The Uses of Enchantment Read online

  Are you saying that you’ve engaged in consensual sex with a member of a different sex, I said.

  Mary didn’t respond.

  So perhaps your mother’s sex phobia isn’t so irrational, I said.

  Mary scoffed.

  She can’t enjoy what she’s not having, she said.

  You seem so certain about your mother’s lack of sexual activity, I said. And yet you and your mother—as you’ve stated—do not communicate except through oversight.

  I found a letter, she said. A letter my father wrote to Greta.

  Who is Greta, I said.

  Greta is the woman he loves, she said.

  Mary explained her family’s relationship to Greta Thatcher and her husband, Kurt, a couple with whom her parents had been close friends since college. Kurt was an executive at a frozen seafood company with an office overlooking Boston Harbor. Greta had grown up in Vienna. Greta and Kurt came along on most of their family holidays—to the Belgrade Lakes in Maine, to Vermont, to the Cape. At first it seemed natural that Greta and Kurt should accompany them—they were like an aunt and an uncle who drank too much and played card games until late at night and had no children of their own. But then it became clear to Mary that her mother deeply disliked Greta, she behaved badly around her, not-so-accidentally breaking plates and burning food. Even Kurt, a generally nonplussed man, began to drink more than his usual amount and punch their father with a jovial repetitiveness that verged on hostile. They last vacationed together when Mary was twelve years old, a cross-country ski trip to the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont. Midway through the week, her parents stopped sharing a bedroom. On the final day at the ski house, Mary came downstairs to find her mother alone in the kitchen, crying. Mary’s father, her mother told her, had gone off to the woods to commit suicide—and it was only through the brave intervention of Greta, who had chased after him in her bathrobe and boots, that he had been persuaded to spare his life for the sake of his family.

  I believed her at the time, Mary said.

  But then, Mary said, she found a letter from Greta to her father. The letter insisted that Mary’s father shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting to leave Mary’s mother because Mary’s mother and father never had sex anymore.

  That’s when I knew, said Mary.

  What did you know, I said.

  That my father hadn’t tried to commit suicide, and Greta hadn’t tried to stop him. They were off in the woods having sex. My mother lied to me.

  It must feel terrible to be lied to, I said.

  It must feel terrible to be such a fucking loser, Beaton.

  You’re still angry with your parents, I said.

  Obviously my dad was just getting back at my mom for being an all-purpose bitch.

  But you said that Greta was the woman your father loved, I reminded her.

  He loved her in the way that you love people who give you leverage.

  That’s a very astute and mature observation, I said.

  Thanks for the approval, Mary responded.

  Notice that the moment I compliment you, you revert to flippancy. Note that such flippancy is a protective measure against being hurt.

  Note taken, she said. Can we stop picking me apart?

  I smiled.

  Unfortunately, that’s what we’re here to do.

  Is it? she mused, her manner darkening. I thought we were here to pick apart other people and how what they did to me in the past made me who I am.

  That’s a very victim-oriented approach, I said.

  Like Kurt, she said. Kurt did something to me, she said.

  OK, I said. Let’s talk about what Kurt did to you.

  Mary glowered at me.

  Was that in quotes?

  Was what in quotes, I said.

  You just said what Kurt “did” to you.

  If you think you heard quotes, then I respect what you think you heard.

  That’s an apology? she said.

  No, I said. I am acknowledging that your perspective is valid even if I disagree with it.

  You’re a petty man, Beaton, Mary said chidingly.

  Once again, you’re diverting what could be an important topic toward a useless critique of me.

  Sorry, she said. My parents didn’t believe me, either.

  I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, I said. You haven’t told me anything to disbelieve.

  Kurt told me that Greta would be there, Mary said, and that Greta would take me clothes shopping after lunch. We arranged to meet at his office.

  But Greta wasn’t there, I guessed.

  Greta had a cold, she said.

  What about Kurt’s secretaries?

  He’d sent them away. We were all alone. He asked me if I wanted to see the view from the conference room on the top floor. But instead he took me to a file room with a very small window. He drew the blinds and then he…

  He touched you, I said.

  Sort of, she said.

  He made you touch him, I said.

  He kissed me and hugged me and I could feel his…

  His erection, I said.

  I wrote in my notes K = Kurt.

  Mary nodded.

  I imagine you felt very betrayed, I said.

  Mary shrugged. Whatever, she said. It was just Kurt.

  Mary coughed.

  But still, I said.

  Mary was seized by a coughing fit. She waved her hands in front of her face apologetically.

  I fetched a cup of water from the waiting-room bubbler. Mary drank the contents gulpingly.

  Thanks, she said. There’s a weird pressure—on my thorax. Every time I think of his—you know—pressing into my stomach I feel pressure on my thorax.

  Calls a chat a chat, I wrote in my notes, but not a penis.

  That’s called displacement symptom formation, I said.

  Mary coughed.

  It’s a common response to unwanted stimulus, I said.

  Yeah, well, she said. You probably think I liked it.

  I think you should tell me how it made you feel.

  It made me feel tired, she said.

  I was reminded of a remark Mary made during our first session, when she claimed that the “moaning sounds,” which sounded like “group sex,” had made her feel “sleepy.”

  You frequently respond to unwanted sexual stimulus with fatigue, I said. It’s almost…

  Postcoital, she said.

  Excuse me?

  I read that a decent number of convicted rapists are caught because they are so relaxed afterward they forget they’ve committed a crime.

  But you’re the raped girl in this equation, not the rapist.

  That’s a very victim-oriented approach, Beaton, she said.

  Why don’t you tell me what the raped girl feels, I said.

  Her feelings do not matter, Mary said.

  Why is that?

  Because the raped girl is a liar, Mary said. Is that a bad thing to say?

  Good and bad aren’t words we value here, I said. Who says the raped girl is a liar.

  Everyone says, Mary said.

  “Everyone” includes you, I said.

  Mary didn’t answer.

  If she’s a liar, I said, why did she lie.

  She lied, Mary said, because the truth is so clearly unbelievable.

  What Might Have Happened

  What might have happened next was nobody’s fault. Looking back on it, the man could not allow himself to take responsibility, nor could he rightly blame the girl. This is how things happen, he imagined explaining to the policeman. They happen by happening. Sometimes explanations and blame do not exist. Sometimes a person’s inability to have a firm feeling about a situation leads to situations in which there are only strong and complicated feelings. One minute the man and the girl were sitting in the Mercedes staring at the darkened third-floor window of his ex-brownstone, his former bad investment, the next minute—or so it felt—they were at a twenty-four-hour rest stop just over the New Hampshire border on 93
north, the man filling the Mercedes with diesel, the girl’s head visible inside the illuminated convenience store above the aisles of potato chips and chewing tobacco and gum. The convenience store, the single visible object emerging from the lightless backdrop of trees, reminded the man of a globe filled with liquid and fake snow and tiny people. The girl was just a tiny fake person inside this globe and he thought to himself: this is the first step toward committing a crime. Dehumanizing the victim. She is just a piece of painted plastic, already drowned and entombed in a tacky shelf ornament flurried with artificial snow.

  The man noticed that the girl had left her ski jacket in the back of the Mercedes. Checking her whereabouts—now she was standing before the beverage cooler—the man opened the back door and removed the jacket, in his guilty haste cutting himself on an expired ski-pass wire, bent at a malevolent angle. He stuck his finger in his mouth—the blood hot, at least in comparison to the air he’d been breathing—and flipped the coat inside out with his good hand.

  No name, as he’d suspected there should be, young girls being fanatically proprietary creatures or so he remembered from his own childhood of three sisters, just a phone number and an instruction: If Found Please Call.

  The man eyed the pay phone, angling from a plowed drift of snow and garbage. It had snowed north of Boston that day. Snow still sifted from the blackness above him like lazily falling stars.

  Now the girl was talking to the cashier, invisible behind a blinking lotto display. Turning him in, he thought. But no. He saw the man hand her what looked to be a tire iron. To defend herself. To cave in his skull. But no. From the bottom of the tire iron dangled what he guessed to be a restroom key.

  The girl unlocked and entered a door at the far end of the store.

  The man scuttled toward the pay phone, her jacket in his hand. In his hurry he skidded on a patch of ice and felt a muscle deep inside his hip twinge, retract, tighten uncomfortably. He proceeded at a more cautious but still urgent pace. The pay phone had a dial tone, thank god, but distant, as though it were being cabled from the moon.

  The man gave the operator his credit card number and the girl’s home phone.

  Silence, of the uninhabited kind. The man thought perhaps the connection had been severed, and of this inconvenience he was half relieved. What was he going to say when her mother, or her father, or possibly even the police, picked up the phone?

  Help me, he would say. I’ve been kidnapped.

  But that sounded pathetic and unbelievable. Was he really so out of control? Of course he wasn’t. He was a man, he was confused, and he was lonely, and this girl had a key to him—a fake key, a toying key, like the restroom key it hung from the end of a tire iron with which she might cave in his skull—but still she represented possibility to him, whereas everyone else in his life represented shortcoming. You’re the man you’ve always been. His ex-wife’s favorite dismissive refrain.

  In the same vein, thus, nobody had forced him to drive this girl home, nobody had forced him to take her out to dinner, to drive her to Boston, to drive her to his ex-wife’s ski cabin in the mountains where god knows what would happen. (It would happen by happening.) Nobody had forced him to do any of this, and yet he still felt cornered, as though he weren’t given a choice in the matter.

  He heard a subtle change in the silence through the earpiece. Somewhere many miles east and south of him, a phone rang. Once. Twice.

  A woman picked up the phone.

  Hello, she said. She sounded angry or half drunk, not crazed with worry, not at all like a mother whose daughter has failed to come home from school.

  Hello, the woman repeated.

  The man didn’t know what to say.

  Hello, she said a third time. She was a smoker, he guessed.

  I’m hanging up now, the woman said.

  Wait, the man said. I’ve got her.

  Got who? Who is this? Is this Preston?

  I’ve got her, he repeated.

  Your father’s a cad, the woman said. Did you know he tried to kiss me at the Ives’s Christmas party? Did you know that he’s a hound for anything on two legs? What an embarrassment.

  My father is dead, the man said.

  You wish, the woman said. Your headmaster will be getting a phone call tomorrow. You can forget Harvard, young man. You can just forget it.

  She hung up the phone.

  The man stared at the receiver, dumbfounded. This was all a joke. He raised his head. The girl was staring at him though the convenience store window.

  He shuttled back to the diesel pump and tossed the girl’s coat into the backseat.

  The girl returned with a paper bag.

  Three kinds of potato chips and a two-liter jug of root beer, she announced. Who were you calling?

  Huh? he said.

  You were on the phone. Who were you calling?

  My office, the man said.

  You don’t have an office.

  My old office, he said. I still get messages through the service.

  Why were you holding my jacket? she asked.

  I…my hands were cold. I couldn’t find my gloves in the dark.

  The girl, not a moron, seemed unconvinced by this explanation.

  Look, she said, holding up a foil bag. Shrimp flavored. Can you believe it?

  I can’t, the man said. I can’t believe it.

  He peered at his cut finger. In this light—from the dashboard, from the dirty fluorescents above the gas island—it appeared covered in a glossy tar. Blacktopped.

  What happened, the girl said. Did you cut it on the gas pump?

  She grabbed his hand. He pulled it back.

  You should get a free tank of gas. You should at least get a free box of Band-Aids.

  The man didn’t answer her. He started the Mercedes and put it into drive. He accelerated quickly, careening too fast over the icy parking lot. He heard something bounce and roll in their wake. His heart nearly concussed itself on his Adam’s apple. Fuck. He looked in the rearview mirror, expecting to see a sprawl of legs and arms. Then he remembered that he’d left the gas cap on the hood. Via his side mirror he could see the tank thrust perpendicular to the car and vibrating violently on its hinge.

  Too late, he thought.

  The back of the car fishtailed as they merged back onto the highway; the salt under the wheels made it sound as though they were driving over glass. Maybe they were. The man almost hoped that they were. Four flat tires would mean they’d have to stop the happening from happening, they’d have to spend the night in the convenience store playing cards with the cashier and eating shrimp chips, they would look like innocent victims of some bad automotive luck rather than a pair of mismatched strangers up to no good with each other.

  You seem nervous, the girl observed. She opened the bag of shrimp chips. Immediately the interior of the car smelled like dried, aerated fish.

  These, the girl pronounced, are disgusting.

  Would you mind throwing those out the window? the man said. The fake stink was making him queasy.

  But that would be littering, the girl said.

  I don’t give a shit, the man said, more harshly than he’d intended.

  Jeez, the girl said. So-rry.

  She unscrewed the cap to the ungainly jug of root beer resting between her thighs. As she lifted the jug with both hands and attached her mouth to the oversize opening, the Mercedes hit a pothole. He heard the plastic bottle strike her teeth. She pulled the bottle away, spilling root beer on her field hockey skirt.

  She coughed gaggingly.

  The man looked away, inexplicably embarrassed.

  Ow, she said.

  I just meant—it’s food.

  Huh? the girl said.

  That’s not littering. If you throw the shrimp chips out the window, but not the bag.

  What’s wrong with you, the girl said, her voice scratchy.

  Nothing, the man said. I’m…tired.

  You and me both, the girl said. She rolled down the
window and pushed the bag of shrimp chips into the wall of cold wind; it sucked backward with a sharp, collapsed crackle. She reclined her seat, the window still open.

  Roll up the window, the man said. The noise was deafening, the cold both invigorated him and caused within him surges of intense hopelessness.

  The girl shut her eyes. Pretending to sleep.

  Roll up the window, the man repeated.

  The girl did not stir.

  The man returned his attention to the empty road, gray asphalt scored with ribbons of salt and snow. His finger hurt more in the cold and he felt his brain unfurling and dissolving. It had turned into a caustic fume behind his eyebrows, useless for thinking. He felt poisoned by this organ of his, the poison spreading to the rest of his body, his aching hip, his injured finger. They would be healed and then readied for evil action, the synapses doped and then firing according to the pointed aims of this formerly complex brain of his, now reduced to a simple vapor, a collection of thoughtless molecules with nothing but science driving them toward an evil conclusion.

  Among the many emotions he felt, empathy was strangely foremost in his mind. He’d spent a week in his former law firm packing up his office, a task that might have taken a day had he not read every dull piece of evidence and testimony, attempting to locate in this morass of paper a hint of what had drawn him to the law in the first place. The most upsetting file was a case against a babysitter, a junior college–educated woman of Italian heritage who had been accused, by a Beacon Hill banker and his wife, of sexually abusing their two children with wooden spoons, with curling irons, with crucifixes. The notes for his closing statement were appallingly exploitative—he had emphasized the fact that the woman, a lapsed Catholic, had a mother who ran a beauty parlor and a father who ran a pizza joint, thereby lending circumstantial, but emotionally compelling, relevance to her chosen tools of abuse. But really it had been an easy case, since everyone was abusing children these days—in groups, by Satan’s minions, from the West Coast to New England; he had made a note to himself on a legal pad never to reference these other cases, but to make sure, subconsciously, that the jurors saw the woman’s act as a continuum of malice sweeping the country. He’d brought up the Lilliputians, not that he’d read Swift since high school. What has a better chance of taking down an elephant—one spear thrown by one man, or millions of tiny spears thrown by millions of tiny people?