Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Lily suspected it was her mood, but the play changed for her that night. In the first scene when Mr. Pumper made Egeus’s speech exactly the same way he always did, Lily heard the threat in it for the first time: “I beg the ancient privilege of Athens; / As she is mine, I may dispose of her, / Which shall be either to this gentlemen, / Or to her death according to our law.” And she heard the violence in what Theseus said, too. “To whom you are but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted and within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it.” The metaphor, lost on her before, jumped to life, and Lily saw the image of a young woman, her face and body smashed by a man’s fist. Lily remembered Mabel in front of the window when they had practiced the lines together. “Just one turn,” she had said, moving her fingers as if she held a screw, “and comedy is tragedy.”

All through the play she heard words and phrases she hadn’t remembered hearing before, and behind the familiar people, behind their T-shirts and shorts and clumsy performances and forgotten lines and Mrs. Wright’s instructions to be “airy” and to “step lightly,” and behind the noise of hammering and sawing from the set builders downstairs, and even behind the muggy weather that hung in the room like a weight, she felt the presence of another play that was almost real, or as real as memory is. Even though she couldn’t really smell the trees, the thistles and the honeysuckle, she remembered that she had smelled them, and she remembered the bloodroot blooming in early spring in the shade of the woods, and the buttercups coming up in the meadow, and the tall grass alive with grasshoppers, jumping and quivering as she waded through it, and she remembered stepping out of the creek to find black leeches all over her legs and running home without looking down, and Lily imagined she understood Martin’s map then of the two places, and she longed to go home, back to her house where she had lived with her parents before she grew up, before her father’s cancer, before the Ideal Cafe and before Ed and Mabel, back to what she remembered, to milkweed and cow pies and the creek.

Music accompanied the actors for the first time that night, a string quartet that played well. Without the music, Lily knew that she probably wouldn’t have felt what she did. The music was emotion for her then, not a reflection of feeling so much as feeling itself, and listening to it after her bad day, she fell into a state that resembled a low fever. A little light in her head and achy in her joints, she played the part of Hermia in a sort of trance.

When rehearsal ended and the music stopped, Lily tried to shake herself to full consciousness but found it hard and didn’t listen to anyone or notice the other actors until Ruth Baker walked up to her carrying a large bolt of white fabric in her arms and said, “This is the material for you and Denise. Do you like it?”

Lily stared at the whiteness and blinked.

“I’ll meet you in the costume room and get you measured.”

“Okay,” Lily said.

“Didn’t you hear Barbara’s announcement?”

Lily looked into Mrs. Baker’s round face and down at the woman’s belly which bulged under khaki pants. “I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming.”

When Lily walked through the door into the wardrobe room, she saw Denise standing on a low stool. Mrs. Baker stood on the floor beside her with a measuring tape, and Martin Petersen was sitting on the floor Indian style with a long piece of fabric draped over his knees. He held a small notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. The naked lightbulb on the ceiling enhanced Martin’s whiteness, but Lily nevertheless had the impression that his skin color was fading with each passing day. I’m sure he’s paler than he was a week ago, she thought. What is he doing here, anyway?

“Martin’s helping me out,” Mrs. Baker said as though Lily had asked the question aloud.

Lily nodded and watched Denise step off the stool. It was normal that Martin should help out, wasn’t it? He was a handyman, after all. Then why did she feel his presence was calculated, that it had something to do with her?

Lily stepped up on the stool and watched Denise leave the room. Denise’s walk annoyed Lily. It was stiff and self-conscious. Her roots are getting dark, Lily thought, and felt Mrs. Baker move the tape measure along the length of her leg. She called out the numbers and Martin scribbled them into the notebook. Lily looked down at him for a moment and saw three needles stuck into the fabric of his shirt. He bent toward the page, and the needles shone for an instant in the light.

Mrs. Baker clicked her tongue as she worked. “You girls,” she said. “Such teeny-weeny sizes. Of course fifteen years and four children ago, I had a twenty-six-inch waist myself, hard to believe now, but I’ve got the wedding gown to prove it.” As she felt Mrs. Baker loop the tape around her waist and tighten it, Lily heard Martin breathing, and the sound made her blush. His pencil scratched the pad. She closed her eyes for an instant and then felt dizzy. She swayed on the chair. Mrs. Baker caught her elbow.

“Lily, are you all right?”

She looked into Mrs. Baker’s concerned face. “Yes,” Lily said. “I just lost my balance.”

“We’re done, dear.”

Lily stepped off the stool, and Mrs. Baker left the room, muttering something to herself about Titania and sequins.

Lily looked down at Martin. The cloth lay beside him now, and she saw that the zipper of his jeans was half open. For a moment she imagined his penis, testicles and pubic hair underneath the denim, and his sex seemed real to her for the first time. After rocking back and forth a couple of times before he spoke, he said, “W-why don’t you come to my house now. We can talk for a while. I–I-I have something to show you.” He paused, and when he spoke again, Lily detected barely audible music in his voice. “I think you want to come now. The woods are just behind the house.”

She stared at Martin and then at a purple velvet cape that lay in a heap behind him and said, her eyes still on the velvet, “Why did you say that about the woods?”

Martin quoted Oberon’s lines to Puck when the fairy king sends his squire to find the herb that will enchant Titania. Every time she heard it, she imagined it the same way: Cupid’s arrow flying in a great arc until it hit its mark in an open field. Martin didn’t stutter at all. “It fell upon a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound: / And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness.’” He looked at her steadily and boldly. He didn’t sound like Martin Petersen at all. The quote was a dare.

“Why not?” she said to him. She shook her hair on her back and looked directly into his eyes.

If he was surprised, Martin didn’t show it. He stood up, stuttered something about his truck, and Lily followed him outside. Walking behind him, she knew she was making a mistake, but it was a mistake she wanted to make. If it weren’t for Ed, she wouldn’t be going home with Martin. If she was at Martin’s, she couldn’t be with Ed, but if she was home, she might not be able to keep herself away from the Stuart Hotel. At the same time, she felt drawn to Martin and curious about the house she had been forbidden to visit.

Sitting beside him in his pickup, Lily watched the road ahead of them as Martin drove in silence past the Dilly Home and Courtland Hill and onto the highway. The seats had a vaguely chemical smell. Lily put her elbow out the window and moved close to the door to be as far away from Martin as possible. She let the wind blow onto her face and looked into the night. For a few seconds she didn’t know Martin was starting to speak, but then she turned to him and heard him sputter, “Do you know what the ‘little western flower’ is?”