The Uses of Enchantment (40 page)

She shook her head, dislodging his gaze.

You’re so, so mistaken, she said. She wasn’t anything like me.

Really? the man said.

Really, she said.

But your aunt told me that you were your mother’s daughter, he said.

What? she said, felled by a sudden wave of dizziness. She kneeled on the floor, hands braced on the coffee table.

When she gave me the book, the man said. Your aunt sat on that couch for hours and told me all about you two.

She stretched out on the floor, hand gripping her head. Above her the quavering rafters closed in, beside her the fake blue flames made a tim-panic snap so deafening it might have been her own veins bursting and flooding her brain. The bones thundered everywhere.
Where am I?
she thought, but she knew the answer. She had paddled through the whale’s organs, its veins, sliding her way into the flammable chambers of its wooden heart.

Tell me everything she said about me, she said.
My aunt.

What Might Have Happened

T
he girl blindfolded him with a dinner napkin and led him upstairs by the hand. She guided him around the narrow banister, wincing as he missed, barely, knocking his knee against the small bureau in which she’d found the movie reels. He had very little sense of caution, she noticed. He followed her willingly even though she’d done nothing to gain his trust; she might as readily push him backward off the second-floor balcony as onto the stale eiderdown puff covering the master bed. She found herself growing angry and irritated with him, a response that she interpreted as misplaced fear. She was a girl, he was a man, she was, in the parlance of her mother’s worldview about all things sexual,
asking for it
. She was asking for it and if she was asking for it, she wanted to want what she was asking for. But anger was easier to entertain than desire at the moment, it heated her body up just below the skin and might even, in a darkened attic, be mistaken for desire.

She quickened her pace down the hallway, leading the man up the pinched staircase at the hall’s end.
Oops
, she said, insincerely, as the man cracked his forehead against the attic doorjamb.
Hunch down
, she ordered.
Step up
.

She arranged the man in the center of the rugs she’d found rolled into musty tubes and piled in the attic corners. She unrolled them but still they humped up in the centers, clinging to their former shape.

Sit, she said.

The man sat. Above him, swaths of loose insulation, stapled between the rafters, spilled like a stop-time pink avalanche over his head.

He fumbled with his blindfold.

Absolutely not, she said. Keep that on.

Keep it on? he said. He sounded drunk to her, and this redoubled her anger. What an idiot, she thought. Allowing his guard down to such a degree that he’d become drunk. She found it hard to muster anything but disgust for him.

She fiddled with the cord on the old projector, a two-ton dinosaur the blue-silver shade of an institutional folding chair she’d managed, not without risking the loss of her toes, to heft atop a stacked set of Reader’s Digest books about geology. She flipped the power switch, igniting the rattle-hum exhale of the exhaust fan. The light through the lens hit the center of the white bedspread she’d wedged into the sash of the attic’s only window.

What is this, said the man, his head turning toward the sound. Are you vacuuming?

We’re watching movies, the girl said.

The man licked his lips. With his blindfold on she found herself more attuned to his other features. His nose was too large, his mouth a nervous twang of flesh that appeared to vibrate even when he was speechless.

His lips disgusted her.

She pretended he was a soldier; she pretended he was a soldier who’d had both of his eyes blasted out by a hand grenade. She pretended he was a man in need of her help and general loving assistance.

I’m going to prove to you I’m not a liar, said the girl, which is why I wanted us to come to this cabin.

Was it
you
who wanted to come to the cabin? the man said. I thought it was my idea.

I made it look like your idea.

Ah, he said. Every idea I’ve ever had was your idea.

Nice way to deny responsibility, said the girl.

No no, said the man, his docile good humor making it hard to imagine him as a soldier who’d had his eyes pulverized, minusculized, pummeled, beshattered. I just didn’t want to take credit where credit wasn’t due.

The girl resisted an urge to kick the man.

She attached the first reel to the projector, removed from a canister marked
KALAHARI I
. The film ticked and stuttered. A bearded man appeared on the screen wearing aviator sunglasses and a khaki jumpsuit. Wherever he pointed his gangly hand, the camera followed. A gang of meerkats twittered on a cracked mud surface, their little claws upraised, their ears flicking backward and forward as though they could hear the sounds of people from a different decade and on a different continent watching them.

Let’s begin at the beginning, she said. Here we are standing outside my family’s brownstone.

All I see are shadows, said the man, his face turned toward the bedspread.

This is all part of the process, said the girl. Didn’t your ex-wife tell you?

No, he said.

A person is better able to remember through abstract prompts to the memory, she said. If you are told exactly what to remember, you’ll never trust it was
your
memory. It will exist as a story somebody told you. It won’t feel like
yours
. This is all about you reclaiming your story.

Fine, said the man tightly.

So here we are standing in front of my family’s brownstone, said the girl. How old am I?

How should I know, said the man. I can’t see a goddamned thing.

Look harder, she said. How old do I look.

The man didn’t respond. He rubbed at his eyes through the napkin.

Do I look twelve, said the girl.

The man raised his head.

Sure, he said.

Say it, she said.

You look twelve.

What are you thinking?

Right now?

In the movie. What are you thinking
in the movie
.

I’m thinking that a person is watching us.

You’re paranoid, she interpreted.

I’m wondering about logistics, he said. If I’m on film, a person is filming me.

Two meerkats began to chase each other around a spiky, shrublike cactus.

Your ex-wife is filming you, said the girl.

Then I’m feeling badly for my ex-wife.

Because you’re attracted to me, said the girl. Because you’re experiencing inappropriate sexual feelings toward a young girl.

Because my ex-wife couldn’t have children, he said.

Why was that?

She had an abortion before she met me, he said. She was no longer able to have children. Isn’t that what you told me?

So your interest in me is purely paternal, said the girl.

At first, said the man. That’s how it always begins.

The khaki-jumpsuit man was joined by a stubby, dark-skinned man. The stubby man wore a pair of soccer shorts; he carried a small flute. Both men smiled that wide, awkward smile of strangers being observed with nothing to say to each other.

So we became father-daughter friends, she said. Here we are in the Commons, going for a row. I’m waving to the camera so enthusiastically that I lose my balance and fall between your legs.

I am rowing, he said.

You are rowing, but you drop your oars and catch me. This is the first time it occurs to you that a father is only a father if he wants to have sex with his daughter.

How does my ex-wife respond to this?

She’s oblivious, said the girl. What I just described to you happened offscreen.

Oh, he said.

Your ex-wife, who is a secret racist, was filming a biracial couple on a park bench having a fight.

Oh, he said again.

Fast-forward now. Are you getting tired?

What?

Tired.

I never get tired, said the man. Which doesn’t mean I’m not bored.

So you’re bored, she said. Not my fault. It’s your life we’re watching.

I didn’t say it was your fault, he said. I have been bored and not tired my whole new life.

Here I am outside your window, she said. You are in your attic. You’re filming me from above as I skip rope on the sidewalk. What are you thinking?

You’re outside on purpose, he said. You’re outside my window skipping rope and wearing—let me guess—your school uniform.

Is that what you’d like me to be wearing?

The man scoffed.

Answer the question, she said.

What I want has nothing to do with it, he said.

Which is why we’re doing this act of reclamation, she said.

The man frowned.

What am I doing, the girl prodded.

You know what you’re doing, the man said.

Tell me, she said. In your own words.

The man paused. She sensed that he was closing his eyes, not literally, since he was blindfolded, but now he was actually seeing images on the backs of his eyelids.

You parade back and forth in front of my window, he said. You hike up your skirt, you behave in a cartoonishly seductive manner to make me pay attention to you.

Interesting, she said.

Don’t flatter yourself, he said.

If I were a therapist, I might say that you’re blaming me for what’s about to happen, she said.

I am blaming you, the man said hotly. Should I not blame you?

I was a girl, she said. An innocent girl.

You’re a transparent and not very subtle tease, the man said.

Fuck you, the girl said tonelessly.

I was just
sitting
there, the man pointed out, growing riled beneath his blindfold, his cheeks and chin covered in an anxious sheen. I was just sitting there in my stupid car reading my stupid paper and waiting for something less stupid to happen to me. I was bored. I was bored and I was so, so awake.

The girl fell silent. The khaki man’s and the stubby man’s heads moved in unison as they watched a bird overhead. The bird’s silhouette flitted across their upturned faces like a fast-moving cloud.

So that’s your excuse, she said. You were bored.

I’m not trying to excuse myself.

Then you’re fine with being a pervert, she said.

The man with the soccer shorts blew his flute. Across the cracked mud expanse, a meerkat rolled onto its back, legs jerking. The khaki-jumpsuit man’s smile froze.

The man’s upper lip curled into his teeth.

He didn’t respond.

You’re a
pervert
, the girl goaded. Don’t you have anything to say to that?

The man blinked, his fists clenching and unclenching.

He didn’t respond.

The girl laughed meanly.

What, he said.

Nothing, she said. I take it back. You’re not a pervert.

The man in the khaki jumpsuit stared at the camera.

You’re too boring to be a pervert, she said. You say you’re bored, but you’re not bored, you’re
boring
. I’ve tried my best, but I give up. I can’t save you from yourself.

The man blinked rapidly beneath the napkin, little cloth shudders.

Fine, he said, voice tightening. I’m a pervert. Is that what you want to hear? Is it?

What do
you
want to hear, the girl corrected.

Me?

You’re not talking for my benefit, she said. You’re talking for your own.

The man in the khaki jumpsuit stared at the man with the killer flute.

Are you beyond? she asked, sweetly mocking. Are you beyond beyond?

The man pinched his head between his hands so forcefully that his forearms trembled. He was, she feared, committing some kind of strange suicide.

When he spoke, she did not recognize his voice.

I spied on you outside my window jumping rope, he said, a ridiculous activity for a twelve-year-old, but fine, that’s how you enjoyed spending your afternoons, jumping rope outside the house of a married man you loved like a father. You wriggled and hopped and fiddled with your too-short skirt, the waistline rolled up a few sleazy turns, and bingo, it occurred to me that I desired you not as a daughter—because, let’s say it, you’re
not
my daughter—but as a girl, or a girl-woman, and I decided to molest you.

Nice, the girl said, though she felt spritzed, suddenly, by a nervous layer of sweat, the backs of her hands and her cheekbones tingling in the overheated attic.

The khaki-jumpsuit man ran into the center of the meerkat tribe folded around its dead. He opened and closed his hands, flashing his white palms at the sky.

Go on, she said.

Of course “molest” wasn’t the word I used—I didn’t use words, because when I tried to articulate my desires to myself all that materialized was your naked body. So one day I invited you up to my attic, and because you believed that you had engineered this invitation, you accepted. This was
your
show, this was your doing, this was all under your control.

The meerkats raised their heads one by one. Their noses quivered.

But then you had to shuck your school uniform for a pervert, then you saw that desire is an ugly force all its own, it cannot be controlled and certainly not by the object that inspired it. And so you learned a hard lesson.

The meerkats turned on the man like attack birds, flying at his pants legs and clawing his arms.

Or maybe not, the man continued. Maybe not because now you think,
I’m older
. Now you think,
I can control the situation
. But I wonder about that. I can sense you’re scared.

Am I, she said.

Not of me. Of you. You can inspire desire, but you can’t feel it yourself. How lonely that must feel. How terribly, terribly lonely.

The man with the killer flute smiled his wide smile.

The images ended, spooling into an unfocused burst of white.