Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“Lily.” Mabel sang the name.

Lily looked at Mabel.

“You’re lost in thought.”

“Sorry.”

Mabel brushed the sleeve of her black tunic. Expensive, Lily thought. She probably bought it in one of those stores in Minneapolis where they look you up and down before they let you in the door. I wonder where she got her money. Professors don’t make that much.

Mabel poured Lily a cup of tea, her hands trembling as she held the pot in the air. The woman always looked cold. But the room was warm, and Lily had gotten used to Mabel’s tremors and quakes and her constantly moving hands. She wasn’t sick. She was nervous, so tightly strung that Lily half expected to hear the woman’s body hum from the strain. Lily held the translucent teacup and imagined its thin sides breaking in her hand.

A copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lay on Mabel’s lap, and she drummed it with her fingers. Then she leaned forward, stared at Lily and said abruptly, “I’ve always liked the idea of changelings.”

Lily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a question, so she said, “Why?”

“Because the older I get, the more certain I am that you can’t know who’s who or what’s what.” Lily examined the layer of pale powder coating Mabel’s face. It ended at her chin. “You never get down to the bottom of it. Never.”

Lily didn’t ask why again, although she wasn’t sure she agreed with this. The “changeling” in the play didn’t have a goblin double or anything like that. She turned her head toward Mabel’s bookshelves and noticed a small drawing propped up between two of the volumes. Japanese, she thought. When she looked at it more closely, she saw with a start that it was a picture of a man with his penis halfway inside a woman. The penis was finely detailed and was unusually large, as were the woman’s genitals. Lily looked away. How could Mabel have such a thing out in the open for people to see? An old lady like her? Lily stared at her knees. The picture reminded her of one of those distorted sexual dreams, and its image lingered: the woman resting on her side with her legs open, her head thrown back, and the man leaning over her, their loose robes falling from their bodies. In spite of herself, the Japanese lovers aroused her, and Lily squeezed her thighs together in the chair.

“I’ll cue you,” Mabel was saying.

Lily looked up. “Fine,” she said. The window lit Mabel from behind and whitened the wisps of gray hair on her head. She moved, and the halo disappeared.

“How old are you, Mabel?” Lily tried to make her voice sound quiet and polite.

Mabel laughed. “Too old to be coy. I’m seventy-eight. I’ll be seventy-nine in February.” She smoothed back a strand of hair. “There’s fifty-nine years between us.” She didn’t calculate. She had the number ready.

Lily sneaked another look at the drawing. “You don’t act that old, you know.”

Mabel stood up. “Well, my inside never caught up with my outside.” She took a deep breath. “Now, stand up. Your voice is important, but so is your body. We have to find Hermia’s posture, her walk, her physical expression.”

They worked together that afternoon for two hours almost without pause, but it took just minutes for Lily to sense that Hermia would never be the same. It wasn’t only that Mabel knew the play well and could quote long passages from it by heart or that she could explain words and phrases that Lily had never made sense of before, it was that Mabel’s voice changed when she spoke Hermia’s lines. She didn’t sound young exactly, but she didn’t sound like herself either, and Lily could almost feel the presence of a third person in the room. At one point, she stopped Mabel and said, “Did you act?” And Mabel answered, “My whole life.” And then, before Lily could question her further, the woman had continued, “Remember this,” she said. “Hermia is no more and no less than the words on the page. To speak them is to be her. It’s that simple. How good you are, however, depends on your ability to embody the language. And that”—Mabel shook a finger at Lily—“is spiritual.”

Until then, Hermia’s verse had been as remote to Lily as a song in another language she could memorize but not understand. But that afternoon, she discovered that by watching Mabel closely, by adopting her tone and posture, she felt more when she spoke the lines. In fact, it seemed to Lily that the emotion came from Mabel’s voice and gestures rather than from inside herself, and this made her a little uneasy. Mabel barked orders at Lily, corrected and scolded, and then, all at once, Lily discovered that she meant what she was saying. She meant it as much as she meant anything. It was as if the old woman had cast a spell over her, a magic of comprehension and belief. A couple of times she burst out laughing for no reason and had to start a scene over again. And once, after Lily gave a particularly fiery speech to Mabel’s Helena, the old woman hugged her, and Lily hugged her back. They had never embraced before. Under the black cloth of Mabel’s tunic, Lily felt the woman’s sharp little bones. She’s just a stick, Lily thought, no flesh at all.

That night at rehearsal, Mrs. Wright told Lily that she had made a “major breakthrough.”

* * *

Riding home on her bicycle from the Arts Guild, Lily looked up at the moon in the darkening sky. Clouds as thin as smoke passed over its white surface, and below it she could see the silhouette of the grain elevator rising above the squat buildings of the town. Her bike jolted over the railroad tracks, and then, crossing the bridge, she breathed in the smell of the Cannon River — carp and rust and underwater weeds. She turned down Division Street, glanced up at Edward Shapiro’s window in the Stuart Hotel, saw that his lights were on and felt a surge of hope.

Inside her apartment, Lily walked to the window without turning on her light. Edward Shapiro was talking on the telephone. He sat in a chair with his legs apart and was jiggling his right knee as he talked. Then he stood up and paced the floor with the receiver clamped between his raised shoulder and chin. Most of the other windows in the hotel were dark or covered. A television flickered beneath a half-drawn shade in a window on the first floor, and the lobby glowed behind the glass door. Ida, who no doubt sat behind the desk, was invisible. Lily looked up at Shapiro and saw him stare at the receiver for an instant before he put it down in disbelief or resignation — Lily didn’t know which. Then she remembered Hank and unplugged her phone. When she turned around, she saw the paper bag lying on the floor, reached for it and took out the shoes. She looked down at the two pale forms in her hands and asked herself why she had taken them. In the garage she had believed that these shoes had belonged to Helen Bodler. In her room, this idea seemed far-fetched. Why would she want a dead woman’s shoes, want them enough to steal them? She hadn’t left the money and that made it stealing, didn’t it? “I’m a thief,” Lily said aloud. Then she kicked off her sneakers and put on the shoes.

When she stood up, they hurt. I’m bad, she thought, and at that same moment, she knew what she was going to do. Lily turned on every light in her apartment and yanked open her window so violently that she saw Shapiro turn his head and look toward her. Good, she thought. Good. He walked toward his window and leaned out. Mabel was typing urgently next door. Lily heard the woman pause, then beat the keys again. Lily walked straight to the window and faced Shapiro. She reached for the band that held her ponytail, undid it and shook her hair onto her back. She looked straight at him, although his face was hidden in shadow, and unbuttoned her blouse slowly. Then she threw it on the floor, ran her fingers over her naked shoulder and bit her bottom lip hard, rolling the flesh inward. This is wonderful, she said to herself, and unbuttoned her cutoff jeans. She turned to one side and wriggled out of the tight shorts. She could feel the stiff material slide down her buttocks, and that sensation, along with the fact that she knew he was looking at her, prompted an image of herself as someone else — a party girl crashing a strip show, a girl who never said die and who could bump and grind with the best of them. She had to hold on to her underpants to keep them from gliding down with the shorts, and she did this as gracefully as she possibly could. Then she hurled the cutoffs in the direction of her blouse, tossed her head and smiled. She hoped he could see the smile. All she could make out of Shapiro now was his silhouette — the line of his head and shoulders in the window. Lily unhooked her bra. She was glad she had worn the one with a front clasp so she didn’t have to struggle with the back. She let it fall down her arms and then crossed her hands over her breasts and rolled her shoulders. These were borrowed gestures, but that was part of the pleasure. For an instant she thought about Marilyn, took the bra in one hand and flung it across the room. The bra sailed higher and farther than she had intended. On its way down, it caught the TV’s On/Off button, and there it remained, hanging several inches off the floor. Lily stared at the bra. It was gray. I’ve got to go to the Laundromat, she thought, and looked down at her breasts, then at her feet. Red marks had formed where the laces rubbed into her skin. She felt naked. For an instant she considered making a dash for the bed and rolling herself in the blanket, but instead she covered her breasts again. Oh my God, she thought. Her heart was beating fast now, and she took a long breath before she took off her underpants. You can’t stop now. It would look really dumb, like you lost your nerve. But the sight of her pubic hair sobered her even more — a triangle of dark hair, more poignant than erotic. Lily didn’t touch the shoes, even though they were pinching her toes like vises. Standing at her window wearing nothing but the shoes, Lily looked across the street at Edward Shapiro. He left the window. For a moment she stared at the back of his canvas, at the chair and the black telephone, and she almost cried. But she held back the tears, walked to the window, and after wrapping herself in the curtain, sat down on the sill. She could smell lilacs in the air. The scent probably came from the bushes outside the library at the end of the block. Their last days, she thought. And that was when Lily heard the music. A man started singing in a language Lily didn’t know, and after a short time a woman answered him. Edward Shapiro came back to the window, and Lily looked at him and listened to the man and woman singing together. She leaned back against the window frame. The crackled paint scraped against her shoulder bone, and she adjusted the curtain to protect her skin. It was a duet from an opera. That much she knew, but it was much simpler than she had imagined that kind of music could be. She thought it was the prettiest song she had ever heard, and she wanted it to go on and on because she knew it was his way of talking to her without talking to her, and she didn’t feel like crying anymore. Listening to the voices of those two people, she imagined that the real adventure of her life was beginning now, that after this, anything could happen, anything at all. When the song ended, the man left the window to turn off the record and returned for a second time. Lily looked into his dark face. They could have called to each other or waved, but they didn’t. They continued to look at each other for what seemed like a long time, but maybe it wasn’t. Lily heard the sound of a car up the street, the wind in the tree branches at the end of the block, and then running footsteps in the alley behind the Stuart Hotel. She looked toward the sound, but saw nobody, and then the footsteps stopped. She realized that Mabel wasn’t typing anymore either. Lily took a last look at Edward Shapiro, and then she stood on tiptoe in the painful shoes and slowly closed the curtains.