The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  They each took a different direction. Lily walked toward the river, trudging between rows of trailers as she listened to a disc jockey drawl out the name of a song. Lily felt the gravel road end, heard the music stop abruptly and waded into the tall grass near the riverbank. Ed was calling Dolores’s name, but Lily couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth. A mosquito whined in her ear and she swatted it blindly. The trees and the water ahead darkened suddenly and, looking up, she saw a cloud drift across the moon. The grass made her legs itch, and she bent down to give them a good scratch before she tromped forward and felt a hard object roll under her sneaker. Lily squatted in the grass, reached out for the thing and felt the cool, round glass of a bottle in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside it, and when she raised it to her nose, it smelled of whiskey. As she crouched in the grass holding the half-empty bottle, the moon came out from behind the cloud and lit the tops of the trees along the river. Through them she could see the shine of river water, and then, only feet away to her right, a white hand was curled in a loose fist. She crawled toward it. Dolores was lying sprawled out on the flattened grass, face up. She’s breathing, Lily thought, looking at the woman’s huge breasts move up and down. “Vomit, piss and booze,” Lily thought and held her breath against the stench. The woman’s skirt was hiked up around her waist, and her pale flesh glowed through a big rip in her stocking. Lily leaned over Dolores and whispered, “Get up!” But Dolores didn’t move. Taking the woman by the shoulders, Lily started to shake her. She shook gently at first, waiting for a response, but the woman’s head seemed as heavy as a bowling ball. Lily shook harder. “Wake up!” she whispered. Nothing happened, and looking down at Dolores’s unconscious face, Lily felt a surge of irritation. She shook Dolores violently. The woman’s head thumped against the ground as Lily threw here entire strength into shaking her, and that was when she realized she was enjoying it, that this shaking had an energy, a life all its own, and that it felt so good she didn’t want to stop, and she shook more. Dolores opened one eye, and Lily saw a glimmer of liquid white. The woman’s mouth parted and her lower lip drooped. Lily let go of Dolores’s shoulders, but the flabby, stupid expression on the woman’s face hadn’t gone away. She looked at the hole in the black stocking and slapped it. When Lily withdrew her hand, her palm was stinging, but she lifted her arm to do it again. At the same moment she heard Dolores groan, and the sound startled her. She hadn’t expected her to wake up at all. But that’s what was happening. Dolores had raised herself up on one elbow and was staring at Lily through eyes that looked like illuminated slits in the night.

  Lily started to shout for Ed and Mabel. She called out their names until her voice was hoarse, and even after they answered her, she kept yelling their names over and over again, as if she was the one who needed to be saved. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she wiped them away when she saw Ed racing toward her. He puffed hard as he knelt over Dolores, who raised herself to a sitting position, threw her arms around him and began blubbering words Lily couldn’t understand.

  Not until Dolores was lying on her bed did Lily see how sick she looked. Her skin was flat white, her eyes red, and the flesh around them a curious shade of violet. Running makeup had turned her cheeks black and green, and partly digested food littered her naked chest and the front of her blouse.

  Mabel was the one who wiped Dolores’s face with wet paper towels, who cleaned her chest and arms, who removed her filthy clothes and ruined stockings and managed to get her under the sheets. Throughout her cleanup, Dolores moaned the word “No.” She tossed back and forth on the bed, her movements so meaningless that it took Lily a while to understand that the woman wanted to sit up. Finally, she managed to raise her body by herself and yelled at them, “Look at me! Am I cut?” Her head flopped forward. “Am I cut?” Then she started to cry, and Lily found the crying much worse than the moaning or shouting.

  Mabel crawled onto the bed and grabbed hold of Dolores’s shoulders. She looked very small and thin beside Dolores, but her decisive movements compensated for her weakness. She pushed Dolores back down on the bed, grasped the woman’s flailing hands and held them tightly. “You’re not cut,” she said. “Do you hear me? You’re not cut.”

  Dolores stopped fighting and lay quietly on the bed. “I saw it,” she said, her voice between a whisper and a groan. “I saw him with a knife.”

  “No,” Mabel said. “You’re not cut. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  Lily turned away. She saw Ed standing in front of an open cupboard with a bottle in his hand. “We’ll let her sleep now,” he said.

  Lily walked over to him and put her cheek on his chest. His shirt smelled vaguely of turpentine, and that smell combined with the arms that came around her and the touch of the whiskey bottle against her back made her want to cry for no reason she could think of anymore. From behind them, Dolores said in a slurred voice either “I’m finished” or “It’s finished,” and Lily heard Mabel say, “No, no, no. Go to sleep.”

  The three of them were silent in the car. Ed drove slowly now, and Lily remembered Dolores in the trailer, her belly speckled with moles and the ragged mark left by the elastic around her middle as she lay naked on the bed. Lily cried without making any sound. Shame was choking her. Her lungs were so tight with it, she couldn’t sit still. She wriggled in the seat, looking out one window, then the other. Dolores knows, Lily thought. She knows what I did.

  Lily saw Ed glance at her in the rearview mirror. Mabel’s head was motionless. Ed started singing. Lily couldn’t understand it. It seemed so sudden, so silly, but he was singing. In a low, raspy voice, he sang, “Row, row, row your boat.” He sang the whole song and then started over. Mabel joined him and made a round of it, her high, thin voice quavering over the words. Lily listened and wiped her cheeks with her hands, and then she sang, too. They all sang, and they were still singing when Ed parked the station wagon in front of the Stuart Hotel.

  * * *

  Even before Lily opened her eyes Sunday morning, she knew the sun had been up for hours. The bedsheet and pillowcase smelled of heat and dust, and she felt the moisture under her arms and between her legs as she turned over on the mattress and understood she was in the bed alone. She heard Ed, smelled paint and coffee, and felt the sunlight on her eyelids. For a moment she let them open and saw the fringe of her lashes as a moving shadow. She decided not to open her eyes, not yet. Her mind was empty. There was nothing but the light and the warmth of the day, but as she sank toward sleep again, she remembered a long row of tall windows with sills painted pale green. It must have been the sunlight that brought them back to her. Through one of those windows she saw the orange school bus in the parking lot under enormous elms. Late spring, she thought, the field trip to the state hospital. I was in the fifth grade. She remembered standing in the large, narrow room lined with beds on either side. The boy had been lying in one of them, his image as clear now as when she had first seen him. He must have been twelve or thirteen. He lay in a bed that had sides like a crib and wore nothing but diapers and plastic pants. He didn’t move and he didn’t see her, but his long limbs had a whiteness and softness that fascinated her—the skin of an infant. She remembered a man’s voice saying, “profoundly retarded children,” and that word “profound” had stayed with her. For years afterward it had meant that motionless boy with vacant eyes.

  Then Lily remembered last night and her shame returned, an ache of regret coupled with a fear of being found out. What if Dolores confronted her, or worse, told Ed and Mabel? Could she deny it and say Dolores had invented the whole thing? Could it even be mentioned without Lily going to pieces? She could hardly contain it now. Her whole body was racked with shame. She sat up and stared at Ed’s naked back in front of the canvas of Mabel. He held a cup of coffee in one hand, and she could see in his neck and shoulders that he was thinking about the picture, so she didn’t speak to him. She remembered Dolores saying “No!” over and over again and looked past Ed’s head through the window, as though the
air outside might relieve her agitation, but it didn’t. She looked down at the tan line below her breasts, at her brown stomach and the pale skin just above her pubic hair. Then she put her feet on the floor, stood up, walked over to Ed and stood beside him. Without putting down his brush, he drew her into him and she laid her head on his chest. She could feel drops of his sweat on her forehead and couldn’t resist moving her cheek against the hairs.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Poor, tired girl.”

  His kind voice made her feel worse. “Do you think Dolores is okay?” Lily said.

  “I called her about an hour ago. She’s alive.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I think she needs a few more hours to recover complete consciousness.” He smiled.

  Lily looked up at him. “Remember when she talked about being cut?”

  Ed touched Lily’s cheek. “Dolores told me this morning that she thought she saw herself being murdered.”

  Lily pulled away from Ed. “What do you mean? How can anybody see that?”

  “She must have been delirious,” Ed said.

  “Jesse James?”

  He nodded.

  Lily looked into his face, and he looked back at her with his still wide eyes. He was looking at her, and he seemed to be paying attention to her, but she had the feeling he really wasn’t. There was something missing in those eyes. She had felt it before and she felt it now, that Ed was both there with her and not there. He acted like he cared about Dolores, but Lily suddenly wondered if he did. Behind him she could see the painting of Tex and the box where the man was strangling the woman. Jesse James, she thought and grabbed Ed’s elbow. “What if it was real?” she said. “What if she saw a real murder? Did you ever think of that? People have been seeing things, Ed, not just Dolores.” Lily started jabbering. She heard herself doing it, but she couldn’t stop. Her voice rose and cracked as she told him about the police log, Boomer’s cowboy, Martin’s cuts, and Becky Runevold. She wanted to make him listen, to startle him. “Her father killed her,” Lily said under her breath. “People will do anything, Ed.” She caught her breath. “Do you hear me?”

  “Take it easy,” he said. He looked down at his elbow, and Lily saw she was digging her fingers into his skin. She let go.

  Ed rubbed his hands together. “I don’t know about what other people have seen or not seen. But I think that Dolores is unstable and, well, not completely trustworthy.”

  “You mean she’s a liar?”

  Ed rubbed the flats of his palms together in and up-and-down motion as if this gesture helped him think. “Maybe not an out-and-out liar, but manipulative and prone to exaggeration. She’s melodramatic—the star of her own show. When she called last night, what frightened me wasn’t what she thought she had seen, but that she would kill herself, to, to get back at me.”

  “For what?”

  Ed’s eyes turned cloudy. He looked past Lily. “For finishing the painting, I suppose.”

  “That’s weird,” Lily said, looking straight at him. “And I’m not sure I believe it. I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t think Dolores was going to kill herself. Her house is much too clean.”

  Ed returned her look and smiled. “Cleanliness and a desire for death don’t mix, is that it?”

  “That’s right,” Lily said. “That house was cleaned for company, and I’ll bet that company was you. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. Maybe it’s Tex! Couldn’t Dolores have seen Tex? How would you feel if somebody’s been killed? Wouldn’t you feel guilty for painting him doing that?” She pointed at the canvas.

  Ed lifted his hands toward her. Lily knew she was being unreasonable, but she shouted anyway. She liked it. It was as good as screaming or crying onstage. She was inside the emotion and also outside it. She felt anger, and at the same time she was watching herself feel it. “Well, won’t you feel responsible if he’s hurt some woman out there?”

  Ed was saying “Enough.” He grabbed her by the wrists and held them firmly. Lily flapped her arms against him, but she didn’t resist with much force. She loved him holding her wrists like that. His secure grip aroused her, and she fell toward him and started kissing his naked shoulder.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

  Lily kissed his ear. She didn’t know why, but he had said the right thing. It excited her more. Her face felt damp against his neck. Then she let her head fall backward. “Whatever you want,” she said.

  He kissed her upper arm and bit it, not hard, but she could feel his teeth and wondered if they would leave a small red mark.

  * * *

  Monday was quiet. The day brought no more rumors about Lily or anybody else. The Chronicle came out, but there was nothing of interest in the log. Lily waited on Stanley Blom at about six o’clock that morning, and when she told him she liked his portrait, the old man smiled and said, “It ain’t a pretty sight, but then a fella like myself can’t hope for that.” Lily had avoided looking at Stanley’s hunchback then and mumbled something about the picture having “character.” “That’s just a nice word for ugly,” he said. And when Lily blushed, the man laughed so hard that he started coughing. In the afternoon, Ed painted Mabel, and Lily watched. The weather was hot, but not too hot, and when Lily recalled that the storm had roared through town only last Tuesday, it seemed impossible. It feels like months ago, she thought. That was the day I buried the shoes. When she thought about slapping Dolores now, she suffered acute discomfort, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been, and she was beginning to think that she was the only one who knew about it anyway. Dolores had been dead drunk. At rehearsal that night, Lily kept her distance from Martin, and he didn’t speak to her. He had rebandaged his hand, so the cuts were invisible. Jim said he’d heard that Martin cut himself at the Grastvedt farm fixing the fence, and Lily believed it. In fact, during those hours of practice, her suspicions waned. What were they made of anyway? Hearsay, rumor, the stories of drunks and crazy people, and the wacko speeches of Martin Petersen himself.

  At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, it all changed again. Lily heard Professor Vegan’s voice rising above the hum of conversation in the cafe and turned her head to listen. He came in once a month with three other retired professors. The four men called themselves “The Over-the-Hill Gang.” They ate big breakfasts, and once their stomachs were full, they would launch into Kierkegaard. Lily had been told that they’d been chipping away at the philosopher for three years, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, as patient and relentless as the day is long. This year there had been only two books, and they had the grimmest titles Lily had ever seen: Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. But the men joked and ribbed each other, and every once in a while Professor Schwandt laughed until he cried. It was true that weather, sports and politics got mixed in with Kierkegaard from time to time, but the men’s doggedness impressed Lily—and they tipped well. “The creature had wings,” Professor Vegan was saying, and Lily moved toward the table of professors with the coffeepot.

  “If Gladys had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. Gladys, as far as I can tell, is very nearly a Holy Roller—evangelical in the extreme. I can’t remember the name of the sect she belongs to, but they do their fair share of trembling and moaning. Marit, on the other hand, is a hard-headed woman if there ever was one, and I would never doubt her powers of observation. She saw the darn thing, too, in broad daylight, only yards from the house.”

  Lily poured Professor Hong coffee even though his cup was nearly full and watched Professor Vegan. He had an ironic smile on his face and lowered his voice for effect. “It came walking along the creek bed from the north very quietly—a translucent being in white with a gigantic pair of wings.” He gulped his coffee and watched the faces of his three colleagues. “And”—he paused—“there’s the matter of the suitcase. After all, who would invent that detail? A supernatural being trudging along with its belongings in a bag.”

 
; Lily looked intently into the coffee and clenched her teeth.

  “Send a memo to the religion department,” said Professor Nichols.

  “A seraph,” said Professor Hong, “on the loose in Webster.”

  The men laughed.

  Professor Schwandt shook his head. “It’s the suitcase that bothers me. An angel with luggage. Smells of heresy, doesn’t it?”

  Professor Nichols smiled. “Yes, I’ve always assumed that divine messengers travel light.”

  “I wonder what it was, really.” Lily interrupted them. “Who it was.”

  Professor Vegan shook his head and looked at Lily. “Beats me, but when I came home, both Marit and Gladys were pretty shaken. Whatever they saw, it must have looked not just improbable, but impossible.”

  Lily poured more coffee all around and left the table. She watched Frances Herda pat Lynn Strom’s shoulder and say loudly, “Keith Ellingboe just isn’t worth it. If you want my opinion, he’s been acting like a horse’s ass for three weeks.” Lynn picked up her orange juice glass and sniffed into it. Wings, Lily thought, and a suitcase. Frances turned her head, and the tiny gold earring in her right ear gleamed for a second in the light from the window. She moved again, and the glint disappeared. Lily carried the coffeepot toward the door. She wanted to go back and ask Professor Vegan whether his wife had mentioned the size or weight of the suitcase and whether she had thought the “thing” was a man or a woman. Lily had met Marit Vegan. Her oldest daughter, Iris, used to baby-sit for her, and the whole family had always struck Lily as indomitably sane. The Vegan house lay on the land above the creek, only a quarter of a mile from the Bodlers’ on the other side of the highway, and it was close to the caves. Suddenly, she wondered what she had done with Martin’s map. She walked past Bert and stood near the door. The light outside was so bright she couldn’t look into it. She squinted toward the street. They saw something, all right, she thought. The suitcase Lily had found in the garage had disappeared into thin air. A man carrying an injured woman, she said to herself, near the city limits. Warm liquid ran onto Lily’s foot. She opened her eyes and saw that the coffeepot had tipped in her slack wrist and that coffee was running onto her white sneaker.