Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“Would it be okay if I sat in on rehearsal tonight?” Mabel said. “I would like to watch anyway, but perhaps if I saw him…” She didn’t finish.

“I think that’s a good idea.” Lily needed an ally, and she didn’t want to face Martin alone. “He acts like he’s got something on me,” she continued, “like a blackmailer or something.” Lily stopped talking. It was you, she said to herself and stared at the floor. The possibility, mad as it was, that she might have lost time and consciousness, that she might have remembered wrong or forgotten a crucial event played like a little tune in the back of her mind. It wasn’t that she accepted what Martin had said as the truth, but she acknowledged uncertainty for the first time, and she felt it as an annoying melody of doubt, like a stupid chorus from a television commercial or pop song that you hum almost without knowing it, and every time you try to get it out of your head, you can’t.

* * *

Martin’s cuts must have been healing well, because he used the hand freely both onstage and off-. Mabel sat in a folding chair in the second row throughout, and Lily worried that there was nothing for the woman to see — in Martin, at least. Watching him herself, Lily saw an unobtrusive, cooperative young man who made a good Cobweb. He stared a little too much and blinked too little, but so what? Everybody was used to that. Lily began to wish he would do or say something to reveal himself. She hoped he would send her another note she could show to Mabel or that he would make a scene in front of the cast. While she was pretending to sleep at the rear of the stage and had opened her right eye just enough to see Martin patting Bottom’s Ass head, Lily heard Mabel laugh loudly, and she daydreamed that Martin suddenly broke out of his role as Cobweb, turned to the audience and confessed. She didn’t invent the exact content of the confession, but in the fantasy he shocked the audience. She saw him red-faced and stuttering, his arms flailing. By the time the fairies left the stage, the story had progressed to a point where the cast had jumped him and was hauling him off to the police station. After that, Lily decided to push her luck.

She took her chance once rehearsal ended and Martin walked past her carrying three costumes over his arm. He was headed for the stairs, and despite the fact that they were not alone — Jim, Denise and Oren were talking just beyond the doors — Lily moved close to Martin and said in a strained but quiet voice, “I know what you’ve done.”

Martin stopped and faced her. He stared, but his face didn’t move.

“I’m telling you I know,” she repeated.

Martin nodded at her but didn’t speak.

Behind Martin, she saw Mabel. Her eyes met Lily’s, and in that instant Lily understood what she had done. She wasn’t only lying. She was pretending to know what she didn’t know, and it occurred to her that this ruse could put her in jeopardy. Martin appeared to be looking through her as he prepared to speak. His mouth moved, and his bandaged hand clutched at the blue material of the costumes. He motioned with his head for her to step aside with him and began to talk, stuttering badly over the first syllable, but the words were clear enough, and after hearing them Lily felt as if she had been kicked hard in the stomach: “So you’ve been to the cave and seen her.” He paused. “I mean, it. ” Martin moved his head to one side. “D-d-did you expect me to deny it?” Then he looked down at his shoes. “You didn’t move her, did you?”

Lily shook her head, but not in response to Martin’s question. She couldn’t accept what she had heard. Has he said what I think he’s said? Martin’s words had come and gone so quickly, and nobody else seemed to have heard them. Denise was giggling into Jim’s face, and Lily saw Martin turn and walk down the stairs with the costumes as Mrs. Wright announced dress rehearsal for Thursday. “We’re close, people, very close. You have two days of rest, so rest well and get ready for a big weekend. There’ll be no stopping Thursday. If you make mistakes, it’s like a real performance, just make the best of it.”

Mrs. Wright’s voice sounded remote. Lily didn’t move. She heard chatter and footsteps and then someone hitting the triangle that was used when the fairies came onstage.

It was Mabel who decided to follow Martin. Lily reported the conversation in a voice she barely recognized as her own. She didn’t know how she managed to repeat those words at all, but she did, and then she wondered if she fully believed them. The two women sat together in Mabel’s old Saab and waited for Martin to walk through the doors, which he did in a matter of minutes. They watched him say good-bye to Mrs. Baker and saw the woman pat his shoulder affectionately. He walked slowly to his truck with his head down, his wrapped hand looking very pale in the darkness. He climbed into the cab of his truck and drove away. Mabel allowed the truck to move ahead of them for a block and then pulled the Saab onto the avenue and began to follow Martin out of town.

“He never touched Bottom or anyone else onstage,” Mabel said.

Lily couldn’t understand how Mabel could talk about the play now, but she didn’t stop her.

“Have you noticed that?” Mabel’s voice was a little hoarse. “He clearly made a conscious decision to play it that way, and it’s very clever, because his gestures look like magic. He would get close, but there was never any real contact. His movements made me think of a mime.” Mabel paused. “It was as if he were tracing the lines of things in his own invisible world, as if he had forgotten the boundaries of real people and real things. I suppose the actor who plays Bottom doesn’t even know, because he’s wearing that head.”

Lily folded her hands and pressed them into her lap. She was thinking of the kiss she gave Martin when he left the stage the first day he rehearsed and the way his face had looked. The moon was almost full, and it seemed to sail along with them as they drove two cars behind Martin’s truck. Lily remembered the latch on the box that Martin had drawn on his map. It was a handle, wasn’t it? Too large for a chest. It wasn’t a chest. Martin’s left-turn signal blinked red ahead of them, and the truck veered onto Old Dutch Road. Mabel slowed the car and waited for the pickup to disappear behind the hill about a hundred yards ahead and turned. When the Saab arrived at the crest of the hill, Lily looked down and saw no lights and no truck.

“Where did he go?” Lily could smell the creek through her open window and manure and hay from the farm across the road. “There it is.” The truck was parked on a slant — two wheels in the grass, two on the narrow shoulder. “We’ll park on the other side,” Lily said. “The old Dundas Road is straight ahead. It’s all grown over now, or mostly, but you can park there. My house, my old house is right up the road, see, around that bend and past the fire-call sign.” Lily took a breath. “I know every rock, bush and stump around here.”

Mabel followed Lily’s instructions and parked the car on the old Dundas Road. When the motor stilled and Mabel had turned off the headlights, Lily said, “What are we doing?”

Resting her hands on the wheel, Mabel said, “I don’t know. Are we near the caves?”

Lily nodded. “It must be where he’s gone. But it’s dark, Mabel. We don’t have a flashlight, and even if we did, the caves aren’t easy to get into.”

“You’re right. Let’s go home. Let the police take care of it. If there’s something to find in that cave, they’ll find it.”

“I want to look in the truck, anyway.”

Mabel was muttering to herself or to Lily, “It’s not uncommon for people who stutter to lose it when, well, when they’re not themselves.” She opened the car door and stepped into the grass. Lily followed, and standing in the night air, she looked across the field lit by the moon.