Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Lily knew she hadn’t laughed. “He says he paid you.”

“You his accountant now?” Dolores let one hip loose and laid her hand on it. Ed moved closer to Dolores, but the woman wobbled toward Lily, placing one high-heeled shoe carefully in front of the other. “I’ve got some advice for you, honey. I’d stay away from him. He ain’t what he seems, all nice and sweet.” She shook her head back and forth. One of her ankles buckled for a second, then she straightened it. A flicker of pain passed over her mouth — the first sign of emotion that had shown through the swagger. “Hear?”

Lily smelled the liquor on her breath and moved her head back an inch.

“He ain’t for little girls. He’s got a rough side, you hear me?”

Lily looked at Ed. His forehead was wrinkling, and she saw him put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Dolores,” he said in a quiet voice. “Go easy.”

She whirled around at him and nodded. “Me?”

Lily heard Mabel behind her, but she didn’t turn around. Mabel slipped her hand into Lily’s, and Lily took it.

“Would you like a loan?” Ed said quietly.

Lily stared at him and then at Dolores. She tried to guess the woman’s age. Was she forty yet? The dress showed a lot of cleavage, and the material was thin enough to reveal the roll of flesh around her middle. The skin on her naked arms was white, smooth and only slightly freckled. Dolores adjusted her hip, and the unconscious motion stirred in Lily an awareness of the woman’s body as distinct from her voice or clothes. Lily saw Dolores turn toward Ed and put her arms around his neck. Ed’s hands moved to the woman’s waist, and Lily imagined him pulling the dress down over Dolores’s shoulders. Why isn’t he embarrassed in front of me? She looked at Ed’s face above the back of Dolores’s head, but the man didn’t meet her eyes.

Dolores was whispering now. “Remember, Eddie, I told you about Jesse James. I seen it again.”

Mabel squeezed Lily’s hand, and Lily looked at her. Mabel’s face looked drawn and tired, but her eyes were sharp. Lily felt she would have given anything to listen to Mabel’s thoughts.

Dolores stood on tiptoe and leaned heavily against Ed, whispering uselessly. Lily could hear every word. “I seen Jesse’s ghost with me, Eddie, only it couldn’t be me because I was watching, but there was two of me.” She took a breath. “And when I saw it I hadn’t had a drop. You hear me? I was as clear as a bell and I saw him sitting in the grass outside the cave with the spitting image of me beside him. And Jesse, he was a living ghost, but the ghost of me was dead as a doornail, and I’m telling you now so you don’t forget that I’ve had a sign. My life’s coming to an end.”

She pulled away from Ed, straightened the front of her dress and narrowed her eyes in an expression that seemed both shrewd and distant. “And then,” she said, “I heard music playing right out of the sky.” Dolores moved her head to one side. “What d’ya think of that, Eddie boy?” She took in Mabel and Lily at a glance and spat out the words “Music from heaven!”

She paused a moment, as though waiting for her words to sink in, then swivelled on her heels and walked to the open door, her big black purse swinging from her hand. Ed followed her, and the two of them stopped in the hallway. Lily watched Ed reach into his back pocket, take out his wallet and hand Dolores several bills. Lily couldn’t tell how much money he gave her, but Dolores took it with a smile and brought the purse close to her face. After fumbling with the clasp, she opened the bag and dropped the crumpled paper money inside.

Lily had heard Ed’s offer of a loan to Dolores as proof of his kindness, but when the actual bills appeared, they sickened her. More than seeing the man’s hands around the woman’s waist, the sight of those bills gave Lily a feeling that not only was there intimacy between them, there was some kind of arrangement. He could easily have walked Dolores down the hall. Giving her money would have been a secret then, but he chose not to hide it, and Lily found his openness inscrutable.

She listened to the clatter of Dolores’s high heels in the hallway, heard the sound recede and then vanish. The carpet on the stairs must have muffled their noise.

Mabel excused herself, saying she was “worn to the bone,” and left them. Before Lily could say a single word, Ed lunged at her, lifted her off the ground, carried her to the little kitchen table and laid her down on it. Then he bent over her and started kissing her neck. She had a hundred questions for Ed about Dolores, but she didn’t ask them, not then. I’ve been taken by storm, she thought to herself as she looked up at him. She liked the sound of it: “by storm.” It seemed to suggest that Ed was her own violent weather.

* * *

By the time Lily walked into the Arts Guild, the place was both crowded and noisy. She stared at the cardboard trees with tissue paper foliage strung along their branches and at Debbie Larsen and Genevieve Knecht, whose arms were flapping as they pretended to fly across the stage. She heard the quartet tuning and the cast chattering and suddenly wanted to close her eyes and press her hands to her ears to shut it out. How can anybody get into character with all this racket? she said to herself and sat down on a folding chair to wait for Mrs. Wright to call the cast to order. Lily looked down at her hands. Her blisters had turned into tough bits of red skin. She rubbed them, and then, out of the corner of her eye, saw Bottom’s Ass head emerge from behind the curtain — now painted, with tufts of hair for a forelock and scruffy mane. She looked up and saw Martin holding the head in front of him, his face quiet, a white bandage wrapped around his left hand. Loud “hee-haws” came from the stage, and Lily watched Ronald Lovold dart from behind Martin and grin at the head.

That evening the play showed improvement, and Lily began to think it might not be an embarrassment after all. Even Denise was less flat. The new sets and props excited the cast to better performances, and Lily, too, was glad for the painted backdrops, fake trees and artificial moonlight, but when she moved and spoke, she forgot the scenery. She didn’t hear or see Mabel anymore when she played Hermia. Mabel’s coaching had moved inside Lily, and with each rehearsal Hermia changed, her character gained tightness and shape. In the end, the Athenian girl was a tough little broad, and that’s how Lily played her.

It might have been neater if what was outside the Arts Guild would stay out and what was inside would stay in, but that’s not how it worked. When Lily spoke to Lysander, she looked into Jim’s face and gave him the feeling she had for Ed, and Jim responded with an expressiveness she hadn’t seen in him before. And when she watched Cobweb tiptoe around Bottom, she perceived an ominous presence in Martin’s fairy that made him better than the others. He never abandoned character. Even when the little fairies snickered at the ridiculous head on Oren’s shoulders, Cobweb’s white face never faltered from its distant, nearly unconscious expression. Several times during rehearsal, Lily felt Martin staring at her, felt his eyes on her neck or back, and when she turned around he was always there to meet her glance, and Lily wondered if scientists had discovered how it is that you can actually feel someone’s eyes on your body. She worried about his hand. How had he hurt it? She wished she could remember what his hands had looked like in the rocking chair, but she didn’t have any memory of them.

After rehearsal she put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Martin.” She spoke in a low voice she instantly regretted because it sounded confidential, but he turned, looked at her and smiled. His eager expression felt like a trap. “I have to talk to you,” she said and corrected her tone.