Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“Just so we understand each other,” Bert said. She moved her arm in feigned slow motion and pushed a fist gently into Lily’s shoulder.

Thoughts of Hank came and went during the remainder of Lily’s shift. She remembered how old he had seemed in high school, a senior when she was a freshman, and how all the girls had wanted him, and then when he came home from the university last year and she saw him at Rick’s in his letter jacket, and he had asked her to dance, what had she felt, exactly? Flattered, she thought, and safe — after Peter. Peter was the college student she had met in the Courtland Arboretum when she was fifteen. He was twenty, and Lily still remembered the way his pale fingers clutched the book he carried around with him everywhere: Beyond Good and Evil. The title alone had excited her, and she remembered the conviction in his voice when he read to her about dancing and happiness and weak, sickly Christians, and how he kissed her in the damp grass and unbuttoned her shirt and talked about Nietzsche while he was doing it. Peter was thin and white, and Lily could see his naked body perfectly when she wanted to — a hairless boy’s body that smelled of soap and perspiration at the same time. He wrote poems that didn’t make sense to Lily, but she remembered there were lots of exclamation marks and ellipses. Her meetings with Peter had been a secret from everyone but Bert, who could keep all secrets. Eight times she had met Peter Lear in the woods of the arboretum. The ninth time he didn’t come. Lily had waited by the tree for an hour and then gone to his dorm room to find him. It was his roommate who talked to her. Phil knew about Lily, and he had sat her down on one of the narrow beds and told her he thought she looked like a good kid, and he didn’t want her to get hurt, but Peter had a serious girlfriend. He was with her at that very moment, and that he, Phil, didn’t approve of Pete’s exploitation of girls. That was the word he used—“exploitation.” He had gone on about it for what seemed like an hour, and Lily had listened until he stopped. “Are you done?” she had asked him. After he had said yes, she had left the room, walked down the hallway to the stairs and out the front door. She had cried as soon as she felt the air. The humiliation had lasted much longer than the sadness. What she remembered most was Phil’s enthusiasm when he talked to her, the gush of words that made his face hot. She could still see the freckles all over his face, his orange eyelashes, and how he kept looking at her bare legs while he talked. Afterward, Lily had invented speeches for him and for Peter, but she never had the opportunity to deliver them. A month later, Peter Lear graduated from Courtland College and went home to Chicago. During the following year, Lily had turned down every date and pushed away the boys at dances and parties. Kathy Finger had started the rumor that Lily was a lesbian, and she hadn’t shut up about it until Hank came along. Lily had only seen Hank on weekends and during his vacations from the University of Minnesota, and she realized now that it had suited her just fine. She had told herself it would be nice to have Hank around all the time, but instead she felt lousy. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that although she had wanted Hank, she hadn’t wanted him for the same reasons she had wanted Peter. She may have wanted Hank because of Peter. But the truth was that until she saw Edward Shapiro in the window, it was Peter Lear she imagined beside her at night. Peter was a physical memory — his delicate fingers between her thighs and his tongue in her ear.

Around noon, Ida stuck her head through the screen door of the cafe and peeked around it. She gave Lily an extra-long look. She knows about me and Hank already, Lily thought, and pretended she didn’t see the midget clerk with the big hair. Stupid town, she said to herself, full of long noses sniffing for dirt and loose lips yakking about it once they’ve found it. Well, they sure as hell aren’t going to see that I give a damn one way or the other. When she left the Ideal Cafe half an hour later with eleven ninety-five in tips in her pocket, Lily straightened her back and lifted her chin and made a dignified exit for anybody who might have bothered to look.

That afternoon, she wandered up and down Division Street for a couple of hours, looking in store windows and watching the kids who were hanging out on Bridge Square. She bought Don Giovanni on tape and a pair of pink underwear with lace around the legs, and when she walked out the door of Berman’s Apparel with the little bag in her hand, feeling relief that she hadn’t run into Mr. Berman, she paused, looked up at the clouds and realized she had decided to get unengaged from Hank Farmer.

* * *

At six o’clock, Lily walked into the Webster Police and Fire Department. From the driveway, she saw Hank’s head through the wide window over the dispatcher’s desk. She had no speech ready. The conversations she had invented earlier in the day had all sounded like people talking on Secret Storm or As the World Turns.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Hank said.

Lily seated herself on the long desk in front of the window and let her legs dangle.

He looked at her evenly.

“Well, here I am,” she said. Lily stared at her newly painted nails. A piece of hair fell across her cheek. She pushed it away.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Lily avoided his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.” Lily looked through the glass window behind Hank at two uniformed officers who were drinking coffee. Lewis Van Son’s feet were propped up on the desk. Lily waved. Lewis nodded.

“So,” Hank said. “Is there somebody else?”

“Not really,” she said.

Hank sighed. “What the hell does that mean?”

Lily looked Hank in the eyes. “It’s my fault, not yours.”

“Okay,” he said. “And?”

“I’m confused.”

“About what?” His voice was aggressive. He leaned back in his chair, and it rolled with the motion.

“Well,” Lily said. “I don’t know what I want.”

Hank opened his mouth. The telephone rang. “Webster Police Department.” He used his official voice. “Yes, Mrs. Klatschwetter.” He listened, puckered his mouth and shifted in the chair. “Are your sure?” Hank rubbed his forehead. “Could you see clearly? Okay, I’ll send someone right away.” Hank recorded an address, repeating it aloud as he wrote. “Highway 19 to Old Dutch Road, left across the creek. Yes, they know the way. Uh-huh, bye.” Hank hung up and lifted his right hand to signal the officers.

“What was that all about?” Lily said.

“Rita Klatschwetter’s got trespassers again, or so she says. Last week it was some guy dragging trash across her field. Now it’s some guy with a body.”

“A body? Jeez,” Lily said.

Hank tapped his index finger on his temple. “They’ve never found a thing out there. She’s called in the sheriff, the highway patrol and us, and insists on giving me the address every time. As if we don’t know it by heart.”

“That’s the big farm out by the Bodler place, right?”

Hank nodded.

Lewis walked through the door, winked obscenely at Hank and grabbed the piece of paper with the address on it. He glanced at it. “Not again,” he said.

“This time it’s a corpse.”

Lewis raised his eyebrows. “Right,” he said.

Lily remembered the garage, saw her fingers disappear behind the thin fabric of the pocket under the suitcase lid. She closed her eyes for a second, opened them and watched Lewis leave the room. He waddled toward the door, the stiff cloth of his blue pants making a noise as his thighs scraped together. He’s really gotten chubby, Lily thought. Carrying a gun in Webster seemed to authorize fat but not violence. No officer in her memory had ever pulled a trigger, unless you counted the tranquilizer gun they shot that poor moose with in the Courtland Arboretum. A man from the Sheriff’s Department had driven the unconscious beast miles north so he could wake up at home. From behind her Lily felt the light change as the sun sank in the sky.