Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“I’m afraid it’s shingles,” Bessy said.

“Nonsense, dear. I had shingles just after the war, you remember. They don’t look a thing like hives.”

Just after Bessy had leaned forward and hissed the words, “Hives don’t crust!” Edward Shapiro walked into the Ideal Cafe. He gripped the counter, and with his nose an inch from Lily’s, he said in a low but clear voice that Bert must have overheard because she dropped the cover to the pie case on the counter: “I missed you.” Lily forgot Martin Petersen then, and she forgot to say good-bye to Bert and Vince and Boomer, and she forgot to take off her apron. She followed the man out the door and onto Division Street, where he took her in his arms and kissed her in full view of every customer in the cafe as well as half a dozen people on the sidewalk. Then he put his arm around her and walked with her up the steps into the Stuart Hotel.

* * *

That afternoon, Lily asked Ed a question she knew she shouldn’t ask. She hesitated, understood it would be smarter not to give in to her curiosity, but the desire was strong, like wanting to pick at a scab that’s bound to bleed if you touch it.

“What’s she like?” she said to the ceiling as she lay on the bed.

“Who?” Ed turned to look at her. He had been standing in front of his canvas.

“Your wife.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Maybe you should tell me. It seems that my life is an open book.”

“No, I just know you have a wife and she’s not here.”

“No, she’s not here.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “I take it back.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all right.” He walked over to the bed and sat down. “I was married for five years.” He paused. “It fell apart. She’s a painter. Her work is very different from mine. She does these tiny little paintings.” Ed traced a rectangle in the air with his fingers about as big as a postcard. “They’re pretty abstract, but once in a while you can make out a little object in them — a pair of scissors or a hat or a pillbox.” He paused. “I always respected her work, but I don’t think she ever liked mine. She never said it, but I got the feeling she thought my stuff was oversized and vulgar. She always seemed surprised when other people showed interest in it.”

“But what’s she like?”

“I thought I was telling you.” He leaned across the bed and took her hand. “Maybe not.”

“How could you marry someone who didn’t like your paintings?”

Ed pressed his lips together and was silent. “I guess I didn’t know until later. We met when we were eighteen, and I think I found her mysterious. I never understood what she was about really, and I ran after her for years.”

“She must be beautiful, though.”

Ed smiled at Lily. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you said she was mysterious and you chased after her, and I think men see pretty women, and they imagine all kinds of things inside the prettiness before they even know the person, and then they’re stuck running and running.”

“Are you speaking from experience, Lily Dahl?” He looked at her tenderly with his eyes narrowed and then grabbed his T-shirt, which was hanging from the iron rail at the end of the bed.

Lily leaned back and looked at him. “You’re the third.”

Ed gave her a surprised look. “Is that what you thought I asked you?”

“I’m telling you. There were two others. I broke up with the second guy the day before yesterday.”

Ed pulled the T-shirt over his head and reached for his jeans. He forgot his boxer shorts, which were lying beside them, and pulled the jeans up over his naked thighs. “Is this for the record, or are you telling me something else?” he said.

Lily bit her lip and looked at him. She looked for her shirt, the same one she had worn yesterday. I have to change, she thought. Then she said, “I guess I just like things to be clear. Do you know what I mean?”

He walked over to the window and looked out. Lily studied his back and wondered if he was hiding some emotion. She thought that if she were in her own room now, she might be able to see his face.

“It’s rare, isn’t it, for things to be clear?” He didn’t turn around. Lily thought he might have been looking into her window across the street, and thinking this made her sad. They were silent for at least a minute. Lily dressed quickly, grabbed her crumpled apron from the bed and walked to his door.

“I’m going home now,” she said. “Good-bye, Ed.”

He turned then and walked toward her. He kissed her hard on the mouth and said, “I’ll call you later.”

Lily lifted her face to his. He likes me better when he knows I’m leaving, she said to herself.

“What’s that look?”

“What look?” she said.

“That look, that look of irony and smugness.”

“Guess,” she said. Then she turned around and walked out the door.

There were no sounds from Mabel’s apartment, and Lily supposed she was either out or asleep. Mabel often slept better during the day than at night. Lily closed her curtains and thought about Ed. I shouldn’t have asked about her. “Elizabeth.” She said the name aloud to hear it. Not Eliza or Liza or Liz, not Lizzie or Beth or Betsy or Bess. She wondered why anyone would want to paint nothing, and then she decided to straighten her room. She tossed a T-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans into her bathroom hamper, walked back into her room, saw the toe of one of the stolen shoes sticking out from under her bed and leaned down to pick it up. In the filtered light that passed through the curtain, she made out the shadow of a foot inside. She didn’t remember this imprint. She knew it wasn’t her foot because hers had a high instep and whoever had worn these shoes before had flat feet. Somehow she had missed that, and she had a sudden, irrational thought that the shoes were changing on her, that traces of their former owner were slowly beginning to appear on them. The shoes did look worse to her, no question about it, more creased and soiled than she remembered, but then maybe she had seen wrong in that dingy garage. Lily brought the shoes close to her nose and sniffed. The Bodlers’ garage smelled like her grandmother’s root cellar, and the odor brought back a memory of lying beside the open door of the cellar, inhaling that good earthy smell, and she saw the small white house in her mind. Her grandfather had stopped farming during the depression when the bank took back most of the land, and that must have been when the place went quiet. Even the house had made no noise. There was no plumbing, so it had never hummed or gurgled as her own house had, and the cows and pigs and chickens that had once been there, animals Lily knew by name, because her father had told her about them, had never been more than thoughts for her. Lily glanced at the night table and saw the book Mabel had given her. She was planning to read it. Middlemarch. The last time she was inside her grandparents’ house was after the vandals had ruined it. She remembered feeling glad that both her grandparents were dead by then and that nobody lived there anymore. She and her father had walked through the door to find smashed mirrors and windows, broken furniture, crockery in pieces on the floor, and that same uncanny silence in the house.

Through the wall came panting and then a short, breathless cry. Lily sat very still and listened. Was Mabel sick? A nightmare? She heard the woman sigh; then her footsteps sounded on the floor. Not long after that, she heard the typewriter. Lily had grown used to that old typewriter. It had come to mean sleep for her. I’m so tired, she thought. She remembered the chicken coop at the Overland farm. She decided she would look at Martin’s drawing again and fell asleep.