Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“You should try out for Eliza Doolittle.”

Lily eyed Mabel but said nothing. The woman seemed to age a little every day: her wrinkles looked deeper, her face more skeletal. She even seemed to have less hair.

* * *

The morning following that conversation, Ed walked into the cafe. Mike Fox paused from his Kents. Pete Lund looked up from his coffee, and Vince and Boomer stood watching behind the kitchen door. But Lily hadn’t known he was there until she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around and saw Ed standing beside the cash register. She remembered him with a sudden, violent rush of familiarity. He looked the same. But Lily had an urge to scream, the way people do in movies when they think someone is dead and it turns out they’re alive.

He started talking to her in a low voice and tried to take her hand, but she held it back from him.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know until just now when I ran into Stanley and he told me what happened. You should have called me, Lily. You should have written me. I would have dropped everything and come…”

It’s too much for me, she thought. Seeing him now. I’ll crack. What does he want?

Lily heard Vince clearing his throat behind her. She felt her face moving uncontrollably. She opened her mouth and shut it. She blinked and felt a gob of mucus in her throat.

Then Vince was behind the counter, Vince, who had been unnaturally nice to her since Martin’s death. He was waving an accusatory finger at Ed, and Lily heard him say that maybe Ed should have bothered to check in with her, that she’d been through hell, and where the hell had he been all that time? Lily backed away from both of them until Vince threatened to “deck” Ed. She staggered forward and stood between them, looking from one to the other. “Stop it,” she said, and as she looked up into Ed’s face, she asked herself who he was, this man who had come and gone and then come back again, and why he thought he could pop in and out of her life like a jack-in-the-box. I’m really mad at you, she thought all of a sudden. Lily didn’t look Ed in the face. “You never called me,” she said. “You never called me once.” She clenched her fists at her sides and grit her teeth. It seemed to her that if she strained every muscle in her body, she could hold herself together. “I’ll come and talk to you after my shift,” she whispered, addressing Ed’s hands.

Vince, who had stepped back several feet, said to Lily that he’d get Bert to cover for her if she wanted, but Lily turned to him and in the calm, loud voice she had used for Hermia told him that she had promised she would never walk out on him again, and by God she was going to stick to it.

Vince, looking very red in the face, retreated, and after he had disappeared into the kitchen, Lily heard Boomer give a long, loud whistle.

* * *

Before she walked across the street to the Stuart Hotel, Lily went into the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. The face she saw was younger, prettier and paler than she remembered, and she was glad she had looked at herself, because she wanted to know what Ed was going to see.

At Ed’s, Lily saw a suitcase lying open on the floor, and she recognized his T-shirts and jeans spilling out of it. She had worn some of those clothes. The room smelled of paint, smoke and other nameless but familiar things, and when she sat down in the canvas chair, Lily felt afraid of those smells. They had come to mean Ed’s body and sex with him in the little iron bed, and she wondered if she would dare to let him touch her again.

Ed sat across from her, but Lily found it hard to look at him, so she studied her hands.

“Stanley didn’t say it in so many words,” Ed said. “But he basically told me I’d been a shit when I ran into him downstairs. He stood there shaking his head and avoiding my eyes. ‘You should have been in touch with that girl.’ He said that several times. I’m sorry, Lily. I’m terribly sorry…”

“Why did you come back?” she said.

“Look at me, Lily,”

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay,” he said. “Don’t look at me. What you’ve been through is terrible. I wish I had known…”

“Why did you come back?”

“It’s over with Elizabeth. She didn’t really want me. She found out about you, and that’s when she started pushing me to try again, but it didn’t take me long to realize that nothing had changed. It felt like a sham.”

Lily looked at the painting of Mabel, which was still standing in the center of the room with its empty story boxes, and asked herself why Elizabeth seemed so unimportant now. The word “sham” seemed to leave a trace in her ear. She repeated it aloud—“Sham.”

“I’m sorry.”

She knew he was. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. It wasn’t an apology. It was more like a comment on the world in general, the way things happen or don’t happen.

Ed seemed to understand this, because he didn’t say anything. She looked at him and noticed that although his body remained still, his face looked grim and set. He stood up, walked to the suitcase, and after riffling through some of the clothes, pulled out a sketchbook and brought it to her. “I drew Martin,” he said. “I started drawing him after he left that day, and I’ve been doing sketches for a while. I want you to have them. You can do whatever you want with them — burn them, throw them away. I don’t care.”

She could hear the decision in his voice — the stubborn will that she remembered. He opened the book and handed it to her.

Lily looked down at Martin. There was no background, no floor, no place in which he was standing in the picture. His body seemed to float on the page, and in his right hand he was holding a cowboy hat. He looked very young — like a boy. She closed her eyes. “You wanted to paint him,” she said, understanding all at once what the sketches meant. “He was going to be the fifth one.” She was whispering to keep away the tears.

“I thought about it,” Ed said. “But I had decided not to. That’s the truth.” Lily noticed that Ed was jiggling his knee.

“Martin was afraid you were going to paint me, but you wanted to paint him. It’s funny.” Lily made a sound, half laugh, half sob, and handed the sketchbook back to Ed. “He … he…” She put her hand over her mouth so Ed wouldn’t see her lips trembling.

He leaned forward. “I love you,” he said. “I’m not sure that makes any difference now, but I want us to be together.”

Lily sat back in the chair and waved him off. After he had pulled away from her, she met his eyes but didn’t answer him. What are you saying? she said to herself. What do you mean? And then as she continued looking at him, she thought, I used to watch you early in the morning before the sun came up. I used to go to the window just to look at you, because I wanted to see you, no, because I had to see you. Why? she thought. Aren’t you saying now what I dreamed you would say to me from the very beginning? It’s strange, Lily thought. Everything is strange in the world. And she looked toward the window and without knowing why she remembered Oberon’s speech near the end of the play: “I then did ask of her her changeling child; / Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent / To bear him to my bower in fairyland. / And now I have the boy, / I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” And Lily felt her chin begin to shake, then her neck and shoulders. She didn’t try to stop the shuddering. It seemed all right now, like a seizure that had been a long time in coming. It wasn’t just that Ed was telling her that he wanted her or that she realized how terribly she had missed him. It was also that Vince had been ready to punch him and that Stanley had yelled at him, and it was the afternoon light coming through the window, and the happiness in Mabel’s face on the painting. It was her own brown legs in Ed’s chair and the warm tears falling on them. And it must have been Martin, too.