. Something about his body repelled me.”

  “But you thought you loved him?”

  “I liked the idea of him—hard hitting newspaperman with a radical streak. I forgot I’d have to live with those thighs.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I became a chambermaid in the Grand Hotel, established residency and eventually went to the university at night.”

  “And your father and brother?”

  “They stayed on the farm. My brother farmed that place until he died, ten years ago.”

  “The farm?” Lily looked at her.

  “Outside Aberdeen, South Dakota.”

  “South Dakota? I thought you came from out east somewhere.”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve never even mentioned it. You’re like a city person through and through.” Lily dried her hands on the towel Mabel handed her.

  “Books.”

  “Books?”

  “Yes, I wanted to live a great and passionate life, a life of risk, beauty and pain.” Mabel laughed. “The last part seemed to come naturally.”

  “Have you?” Lily looked into Mabel’s eyes. “Has it been like that?”

  Mabel smiled. “I think that it’s not what happens in life so much as how you imagine what happens, how you color events. It’s rather like the idea of the changeling when I think about it. Substitution is involved. When I worked in that hotel and made people’s beds and cleaned their toilets and straightened their perfumes and their soaps and emptied their ashtrays into a tub, I felt humiliated every single second because I imagined that I was destined for something else, but the truth is, I had no reason to believe that. I was a poor girl from the South Dakota sticks. But I had read a lot of books, and those stories wrote mine, if you see. You know who gave them to me?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “My mother.”

  “Is that why you’re always giving me books to read?”

  Mabel narrowed her eyes at Lily. “Maybe,” she said and stood up abruptly and left the room. She returned with a long, black shirt and tossed it at Lily. “Here put this on. You’ll look good in it, and we’ll put that dirty thing in bleach.” She nodded at Lily’s T-shirt.

  “Why did you take this apartment, Mabel?” Lily said and looked at her hard.

  Mabel shook her head. Her small face looked suddenly tired. “It reminded me of a place where I once lived—these little rooms.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted to return to it. I suppose…” Mabel shook her head.

  Lily stared at the black shirt in her lap. As she pulled off her T-shirt, her blistered fingers throbbed, but she pushed her arms into the sleeves of the new shirt, and when it hung open around her, Lily looked down at the long row of buttons, then back up at Mabel.

  Mabel buttoned the shirt. She held the material away from Lily’s breasts so she didn’t brush them with her moving hands, and her fingers left a scent of perfume behind them. When she finished, she looked into Lily’s eyes and said, “Secrecy isn’t always a bad thing, you know.”

  “Isn’t it?” Lily thought about the shoes.

  “Confession is a problem,” Mabel said. “In friendship, anyway. The listener can’t always bear the weight of it. That’s why I’ve always thought a priest in a box is a beautiful thing—the guilty person whispering through a hole into an ear that can hear anything. Freud understood that, too, with the couch. You didn’t have to look at the analyst. It’s all lost now. People stare straight into the eyes of their psychiatrists.”

  Lily watched Mabel’s face. The woman turned her head away from Lily toward the window. “I wonder if he’s on vigil again tonight. Whoever he is, he’s up to something.” Mabel smiled a small thin smile that disturbed Lily. It looked out of place. Then she walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. Her motion was both dramatic and self-conscious, but Lily couldn’t quite tell whether Mabel was making fun of herself or not. “I am that merry wanderer of the night,” she said as she peered out the window. Lily recognized Puck’s line. “No,” Mabel said. “Maybe it’s too early.” She turned around. “He’ll be back though.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I heard it in his footsteps: unfinished business.”

  Mabel fed Lily a sandwich and insisted that she keep the shirt, which was silk and probably expensive. Lily protested but then gave in.

  Before Lily left for Ed’s, she stood on the landing with Mabel to say good-bye. The woman leaned forward and put her lips to Lily’s cheek. She barely grazed the skin, but the feeling of the kiss lingered as Lily walked down the stairs, out the door and into the street. When she opened the door of the Stuart Hotel, she could still feel it, as though Mabel’s lips had left an impression on her face.

  * * *

  The story Lily told Ed to explain her cut and burns not only rang true, it sounded more plausible than the truth. She had slipped in the kitchen at work, grabbed the stove to block her fall, but rather than catch her balance, she had burned her fingers and smashed her head on the oven door. As she told it, she saw it happening like a real memory, and to some degree it supplanted the actual story. Dull fiction took the place of ridiculous fact, for the simple reason that it seemed more real than reality. Ed believed Lily, and Lily almost believed herself.

  As he lay beside her in the narrow bed that night, he talked to her. It wasn’t a conversation, but a monologue. Ed stared at the ceiling and began to describe her body part by part. He began with her hair, moved to her forehead and included the cut. He described her eyebrows, her eyes, her nose and mouth and chin. Slowly, meticulously, he moved down her body without ever looking at her, providing such detail that she felt her body no longer belonged to her, and even though she wanted him to touch her, she didn’t ask him to because the sound of his voice in the darkened room filled her with such intense pleasure and expectation that she didn’t want it to stop. But when his description reached her toes, he kissed them. Lily wondered how many women he had ma
de desperate with this kind of talk, and yet when he kissed the burns on her fingertips so softly that the slight pain his lips brought only made her happy, she forgot all about the other women. They had no faces and no names, after all, except Elizabeth—and that was only a name.

  Lily woke in the night to pee, stood up in the room, and before she opened the door to the bathroom, walked to the window and looked out across the street at her own building. A single light burned in Mabel’s living room. Lily guessed it was the desk lamp and that Mabel was still working on her book far into the night. Then Lily searched the street for signs of the man Mabel said kept watch there, but saw nobody. The instant she turned her head to walk away, however, she heard a noise beneath her, maybe from the steps of the hotel. She pushed open the screen and hung her head over the edge to see who it was, but again she saw no one, only heard him running down the alley beside the hotel. She listened for more, but whoever it was had either stopped moving or had gone too far to be heard.