The Uses of Enchantment (43 page)
Gaby snorted.
“That’s some corny therapy talk,” she said.
“Really a stretch,” Regina agreed. “But a nice try.”
“You always were a lousy liar, Mimsy,” Gaby said. “Regina, heads or tails?”
Regina chose heads. Gaby flicked the quarter and failed to catch it. It landed soundlessly on the carpet.
“I
am
the oldest,” Regina said, taking Abigail Lake by her sawed-off ends and stuffing her, awkwardly, into the fireplace.
The three of them watched. They waited. But the canvas didn’t catch. Abigail Lake seemed impervious to extinction.
Finally, the painted surface turned slick and bubbly.
“There,” Gaby said.
“Fuck you, Mum,” Regina said.
“Adieu, symbolic portrait of Mimsy in a bonnet,” said Gaby.
Abigail Lake’s hands curled up into themselves like actual witch’s feet receding beneath a house foundation. Exhausted, hungover, weirdly tweaked by Abigail Lake’s imminent forever disappearance, Mary started to cry. Quietly, so that no one would notice. Was she sad? Relieved? Just really unbearably tired? She couldn’t say.
Regina pulled off her ski hat; her hair crackled audibly with static. She reached around Mary’s ears and pulled the hat over her head.
“This doesn’t make me like you,” Regina said to Mary as Abigail Lake burned. “Or you either,” to Gaby.
“I definitely don’t like either one of you,” Gaby said, handing Mary a scrap of newspaper with which she was presumably meant to blow her nose.
Mary watched as Abigail Lake’s eyes and cheeks slid and muddied, the fire’s serrated edges sawing through the canvas edges and exploding into green-tinted flames. She should listen to her own advice: Mum was dead. Why did she need to forgive Mum, and vice-versa? What mattered were the people who weren’t dead yet—her sisters, her father. What mattered was that she was being given a chance to rectify things, as Roz had pointed out, and she didn’t want to fuck it up.
Mary reached into the waistband of her father’s jeans and withdrew the bag, pulling
Miriam
from its interior. Symbols of forgiveness were worth what, anyway?
When I say what she would have wanted I am saying: this is what I want.
Mary didn’t wait for the book to catch. Her final vision of
Miriam
was a black silhouette quivering between states of matter, that stunned moment when a flammable object can seem stubbornly immune to flame.
“Take Umbrage!” she announced. She so desperately wanted her sisters to cry, or show some kind of vulnerability, but she knew better than to expect the impossible. Expressing indignation, or sarcasm, or anger was the only way of exhibiting love in her family, and really what was so wrong with that?
“Take Umbrage!” she repeated.
Her sisters didn’t respond, or if they did, Mary didn’t hear them as she climbed the front stairs and entered her parents’ bedroom, shutting the door softly so as not to wake Aunt Helen. She stretched out on her mother’s side of the bed, taking no umbrage herself while thinking of the time she’d found her mother asleep in her own bed once, that confusing and glorious time, thinking of the time—just this morning, in fact—when she’d gazed up at the insomniac man, snoring in his armchair, the girl from his past serene and asleep at his feet.
Notes
APRIL 15, 1986
M
ary did not show up for what became our final appointment. Later, I would admit to my own analyst to feeling a powerful sense of relief when she failed to materialize in the waiting room at 10 a.m., 10:10, 10:30. At 10:35, I decided to go for a walk, to buy a coffee and sit on a bench in the Commons. It was the first warm day of the year and my office, for many reasons, had become small and oppressive to me.
The Commons teemed with airily dressed mothers and unjacketed businessmen, the emotional gloom of a winter-bound populace exposed by the sun to be as seasonally fragile as ice. To say that I was drawn to one particular end of the duck pond over another would be to attribute too much power to my subconscious; but I was drawn to the southern end of the pond where the sun was most vicious on the brown water and the glare so intense that I couldn’t discern people, only black scurrying shapes.
I sat on a bench. I dumped two sugars into my coffee. I shaded my eyes against the sun with my paper bag. I watched the silhouette of a pair of boaters, a father and a daughter from the looks of their outlines, glide past me in a rental skiff.
I guess I’m late, she said.
I turned to my bench mate. She wore sunglasses and a weathered canvas beach hat, as though she were a celebrity striving, in an extremely conspicuous way, to achieve invisibility.
I tried to remain unsurprised.
Forty minutes late, I said. If sitting at a duck pond counts as showing up at all.
What makes an appointment, she asked. The doctor or the office?
It’s a nice day, I said, ignoring her pithiness. Better that we’re outside anyway.
She didn’t respond.
What a tacky way to meet for our last time, she said.
Is this our last time? I said. When did you decide this?
A fortnight ago. I think we’ve reached the end, she said. I think we’ve used each other up.
Have we been using each other? I said.
This was a topic she’d circled in the past—the notion that we were exploiting each other, or, as she’d stated it, that we were helping each other further our careers. At the time I’d dismissed this preoccupation of hers as another of her false leads, but now saw it as incredibly prescient, almost as though she’d known, from the beginning, that she was bound to be my muse. We had not helped each other out—no, no, to her mind we had
used
each other. But still.
I used you, I said. Is that what you think?
She pushed her sunglasses—too big for her face, not her sunglasses—up the bridge of her nose.
Wouldn’t you rather be used than unused? Personally I would rather have a use.
You’ll have a use, I said.
You promise? she said.
I promise, I said.
We lapsed into silence.
I’ve seen this in movies, she said. Girls and old men on park benches. They have meaningful exchanges. When the conversation stalls they feign interest in ducks. When they depart each will be eternally touched by the other—the old man by the girl’s wise innocence, the girl by the old man’s innocent wisdom.
You’ve never been touched by my innocent wisdom, I said. Any reason you plan to start today?
She didn’t respond.
We sat in silence. We feigned interest in ducks.
He took me rowing here, she said.
Who? I said.
K, she said.
Kurt, I said.
Whoever, she said.
But K is Kurt, isn’t he? I said. He was Kurt, symbolically castrated for your imaginary purposes.
Everyone should have a purpose, she said.
And so he did. You symbolically castrated him because he kissed you when you were younger. You symbolically castrated him because, despite what you’ve wanted me to believe, your imagination does not permit the inclusion of genitalia.
Don’t say
genitalia
so loudly, she said loudly.
K was Kurt, I insisted.
Whatever, she said. You can call him what you like. It’s your story now.
My story, I said. Am I the patient? Are we switching roles again?
She tossed me an irritated look. Or was it a knowing look? What
did
she know? Did she know I’d already taken her story as my own, did she know, hyper radiant that she was, a girl able to intuit, with her stealthy imagination, that I’d begun to type up my notes and that her name was already Miriam?
You know what you’re doing, she said, standing to leave.
She smiled at me, and I sensed in her smile a knowing sadness, a woundedness, a palpable regret and uncertainty of the sort she’d never revealed to me during our sessions together. It occurred to me then, as it had briefly when her aunt visited my office, that Mary’s fantasies weren’t fantasies at all. But this suspicion didn’t disturb me. This suspicion did not, as it had over lunch with Hoppin, initiate pangs of guilt. I recalled what Helen said at the library fund-raiser—
the tragic lives of the untragic
. Mary had been a useless girl, and I was putting her to use with her permission. Subsequently, we had long since passed the point when the truth was of any consequence between us. As I watched her disappear into the intensifying glare radiating off the pond, her small black figure swallowed by the sun, I understood that it did not matter to me anymore what was true and what was not, because while Miriam remained with me, the girl who had inspired her was gone from my life for good.
Acknowledgments
S
ince the city of Boston inarguably exists for some people, I have tried to do geographic justice to its portrayal (though there is not, to my knowledge, a two-block concentration of mental-health professionals located on a small street northwest of the Commons). The towns of West Salem and Chadwick do not exist for anybody, and thus all street names, schools, train stations, hockey rinks, stone walls, minimalls, and other landmarks will hopefully be granted the immunity of fictional places. Abigail Lake is a fabrication and not one of the accused witches executed in Salem in 1692, despite the claims of this book. There
was
an Alice Lake executed around 1650–1651, but while her last name has been nicked, she is otherwise not to be considered a historical inspiration for this character.
A debt of inspiration is owed to the following writers and books: Janet Malcolm (everything she’s ever written but particularly
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
and
In the Freud Archives
); Adam Philips; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (
The Assault on Truth
and
Against Therapy
); Leslie Farber; Alice Miller;
Remembering Trauma
by Richard J. McNally;
Sybil
by Flora Rheta Schreiber;
You and Psychiatry
by William C. Menninger, M.D., and Munro Leaf. Dr. Hammer and his theory of hyper radiance owe a great conceptual debt to historian Mary Beth Norton and her book
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
. Bruno Bettelheim, from beyond the grave, kindly did not forbid the second-hand use of his title.
Immeasurable gratitude is due to early reader Amanda Gersh for her subtle suggestion that the then book should be burned at the proverbial stake and to later reader Jonathan Lethem for his help with less terminal problems. Henry Dunow is thanked for donating his incisive, beat-around-no-bush insights and for applying psychic compresses via telephone when someone became ridiculous. Bill Thomas is thanked for his unwavering smarts and early support—I’ve tried to deliver an end product deserving of his confidence in me.
The people at Doubleday (in particular Melissa Ann Danaczko and Alison Rich) have been sublimely nice, intelligent, flexible, and efficient. I greatly appreciate this.
I would like to thank Donna Bassin for in no way being a model for any character in this book. A hefty check is owed to Andrew Leland for picking up my
Believer
slack in perpetuity. Ben Marcus is thanked and thanked and thanked and thanked.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the therapists whose priceless inspiration was purchased at great hourly cost. This book is, in some roundabout, and I hope not entirely insulting, way, an appreciative nod to you.
ALSO BY HEIDI JULAVITS
The Effect of Living Backwards
The Mineral Palace
Hotel Andromeda
(
WITH JENNY GAGE
)
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Heidi Julavits
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Julavits, Heidi.
The uses of enchantment : a novel / Heidi Julavits.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Psychologists—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.U522U84 2006
813'.6—dc22 2006045434
eISBN: 978-0-307-38940-4
v1.0
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