Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“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.”