The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  * * *

  Sunday afternoon, Mabel accepted Ed and Lily’s invitation to visit them at the Stuart Hotel, and within half an hour of her arrival, she fainted. The moment Mabel tripped through the door wearing a pale purple shirt, narrow black pants and a cloud of perfume, Lily could feel the woman’s nervous excitement. She talked a blue streak, careening from one subject to another in a high tremulous voice while she gestured with her hands to make her points. The weather had turned hot and humid, and the rain, which hadn’t amounted to more than a drizzle the day before, still threatened. Ed turned the painting of Dolores around to show it to Mabel, then the painting of Stanley. She looked at each one very closely but didn’t stop talking. She was especially attracted to the narrative boxes along the top of the canvases and launched into a discussion of memory that had something to do with walking through a house, room by room. Ed seemed to understand perfectly, but Lily found it hard to follow. Mabel said that she used the “device” herself to remember speeches or texts and that for her the most important thing was “walls.” Ed turned around the portrait of Tex, and Lily watched Mabel look at the painting of Tex and then collapse. She fell so fast that if Ed hadn’t been only inches away, she would have landed on the floor. Ed carried Mabel to his bed, laid her down on it and felt her pulse.

  “You don’t think it was the painting, do you?” he said in a whisper. “Maybe the nudity came as a shock. Her pulse is okay.”

  “She’s not that kind of old lady, Ed. Anyway, it’s only men who think seeing a penis is some big deal. Women couldn’t care less.”

  He smiled at her comment, then turned to Mabel. Only seconds later the woman opened her eyes, but during that intervening moment Ed looked at Mabel with an expression of such intensity that Lily was taken aback. Mabel moved, woke, and her waxen face regained its color quickly.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she groaned.

  “It’s hot,” Lily said. “Your nerves.”

  Mabel sat up and stared at Ed. “I don’t understand it,” she said slowly. “It’s the painting, of course. It happened once before many years ago when I was a student, with a reproduction, if you can imagine that. The professor passed around that famous Grünewald painting of the dead Christ. I took one look at it and keeled over. At the time, I didn’t know what an impression that same painting had made on poor Dostoyevsky, but it did comfort me a bit when I read about his response.” Mabel looked wildly around the room for a moment, then back at Ed. “Maybe they’ll drop like flies when you exhibit it. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

  “Don’t get too worked up,” Lily said and patted Mabel’s hands.

  Ed looked at Mabel closely. “I want to paint you,” he said. He moved his head to the side and stared at Mabel’s neck, then her legs. Lily didn’t like seeing him look at Mabel in this way, but the woman herself seemed pleased. She straightened herself and lifted her chin.

  “You do?” she said.

  “Yes, very much. It’s a commitment, you understand. I would start drawing right away, and you would have to talk to me for hours and hours. It’s a bit like going into a hole with someone for a week, which, frankly, can be unpleasant, and then there’s the problem of finding a story for the boxes. Sometimes, that’s hard for people. I pay by the hour, of course, not a lot, but—”

  Mabel interrupted him. “I agree.”

  Ed grabbed both Mabel’s hands and said, “We’ll start tomorrow.”

  Lily watched them. She had introduced them to each other, and now within forty minutes of their meeting, they were talking about going into a hole together. If Mabel hadn’t fainted, Lily realized that it probably wouldn’t have happened. She couldn’t explain why she believed this, but she did, and she watched the two of them with a new wariness. She had wanted them to like each other, but not this much, and she resisted their sudden rapport by saying very little. Mabel seemed calmer after fainting, but she talked nevertheless, mostly about the portrait of Tex and what was in it that she hadn’t wanted to see. “It’ll go straight into my book tonight,” she announced. She seemed happy, almost proud of having keeled over after looking at a picture. When Lily said she thought it was the heat, not the painting, both Ed and Mabel turned skeptical eyes in her direction, so she gave up that line of argument. Despite her willingness to discuss the painting, Mabel wouldn’t look at it again. Ed turned it to the wall, hiding the big man and his ugly fantasies. Lily looked at the back of the canvas and, wanting to leave Mabel behind as the main subject of the afternoon, asked Ed what Tex was really like.

  “Really like?” he said. “I don’t know. He has a thing about outlaws—Wild West characters. He brought a gun to one of the sittings—a forty-five—big thing, scared the shit out of me, if you want to know the truth. But I had a strong feeling that if he saw my fear, it would go badly, and I did my best to stay cool. As it turned out, the gun wasn’t loaded. He was kind enough to show me the empty chamber, and then he settled down to work. The gun was an ornament really, didn’t need bullets.” Ed paused. “He said they banned him from the reenactment of the Jesse James robbery, and it broke his heart.”

  “No,” Lily said. “They said he couldn’t be Jesse James, and that’s the only part he would take.”

  Ed nodded. “Jesse James keeps coming up. Just the other day Dolores told me she’d seen him.”

  “Dolores of the painting?” Mabel said.

  Ed nodded. His eyes looked distant. “She’d been drinking and wasn’t too clear on the details, but she said she’d seen him in the woods, or rather his ghost, coming out of a cave.” He paused. “It’s gruesome, actually, now that I say it. According to Dolores, he was carrying a woman’s head.”

  Lily looked at Mabel, who had turned to Ed. “What?”

  “That’s what she said. Pink elephants, I guess.”

  Mabel wrinkled her forehead.

  The absurd story rattled Lily more than she would have liked to admit, and she didn’t say anything. It reminded her of some other story she couldn’t place. She rubbed the blister on her index finger against the blister on her thumb and felt the liquid inside them move back and forth.

  Ed looked at Mabel. Lily wished he would look at her. “The fact is, Dolores is an unusual woman. She has a kind of instinctive intelligence.”

  “Not everyone would use that adjective in front of that noun,” Mabel said, “but I do understand you.”

  Lily cleared her throat. Ed and Mabel looked at her. “I guess the head was a ghost, too, huh?”

  “She didn’t say,” Ed smiled.

  Lily smiled back at him. She stretched in her chair. “I’m hot,” she said and continued to look into his eyes. She undid three buttons of her shirt, untucked it and tied it under her breasts. She felt both of them watching her, and knowing they were looking made her happy. “There, that’s better,” she said. Lily stretched again slowly, rolling her shoulders backward and then raising her arms above her head so the gap of bare skin beneath her shirt widened. Then she looked at Ed and bit her lip.

  He gave her a suspicious look, and as he smiled, he shook his head in gentle reprimand. The expression launched a sudden fantasy—Lily imagined pushing Ed to the floor and climbing on top of him. She smiled, crossed her legs and turned to Mabel, whose face made it clear she hadn’t missed a second of the exchange between Lily and Ed.

  Mabel squinted at Lily. She made no attempt to hide her irony. “Lily Dahl,” she said, as though she liked listening to the sound of the name. “Let’s show Mr. Shapiro Hermia.” She paused. “The fight. I know Helena’s lines.”

  “Now?” Lily said.

  Mabel nodded. “I think this is a very good time. It will be our rehearsal. When we’re done, I’m going to leave. You start: ‘You juggler.’”

  Lily and Mabel performed the scene three times for Ed. Mabel was a far better Helena than Denise. The third time Mabel lifted her face to Lily’s and said, “Good Hermia, do not be so bitter with me. / I evermore did love you, Hermia, / Did ever keep your counsels,
never wrong’d you.” Lily listened to the words and blushed.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock the following morning, Bert told Lily that she had just seen Mabel Wasley walk through the door of the Stuart Hotel. Lily turned immediately toward the street, but Mabel had already disappeared inside. She wished she had seen her, if only to catch a glimpse of the woman’s clothes. How had Mabel decided to dress for the “hole”? Then she tried to imagine the conversation between Ed and Mabel. She saw Mabel gesturing dramatically as Ed leaned toward her with that engrossed expression he had had when Mabel fainted. I wonder why he doesn’t want to do a portrait of me, Lily said to herself. It was the first time she had thought about herself as someone Ed could paint, but as soon as she did, she felt bad. Why had he wanted to paint Mabel, but not her? Lily remembered the paintings, saw each person on the canvas: Dolores, Tex, Stanley. They’re all so private, Lily thought. In fact, when she thought about the pictures, she had the feeling that Ed was painting privacy itself—people who looked straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time. He chose people for a reason, didn’t he? Suddenly Lily felt that he would never choose her and that he saved a special kind of intimacy for the people he painted. She tried to see herself as one of them. What would she have to tell in the boxes if he asked her? Lily saw the ground where her grandparents’ house had been. The new owners had razed it to the ground. And now it’s like nothing was ever there. But that’s not my story, she thought. And thinking of Mabel and Ed across the street, Lily felt annoyed that they were together. She imagined Mabel in some drooping silk number and felt a pang of regret about her own clothes. She could almost hear Mabel talking—a stream of sentences filled with the names of people Lily had never heard of. When she left the cafe, she was inventing Ed’s painting of Mabel for herself. She imagined the woman the way she had seen her the day before—a small body on the narrow bed, drained of color and nearly of life: the portrait of a corpse. Lily found the image comforting.

  Standing outside Ed’s door, she heard them talking. Ed’s voice was low, confidential, a little hesitant. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she thought he sounded exactly the way she had imagined him. Lily’s neck and jaw hardened at the sound. Then she heard Mabel answer, her voice pitched much higher. “She had one blue eye and one brown. A rare trait, and once you noticed it, utterly arresting. I didn’t see it at first, but when I did, I couldn’t stop looking at those mismatched eyes. I honestly think that if her eyes had been the same color, I wouldn’t have responded in the way I did. She was very beautiful and very quiet. If she had talked, it might all have been different, too. I suppose I fell in love with her without ever saying it to myself or to her or to anyone until twenty years later when I allowed myself to think it. She was like a cat, really, or maybe a cat bewitched. She had no goodness in her, but she wasn’t bad either. She was empty of all moral sense. I used to rub her back for her and her feet, and I remember that touching her troubled me. It wasn’t only a sense of the forbidden. That vacuum in her frightened me. But she knew more about me than I did myself. She teased me like a lover, luxuriated in my devotion the way she did in everyone else’s, just because she had an appetite for it. And then she was gone, ran off. I never saw her again…”

  Lily turned around and walked down the hall. She went quietly but quickly, her pulse drumming in her ears, and she ran all the way home to her room. She went straight to her closet, snatched the canvas bag from the floor and threw the filthy thing on her bed. She took out the shoes and looked at them. She turned them over in her hands and picked at the frayed leather with her fingers. The fire had colored them—black, brown, ocher, yellow. Spotted and speckled with burns near the heels, the toes of both shoes had been scorched through. She brought them close to her face and smelled them, breathing in the odor of ashes and then the stink she remembered from the fire. I have to get rid of them, she said to herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them into the garbage. She laid them side by side on the floor and stared at them for a minute. They’re the sorriest excuse for shoes I’ve ever seen, she thought, and then with slow, deliberate motions, she removed her sandals and slipped her feet into them. One tore. The other flapped around her instep. Without understanding why, Lily felt cruel wearing those charred, dilapidated shoes, and right then she decided it was a feeling she wanted. Without taking them off, she set her alarm to wake her for rehearsal, lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Lily was dreaming when the alarm woke her, but whatever it was, it died with the clock’s ringing, and she remembered nothing of it.

  * * *

  Lily suspected it was her mood, but the play changed for her that night. In the first scene when Mr. Pumper made Egeus’s speech exactly the same way he always did, Lily heard the threat in it for the first time: “I beg the ancient privilege of Athens; / As she is mine, I may dispose of her, / Which shall be either to this gentlemen, / Or to her death according to our law.” And she heard the violence in what Theseus said, too. “To whom you are but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted and within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it.” The metaphor, lost on her before, jumped to life, and Lily saw the image of a young woman, her face and body smashed by a man’s fist. Lily remembered Mabel in front of the window when they had practiced the lines together. “Just one turn,” she had said, moving her fingers as if she held a screw, “and comedy is tragedy.”

  All through the play she heard words and phrases she hadn’t remembered hearing before, and behind the familiar people, behind their T-shirts and shorts and clumsy performances and forgotten lines and Mrs. Wright’s instructions to be “airy” and to “step lightly,” and behind the noise of hammering and sawing from the set builders downstairs, and even behind the muggy weather that hung in the room like a weight, she felt the presence of another play that was almost real, or as real as memory is. Even though she couldn’t really smell the trees, the thistles and the honeysuckle, she remembered that she had smelled them, and she remembered the bloodroot blooming in early spring in the shade of the woods, and the buttercups coming up in the meadow, and the tall grass alive with grasshoppers, jumping and quivering as she waded through it, and she remembered stepping out of the creek to find black leeches all over her legs and running home without looking down, and Lily imagined she understood Martin’s map then of the two places, and she longed to go home, back to her house where she had lived with her parents before she grew up, before her father’s cancer, before the Ideal Cafe and before Ed and Mabel, back to what she remembered, to milkweed and cow pies and the creek.

  Music accompanied the actors for the first time that night, a string quartet that played well. Without the music, Lily knew that she probably wouldn’t have felt what she did. The music was emotion for her then, not a reflection of feeling so much as feeling itself, and listening to it after her bad day, she fell into a state that resembled a low fever. A little light in her head and achy in her joints, she played the part of Hermia in a sort of trance.

  When rehearsal ended and the music stopped, Lily tried to shake herself to full consciousness but found it hard and didn’t listen to anyone or notice the other actors until Ruth Baker walked up to her carrying a large bolt of white fabric in her arms and said, “This is the material for you and Denise. Do you like it?”

  Lily stared at the whiteness and blinked.

  “I’ll meet you in the costume room and get you measured.”

  “Okay,” Lily said.

  “Didn’t you hear Barbara’s announcement?”

  Lily looked into Mrs. Baker’s round face and down at the woman’s belly which bulged under khaki pants. “I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming.”

  When Lily walked through the door into the wardrobe room, she saw Denise standing on a low stool. Mrs. Baker stood on the floor beside her with a measuring tape, and Martin Petersen was sitting on the floor Indian style with a long piece of fabric draped over his knees. He held a small notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. The
naked lightbulb on the ceiling enhanced Martin’s whiteness, but Lily nevertheless had the impression that his skin color was fading with each passing day. I’m sure he’s paler than he was a week ago, she thought. What is he doing here, anyway?

  “Martin’s helping me out,” Mrs. Baker said as though Lily had asked the question aloud.

  Lily nodded and watched Denise step off the stool. It was normal that Martin should help out, wasn’t it? He was a handyman, after all. Then why did she feel his presence was calculated, that it had something to do with her?

  Lily stepped up on the stool and watched Denise leave the room. Denise’s walk annoyed Lily. It was stiff and self-conscious. Her roots are getting dark, Lily thought, and felt Mrs. Baker move the tape measure along the length of her leg. She called out the numbers and Martin scribbled them into the notebook. Lily looked down at him for a moment and saw three needles stuck into the fabric of his shirt. He bent toward the page, and the needles shone for an instant in the light.

  Mrs. Baker clicked her tongue as she worked. “You girls,” she said. “Such teeny-weeny sizes. Of course fifteen years and four children ago, I had a twenty-six-inch waist myself, hard to believe now, but I’ve got the wedding gown to prove it.” As she felt Mrs. Baker loop the tape around her waist and tighten it, Lily heard Martin breathing, and the sound made her blush. His pencil scratched the pad. She closed her eyes for an instant and then felt dizzy. She swayed on the chair. Mrs. Baker caught her elbow.

  “Lily, are you all right?”

  She looked into Mrs. Baker’s concerned face. “Yes,” Lily said. “I just lost my balance.”

  “We’re done, dear.”

  Lily stepped off the stool, and Mrs. Baker left the room, muttering something to herself about Titania and sequins.