The Uses of Enchantment (37 page)

Ex-wife didn’t allow smoking in the house, he said. Log cabin. Fire trap. Etc.

You smoked when she went skiing, the girl said. You hid in the attic and opened a window. You lit incense to mask the smell.

The man shrugged crossly. You’d know better than I, he said.

The girl took this as permission to forage for cigarettes. She scurried up the staircase which was carpeted in a rust-brown shag that, when trod upon, released the smell of mildew.

While you’re up there, he called after her, change your clothes.

Because if I’m dressed like an adult, she said from the landing, you can forget you’re molesting a child.

That’s right, the man said, raising his glass. Cheers.

The girl disappeared around the landing.

The man threw back the scotch while standing at the wet bar; the rule of drunks, he knew, dictated that each trip to the bar equaled one drink, even if each trip to the bar equaled three drinks. He refilled his glass, emptied it, refilled it a second time, returned to the couch. The scotch surged and settled around his heart. He was a threatened man.
Threatened man
. A redundancy. He was a man. A redundant man. He felt the need to stoke the fire with the poker, he felt the need to growl in a throaty, mucusy timbre, he felt the need to run upstairs and teach the girl a lesson.
A redundant man with bats in his attic is nobody’s fool
.

Upstairs, he heard the sounds of resistant drawers opening, the swelled wood popping loose with a mortally wounded rodent squeak. He imagined her holding up his wife’s clothing, item by mothbally item, trying to select an outfit he’d like. Or an outfit he’d dislike, an unsettling outfit. Or maybe the girl would opt for something predictable—now that she was fatigued her story lines were starting to fray—and emerge in a silky bathrobe and nothing beneath. She’d forgo the old sheepskin slippers in exchange for something less mutton-footed—his ex-wife’s leather sandals, perhaps, college-era hippie thongs that she wore around the house when the fire was too hot.

But most likely, he thought, the girl, if she wasn’t predictable in one way, would be predictable in another. Instead of mocking him via the overtly sexual, she would mock him through its opposite. She would descend the staircase with pajama pants turbaned on her head, the bunchy terry-cloth robe his wife stole from the Copley Plaza Hotel, an inherited pair of rubber waders, grotesquely interpreting adulthood like the child playing dress up that she was. The man tried to prepare himself for anything, because he was sensing that this evening had turned into a serious game. It had been a game from the second he’d opened his car door for her, but he’d taken it lightly—a larkish opportunity pursued by a bored man. But the evening’s larkish aspect had long ago expired. In the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour rest stop on the highway. As he hurried toward the pay phone and hurt his hip—which, now that he thought about it, hadn’t hurt at all since the parking lot. A side effect of his subterranean panic, which had since left his muscles, shifted to the surface, now made plain by his vibrating hands holding an empty scotch tumbler. Momentarily empty. He refilled it, listened to the no-noise of the girl in his ex-bedroom. Where was she? He shot a worried glance at the stairwell, half expecting her head, or rather her eyes, like those of a bat in the rafters, to be spying on him with unblinking animal disinterest. But no. The landing was empty. He waited for the clinking of his ice cubes to subside. Far above him—in the attic—he heard a hull-like creaking, a furry thump. Looking for cigarettes, he thought. That’s where she was.

He sipped his scotch economically. Usually the ironclad awakeness of insomnia prevented alcohol from affecting him, but tonight was different. Tonight his brain was muzzy, the hyperalert state that made every object appear spotlit and coated in titanium had rescinded its hold on him. This worried him. He worried that, muzzy-brained, he wouldn’t be up to the challenge of beating the girl.
Beating the girl
. As in
defeating
the girl, he said to himself, mentally squaring away any potentially misunderstood double entendres as if he would be called to the stand to testify against himself. Really this was all just a game; to consider it a game made him both less and more anxious. A game was fun. A game could be lost. He started to wonder if perhaps the girl had been put up to this game by his ex-wife. She was the kind of woman who laughed when people vomited into their laps on planes. It wouldn’t be beyond her.

Yes, he decided, his paranoia growing, his ex-wife had put the girl up to this. How else to explain it? What kind of girl would engineer her own kidnapping by a strange man? It didn’t make sense that a girl would do a thing like this. Who would intentionally put herself at risk? Who would purposefully cause such alarm back home? Unless that was the point. She was using him, and in return, she was giving him what she thought any man his age would want. Sex. Yes, she’d figured, any man would want to have sex with her, particularly if it were being forced upon him as a natural part of his past.

Upstairs he heard a door open and close. In the silence that ensued he heard what he interpreted as the sound of her interim nakedness as she shed the field hockey uniform, the sweatpants, the slippers, and re-draped herself with the overtly sexual or patently ridiculous outfit she’d fashioned from his ex-wife’s drawers. Almost as though her nakedness triggered it, a continent of wet snow slid from the roof and landed outside the door with the dense thud of a body striking ground. He started, thinking maybe she’d thrown herself from the window.
Defenestration was all the rage.

He opened the door—it was completely dark now—and stared past the cabin’s glow into the indistinguishable murk beyond. The night was so evenly and inertly chilled that the effect was akin to staring into a refrigerator whose bulb had burned out. In the distance he heard a coyote, and the desperate noise of some clawed animal scratching itself.

Don’t turn around, the girl said.

She was behind him. How had she gotten behind him?

Can I close the door? the man said.

Were you leaving? the girl said.

No, the man said. I was thinking.

You think a lot when you’re about to abandon me, the girl said. What were you thinking about?

I was wondering if you’d thrown yourself from the bedroom window, the man said.

Why would I do that? she said.

I have no idea, the man said. I don’t know you well enough to say.

Do you believe that knowing a person means they can’t still surprise you? the girl asked.

The man could hear the girl breathing. Raspy. Maybe she’d been crying upstairs. Maybe after all those hours in wet clothing she’d caught a cold.

I guess not, the man said.

Would it scare you if you were the person who knew me better than anyone else in the world?

We’re wasting heat, the man said. I’m shutting the door now.

He didn’t wait for her to condone his plan. As he closed the door he heard her scurry, sock-footed, into the kitchen.

Lie on the couch, she said. With your feet facing the door.

Can I freshen my drink? the man asked.

No, the girl said. You’ve had enough to drink tonight.

She’s been spying on me
, the man thought as he extended his body on the couch.

Would it? the girl said. She’d positioned herself now behind his head. In the window opposite, he caught her reflection. Momentary, because she caught it too. She flicked the row of switches by the stairwell, extinguishing the lamps and the upstairs hall light. He shivered on the couch, the outside chill still clinging to his sweater. She looked like no one he recognized.

The house was dark, save for the meager glow of his struggling fire.

Would it what? the man said.

Would it scare you if you knew me better than anyone else in the world, the girl repeated.

Scared, the man said. I don’t know about scared. Maybe sad. Sad for you.

You shouldn’t be sad for me, the girl said. You should be sad for yourself.

I am sad for myself, the man said. Not actively. But atmospherically, I am sad for myself.

Poor you, said the girl.

I’m not asking you to pity me, the man said. I’m being matter-of-fact. If I know you so well, you should know me well, too.

But I do know you, the girl said. Better than you do. You forget.

Right, right, the man said, growing tired of this charade.

Have you ever gone to therapy? the girl asked. I’ve always wanted to go to therapy. Maybe I’ll go when I get home. I’ll probably need it.

The man didn’t ask her why.

Don’t you think I’ll need therapy? the girl prodded.

I say this respectfully, the man said, but it’s my hunch you needed therapy long before you met me.

Could be, the girl said thoughtfully. But I didn’t have a reason to go. Now I’ll have a reason.

Do you need a reason? the man said.

In my family, the girl said, yes.

So that’s why you’re here? the man said. You want a reason to go to therapy?

Maybe, the girl said.

Seems a lot of trouble to go to, the man said.

But we’re having fun in the meantime, the girl said. We’re having an adventure and we’re learning a lot about ourselves.

Why do you want to go to therapy? the man said.

The girl laughed. Why does anybody want to go to therapy? she asked.

The man did not know the answer to this seemingly obvious question.

I’ve always had a fantasy about going to therapy and saying not a single true thing about myself.

Why would you want to do that? the man said.

Because, the girl said. I could become anyone.

You could become your own most impossible person
, the man thought.

I’d imagine that’s difficult, the man said. Saying not a single true thing. The truth creeps in. Every good lie is founded on a truth.

Then I’ll tell bad lies, the girl said.

So when you get home, the man said, what bad lies will you tell about us?

Behind him, he heard the snip of a lighter.

I don’t know, the girl said through her exhale. That all depends on what happens.

Chadwick

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

S
he stood at the threshold to the man’s house. I am dreaming this, she thought, I am surely dreaming this.

The man slipped behind her to shut the door. It latched meaningfully with a chunky, no-going-back sound that echoed through his foyer.

She should have been shocked by the man—by the mere fact of him standing here before her—but instead she felt seized by a more pressing panic.
Her mother had met the man.
Impossible, unthinkable. In all her many imagined permutations of the past, she had never once entertained this scenario. But if her mother had met the man then her previous theory, supported by her vision of her mother and Dr. Hammer sitting around his living room drinking coffee liqueur, was violently upstaged. The table overturned, the image ignited from the sides and consumed itself. In the bright blankness, nothing new coalesced. Her head was a stunned and newly empty space, the hole from which a wisdom tooth had just been pulled, the pain dulled by Novocain and a dense plug of gauze.

She was struck by the smell of cooking fish.

Sorry, the man said, gesturing toward the kitchen. I’m making dinner.

She stared at him numbly.

Fish, the man explained.

He smiled uneasily. His face had changed so little that she was confident she’d have recognized him on a plane or in a hardware store, she’d have experienced that electrocuted vertigo sensation that attended all unexpected meetings with people you’d relegated not only to the past but to your imagination. He had ceased to exist for her.

I’m not hungry, she said.

No no, he said, it was just that—when I imagined seeing you again, I didn’t factor in the possibility that my house would smell of fish.

I love the smell of fish, she said.

Nobody loves the smell of other people’s fish, he said. Drink? Vodka? Wine? Vodka?

Vodka, she said.

They remained awkwardly in the foyer. His house reminded her of a hotel business suite—functional and striving to offend no living creature. The walls were painted a drab khaki, the at-attention living-room furniture upholstered the color of an unexceptional dog, a generic gray-tan-brown that would, she imagined, appear browner in the sun, or more tan, or more gray. A kaleidoscope of blah is how she would describe his decor if asked; she repeated this phrase—
a kaleidoscope of blah a kaleidoscope of blah
—as a way to calm herself.

The smell of fish became the smell of burned fish.

So then, the man said. Can you hold on a minute?

He abandoned her in the foyer without inviting her farther inside. She considered leaving. She’d dreamed of seeing the man again, of course she had, but this reunion was not as she’d imagined it would be. She’d imagined they would fall back into an easy rapport tinged with hostility and a slight erotic promise that no real-world concerns would have spoiled in the interim. She’d imagined her insides would flutter wildly, as though she had swallowed a small and giddy bird. She’d imagined that she would discover that all these years she’d been waiting for an unspecified
something
to happen to her, and that this
something
was embodied by the man. The loneliness of this realization was overwhelming.

The man returned, face sweaty, hands fumbling with a dish towel.

That’s that, he said. Tossed it to the cats. Figure of speech. Wouldn’t want you to think I’d become a cat person. Oh. I forgot your vodka.

The man disappeared again.

Make yourself comfortable, he called from the kitchen.

This, she wanted to inform him, would be an impossibility.

She slung her coat over a chairback and sat rigidly on the couch amidst his kaleidoscope of blah. If she’d known she’d be seeing the man tonight, she might have taken more care to appear as the remarkable girl he’d once known, rather than the invisible woman she’d become. Maybe, she reflected, her disappointment upon seeing the man had nothing to do with him; maybe her disappointment was inspired only by herself, and her own failure to be instantly transformed by his appearance. But at least, she thought, at least she could still be upended by a person, even if the upending was due to a disappointment. Better than seeing Bettina Spencer and experiencing nothing except the nostalgic sensation of lack, a distant muscle memory of what it used to be like to succumb to the magic pull of a stranger.