Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Ed nodded. “Jesse James keeps coming up. Just the other day Dolores told me she’d seen him.”

“Dolores of the painting?” Mabel said.

Ed nodded. His eyes looked distant. “She’d been drinking and wasn’t too clear on the details, but she said she’d seen him in the woods, or rather his ghost, coming out of a cave.” He paused. “It’s gruesome, actually, now that I say it. According to Dolores, he was carrying a woman’s head.”

Lily looked at Mabel, who had turned to Ed. “What?”

“That’s what she said. Pink elephants, I guess.”

Mabel wrinkled her forehead.

The absurd story rattled Lily more than she would have liked to admit, and she didn’t say anything. It reminded her of some other story she couldn’t place. She rubbed the blister on her index finger against the blister on her thumb and felt the liquid inside them move back and forth.

Ed looked at Mabel. Lily wished he would look at her. “The fact is, Dolores is an unusual woman. She has a kind of instinctive intelligence.”

“Not everyone would use that adjective in front of that noun,” Mabel said, “but I do understand you.”

Lily cleared her throat. Ed and Mabel looked at her. “I guess the head was a ghost, too, huh?”

“She didn’t say,” Ed smiled.

Lily smiled back at him. She stretched in her chair. “I’m hot,” she said and continued to look into his eyes. She undid three buttons of her shirt, untucked it and tied it under her breasts. She felt both of them watching her, and knowing they were looking made her happy. “There, that’s better,” she said. Lily stretched again slowly, rolling her shoulders backward and then raising her arms above her head so the gap of bare skin beneath her shirt widened. Then she looked at Ed and bit her lip.

He gave her a suspicious look, and as he smiled, he shook his head in gentle reprimand. The expression launched a sudden fantasy — Lily imagined pushing Ed to the floor and climbing on top of him. She smiled, crossed her legs and turned to Mabel, whose face made it clear she hadn’t missed a second of the exchange between Lily and Ed.

Mabel squinted at Lily. She made no attempt to hide her irony. “Lily Dahl,” she said, as though she liked listening to the sound of the name. “Let’s show Mr. Shapiro Hermia.” She paused. “The fight. I know Helena’s lines.”

“Now?” Lily said.

Mabel nodded. “I think this is a very good time. It will be our rehearsal. When we’re done, I’m going to leave. You start: ‘You juggler.’”

Lily and Mabel performed the scene three times for Ed. Mabel was a far better Helena than Denise. The third time Mabel lifted her face to Lily’s and said, “Good Hermia, do not be so bitter with me. / I evermore did love you, Hermia, / Did ever keep your counsels, never wrong’d you.” Lily listened to the words and blushed.

* * *

At ten o’clock the following morning, Bert told Lily that she had just seen Mabel Wasley walk through the door of the Stuart Hotel. Lily turned immediately toward the street, but Mabel had already disappeared inside. She wished she had seen her, if only to catch a glimpse of the woman’s clothes. How had Mabel decided to dress for the “hole”? Then she tried to imagine the conversation between Ed and Mabel. She saw Mabel gesturing dramatically as Ed leaned toward her with that engrossed expression he had had when Mabel fainted. I wonder why he doesn’t want to do a portrait of me, Lily said to herself. It was the first time she had thought about herself as someone Ed could paint, but as soon as she did, she felt bad. Why had he wanted to paint Mabel, but not her? Lily remembered the paintings, saw each person on the canvas: Dolores, Tex, Stanley. They’re all so private, Lily thought. In fact, when she thought about the pictures, she had the feeling that Ed was painting privacy itself — people who looked straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time. He chose people for a reason, didn’t he? Suddenly Lily felt that he would never choose her and that he saved a special kind of intimacy for the people he painted. She tried to see herself as one of them. What would she have to tell in the boxes if he asked her? Lily saw the ground where her grandparents’ house had been. The new owners had razed it to the ground. And now it’s like nothing was ever there. But that’s not my story, she thought. And thinking of Mabel and Ed across the street, Lily felt annoyed that they were together. She imagined Mabel in some drooping silk number and felt a pang of regret about her own clothes. She could almost hear Mabel talking — a stream of sentences filled with the names of people Lily had never heard of. When she left the cafe, she was inventing Ed’s painting of Mabel for herself. She imagined the woman the way she had seen her the day before — a small body on the narrow bed, drained of color and nearly of life: the portrait of a corpse. Lily found the image comforting.

Standing outside Ed’s door, she heard them talking. Ed’s voice was low, confidential, a little hesitant. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she thought he sounded exactly the way she had imagined him. Lily’s neck and jaw hardened at the sound. Then she heard Mabel answer, her voice pitched much higher. “She had one blue eye and one brown. A rare trait, and once you noticed it, utterly arresting. I didn’t see it at first, but when I did, I couldn’t stop looking at those mismatched eyes. I honestly think that if her eyes had been the same color, I wouldn’t have responded in the way I did. She was very beautiful and very quiet. If she had talked, it might all have been different, too. I suppose I fell in love with her without ever saying it to myself or to her or to anyone until twenty years later when I allowed myself to think it. She was like a cat, really, or maybe a cat bewitched. She had no goodness in her, but she wasn’t bad either. She was empty of all moral sense. I used to rub her back for her and her feet, and I remember that touching her troubled me. It wasn’t only a sense of the forbidden. That vacuum in her frightened me. But she knew more about me than I did myself. She teased me like a lover, luxuriated in my devotion the way she did in everyone else’s, just because she had an appetite for it. And then she was gone, ran off. I never saw her again…”

Lily turned around and walked down the hall. She went quietly but quickly, her pulse drumming in her ears, and she ran all the way home to her room. She went straight to her closet, snatched the canvas bag from the floor and threw the filthy thing on her bed. She took out the shoes and looked at them. She turned them over in her hands and picked at the frayed leather with her fingers. The fire had colored them — black, brown, ocher, yellow. Spotted and speckled with burns near the heels, the toes of both shoes had been scorched through. She brought them close to her face and smelled them, breathing in the odor of ashes and then the stink she remembered from the fire. I have to get rid of them, she said to herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them into the garbage. She laid them side by side on the floor and stared at them for a minute. They’re the sorriest excuse for shoes I’ve ever seen, she thought, and then with slow, deliberate motions, she removed her sandals and slipped her feet into them. One tore. The other flapped around her instep. Without understanding why, Lily felt cruel wearing those charred, dilapidated shoes, and right then she decided it was a feeling she wanted. Without taking them off, she set her alarm to wake her for rehearsal, lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Lily was dreaming when the alarm woke her, but whatever it was, it died with the clock’s ringing, and she remembered nothing of it.

* * *