Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

* * *

The story Lily told Ed to explain her cut and burns not only rang true, it sounded more plausible than the truth. She had slipped in the kitchen at work, grabbed the stove to block her fall, but rather than catch her balance, she had burned her fingers and smashed her head on the oven door. As she told it, she saw it happening like a real memory, and to some degree it supplanted the actual story. Dull fiction took the place of ridiculous fact, for the simple reason that it seemed more real than reality. Ed believed Lily, and Lily almost believed herself.

As he lay beside her in the narrow bed that night, he talked to her. It wasn’t a conversation, but a monologue. Ed stared at the ceiling and began to describe her body part by part. He began with her hair, moved to her forehead and included the cut. He described her eyebrows, her eyes, her nose and mouth and chin. Slowly, meticulously, he moved down her body without ever looking at her, providing such detail that she felt her body no longer belonged to her, and even though she wanted him to touch her, she didn’t ask him to because the sound of his voice in the darkened room filled her with such intense pleasure and expectation that she didn’t want it to stop. But when his description reached her toes, he kissed them. Lily wondered how many women he had made desperate with this kind of talk, and yet when he kissed the burns on her fingertips so softly that the slight pain his lips brought only made her happy, she forgot all about the other women. They had no faces and no names, after all, except Elizabeth — and that was only a name.

Lily woke in the night to pee, stood up in the room, and before she opened the door to the bathroom, walked to the window and looked out across the street at her own building. A single light burned in Mabel’s living room. Lily guessed it was the desk lamp and that Mabel was still working on her book far into the night. Then Lily searched the street for signs of the man Mabel said kept watch there, but saw nobody. The instant she turned her head to walk away, however, she heard a noise beneath her, maybe from the steps of the hotel. She pushed open the screen and hung her head over the edge to see who it was, but again she saw no one, only heard him running down the alley beside the hotel. She listened for more, but whoever it was had either stopped moving or had gone too far to be heard.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, Mabel accepted Ed and Lily’s invitation to visit them at the Stuart Hotel, and within half an hour of her arrival, she fainted. The moment Mabel tripped through the door wearing a pale purple shirt, narrow black pants and a cloud of perfume, Lily could feel the woman’s nervous excitement. She talked a blue streak, careening from one subject to another in a high tremulous voice while she gestured with her hands to make her points. The weather had turned hot and humid, and the rain, which hadn’t amounted to more than a drizzle the day before, still threatened. Ed turned the painting of Dolores around to show it to Mabel, then the painting of Stanley. She looked at each one very closely but didn’t stop talking. She was especially attracted to the narrative boxes along the top of the canvases and launched into a discussion of memory that had something to do with walking through a house, room by room. Ed seemed to understand perfectly, but Lily found it hard to follow. Mabel said that she used the “device” herself to remember speeches or texts and that for her the most important thing was “walls.” Ed turned around the portrait of Tex, and Lily watched Mabel look at the painting of Tex and then collapse. She fell so fast that if Ed hadn’t been only inches away, she would have landed on the floor. Ed carried Mabel to his bed, laid her down on it and felt her pulse.

“You don’t think it was the painting, do you?” he said in a whisper. “Maybe the nudity came as a shock. Her pulse is okay.”

“She’s not that kind of old lady, Ed. Anyway, it’s only men who think seeing a penis is some big deal. Women couldn’t care less.”

He smiled at her comment, then turned to Mabel. Only seconds later the woman opened her eyes, but during that intervening moment Ed looked at Mabel with an expression of such intensity that Lily was taken aback. Mabel moved, woke, and her waxen face regained its color quickly.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she groaned.

“It’s hot,” Lily said. “Your nerves.”

Mabel sat up and stared at Ed. “I don’t understand it,” she said slowly. “It’s the painting, of course. It happened once before many years ago when I was a student, with a reproduction, if you can imagine that. The professor passed around that famous Grünewald painting of the dead Christ. I took one look at it and keeled over. At the time, I didn’t know what an impression that same painting had made on poor Dostoyevsky, but it did comfort me a bit when I read about his response.” Mabel looked wildly around the room for a moment, then back at Ed. “Maybe they’ll drop like flies when you exhibit it. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

“Don’t get too worked up,” Lily said and patted Mabel’s hands.

Ed looked at Mabel closely. “I want to paint you,” he said. He moved his head to the side and stared at Mabel’s neck, then her legs. Lily didn’t like seeing him look at Mabel in this way, but the woman herself seemed pleased. She straightened herself and lifted her chin.

“You do?” she said.

“Yes, very much. It’s a commitment, you understand. I would start drawing right away, and you would have to talk to me for hours and hours. It’s a bit like going into a hole with someone for a week, which, frankly, can be unpleasant, and then there’s the problem of finding a story for the boxes. Sometimes, that’s hard for people. I pay by the hour, of course, not a lot, but—”

Mabel interrupted him. “I agree.”

Ed grabbed both Mabel’s hands and said, “We’ll start tomorrow.”

Lily watched them. She had introduced them to each other, and now within forty minutes of their meeting, they were talking about going into a hole together. If Mabel hadn’t fainted, Lily realized that it probably wouldn’t have happened. She couldn’t explain why she believed this, but she did, and she watched the two of them with a new wariness. She had wanted them to like each other, but not this much, and she resisted their sudden rapport by saying very little. Mabel seemed calmer after fainting, but she talked nevertheless, mostly about the portrait of Tex and what was in it that she hadn’t wanted to see. “It’ll go straight into my book tonight,” she announced. She seemed happy, almost proud of having keeled over after looking at a picture. When Lily said she thought it was the heat, not the painting, both Ed and Mabel turned skeptical eyes in her direction, so she gave up that line of argument. Despite her willingness to discuss the painting, Mabel wouldn’t look at it again. Ed turned it to the wall, hiding the big man and his ugly fantasies. Lily looked at the back of the canvas and, wanting to leave Mabel behind as the main subject of the afternoon, asked Ed what Tex was really like.

“Really like?” he said. “I don’t know. He has a thing about outlaws — Wild West characters. He brought a gun to one of the sittings — a forty-five — big thing, scared the shit out of me, if you want to know the truth. But I had a strong feeling that if he saw my fear, it would go badly, and I did my best to stay cool. As it turned out, the gun wasn’t loaded. He was kind enough to show me the empty chamber, and then he settled down to work. The gun was an ornament really, didn’t need bullets.” Ed paused. “He said they banned him from the reenactment of the Jesse James robbery, and it broke his heart.”

“No,” Lily said. “They said he couldn’t be Jesse James, and that’s the only part he would take.”