The Uses of Enchantment (23 page)

She opened the door—her whole body was required to overcome the hinges’s stiffness—and threw herself into the passenger seat. Her hip bone struck the gearshift, a dull and unimportant pain, not equal to her overall numbness.

The man sat in the driver’s seat, smoking.

Shut the door, he said.

She shut the door. She pressed her hands, curled in her sleeves, against the heater vents on either side of the glove box. Her nose ran profusely. She blotted it with her shoulder.

The man smoked, said nothing.

You’re smoking again, the girl said, her heart beyond wild.
Show him nothing
.

The man nodded. Apparently, he said.

Amazing, the girl thought. As though nothing had happened.
The cold the fear the end
. But she could beat him at this game of pretending nothing had happened.

Apparently, the girl said, struggling to keep the rattle from her voice. You like that word.

Do I? the man said.

You use it a lot.

Huh, the man said.

I guess because you don’t agree with a statement even if all facts point in that direction.

It’s the privilege of an amnesiac, he said.

You can’t be an amnesiac about the present, girl said.

No? the man said. Is there a rule about when a person can start forgetting?

You know what I mean, the girl said.

He held up a hand in a gesture of apology, or a call for a truce, or a warning to back off.

This made the girl angry. She had almost died, for fuck’s sake, she wanted to yell.

She did not yell.

I thought you didn’t have any cigarettes, the girl said, recalling their interaction—what was it, two years ago? ten?—while parked in front of his brownstone.

I lied, the man said. An ex-smoker always has cigarettes. For those situations that are beyond him.

Can I have one? the girl asked.

The man jutted his chin toward the dash. He made no move to knock a cigarette from the pack. He made no move to light it with his blue plastic lighter.

She removed her frozen hands from her sleeves. Her toes and fingers were burning back to life and all sensations were amplified. Flicking the lighter felt equivalent to running her thumb pad over a serrated knife blade.

For those situations that are beyond me, the man repeated. I am beyond.

Really, the girl said.

I am beyond beyond, he said.

Is that why you disappeared?

I
disappeared, he said.

You disappeared, she said.

I was behind that boulder, the man said, gesturing with his cigarette to a lumpy granite flank emerging from between two large trunks. I was relieving myself.

For a long time, the girl said.

What?

The car was cold. I could see my breath. You didn’t just leave to “relieve yourself.”

I was thinking, the man said.

You turned off the car and the heat, the girl said.

I took the keys, he admitted. I didn’t mean to leave you without heat. I only meant to leave you without keys.

You thought I would steal your car, the girl said.

The man didn’t answer. Then he said: Do you know what’s at the end of this road?

Not a rainbow, the girl said caustically.

At the end of this road is a sixty-foot drop-off. It comes without warning. If you were driving and you didn’t know any better, you’d drive right over the edge.

The girl must have appeared skeptical, because the man put the Mercedes in drive and continued down the two-rut road, the ice and snow sawing at the undercarriage. He slowed around a turn. The woods evaporated.

The man put the Mercedes in park.

A quarry, the man said. Filled with water now, and eels apparently. I mean, filled with eels without question if you believe what people tell you. It’s a swimming hole in the summer. When I was married to my ex-wife, she invited a couple to our ski house. The couple’s marriage was in bad straits. The wife was a drinker. The husband was indifferent.

Indifferent to her drinking?

Indifferent to her period, the man said. The wife got drunk, her husband remained indifferent, and the two of them had a fight over dinner. The woman began to cry and the man yawned, so the woman drove off in their car. We didn’t think she’d end up on this road.

She drove into the quarry, the girl said, thinking
the cold the fear the end
.

Some ice fishermen called the police to report the hole in the ice, right around the time the man learned from his neighbor in Boston that his wife hadn’t driven home as he’d suspected she had. The rescue team found the car but it was empty. They had to wait until spring when they could send more divers.

How did they know she was dead? the girl asked. I mean, how did they know for sure that she was in the quarry?

They didn’t, the man said. The indifferent husband, who was a little bit less indifferent after this, received an unsigned postcard from a cruise ship six weeks after her car was found. Her handwriting, or so he thought. He told everyone she was having an affair, that she’d left him for another man. Five months later they found her body in the quarry.

I bet he felt like a dick, the girl said.

I don’t know how he felt, the man said. He was my wife’s friend, apparently.

Apparently, the girl said.

Sorry, the man said.

He carefully turned the car around, making sure to leave plenty of clearance between the car and the edge of the quarry. The girl was reminded of her initial impression of him—he was a cautious caretaker of a man.

So, he said. Where did you go?

Me? she said. I was following you.

But I was behind that boulder.

They had reached the place where they’d previously been parked.

I was following the tracks, the girl said.

Tracks, the man said. There were no tracks.

They must have been a hunter’s tracks, the girl said.

The man didn’t want to disagree with her, she could tell. He was beyond beyond.

There was only one set of tracks, he said firmly. Your tracks.

And you didn’t follow them, the girl said.

The man nodded.

Yes you didn’t follow them or yes you followed them.

Yes I didn’t follow them.

Huh, the girl said.

I knew you’d come back, he said.

But what if I had been kidnapped? she asked. By the hunter?

What hunter? he said.

Or whoever it was. The tracks. I was following somebody’s tracks.

The man stopped the car. He walked over to the place in the woods where she’d emerged.

He returned to the car.

See for yourself, he said.

The girl didn’t want to get out of the car; she was warm now, and vulnerable anew to a chill.

I believe you, she said.

See for yourself, he said.

I don’t need to see for myself.

Yes, he said. You do. Later I don’t want you to say
apparently
.

Apparently?

Apparently there was only one set of tracks. That is what you will say.

Reluctantly, the girl exited the car. The footprints had softened in the wind to tiny bluish depressions. One set headed into the woods. One set returned. She felt dizzy, her body in a state of sleepless, hungry shock. The sight of the single footprints—clearly her own, and only her own—disoriented her, made her feel like the man was playing games with her, or possibly that she was playing games with herself. Yes, like the man and his amnesia, she was fracturing off from some core person, and the two of them were proceeding forward in the same body with very different designs on the world.

See, the man said. Did you see.

The girl grabbed another cigarette from the dash with her shaking fingers.

Apparently, she said, smiling, trying to make light of it all. Apparently you were right.

Mary Chapter

M
ary couldn’t believe, all these years later, that the same mask poster hung on the wall in Roz’s waiting room, that she had the same wicker furniture with the same throw pillows, that she even had the same fake ficus, its green leaves now faded to the generic paraffin hue of old plastic. She’d entered a minutely preserved time capsule, maintained in pristine condition like her own bedroom. Or maybe she had, via some trick fold in the universe, returned to her teenage self, the past fourteen years had been nothing but a fantasy she’d pursued past the usual boundary, in her usual way, yet another fantasy brought too finely to life that had cycled back to haunt her.

She eyed the pile of magazines on the coffee table, heart tumbling beneath her coat. What if she picked up the magazines and they, too, dated back to the mid-eighties? What if? All roads led back to this waiting room—no matter what believable construct she’d fashioned, her adult self would eventually become curious about its own unresolved past. It would wonder about the fates of this or that person. It would land her in front of the mask poster and it would all begin again.

So wound up was she that she didn’t hear the office door open. The polite cough made her jump.

Roz—a discernibly aged, statelier Roz—stared at her from behind a pair of purple plastic glasses.

Thank god thank fucking god
.

“Is this a good time?” Mary said.

“For you, it’s always a good time,” Roz said.

Like her waiting room, Mary reflected wryly, Roz hadn’t changed one bit; she still had the capacity to make displays of emotional capaciousness seem belittling in the extreme.

Roz gestured Mary into her office, which, Mary noted as she shed her coat,
had
changed. The room was painted a pale violet color that she registered as new, even while she couldn’t remember the wall color it replaced. Roz’s couch had been reupholstered, the orange corduroy traded in for a dark red velour. Roz herself appeared to have been reupholstered, her hemp layers sloughed away, leaving her clad in a navy dress with lapels and double-breasted gold buttons made of a shiny wool-ish material. Roz had traded in her earth-mother hippie-academic look for a corporate-librarian look.
The touring
, Mary imagined Roz explaining.
Need to travel light. Permanent press so much easier when you’re on the road.

Roz remained at her desk, writing. “Just let me finish these notes,” she said to the desk, over which hung her framed book-jacket covers, her diplomas, and a photo of her shaking hands with a tall Indian woman in a sari. A long fish tank gurgled and spat like somebody drowning in the corner. Three fat brown fish lazed at the bottom, mulish faces pointed outward.

“So,” Roz said, swiveling her chair toward Mary. “No surprise to see you.”

“Is it not?” Mary asked. She smiled woodenly. She tried to keep her tone civil, but found herself squeezed by a familiar mood vise. Roz was like family in that way; Mary’s brain experienced the equivalent of an evolutionary setback when it encountered her, regressing to a reptilian thuggishness.

“I knew you’d be here. The question was when.”

“That’s why you’re the doctor,” Mary said jokingly.
I’m not your doctor
, Mary imagined her saying. Say that, Mary thought, and I will punch you dead center in the suit dress.

Roz removed her reading glasses and propped them on her knee, making a little face of it. Age had softened Roz; her skin had a dull windburned appearance, it had not so much wrinkled in the intervening years as lost its structural integrity like an overripe fruit. It slumped, dragging her mouth wider, her eyes bigger. Her wild hair had whitened around her forehead; she looked blizzarded, Roz did. A woman just in from a blizzard. The effect was appealing. Had Roz always been pretty? Mary wondered. Had she despised the woman too much to notice? Maybe. Maybe not. She’d found, as she’d begun to age herself, that she was more prone to locate in decimated faces some shred of former prettiness made more apparent by the sags and the wrinkling, by these tricks of distortion.

“I’d hoped, of course, that you’d come to me before your mother died.”

“I almost went to hear you read once,” Mary offered. “In Oregon. But the whole point of my life out there is—”

“Is that it isn’t your life here.”

“Correct,” Mary said.

“What an honest statement,” Roz said.

“Actually, you said it,” Mary said.

“Too bad you couldn’t have found it in yourself to be honest with me before your mother died. Now your visit to me appears self-serving.”

“I thought that’s why people came to therapy,” Mary said.

“I know that’s what
you
think,” Roz said.

Mary gripped her thighs.

“I’d like to point out,” Mary began cautiously.
I’d like to point out that you’ve gone zero to bitch in less than three minutes
. But no. She retooled her approach, flexed her reverted-to-lizard brain.

“However much my behavior might be an ongoing disappointment to you, I think, under the current circumstances, I deserve to be cut a little slack.”

Roz’s expression shifted from stony to stock sympathetic. Her face was like those old View-Masters Mary and her sisters used to fight over; a flick of a lever and you’ve rotated from the Grand Canyon to the Bering Strait, from Victoria Falls to the bat caves of Zulu National Park.

“I am sorry about your mother,” Roz said.

“Thank you,” Mary said. “It’s been harder than I expected.”

“You expected it to be easy?”

“I expected it to seem inevitable,” Mary said. “She’d been sick.”

“Not for long,” Roz said. “Certainly not long enough for it to seem inevitable to her.”

Mary’s gut shifted queasily. With guilt, yes, but also with resentful bewilderment. That this woman should know more about how her mother felt before she died was, well,
ironic
in the least bitter of terms.

“Your mother became a different woman,” Roz said. “She changed.”

“I suppose you take credit for that,” Mary said.

Roz chuckled. She swiveled back and forth in her chair.

“You’re so distrusting,” she said.