Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Dolores stopped fighting and lay quietly on the bed. “I saw it,” she said, her voice between a whisper and a groan. “I saw him with a knife.”

“No,” Mabel said. “You’re not cut. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Lily turned away. She saw Ed standing in front of an open cupboard with a bottle in his hand. “We’ll let her sleep now,” he said.

Lily walked over to him and put her cheek on his chest. His shirt smelled vaguely of turpentine, and that smell combined with the arms that came around her and the touch of the whiskey bottle against her back made her want to cry for no reason she could think of anymore. From behind them, Dolores said in a slurred voice either “I’m finished” or “It’s finished,” and Lily heard Mabel say, “No, no, no. Go to sleep.”

The three of them were silent in the car. Ed drove slowly now, and Lily remembered Dolores in the trailer, her belly speckled with moles and the ragged mark left by the elastic around her middle as she lay naked on the bed. Lily cried without making any sound. Shame was choking her. Her lungs were so tight with it, she couldn’t sit still. She wriggled in the seat, looking out one window, then the other. Dolores knows, Lily thought. She knows what I did.

Lily saw Ed glance at her in the rearview mirror. Mabel’s head was motionless. Ed started singing. Lily couldn’t understand it. It seemed so sudden, so silly, but he was singing. In a low, raspy voice, he sang, “Row, row, row your boat.” He sang the whole song and then started over. Mabel joined him and made a round of it, her high, thin voice quavering over the words. Lily listened and wiped her cheeks with her hands, and then she sang, too. They all sang, and they were still singing when Ed parked the station wagon in front of the Stuart Hotel.

* * *

Even before Lily opened her eyes Sunday morning, she knew the sun had been up for hours. The bedsheet and pillowcase smelled of heat and dust, and she felt the moisture under her arms and between her legs as she turned over on the mattress and understood she was in the bed alone. She heard Ed, smelled paint and coffee, and felt the sunlight on her eyelids. For a moment she let them open and saw the fringe of her lashes as a moving shadow. She decided not to open her eyes, not yet. Her mind was empty. There was nothing but the light and the warmth of the day, but as she sank toward sleep again, she remembered a long row of tall windows with sills painted pale green. It must have been the sunlight that brought them back to her. Through one of those windows she saw the orange school bus in the parking lot under enormous elms. Late spring, she thought, the field trip to the state hospital. I was in the fifth grade. She remembered standing in the large, narrow room lined with beds on either side. The boy had been lying in one of them, his image as clear now as when she had first seen him. He must have been twelve or thirteen. He lay in a bed that had sides like a crib and wore nothing but diapers and plastic pants. He didn’t move and he didn’t see her, but his long limbs had a whiteness and softness that fascinated her — the skin of an infant. She remembered a man’s voice saying, “profoundly retarded children,” and that word “profound” had stayed with her. For years afterward it had meant that motionless boy with vacant eyes.

Then Lily remembered last night and her shame returned, an ache of regret coupled with a fear of being found out. What if Dolores confronted her, or worse, told Ed and Mabel? Could she deny it and say Dolores had invented the whole thing? Could it even be mentioned without Lily going to pieces? She could hardly contain it now. Her whole body was racked with shame. She sat up and stared at Ed’s naked back in front of the canvas of Mabel. He held a cup of coffee in one hand, and she could see in his neck and shoulders that he was thinking about the picture, so she didn’t speak to him. She remembered Dolores saying “No!” over and over again and looked past Ed’s head through the window, as though the air outside might relieve her agitation, but it didn’t. She looked down at the tan line below her breasts, at her brown stomach and the pale skin just above her pubic hair. Then she put her feet on the floor, stood up, walked over to Ed and stood beside him. Without putting down his brush, he drew her into him and she laid her head on his chest. She could feel drops of his sweat on her forehead and couldn’t resist moving her cheek against the hairs.

“Good morning,” he said. “Poor, tired girl.”

His kind voice made her feel worse. “Do you think Dolores is okay?” Lily said.

“I called her about an hour ago. She’s alive.”

“Is that all?”

“I think she needs a few more hours to recover complete consciousness.” He smiled.

Lily looked up at him. “Remember when she talked about being cut?”

Ed touched Lily’s cheek. “Dolores told me this morning that she thought she saw herself being murdered.”

Lily pulled away from Ed. “What do you mean? How can anybody see that?”

“She must have been delirious,” Ed said.

“Jesse James?”

He nodded.

Lily looked into his face, and he looked back at her with his still wide eyes. He was looking at her, and he seemed to be paying attention to her, but she had the feeling he really wasn’t. There was something missing in those eyes. She had felt it before and she felt it now, that Ed was both there with her and not there. He acted like he cared about Dolores, but Lily suddenly wondered if he did. Behind him she could see the painting of Tex and the box where the man was strangling the woman. Jesse James, she thought and grabbed Ed’s elbow. “What if it was real?” she said. “What if she saw a real murder? Did you ever think of that? People have been seeing things, Ed, not just Dolores.” Lily started jabbering. She heard herself doing it, but she couldn’t stop. Her voice rose and cracked as she told him about the police log, Boomer’s cowboy, Martin’s cuts, and Becky Runevold. She wanted to make him listen, to startle him. “Her father killed her,” Lily said under her breath. “People will do anything, Ed.” She caught her breath. “Do you hear me?”

“Take it easy,” he said. He looked down at his elbow, and Lily saw she was digging her fingers into his skin. She let go.

Ed rubbed his hands together. “I don’t know about what other people have seen or not seen. But I think that Dolores is unstable and, well, not completely trustworthy.”

“You mean she’s a liar?”

Ed rubbed the flats of his palms together in and up-and-down motion as if this gesture helped him think. “Maybe not an out-and-out liar, but manipulative and prone to exaggeration. She’s melodramatic — the star of her own show. When she called last night, what frightened me wasn’t what she thought she had seen, but that she would kill herself, to, to get back at me.”

“For what?”

Ed’s eyes turned cloudy. He looked past Lily. “For finishing the painting, I suppose.”

“That’s weird,” Lily said, looking straight at him. “And I’m not sure I believe it. I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t think Dolores was going to kill herself. Her house is much too clean.”

Ed returned her look and smiled. “Cleanliness and a desire for death don’t mix, is that it?”

“That’s right,” Lily said. “That house was cleaned for company, and I’ll bet that company was you. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. Maybe it’s Tex! Couldn’t Dolores have seen Tex? How would you feel if somebody’s been killed? Wouldn’t you feel guilty for painting him doing that?” She pointed at the canvas.

Ed lifted his hands toward her. Lily knew she was being unreasonable, but she shouted anyway. She liked it. It was as good as screaming or crying onstage. She was inside the emotion and also outside it. She felt anger, and at the same time she was watching herself feel it. “Well, won’t you feel responsible if he’s hurt some woman out there?”