The Uses of Enchantment (14 page)

She looked at me slyly.

Are you a Hammer of Witches? she asked.

Mary, I said.

Oops, she said. I forgot.
An implied sexual advance is no joking matter.

She returned to the appendix. She stood and intoned in a deep voice “Who are the children on whom you have cast a spell?”

Mary
, I said.

What, she said.

You’re trying to derail this session by hiding behind that book.

Mary placed the book on the floor beside the couch. Resuming her cross-legged position, she bunched the fabric around the holes in her tights, jamming the bunched bit between her big toe and the neighboring toe until her feet appeared cloven.

I’m hiding in plain sight, Beaton, she said. Maybe a book is the best place to look.

What Might Have Happened

T
his is how the story might have ended: the man drove the girl home.

But as the man started to drive the girl home he realized that he was too curious to drive the girl home. Intensely, even shamefully curious, curious to the point of feeling erotically charged by his curiosity. Not that he believed the girl’s insinuations that he had molested her—he didn’t believe them for one second, and why should he? He didn’t have amnesia—that lie had erupted from him because, well, he’d been accused of the same by the managing partner at his law firm who interviewed him for the purposes of “damage control.” “Amnesia won’t play well in this context,” the general counsel had said when he’d refused to speak to him about the matter, claiming he didn’t remember. But of course he remembered. He remembered peering down his nose in order to center the tip of his cigarette in the glowing bull’s-eye of his car lighter, the heat warming his upper lip. He remembered the sound the body made as it glanced off his car, as though someone had hurled a giant bag of wet trash at the passenger-side door. He’d taken his eyes off the road for a millisecond, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of time. His first reaction, when in his rearview mirror he saw the man tumbling along the breakdown lane and striking, with the floppiness of a rolled carpet, the guardrail, was one of dumbfounded amazement.
How has this never happened to me before?
he remembered thinking. He’d peered down his nose to light a cigarette while driving five or six times a day for ten years, taking special pleasure in landing the cigarette in the dead center of the lighter’s concentric circles. He felt misled, cheated, as though he’d been seduced into casualness over a situation that required constant vigilance to prevent its turning tragic.

A crowd quickly gathered up and down the highway shoulder and gawked at him from a safe distance. He’d struck his head against the windshield when he slammed on his brakes; blood ran sideways over his temple, pooling in his ear, flowing over his earlobe and coagulating, finally, in a stalagtitelike drop. One of the gawkers was a physician. He kneeled by the heap of rolled rug and felt for a pulse. He rose to his feet with no urgency whatsoever.

The man was dead. The man had killed a man.

For less than thirty minutes, he contemplated the fact that he’d become the person his ex-wife claimed, in not so many words, to wish she’d married. He’d been cutting garlic for a salad dressing when she announced that she was leaving him for good. He turned quickly and without thinking, knife pointed outward, the point jabbing in and out of her arm—just a fraction of a millimeter—with the invisible quickness of a sewing machine needle. She bled a pinprick’s worth of blood.

She met his gaze daringly. “Go on,” she said. “Stab me again if you want me to stay.” She didn’t say:
You timid, depressive cipher
. She didn’t say:
At least a man who stabs his wife gives a shit about something
. She didn’t have to say these things.

He returned to chopping his garlic.

And so if he were honest with himself—he tried mostly to be—he’d have to admit that the initial numb horror he felt at killing a man was reprehensibly counterbalanced by an intoxicating sense of freedom, even of victory. Yes he’d suffered a mild concussion, yes he’d been in shock, but still this did not excuse the fact that his first impulse, as he stood watching the medics cover the dead man with a tarp, was to call his ex-wife and tell her: I have killed a man.

When it emerged, after a quick medical exam by the ambulance medics and an ID check by the police, that the man he’d killed was suicidal and mentally ill—he had escaped from a home south of the highway—he did not feel entirely relieved. He felt, instead, the deadweight of his boulder self redescend. He felt the strangulating tightness of his own skin. “Wrong place, wrong time,” said the sympathetic officer who had, thirty minutes earlier, locked him in cuffs. “We understand your need to reassess after the tragedy that’s befallen you,” his partners wrote in response to the memo he sent, announcing his indefinite leave of absence from the firm. “This would only happen to you,” his ex-wife said.

And so he found the girl refreshing. He found it refreshing to contemplate that he might be hiding a less pitiable victim of a person inside of himself. Of course, it was all a silly game. He reasoned that he could only find refreshing the possibility that he might have molested a young girl if the possibility were, in fact, impossible. He knew it was impossible. He’d spent his afternoons outside Semmering Academy reading his newspaper in his car because after he’d killed the suicidal man he’d thought:
I could be anybody now. Once a man has killed another man, even if unintentially, a world of options is open to him. I could be a molester of young girls
. He thought it wrong to cut himself off from this possibility, a refusal to fully self-realize, and so he’d stationed himself in a place where he would be most tempted. Sadly, he’d learned, he didn’t much care for young girls, not at least as objects to desire. It was their noises he preferred; their screeches and their laughter so maniacal at the edges. They lived with the daily cognizance that they had no idea, despite their careful schooling and safe families, what they would become. Miserable lawyers? Adulterers? Alcoholic mothers? The future seems rife with failure when you’re primed to succeed—this he recalled keenly from his own upbringing. When you are primed to succeed your failure looms like a certainty, at which you maniacally laugh as you skip class to smoke cigarettes in the cemetery. He felt comfortable amidst their pigeon squawking, which receded as they passed his car in search of a mausoleum behind which to crouch and prepare for their black futures. Failure was easier to accept, he knew, if there were seeds of its promise one could locate in an earlier time. There, you see. There is where it all began to go wrong.

Thus, he allowed himself to enjoy this girl in his passenger seat, because what was the risk? Certainly her imaginative rendering of his past made him a more intriguingly dark person than the version delivered to him by his ex-wife—now an active member of a women’s encounter group—who had involved him in her urgently ridiculous need to
reclaim her own story
, as though he’d ever been the one in control. He accompanied her on trips revisiting their former house, their former vacation spots, their former favorite restaurants, while his ex-wife narrated her experience of being married to him into a handheld tape recorder. If he tried to correct her account, she’d raise her voice and state imperiously: “This is my story now.” Generally speaking, her version of him could be summed up as follows: socially reticent, well-meaning, and killingly bland litigator afflicted by food allergies engages for years in loveless union with woman he finds repulsive but doesn’t have the guts to leave.

It was not so terribly far off the mark.

He peered sideways at the girl, her feet on the dash, her chin resting between her knees and bouncing as he drove over the potholed road.

You’re going to bite off your tongue, the man said.

Wouldn’t you like that, the girl said.

No, in fact, the man said.

So, Mr. Amnesia, do you remember where my house is? the girl asked.

Which house? the man asked. The first house or the second house?

What do you mean, the first house, the girl said.

The house where we were neighbors, the man said.

The girl smiled into her knees.

And so it was that the man found himself actively awake at 9:55 p.m. and driving toward Boston in the company of a strange girl. This so-called Ida. She didn’t feel like an Ida to him, any more than she felt like a total stranger. He allowed himself to consider; maybe he had been following her for a reason. Maybe she did know something about him—was it so outlandish a notion? Not what she’d claimed, of course, but perhaps she possessed insight into him as a more fascinating person; like the suicidal man who chose him from a road’s worth of death options, she too privileged other ways of perceiving him.

Soon the woods on either side peeled away to reveal office parks and malls, their brilliantly lit car lots empty of cars. These gave way to industrial wastelands of shipping containers and railway tracks, then warehouses and the first shabby beginnings of the habitable city.

Do you remember where you’re going? the girl asked.

The man nodded. He’d been to this house with his ex-wife too many times recently as part of her reclamation therapy, his unimaginative past shoved in his face in the name of her cure.

Good, the girl said. Because I haven’t been here since I was little.

Are you scared? the man asked.

Are you scared? the girl asked.

A little, the man admitted.

No you’re not, the girl said. You’re excited. It’s all that coffee you drink. You’ve always been a big coffee drinker.

I’ve become a big coffee drinker, he said. Since I have insomnia, it’s nice to be alert.

You were always a coffee drinker and a smoker, the girl said. You sucked Sucrets so your wife wouldn’t know. You hid a lot from your wife.

Could you blame me? the man asked.

The girl smiled sweetly. I’ve never blamed you, she said.

The man exited toward Storrow Drive, pinballing through the rotaries toward the house where he used to live. It was almost 11 p.m. by the time they pulled up outside the brownstone that he and his wife had sold in the late seventies for barely what they’d paid for it. Implicit in this fact, when recounted to him by his ex-wife, was this: He had been bad with money. He had been bad with investments. He had, due to his dislike of new people and new routines and his all-round timidity toward life—and this was confusing—
bullied
her into buying near their old apartment in the city (bad investment) rather than in the newly fashionable suburbs (good investment). He had forced her to become an angry and aggressive person; it was her only defense against becoming like him, against drifting out of existence as quietly as their money.

He pulled up in front of his former bad investment and put the Mercedes in park, leaving the engine running. The streets gleamed like a petroleum spill in the parchment yellow of the streetlamps. Brakelights and headlights bled red and white through the sheeny black, everything running together and jarring his sense of perspective and horizon until it was hard to tell where the ground was, where the sky.

This is it, the girl said, her chin still resting on her knees, eyes tilted up at the world, or what they could see of the world through his windshield.

She pointed at his old house.

But that’s my house, he said.

I know, she said. Just testing you.

This time she pointed to a brownstone across the street.

I thought your house burned down, the man said. He’d been expecting a new glassy house slid between the brownstones like a vein of quartz through granite.

Burned down
, the girl said, is a figure of speech. We sold the shell to a couple that wanted a fixer-upper. They were from Texas. Dad said they had a lot of
giddyap and go
.

The girl chewed on her sweatpants.

You seem nervous, said the man.

Just tired, the girl said.

It’s late, the man said. After eleven. And it’s a school night.

The girl fiddled with the Mercedes’s lighter, pushing it in and then yanking it out, turning the dead heating coil toward her face.

This is broken, the girl said. Do you have any cigarettes?

I don’t smoke anymore, he reminded her.

But you used to, the girl said. I bet there’s a straggler in the seam of this seat.

She lifted her hips high, her field hockey skirt riding above her waist, her sweatpants pulling downward to expose the elastic band of her underwear.

Voilà, she said. She held up a flattened cigarette, the filter dangling by a tiny hinge of paper. She tore the filter free and dropped it onto the floor of the Mercedes.

Got a light?

No, I…the man fumbled.

You don’t smoke
, the girl said. Some advice: a lighter is a good prop for picking up women at bars.

I don’t go to bars, the man said.

You just hang out across the street from an all-girls high school.

She was smiling as she said this.

Joking, she said.

Not funny, the man said.

Not funny but true, the girl said. I bet you have matches in this car.

She checked the glove box, underneath the floor mat. She found a book in the door pocket, wrapped in a desiccated woman’s leather glove. His ex-wife’s glove? Whose glove? He didn’t have a clue. He felt suddenly threatened by the amnesia he’d only pretended to have.

One match left, she said. Should you do the honors or should I?

I’ll do it, the man said.

There’s a lot of pressure here, the girl said, holding up the last match. Think you can handle it?

The man removed the matchbook from her fingers, careful his skin didn’t touch hers.

The flint had been scraped bare.

He struck the match on the first try. His hands were steady as he cupped the flame and extended it toward the girl’s mouth.