The Uses of Enchantment (33 page)

That girl—this girl—he wanted her gone.

But this girl was going nowhere without considerable effort on his part. Where the hell would she go? The process of getting rid of her involved hours and hours of preparation: a call to the local tow-truck company run by a notoriously unreliable pair of alcoholic half brothers who might or might not show up before dark the following day. Then the hours-long drive back to Boston, the discussion of the “story” such as they would both agree to represent it to anyone who asked. The actual goodbye.

The girl sipped her soup from a coffee mug. She was still wearing her sweatpants, her field hockey skirt, but she’d removed her cleats and her socks. She’d found a pair of his ex-wife’s shearling slippers beneath the bobbled drape of the guest-bed coverlet. She appeared tense to him, her lips had all but disappeared inside her mouth; maybe it was the lack of sleep. Insomnia, after all, was something for which one trained for years. And yet she refused to sleep, she insisted that she wanted to keep him company, that she wanted to experience what he experienced.

Appropriately, then, she looked unhappy.

Yes, he thought, no doubt about it,
she looked unhappy
. And why wouldn’t she be unhappy? If he was perfectly aware of how hard it would be to get rid of her, she didn’t even have the privilege of such specific knowledge. For all she knew there
were
no alcoholic half brothers who towed cars when they damned well felt like it; there were no buses, there was no phone, she was as stuck as an Eskimo in a blizzard without his dogs.
Stuck as an Eskimo in a blizzard without his dogs
. A strange metaphor, the man thought, until he realized he had, last week, during an insomniac 4 a.m. space-out before the television, “taken in” a documentary about Eskimos. (He used that phrase now when he was watching but not watching; “taking in” a movie. “Taking in” the weather report. He “took things in” and these things rolled around in his head, stray bits of information that failed to adhere to anything resembling a thought.) Yes, these Eskimos were a spontaneous bunch, they hopped in and out of their kayaks and could industriously build an igloo from scratch in gale-force winds, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t struck dumb by their own isolation once they’d barricaded themselves inside and had nothing to do but stare at the semitranslucent walls and wait out the storm. The Eskimo husband was stoic and grumpy until his wife refused to feed the crying baby. Clearly she was too depressed even to feed the baby. It flailed on a snow mound as the wife stared at it, uncaring. Then, the man could tell, the Eskimo husband’s whole shitty world dropped out from under his sealskin boots, and he started to smile.

The girl hid her face in her soup mug. It appeared to him that she was trying very hard not to cry.

This girl. This strange girl. He had—inadvertently, advertently—made her cry.

Suddenly the man stopped wanting the girl gone. No, no, he wanted her to
stay
. Not because he wanted her to
stay
exactly but because, well, worse than his own desire to be alone was his fear that the girl, too, wanted to be alone. That would be worse, he decided. If the girl wanted to be alone because he made her unhappy. Thus he determined that he must stay in the living room with her and ensure that she was happy.

Happy
, he thought. Yes yes. Then, scoffingly, he caught himself, as he was now prone to do—“catching himself” meaning not that one hand grabbed the other hand, either literally or figuratively, but “catching himself” as in catching a glimpse of himself, as though he were an unbiased stranger observing his behavior on a train. His internal stranger on a train scoffed and said: Here is a girl who has kidnapped you—or gotten herself kidnapped—and you are concerned for her happiness? I find this ridiculous. And I will laugh at you, a little dismissive cough of a laugh.

Hah.

What’s so funny, the girl said. She was playing with the tassel on his ex-wife’s shearling slipper, trying to appear nonchalant, but he heard the tightness in her throat. It destroyed him, that tightness. He was a criminal, a potential abuser of minors, a crusher of innocents. His little Scheherazade, she was too unhappy even to tell him stories. How was it that the real Scheherazade never let on that she was scared out of her mind? How was it that her sultan, or her king, or whomever it was who wanted to kill her, how was it that this sultan or king was so wooed by her stories that he did not hear the occasional tightness in her voice and recoil, forced to reconsider his bloody plan?

What’s funny, she repeated. She wiped her nose. She attempted a wan, transparently miserable smile.

I was wondering to what degree you would consider yourself happy, he said.

Happy, she said. She moved from an averagely happy smile to the insanely happy grin of a person about to break into sobs. Had he done the right thing by asking? Showing his tender, caring side? Or had he only reminded her, rubbed her face in the fact that the last thing she was at this moment was happy? Soon he would know, she would begin to cry and he would know.

But instead she pulled back from the precipice of total dissolution and retreated behind her teenager’s mask of skeptical ennui.

Is this the kind of thing you wonder about in the woods? she asked with an efficient
I’m fine
toss of her dirtying hair.

The woods might have something to do with it, the man said.
I am relieved
, he thought.
The last thing I need is a crying girl on my hands
. But he also wanted to know what she was thinking. He wanted to ask her if she was disappointed in him. He had taken her to a cabin in the woods with fake wood paneling and a distinctive mold smell. His fire was lame. She had imagined an outcome and he had failed to deliver it.

You weren’t wondering if I was happy in the diner, she said. You weren’t wondering if I was happy at the rest stop.

On principle I don’t express wonder, the man said. Which doesn’t mean I’m not wondering every second of every day.

A piece of bark on a burning log exploded. The girl jumped, spilling soup on her sweatpants.

Whoops, she said, her composure jostled.

Cry now
, the man thought to himself.
Cry now
.

But she didn’t cry. She efficiently blotted the soup spill with her napkin.

I’m thinking this cabin depresses the heck out of you, she said.

The girl rolled the shearling slipper tassel between her thumb and forefinger.

The moment, he realized. The moment was gone.

Tough
, he thought, not without a fair bit of admiration. This girl was tough.

What’s up with that poster in the guest room? She asked. The one that says
WE ARE MEERKATS
!

What’s up with it? the man said. My ex-wife’s former brother-in-law was a solar engineer.

The man jerked his head toward the rafters, his attention snagged by a shifting piece of air. The dark overhead rippled imperceptibly like the skin of a pudding. A bat, he thought. A goddamned family of bats.

The girl picked at her slipper, clearly confused.

My ex-wife’s former brother-in-law. Her sister’s ex-husband, he explained, trying not to eye the ceiling. My twice former brother-in-law.

I got that, she said.

Oh, said the man, understanding now. The meerkat is the solar panel of the animal world, and thus my twice former brother-in-law the solar engineer’s favorite animal. He believed his rarified enthusiasms were shared by the masses. Thus, for such an otherwise eccentricity-free household, we have a lot of meerkat tchotchkes.

The man pointed to a Meerkat Society ashtray; the meerkat bookends on the fireplace mantel; the meerkat andirons.

The meerkat rolls onto its back and raises its body temperature by exposing its black stomach to the sun, the man continued. The meerkat is a member of the mongoose family. It usually travels in a “mob” or a “gang” of thirty. That pretty much exhausts my knowledge about meerkats. We have some films upstairs of my twice former brother-in-law on safari in the Kalahari, if you’re still curious.

For someone with amnesia, the girl said, you remember a lot.

The man reddened.

My ex-wife and I took a trip here after the accident, he said quickly. She wanted to help me remember. We walked around the cabin and she told me stories relating to every needlepoint cushion and piece of ski-house junk. This was cathartic for her.

I bet it was cathartic for her, the girl said. Lying through her teeth.

She wasn’t lying to me, the man said. He felt defensive on behalf of his ex-wife, suddenly. They had actually shared a tender weekend and he had slept with her. A woman whom he found nearly as repugnant as the woman from the general store.

What could be more
cathartic
, the girl said, than to mess around with the head of the man who had messed around with
her
head. Who had loved
girls
, while pretending to be her devoted husband. Who lost her money on a crappy brownstone. Who embarrassed her at weddings.

That’s enough, the man said, thinking he wanted the unhappy girl back. The quiet, unhappy girl. He started to connect her stories with her hostility; her stories were not made to entertain, they were made to derail him. They were weapons of self-defense.

The girl dropped her empty soup mug on the floor; it tipped onto its side, rolled under the couch.

She did not lie to me, the man said.

You don’t know that, the girl said. I wouldn’t be here if you knew that for sure.

The man nodded. Right, he thought. That’s why she believed he was here. But that didn’t explain why
she
was here. Why she had engineered to be abducted by him? What was in it for her? She should be scared of him, if she were a normal girl of seventeen. She should be fearing for her life. If he were to take a step back, if he were to allow his stranger-on-a-train self to view his actual self, the oddness of his predicament was blazingly apparent. Who the fuck was this girl?

You wouldn’t be here if I knew, the man said. Which still doesn’t exactly explain why you’re here.

The girl smiled. Doesn’t it? she said.

I don’t think so, the man said.

Oh, she said. You’re right.

So then, the man said. Why are you here?

A good question, the girl said. I’m surprised it’s taken you so long to ask it.

There hasn’t really been…the need, he said. What he meant was: It had happened. Things happen by happening.

True, said the girl. But now there is a need.

There is, he said.

Something understood between us has been destroyed, she said.

Not necessarily, the man said.

No, that’s what you think.

OK, the man agreed. That’s what I think.

Your back is against a wall and you’re wondering why. Why would you let yourself be backed against a wall by a person you don’t even know?

Can’t I be backed against a wall by a stranger?

You’re backed against a wall when you know what the other person wants and this conflicts with what you want and there’s no satisfying the both of you. But you don’t know what I want, and this is starting to frustrate you. Or this is how I’m reading your take on the situation.

My take on the situation, the man thought to himself, is that you are a disturbingly odd girl, and despite the fact that I am older than you and outweigh you by eighty pounds, I feel endangered in your presence.

Maybe, the girl said, maybe, like your ex-wife, I’m also out for revenge.

That makes no sense, the man said. I’ve never done anything to you.

Actually you have, the girl said. But I don’t blame you, as I’ve said. I’m not out for revenge against
you
.

Ah, the man said, relaxing slightly. You’re using me to get revenge on another person.

The girl made an angry cross-hatch with her thumbnail, impressing a red
X
onto her ankle. Her ankle, the man noted, was as small around as any normal person’s wrist and scarred—not a pretty ankle—but something about its evident bones and its scars made it, and her, unspeakably alluring.

It’s OK if you are, the man said. Using me for revenge.

If I
am
using you, well, at least I’m offering you something in return.

What’s that again? the man asked.

I’m offering you your lousy forgotten life back.

The electric cuckoo clock on the wall commenced its hourly foolishness. Four o’clock. Thank god, the man thought. Though, as an insomniac, the idea of night usually made him anxious, in fact he couldn’t wait for this day to end.

I suppose that’s a fair exchange, the man said.

So you admit that your wife lied to you, the girl said.

The man ran his hands through his hair and stared at the meerkat andirons, their squirrel-like arms raised in clawed confrontation across an abyss of smoking logs. What was the point in disagreeing with her?

Chadwick

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

T
he roads were empty, the temperature now well below freezing, and the prior rain seized into an even slick of ice. The stress of the poor driving conditions winched Mary’s shoulders as high as her chin. She lowered the volume of the distantly live symphony performance on the radio, but found the noise of the wheels leaving the patches of salted road for the soundless swaths of friction-free ice deeply unsettling. She re-cued the symphony. Eventually she spotted the beetled form of a salt truck ahead of her, its load rising humplike above its orange metal container. She followed it, not minding that it kicked a salinated slush onto her windshield smoothed by her wipers to gauzy streaks, creating a prism through which the truck’s rear lights were stretched and multiplied like a hundred bug eyes.

It was 10:42 p.m.

She’d once known a shortcut to Chadwick—a series of badly lit back roads, each turn a potential failed vector that would deposit her in a tree trunk, a mailbox, a six-foot-thick wall of arbor vitae—and though there was no need for a shortcut at 10:42 on an icy November week night, shortcuts were ingrained in her by her father, a man for whom finding a good shortcut was like stealing a game of golf from an opponent with a far snazzier set of clubs. Each shortcut he discovered between the wealthy suburbs was further proof of the superiority of his working-class street smarts, his way of tunneling more stealthily through this foreign world he called home. So she’d taken the short cut, turning off the lit and salted route onto a side street so narrow it might have been someone’s private drive, she’d negotiated the potholes and the stretches of icy road where it seemed that her aunt’s station wagon had been converted to an unsteerable hovercraft, the brakes flurrying the air like a pair of useless rudders. Eventually the road looped back to the main highway—a place she had no intention of ending up, a place she found herself relieved to be.