The Uses of Enchantment Page 15

  He had written a phrase in pencil, then sketched around the letters so that they appeared to spring from the lined page three-dimensionally: EMPOWER THE TINY PEOPLE.

  He had won the case, a victory that affected him in his present head about as much as reading about the outcome of a tribal skirmish in Borneo.

  What did affect him was the newspaper photo of the woman—the girl, really—being led away from the courtroom crying so intensely that her nose was a swollen blur of snot, her eyes two miserable slits, and the thought that such desires (assuming she was guilty—and he did, for the sake of his conscience, assume as much) could lurk in a girl like that, a girl who was so blandly, functionally average-seeming, such an exemplary representative of the blah American mean. But truth had a hard time adhering to logic these days; her guilt seemed the only possible choice to him because it seemed so impossible. And now the outlandish was happening to him, and he empathized with this poor Italian girl, whose brain had vaporized in a similar way and infiltrated her hands and fingers like a bad drug. He was—to his happiness and to his horror—becoming his own most impossible person.

  The man shivered, his teeth so tightly gritted they caused his jaw muscles to cramp. The fucking cold, he thought. He glanced at the girl, still pretending to be asleep. Useless to ask her a third time to shut the window, she was clearly toying with him and enjoying it, or that’s how he read the smile on her fake-sleeping face. He lunged across her body and wrenched the window handle around and around and around, leaning all his weight on her, his elbow jabbing into her rib cage with each rotation. He heard her gasp, which inspired him to extend his elbow farther into her midsection as he cranked. His left hand held the steering wheel loosely; with each lunging rotation he pulled the wheel slightly to the right until, just as he’d cranked the handle one final time, the window glass meeting the frame with the suction sound of a vaccum sealing, the car’s rear end started to skid.

  He jerked to an upright position and tried to recorrect the car’s drift, really it was so casual, the car’s gentle sideswiping, but the man’s panicky left rotation worsened the problem into something decidedly not casual. Now the car was made of two independently moving parts, the rear of the car attempting to overtake the front of the car, and soon the car was perpendicular to the road, then facing backward, then perpendicular again, then forward. The man turned the wheel in the opposite direction of their spin and the car paused for a second, quivering violently, as though deciding between two equally desirous forces. The man won, or so for a split second it appeared. But his body, never such a reliable object, failed them. The car returned to a wobbly fishtailing motion, veered to the right, and buried its nose in the partially snow-obscured guardrail.

  Metal against metal. The snapping lanyard sound of safety belts, the forced exhalations as both the man and the girl jerked forward then backward into their seats.

  Silence.

  The man looked at the girl. She was holding her stomach.

  Are you OK? he said.

  Her wide eyes fixated on the darkened dash. It took him a second to realize: she was hyperventilating.

  Are you OK? he repeated, wanting to touch her but thinking: her neck could be broken. He knew this much from the television shows he watched all night long, night after crushingly dull night: do not shift a person with a possible spine injury. Insomnia is my friend.

  Can I help you, the man said. Tell me. What can I do.

  The girl shook her head—did he detect a touch of irritation?—still trying to catch her breath.

  OK, he said. OK.

  The girl glared at him. No doubt about it—she was irritated. Not terrified, not paralyzed—pissed off. The man fell back against his headrest. It’s over, he thought to himself. Not the accident. But this night. This happening. The police would arrive. The tow truck would arrive. He and the girl would part, no harm done.

  He massaged his left collarbone and his neck tendons, smarting from where the seat belt had near-garroted him upon impact. His eyes were closed, thus he was utterly unprepared for her attack. His stomach recoiled, his body pitched forward. He struck his chin on the steering wheel.

  Jesus Christ! he said.

  The girl glared at him.

  That’s for being a jerk, she said.

  It was an accident, he wheezed.

  I’m not talking about that, she said. You think I haven’t been in a car accident before? You think I care about accidents?

  The man massaged his diaphragm. It felt bruised. He imagined he could make out little individual swellings where her knuckles had made contact.

  You knocked the wind out of me on purpose, the girl said. On purpose. While you were pretending to roll up the window.

  The man didn’t defend himself.

  That’s a lot of dishonest crap, the girl said. If you want to hit me you should just hit me.

  Like you hit me, the man said. Out of nowhere. That’s more honest.

  The girl stared out the window at the woods. Steam rose from the hood of the car. The engine was dead—or had he turned it off?

  Guess we’re fucked, she said.

  The man didn’t reply. He felt like sobbing. The sky was turning colors as he watched. From gray to pinky-violet to a deep red-orange. Once light was shed upon this situation, he thought, it will become untenable. It would not hold up to the scrutiny of day. The girl would disappear like a ghost, and this impossible person he’d witnessed in himself would recede.

  Is the engine dead? the girl asked.

  The man shrugged. He assumed yes.

  Try it, she said. Try the ignition.

  The man turned the key.

  The car started up.

  No, he thought to himself. Not possible.

  Amazing, the girl said. We are two very lucky people.

  The man experienced a disorienting cramp of nausea; he turned his head to the left, closed his eyes. Maybe he just needed to sleep.

  I’m sorry for hitting you, the girl said.

  Don’t worry, the man said. I deserved it, apparently.

  The girl laughed. Apparently, she said. That’s no fun.

  What’s no fun, the man said.

  You should resent me for hitting you, she said.

  Do you resent me for hitting you? the man asked.

  The girl thought about this. No, she said. I was relieved.

  You were relieved?

  It gave me a good excuse, she said. It gave me a good excuse to hit you.

  The man experienced a second vertigo twinge of sick. His ex-wife, during one of her reclamation therapy sessions, had admitted something uncannily similar. She’d wished for him to trip up in the final years of their marriage. She’d wished for him to stab her. Nothing gave her more pleasure than when he gave her a decent reason to hate him.

  Look, the girl said, pointing out the window. The sunrise, now the pretty-scary intensity of a forest fire, made a million spears of the treetops; their black silhouettes appeared already burned.

  Beautiful.

  I have to pee, the girl said.

  She pulled on her cleats without tying the laces.

  Be right back, she said.

  He watched her scale the modest snowbank into which they’d landed. The red-orange sunrise seemed capable of burning her up. Soon she disappeared from view, but he could hear the crunching of her shoes as she sank into the snow, en route to find a tree or some safe place to hide behind. Maybe she’ll disappear, he thought. Maybe she’ll disappear and wait for him to come looking for her. But he knew this was foolish thinking. He knew she was coming back without his needing to find her.

  Boston

  NOVEMBER 9, 1999

  It was immature, Mary knew, it was inexcusable behavior for a thirty-year-old woman, but this did not stop her from tailing the red coat down Commonwealth Avenue. She kept a steady padding of four or five pedestrians between herself and the coat; at street crossings she paused to look into store windows as the coat waited for the light to cha
nge. She was feeling fairly proud of her technique until she momentarily lost her mark inside a scrum of school kids tumbling from the T exit, emerging from the pile just in time to see the coat disappear into a yellow-awninged store at the end of the block.

  Mary feigned interest in a flyer taped to the window, uncertain how to proceed. Seven minutes earlier she’d been standing outside Roz’s office, plotting her Roz approach. Should she ring the bell and identify herself and hope that Roz was still such a meddler that she’d welcome Mary into her office? Or wait until another client exited and sneak into the brownstone and then…the then had yet to be worked out in detail. Through the glass of the brownstone’s front doors she had seen a woman in a red coat pulling on gloves and tensing her shoulders and generally readying herself for the cold. This was her chance; she would slide inside and then figure out what to do.

  Yes. Perfect.

  As the woman politely, if distractedly, held the door for her, Mary caught a narrow glimpse of nose and eyes, shuttered by the earflaps of a fur hunting cap. Just that glimpse was enough to be certain—fairly certain—that the face belonged to Bettina Spencer.

  Mary watched the red coat until it was three stoops away, thinking of course Roz sucked Bettina into her vampiric orbit. She marveled at how youthful Bettina appeared, given that she was now in her early forties. She glowed in that rested, expensively moisturized, just-enough-sun way. In other words: she looked rich, and presumably she was rich now, at least according to Mary’s research, conducted in the Grove library those weeks after she’d first learned of Mum’s illness. These after-work spools through the microfiche provided her with her first inklings of what had happened to Dr. Hammer, because while his trial consumed the Boston papers she had pointedly avoided reading them. Soon thereafter she had left for college, she had spent four years in Ashland, Oregon, a town where people subscribed to crystal healing newsletters rather than reading pop psychology books when they had a yen for self-improvement. Nobody had heard of Miriam or Dr. E. Karl Hammer. She was young, and in the way that the young can be disturbingly self-exonerating, she was. Forgetting him was easy. Disappearing into the blank otherworldliness of the Northwest was easy, resuming her life as an unremarkable person was easy. But then Dr. Hammer and his uncertain fate had begun to needle her conscience, a conscience that grew exponentially more self-lacerating after Mum was diagnosed. Dr. Hammer became her obsession, a man whose fate she returned to night after night, watching his life unravel like the doomed protagonist of a freeze-frame TV miniseries (the Evil Hammer, Malleus Malefactorum), with obvious villains and an outcome that felt clunkily fore-shadowed.

  And so she had learned: when Roz and her colleagues from the Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board started to circle Dr. Hammer, Bettina decided to sue Dr. Hammer for retroactive abuses. Dr. Hammer had volunteered as the Semmering mental health adviser while a graduate student at BU, a job he’d ceded to Roz after Miss Pym decided it would be more “seemly” for her girls to be counseled by a woman. He was Bettina’s doctor after her mysterious reappearance. Bettina claimed Dr. Hammer had practically forced her to admit she’d been abducted by the field hockey coach. She’d been suggestible at the time, she conceded. But this did not excuse his taking advantage of her fragile mental state, this did not excuse his urging her to claim as her story a flight of his own imaginative fancy, which was his first, desperate attempt to make a name for himself.

  Dr. Hammer denied it all.

  Fourteen years later, viewed as sequential pieces of reporting, Bettina’s case appeared ludicrously unwinnable and on its own would have probably amounted to little more than the empty accusations of a provenly troubled liar. But combined with the earlier assault led by Roz and her board and the general climate of paranoia surrounding minors and authority figures in the mid-to-late eighties, Dr. Hammer didn’t stand a chance. His license, already suspended indefinitely, was permanently revoked. Soon thereafter he disappeared from the headlines and, presumably, from Boston.

  There existed no photographs of Dr. Hammer entering or leaving the courtroom. Instead the papers printed and reprinted, with evident schadenfreude, his author photo, which, as his situation worsened, slowly transformed from a confident head shot to a cautionary portrait of hubris. The repetitive appearance of this one photo also had a slightly morbid feel to it, as though Dr. Hammer had gone missing and people were hopefully looking for him, even though everyone secretly presumed he was dead.

  Mary had never been inside this particular storefront—a bookstore/stationery/notions/café that approximated the experience of stepping into somebody’s wealthy grandmother’s boudoir, a tensely desexed space that smelled headachingly of tea rose. The tables on which new books spiraled roofward in propeller-shaped piles were draped in toile tablecloths; the identical-looking saleswomen sported dark blond bowl cuts, pleated wide-wale corduroys, duck boots, and matching toile smocks; the square footage afforded the stationery area of packaged vellum greeting cards and wrapping papers and monogrammed desk sets far exceeded the square footage given over to books; the café was in fact a “tearoom,” which was in fact a corner of the store with three tables and a small bar, cordoned off by a few gold posts and a thick swoop of nautical-looking rope.

  Mary was assaulted by a perky middle-aged saleswoman wielding a pair of silver scissors and a bolt of kelly green grosgrain ribbon.

  “Was it two yards you wanted?” The woman punctuated her question with two emphatic snips of her scissors.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Of ribbon,” the woman said. “Two yards?”

  “You’ve got me confused with another customer,” Mary said.

  The woman scanned the store with skittish irritation. Mary scanned along with her, noting that she and Bettina were the only customers under fifty. For the second time that day she found herself feeling wrongly seen, and wondered if in fact she had a mistaken sense of how she appeared to the rest of the world. Like a prospective Semmering parent with a high school–aged daughter. Like a preppily de-eroticized matriarch with a penchant for toile and kelly green ribbon.

  Mary lurked behind the “Local Authors” table, grabbing for camouflage purposes the first book her hand encountered. She ruffled the pages while focusing on Bettina, partially hidden behind a freestanding shelf of greeting cards. The greeting-card area was organized by feeling rather than event, the calligraphied signs reading REJOICE! REGRET, SYMPATHY, EMPATHY, CLOSURE. Bettina picked up a card in LIMBO…before shifting her attention to FORGIVENESS. Mary partly suspected she was meeting someone, an older mustier someone—why else would she be in this store?—but she also suspected that Bettina didn’t really have much of a purpose. In this store, in her life. In the grand sense, Bettina was purposeless. Unless skin care was a purpose. Unless she was up to something with Roz.

  “Can I help you?”

  A second middle-aged saleswoman with a blond bowl cut, indistinguishable from the first, flashed her a white-toothed grimace.

  “Thanks, no,” Mary said to the woman.

  “Oh! Have you read that book?” the woman gushed nervously. She wore a name tag. ANNE. She held an uncapped glue stick. “She’s one of our best-selling local authors.”

  Mary looked at the book she’d been fake-reading.

  The Tarnished Trivet, by Rosemary Biedelman.

  “Of course,” Mary said, more bitchily than she intended.

  Anne retracted inside her too-big smock.

  “I mean, who hasn’t read it?” Mary added to soften her remark.

  “It’s been one of our most dependable best sellers,” said Anne, with mechanical enthusiasm. “I have customers who have read it four, five times.”

  Anne test-drove a second grimace-smile. Poor woman, Mary thought. Obviously the salespeople worked on commission here; obviously Anne’s sales, given her rigor-mortised technique, were negligible to none.

  Anne’s agonized smile persisted while she struggled to find a conversational hook.

  M
ary decided to help her out.

  “I know Rosemary Biedelman,” she offered.

  “You do!” said Anne.

  “I do,” Mary said.

  “So do I!” said Anne.

  Anne fiddled anxiously with her glue stick. She foundered.

  “How do you know Roz,” Mary said.

  “She’s a regular customer here. Which is why we have her books stacked so prominently. How do you know…”

  Then something occurred to Anne. She reddened. Her attitude toward Mary, previously wary-to-fearful, shifted. Anne visibly calmed, as though she’d been awarded an upper hand in this mysteriously weighted transaction.

  Mary understood—Anne assumed that Mary was one of Roz’s patients, and Anne, clearly a self-loathing basket case, still clung to the only bit of flotsam left from her wreck of a life: only weak people went to therapy.

  This assumption of Anne’s made Mary unhappy. No, it made her quietly enraged.

  “Actually, I’m a colleague of Roz’s,” Mary said. “I’m a psychotherapist.”

  “Oh!” Anne said.

  “Yes indeed,” said Mary.

  “Then you definitely don’t need to read self-help books do you?” Anne said.

  “You know what they say about psychotherapists,” Mary said. “The blinder leading the blind.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have any idea since I’ve never been in therapy,” Anne said. “But as the book buyer for the store, I’m obliged to read all the self-help books. I don’t subscribe to most of the nonsense. Which is not to say they’re all nonsense,” Anne said quickly.