Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“Is the woman someone special? I mean…”

“He didn’t say.”

“But I thought you said you talked to everybody when they’re posing for you.”

“I do, but he wouldn’t say. He just told me what to draw.”

In the third box a dead man was hanging by his neck from a tree. “Is that him, too?”

“Yes, I think it is, but when he talked to me, he explained every particular in the drawing, but he never used the word ‘I.’ He said ‘he.’ I think we both knew ‘he’ meant ‘I.’ What I admired about him was his certainty. He knew. Howard never wavered.”

“Howard?”

“Howard Gubber.”

Lily smiled. “Wow! That’s a wuss name if I ever heard one. I bet you’re the only guy in Webster who knows his real name, except his mother, and she’s probably pushing up flowers in Urland Cemetery.”

Lily pointed at the third canvas, and Shapiro obediently turned it toward her. It was smaller than Tex’s.

“Why, there’s Stanley,” Lily said. “Stanley Blom. He eats at the Ideal quite a lot. He’s a sweet guy.” Lily moved her head to one side as if she could see him better that way. The little man sat on a chair and looked straight out. His bent body was somewhat disguised in that position, and he was dressed in a suit he must have saved for church. He certainly didn’t eat breakfast in it. His narrow, wrinkled face was unmistakable, however, a mass of brown spots and cysts. Lily looked at Stanley’s boxes. In the first there were two boys running together, one ahead of the other. In the second was a large, long house with lots of windows. “Who lived here?” Lily said.

“It’s a sanatorium,” he answered and stepped close to her. “That boy”—he pointed to the second child in the first frame—“was his brother. He died of tuberculosis in 1925. ‘I’ve only got one big story,’ he told me, and this is it.’ His brother’s name was Henry.”

Lily turned her head to the last picture. It showed a room with a window and an empty bed. The baseboard of another bed could be seen in the frame, but the bed with nobody in it stood at the center.

Lily felt the man’s hand on her shoulder. “Henry died before one of the family’s visits. When Stanley and his parents walked into the room, the boy was gone.”

“You mean they didn’t get to see him?”

“Not that day, not alive. The empty cot was the way he knew his brother was dead, and that’s how he tells the story.”

Very gently, the man turned her toward him. She looked up at his eyebrows and large eyes, the straight nose and small mouth, and she thought, God, it’s a beautiful face. Before he kissed her, she said, “How old was he? Henry, I mean.”

“He was nineteen.”

Lily’s shorts were unsnapped and the man’s shirt was off before she remembered she was menstruating. She knew she had to say it. She clamped her fingers around his wrist and said in a tense voice that embarrassed her, “I have my period. Does it matter?”

He shook his head.

“I’ll be right back.”

Lily watched her nearly bloodless tampon disappear down Edward Shapiro’s rust-stained toilet. Blue, green, yellow and brown paint streaked the sink basin. Before she left the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet. Inside, on a filthy glass shelf, lay a slender black razor — nothing else. Lily checked her face in the mirror. She thought it looked a little red, but otherwise good. When she shut the bathroom door, she consciously acknowledged that she had no doubt. She felt nothing that might make her hesitate.

He wasn’t shaven, and his whiskers rubbed her cheek when he kissed her, and she smelled turpentine from his hands, but what she liked was that he didn’t seem to worry about himself. She could feel the relaxation in his arms and legs. He wasn’t passive, but he wasn’t in a hurry either, and Lily had the sudden thought that both Peter and Hank had watched themselves making love to her, and this man didn’t. She felt the coarse hair on his chest, and she moved her fingers to his navel and touched the skin around it, and then she kissed that spot and felt the muscles in his thighs that she had looked at so closely through the window. She touched his knees and his calves, and he kissed her neck and shoulders and back, and he kissed her behind her knees and he kissed her ankles, and he didn’t touch her genitals for a long time, and Lily thought that if she hadn’t loved him before, she loved him now. Then he surprised her. He gripped her inner thighs with his hands and pulled her toward him, and she thought, It’s like he knows, knows all about me, and she let her head fall back on the mattress. Through the thin sheet she could feel a small hard button pressing into the back of her head as he lowered his body onto hers. He fumbled with a condom for a couple of seconds, but she closed her eyes and listened to him breathe. She clutched his back tightly. They were both sweating on top of the white sheet, and Lily imagined herself in the window as though she were looking at herself with his eyes, and again she saw herself pulling down her shorts, and she bit his neck, not hard, lightly. While they made love she talked to herself silently, telling herself what they were doing, and this aroused her more, and when she felt her orgasm, she yelled out, but she didn’t know how loud she was and didn’t care, and seconds later, she looked up at his face and saw the pupils of his eyes move upward toward his lids and felt the faint tremor of his orgasm and then the weight of his body on top of her. She smelled his hair — shampoo and cigars. In the dim light, she looked at the skin on his shoulders, at the tiny bumps and discolorations. She ran her finger over them and thought that he was like nobody else.

When he asked her how old she was, she lied to him and said, “Twenty-one.” The addition of those two years seemed significant, and she promised herself to tell him the truth later.

They talked for hours that night, and Lily found out that he was born in Newark, New Jersey, and went to art school in New York, but he had studied art history, too, and that before he found a gallery, he had made money copying old masters’ paintings and selling them to rich men, mostly in Texas, who wanted a Caravaggio or a Renoir or a David for their wives and girlfriends. Shapiro was thirty-four years old, and he said that he had only recently “found his real work.” So far, he had sold four “real” paintings, but he was feeling optimistic. And Lily told him about acting and about playing Hermia in a A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He didn’t say it was an impossible business and much too hard to get into, or what made her think she could do that? He listened to her talk and smoked his cigars and asked her questions about why she wanted to be an actress and how she felt when she acted. She told him about Marilyn then. He didn’t even smile. He said he had loved Marilyn in The Misfits, and that what he had liked about her was that she seemed so alive, more alive than a lot of actors, fragile and vigorous at the same time. It made Lily very happy to hear him talk about Marilyn, and when he paused, she kissed him all over his face, and told him he was beautiful, and they made love again.

In the morning Lily woke for work without an alarm. She had slept only two hours, and after she had carefully lifted the man’s arm off her waist, she sat up and put her feet on the floor. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, but when she looked at the sleeping man, she said to herself, I was lying there beside him. She dressed quickly and penned him a note. There were many things she would have liked to have written in that note: “I love you. I adore you. I think you’re the most wonderful person in the whole world,” but these sentences would have been unwise, so she wrote: “Dear Ed”—it was nice to call him Ed—“My telephone number is: 645-1133. Lily.” She studied her handwriting for an instant, fearing it looked childish, but she let it go, and tiptoed down the stairs past Ida. The woman was sleeping with her head on the desk, a jowl mashed by her right arm. Her makeup had faded during the night, and Lily thought her face looked softer and prettier than it had the night before.