Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Ed was saying “Enough.” He grabbed her by the wrists and held them firmly. Lily flapped her arms against him, but she didn’t resist with much force. She loved him holding her wrists like that. His secure grip aroused her, and she fell toward him and started kissing his naked shoulder.

“What am I going to do with you?” he said.

Lily kissed his ear. She didn’t know why, but he had said the right thing. It excited her more. Her face felt damp against his neck. Then she let her head fall backward. “Whatever you want,” she said.

He kissed her upper arm and bit it, not hard, but she could feel his teeth and wondered if they would leave a small red mark.

* * *

Monday was quiet. The day brought no more rumors about Lily or anybody else. The Chronicle came out, but there was nothing of interest in the log. Lily waited on Stanley Blom at about six o’clock that morning, and when she told him she liked his portrait, the old man smiled and said, “It ain’t a pretty sight, but then a fella like myself can’t hope for that.” Lily had avoided looking at Stanley’s hunchback then and mumbled something about the picture having “character.” “That’s just a nice word for ugly,” he said. And when Lily blushed, the man laughed so hard that he started coughing. In the afternoon, Ed painted Mabel, and Lily watched. The weather was hot, but not too hot, and when Lily recalled that the storm had roared through town only last Tuesday, it seemed impossible. It feels like months ago, she thought. That was the day I buried the shoes. When she thought about slapping Dolores now, she suffered acute discomfort, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been, and she was beginning to think that she was the only one who knew about it anyway. Dolores had been dead drunk. At rehearsal that night, Lily kept her distance from Martin, and he didn’t speak to her. He had rebandaged his hand, so the cuts were invisible. Jim said he’d heard that Martin cut himself at the Grastvedt farm fixing the fence, and Lily believed it. In fact, during those hours of practice, her suspicions waned. What were they made of anyway? Hearsay, rumor, the stories of drunks and crazy people, and the wacko speeches of Martin Petersen himself.

At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, it all changed again. Lily heard Professor Vegan’s voice rising above the hum of conversation in the cafe and turned her head to listen. He came in once a month with three other retired professors. The four men called themselves “The Over-the-Hill Gang.” They ate big breakfasts, and once their stomachs were full, they would launch into Kierkegaard. Lily had been told that they’d been chipping away at the philosopher for three years, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, as patient and relentless as the day is long. This year there had been only two books, and they had the grimmest titles Lily had ever seen: Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. But the men joked and ribbed each other, and every once in a while Professor Schwandt laughed until he cried. It was true that weather, sports and politics got mixed in with Kierkegaard from time to time, but the men’s doggedness impressed Lily — and they tipped well. “The creature had wings,” Professor Vegan was saying, and Lily moved toward the table of professors with the coffeepot.

“If Gladys had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. Gladys, as far as I can tell, is very nearly a Holy Roller — evangelical in the extreme. I can’t remember the name of the sect she belongs to, but they do their fair share of trembling and moaning. Marit, on the other hand, is a hard-headed woman if there ever was one, and I would never doubt her powers of observation. She saw the darn thing, too, in broad daylight, only yards from the house.”

Lily poured Professor Hong coffee even though his cup was nearly full and watched Professor Vegan. He had an ironic smile on his face and lowered his voice for effect. “It came walking along the creek bed from the north very quietly — a translucent being in white with a gigantic pair of wings.” He gulped his coffee and watched the faces of his three colleagues. “And”—he paused—“there’s the matter of the suitcase. After all, who would invent that detail? A supernatural being trudging along with its belongings in a bag.”

Lily looked intently into the coffee and clenched her teeth.

“Send a memo to the religion department,” said Professor Nichols.

“A seraph,” said Professor Hong, “on the loose in Webster.”

The men laughed.

Professor Schwandt shook his head. “It’s the suitcase that bothers me. An angel with luggage. Smells of heresy, doesn’t it?”

Professor Nichols smiled. “Yes, I’ve always assumed that divine messengers travel light.”

“I wonder what it was, really.” Lily interrupted them. “Who it was.”

Professor Vegan shook his head and looked at Lily. “Beats me, but when I came home, both Marit and Gladys were pretty shaken. Whatever they saw, it must have looked not just improbable, but impossible.”

Lily poured more coffee all around and left the table. She watched Frances Herda pat Lynn Strom’s shoulder and say loudly, “Keith Ellingboe just isn’t worth it. If you want my opinion, he’s been acting like a horse’s ass for three weeks.” Lynn picked up her orange juice glass and sniffed into it. Wings, Lily thought, and a suitcase. Frances turned her head, and the tiny gold earring in her right ear gleamed for a second in the light from the window. She moved again, and the glint disappeared. Lily carried the coffeepot toward the door. She wanted to go back and ask Professor Vegan whether his wife had mentioned the size or weight of the suitcase and whether she had thought the “thing” was a man or a woman. Lily had met Marit Vegan. Her oldest daughter, Iris, used to baby-sit for her, and the whole family had always struck Lily as indomitably sane. The Vegan house lay on the land above the creek, only a quarter of a mile from the Bodlers’ on the other side of the highway, and it was close to the caves. Suddenly, she wondered what she had done with Martin’s map. She walked past Bert and stood near the door. The light outside was so bright she couldn’t look into it. She squinted toward the street. They saw something, all right, she thought. The suitcase Lily had found in the garage had disappeared into thin air. A man carrying an injured woman, she said to herself, near the city limits. Warm liquid ran onto Lily’s foot. She opened her eyes and saw that the coffeepot had tipped in her slack wrist and that coffee was running onto her white sneaker.

Behind her she heard Vince yelling, “Watch the pot!” She turned around to look at him and set the coffee near the cash register. “You okay?” he said. Lily didn’t answer him. She was thinking. I can’t just let this go. Somebody has got to do something. I can’t stay here and pretend nothing’s happening. Lily wiped her shoe with a napkin and faced Division Street again. The bright sunshine was hard to look at. Lily reached for the screen door and opened it. I’m going now, she thought. It can’t wait. She walked out into the street, turned right and then right again up the alley to her bicycle.

Lily rode past the Ideal Cafe and saw Vince standing in the doorway in his white apron. He waved a spatula at her and roared, “Where do you think you’re going! Get back here! If you don’t get your ass back here in two seconds, you’re fired!”

She didn’t pay any attention to him. Vince was standing in another dimension, like a person in a movie she could watch without him affecting her directly. He had fired her twice before, but both times he had rehired her within twenty minutes, and both times it had been his fault for being such a hothead. Now she was the one who had walked out on him, and it seemed only fair that he should fire her. There was something oddly pleasant about the uproar she had created: the fat man screaming in the doorway, the startled faces in the cafe. It had been so easy, had taken only a couple of seconds to turn the Ideal Cafe upside down. Lily knew where she was going. She was looking for someone — a nameless girl hidden at Martin’s or at the Bodlers’, in the woods or in the caves. Whoever she was, she must look something like both Lily and Dolores. Whoever she was, Lily felt she had to find her. Just beyond the Webster city limits, Lily imagined the suitcase lying abandoned in the woods, and she imagined her fingers on the lid pulling it open a couple of inches, and then in the fantasy she slammed down the lid to shut out the horrible contents.