Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“No,” Lily said.

Martin paused.

Lily didn’t look at him, but she felt the effort he was making to say the next word.

“A p-p-pansy.”

“Really?” Lily said, and then she remembered her mother’s pansies lined up in trays before she put them into the ground, some had white petals with deep violet or blue splotches at their centers. “It makes sense,” she said. “I can see it.”

Martin nodded. Lily looked at his profile in the light from the dashboard. He moved the clutch into second. Lily leaned back against the seat and thought that sometimes experience was good for its own sake, that Martin Petersen was at the very least an interesting character, and that this too might be an adventure.

He drove fast, not crazy fast, just fast, and Lily sensed urgency in him. They passed the Bodlers’, and Lily saw a single light burning in the house upstairs, and she looked at the tall junk heaps, black against the wood behind them, and felt a sudden pang of anticipation. Martin turned onto the gravel road that passed beneath an arch of trees and stopped in front of the tiny house. It was completely dark.

When the motor stilled, Lily heard crickets in the grass. She opened her door, and Martin cried, “W-w-wait!” Lily was so startled she waited, watched Martin run around the front of the truck, appear at her door and hold out his hand to help her down. Lily played along.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said.

Once she was standing on the ground beside him, Martin bowed and made a flourish with his hand.

He flicked on the porch light when they reached the house. Lily looked around her and noticed a dying plant on a small table — its leaves so withered it was unrecognizable. Martin opened the front door, and Lily stopped behind him. The odor she had smelled in the truck was stronger in the house, glue or some chemical. They walked straight into what must have been the main room. Martin turned on the light. A worn sofa, a couple of straight-backed chairs and a table were the only furniture. Martin was telling her to sit down, and Lily walked toward the sofa, asking herself why the room made her feel bad. She remembered that Martin’s father had had lips with almost no flesh to them, and for some reason she had a sudden image of him with a rifle trudging across a field, although she couldn’t remember where it came from. The room had no bookshelves, but there were books in piles everywhere, and after she sat down Lily read some of their titles: Gray’s Anatomy; Stalin: A Biography; The Many Uses of Molds; Drawing the Human Figure; The Third Reich; The Future Eve; The Numberless Planet. She also saw a pile of science fiction and detective paperbacks and at least one romance called Baxter Manor. In the nearest corner she noticed a heap of two-by-fours and a toolbox sitting on the floor beside a pile of old clothes or material, a large pair of scissors, bits and pieces of foam rubber, spools of thread, tubes of paint and several knives laid neatly in a row. The overhead light didn’t illuminate the corner fully, and in its obscurity Lily also saw the vague shapes of things she couldn’t identify. The knives unsettled her, but she told herself that in daylight they would probably look innocent.

She turned away from them to the opposite corner of the room, where she noticed a rocking chair with a large black piece of material draped over its arm. Taped to the wall was some kind of collage pasted onto a world map. The map looked hand drawn and reminded Lily of the map Martin had given her. On and around it were newspaper clippings, color pictures from magazines; some of them looked torn, others neatly cut. Lily stood up from the sofa, walked toward it and heard Martin grunt behind her, but she pretended not to hear. Stopping in front of the collage, Lily noticed that the center of the collage was blank — no pictures, no drawings, nothing, but because it was surrounded by so much stuff, the emptiness seemed significant. Then she looked at a picture of a starving child, most likely taken from an advertisement for an aid organization like Save the Children or CARE. Beside it Martin had taped a photograph of a young model from a fashion magazine in an evening gown. The juxtaposition was obvious and awful, but as she looked more closely she saw that the simpering model and the miserable child had expressions on their faces that were weirdly similar. She looked from one article and picture to another — an old photograph from Vietnam, articles about John Wayne Gacy, Jack the Ripper, June Putkey, the Webster girl who stabbed her mother a couple of years ago, an article with the headline, “Thousands Visit Statue of the Virgin Alleged to Have Healing Powers,” and a grainy photograph of death camp victims in open graves, more ads for clothes, beer, cigarettes, images of gardens with fountains, flowers and trees. She saw a number of clippings from tabloids including, “Man Has Head Transplant and Lives,” “My Baby’s Father Is an Alien” and “Satan’s Burial Ground Discovered in Utah. Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Horned Skulls.” Just beside a magazine ad for toothpaste that showed a young woman with snow-white teeth, Lily saw a star beside Bergen Belsen and beneath the star Martin had drawn a box that looked similar to the box Martin had drawn for her but narrower. Lily closed her eyes for an instant. The muscles in her shoulders tightened. She could feel Martin behind her and turned quickly toward him. “What is this, Martin?”

He regarded her evenly, his lips tightly shut. She saw his head shake slightly, saw his tongue, his teeth. He stuttered unintelligibly.

“How can you stand to have this up, to see these things all the time?” She rested her hand on the back of the rocking chair and felt it sway under her touch. The black material hanging over it brushed her leg. She stepped back.

Martin pointed to an ad for the telephone company that showed a mother embracing a child in a green backyard. “Th-there are nice pictures, too.”

“I know, Martin, but beside the rest, they look like a joke, and all those pretty models and the flowers. I don’t know.”

Martin turned away from her. She heard him sputter through the first consonant and then his words came fluently but with that same lilt in his voice she had heard before. “It’s a mix, this and that. What is. And it’s all got a name. Everything’s called something, even”—he paused and pointed to Auschwitz—“even places that shouldn’t have one. I read about a lot of things. I see stuff on TV.” He moved his head toward an old set with vinyl sides painted to look like wood grain. “Black and white. I don’t want color.”

They were silent for several seconds. Lily didn’t like the smell of the house. She turned her head toward the bedroom door, which was standing open. She could see an unmade bed covered with loose papers, a desk and a few inches of a dresser. “What did you want to show me?” Lily said. “I have to go home soon.”

Martin walked past Lily into the bedroom. She heard a drawer open and close. He returned with a piece of newspaper and asked her to sit down again, which she did. “It’s this.” He gave her the old, yellow piece of newsprint.

Lily looked down at a small photograph of a child, a girl no more than two or three years old with short dark hair. She was smiling broadly. “Who is it?”

“Becky Runevold.”

“I don’t think I know who that is,” Lily said.

“Her father killed her sixteen years ago.” Martin paused. “T-t-today. She would’ve been our age.”

“Today?” Lily said. “Did you know her?”

“No.”

“But it was a long time ago. Where did this picture come from?”

“The Pioneer Press. Mom cut it out.”

“Your mom knew the family?”