The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

1

She had been watching him for three weeks. Every morning since the beginning of May, she had gone to the window to look at him. It was always early, just before dawn, and as far as she knew he had never seen her. On that first morning, Lily had opened her eyes and spotted a light coming from a window across the street in the Stuart Hotel, and once she had moved closer, she had noticed him in the shining square: a beautiful man standing near a large canvas. Stripped down in the heat to only his shorts, he had stood so still for a minute that he hadn’t looked real to her. But then he had started to move, using his whole body to paint, and Lily had watched him reach, stoop, lunge, and even kneel before the canvas. She had watched him pace the floor, rub his face hard with his hands, and smoke. The man smoked little cigars, which he held between his teeth whenever he paused to think. And sometimes, when he was just quietly smoking, he would nod at the painting as if it were talking to him. Lily had studied the lines of his muscles and the light brown color of his skin and the way it gleamed in the light, but she had not seen what he was painting. The front of the canvas had always been hidden from her.

Division Street was wide and treeless. The man’s room was at least twenty yards from Lily’s, and she had never been closer to him than that. Exactly what she expected from watching him she didn’t know, but it hardly mattered. The truth was that she couldn’t look at the man enough, and on those days when he didn’t go to bed but stayed up and worked through the dawn, she had to force herself to close her curtains and turn away from the window.

On this particular morning, however, it was raining hard and Lily couldn’t see him clearly. She stuck her head out the window and squinted in his direction. Rain pelted her face, and water was streaming down his closed window, so all she could make out was a blurred, waving body behind the glass. And then, before she understood what was happening, he walked to his window, jerked it open and leaned out into the rain. Lily ducked beneath the sill and squatted on the floor. Her heart was beating fast and her cheeks turned hot as she listened to the noise of water running in the gutters. She had taken a terrible risk leaning out that way. Before that moment, she had scolded herself a little for spying on him, but the thought that she had been discovered filled her with sudden, acute shame. She had been so careful, too, always crouching beside her window with only her eyes above the sill, making sure no light was on in her room, and every time she did turn them on to shower and get dressed for work, she had kept her curtains tightly closed.

Lily knew that the man’s name was Edward Shapiro. Although they hadn’t exchanged a single word, she had gathered several facts about him and had heard a lot of gossip. She knew for certain that Edward Shapiro had spent a year as “artist in residence” at Courtland College. She knew that instead of returning home to New York City at the end of his last semester, he had decided to stay on in Webster, and that was when he had rented the room in the Stuart Hotel. She also accepted as fact that sometime in March, his wife, who had been living with him in faculty housing, had packed her bags and left him. The rest was rumor. A lot of people wanted to know what he was doing in a fleabag like the Stuart, a hotel so crummy that it didn’t even take women. The five or six old codgers who lived there were a sad bunch, and Lily knew most of them. The hotel’s restaurant had been closed for as long as she could remember, even though they had never taken down the sign for it, and just about every morning, one by one, the men would shuffle across the street to eat their breakfasts at the Ideal Cafe, where Lily waited on them six days a week. She had heard that Edward Shapiro was poor, that he gambled his earnings at the college on baseball games, and she had heard he was rich but was too cheap to rent a decent place. She had heard his wife left him because he gambled, and she had heard she left him because, as Lester Underberg put it not a week ago in the cafe, “he couldn’t keep his pecker at home.” Lester had it “on good authority” that Shapiro had “nailed” a beautiful redheaded student in his office while playing Verdi at full tilt. According to Lester, Shapiro had received dozens of young opera fans in his office while he was at the college, but the truth was that Lester couldn’t be trusted. He collected dirt on everybody and anybody, and on a couple of occasions Lily had caught him telling out-and-out whoppers. Lester was right about Edward Shapiro’s love for opera, however. There had been nights in the past weeks when she had heard music coming from his window, and twice the voices had been so loud that they had woken her from a deep sleep. The story about the redhead stuck in her mind nevertheless, and Lily kept adding details to it that Lester had left out. She imagined Shapiro and the girl, saw her lying with her legs open on a desk, her skirt pulled up around her waist and the man standing over her, completely dressed except for an open zipper. Over and over, she had played out the scene in her mind, had seen papers scatter and books drop from the desk as the man grappled with his student. Lily had watched for women to appear in the man’s window, but if they visited, they never stayed the night. The narrow iron bed that stood in the far right-hand corner of his room had been empty twenty-two mornings in a row.

Lily balked at moving, but very slowly she peeked over the sill. Shapiro’s window was dark, and she felt her shoulders sink in relief. When she closed her curtains, she heard footsteps from the apartment next door. Mabel’s up, she thought. Mabel Wasley slept very little, and the wall between the two rooms wasn’t thick enough to muffle even the smallest noise. Day after day, Lily listened to the old woman walk, rustle papers, open and close cupboards and drawers, clink dishes, cough, mumble, flush her toilet, and all afternoon and far into the night she listened to Mabel type. Exactly what Mabel was writing had never been clear to Lily, although the woman had once explained it. The enormous manuscript was an autobiography of some kind that included dreams and how they mixed into everyday life, but whenever Mabel talked about the book, she went on and on and used words Lily didn’t understand, and sometimes when she was particularly excited, her voice would get very loud until she was almost shouting, so Lily didn’t like to bring up the subject. For nine months Lily had lived above the Ideal Cafe alone. She had rented her room only a few days after graduating from high school, and when Mabel arrived in early March, Lily had welcomed the company, even though from time to time, she had the impression that Mabel was hiding something. No one knew much about her, although she had taught at Courtland College for twenty years. There were rumors that she had been married several times before she came to Minnesota, but Mabel had never mentioned a husband, and although she was very friendly, she was also stiff, and that stiffness forbade prying.

Lily sat down at her table where she ate and put on her makeup and did anything else that required sitting. She had hung her mirror above it and looked at her own tired face in the reflection and at Marilyn Monroe’s face behind her on a poster she had fastened to the wall. Boomer Wee had once said she looked like Marilyn, only dark, and even though Lily knew this wasn’t true, she liked the idea. She leaned toward the mirror, lowered her eyelids, parted her lips and pushed her breasts together to make a long cleavage over her white bra. She glanced at Marilyn again and then heard a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep.

Without turning around, Lily saw Mabel enter the room in the mirror. The old woman walked quickly, her long robe sweeping the floor, and stopped when she reached the chair.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to catch you before work and ask you how the play was going and tell you that if you’re still having trouble with the part, I might be able to help. You know I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream for, well, close to thirty years, and it struck me last night that I could coach you. Hermia’s a wonderful part, really, and you’re perfect for it. What do you think?” Mabel delivered this speech fast and with few breaths, addressing Lily’s reflection in the mirror, all the while waving her hands for emphasis, and once her fingers brushed the top of Lily’s head. Then she let her hands fall and rested them lightly on Lily’s shoulders. They were both silent for several seconds, and Lily stared at their faces in the mirror and at Marilyn’s between them, and she thought that the three of them looked strange together. Mabel’s small heart-shaped face, with deep wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes and mouth, had an intense expression that could have been either defiance or concentration. Marilyn wasn’t smiling either, but her lips were parted to show teeth, and her fingers indented the flesh of her right breast. There was something too perfect about the way the three of them were framed in the mirror, and it bothered Lily. It created an annoying stillness that made her think suddenly of things that were alive and things that were dead, and she shrugged her shoulders to release herself from Mabel’s touch.

“Monday’s good after work. I need help. I remember my lines, but half the time I don’t know what they mean.”

The woman clasped her hands. “We’ll have tea first.”

Mabel’s happiness irritated Lily for some reason, and she said nothing more.

Mabel left the room. She didn’t say good-bye. Instead, she recited some of Lily’s lines from the play: “Dark night, that from the eye his function takes.” Lily saw Mabel put a finger to her ear. “The ear more quick of comprehension makes; / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense.”

The woman’s voice was thin and old, but her delivery had a nuance and understanding Lily knew she lacked completely. That’s why she did it, she thought, to show me how natural and good she is. Isn’t that what Mrs. Wright had been telling her in rehearsal? “Just speak in your natural voice,” and Lily had thought to herself: But what is my natural voice?

* * *

The early customers who straggled into the Ideal Cafe were all men, all regulars, and none of them had much to say. Between five and six the place was pretty quiet. The men who came in during that first hour didn’t have wives or girlfriends, but every one of them would have had a story to tell if he’d chosen to tell it, a story about the accident, death, bad break or quirk of personality that had turned him into what he was now: a solitary character who arrived at the crack of dawn to eat his breakfast alone in a room full of other solitary characters who were eating their breakfasts alone.

Pete Lund usually arrived first, after chores on his big farm east of town. Pete’s wife had died of breast cancer a couple years back, and he had taken to eating his meals out. A year ago when Lily first started working, he had placed his order aloud, and it still stood: a cup of black coffee, two eggs, scrambled, and three pieces of white toast with strawberry jam, not grape jelly. After that, he hadn’t bothered to speak. When Lily approached him, he nodded at her, and she put in the order. Harold Hrdlicka, who had bought the old Muus farm, took his eggs sunny-side up with hash browns, and Earl Butenhoff from the Stuart Hotel ate a bowl of Wheaties before his eggs — once over easy — and finished off his meal with a fat, usually half-smoked stogie that he carried around in his shirt pocket. By five-thirty that morning they had all arrived, each one sitting in his own booth waiting for food. Pete was staring over the counter at Vince’s collection of “semiantique” windup toys. Harold was reading the Webster Chronicle, and Earl studied the tabletop between repeated throat-clearings — during which he spat gobs of yellow mucus into a huge, stained handkerchief that he pulled in and out of his pants pocket. From the kitchen, Lily could hear Vince singing “Anything Goes” in a low voice. She could hear the rain outside and smell bacon and sausage on the grill, and from the street came an odor of wet pavement, grass, and what she supposed were worms crawling onto the sidewalk, and as she moved from table to table with her pot of coffee, she felt happy and hummed along with Vince under her breath.

Martin Petersen walked into the cafe around six, took his usual seat in the booth by the window and started staring at Lily. Every time he came in for breakfast, he stared. She was used to it, not just from Martin, but from lots of people. She had suffered through braces on her teeth, breasts that wouldn’t grow and a reputation as a tomboy, but the year she turned fourteen, it had changed, and now after five years she had grown used to her looks and the staring that went with them. Sometimes she liked it, and sometimes she didn’t, but she had learned to pretend that she didn’t notice. Martin, however, was different. He always studied her calmly and deliberately as if it were his job to look at her, and because she couldn’t penetrate what he meant by those long stares, Martin’s eyes made her a little uncomfortable. But at the same time, she felt oddly drawn to him. Martin was mysterious. She had heard rumors that he was gay and rumors that he was a person who had no interest in sex. Linda Haugen had once whispered to her in confirmation class that Martin had been “born both” and that “they took the girl half away.” But this had to be nonsense. The secret of Martin wasn’t his body, but it wasn’t his mind either. He gave off something peculiar — an air of hidden knowledge or intuition that sometimes made Lily feel he was looking at her from a great distance even though he was only inches away.

Lily couldn’t remember not knowing Martin Petersen. The house where Martin lived as a child and where he still lived wasn’t far from Lily’s own childhood house on the outskirts of town, and she and Martin had sometimes played together in the woods or near the creek. He had stuttered even worse then than he did now. A couple of times, she had taken Martin home with her to play, but Lily had never gone to Martin’s house. There had been something wrong with his father, and whatever it was, it had made Lily’s mother nervous enough to leave it unexplained. When Lily was eight, Martin’s father, Rufus Petersen, had killed his dog — a bitch about to give birth. He shot her and left the bleeding carcass down by the creek, where Lily’s father had found the poor mutt and buried her along with her unborn pups. Lily remembered the blood on her father’s shirt from the dog, and remembered that he had cursed Rufus Petersen with uncommon violence. She had played with Martin less often after that, but he rode the same school bus that she did, and she remembered he was teased mercilessly for his stutter. Once Andy Feenie and Pete Borum had beaten up Martin behind Longfellow School, and she remembered him coming around the brick building, bawling loudly as blood poured down his shirt from his nose. In high school, Martin had kept mostly to himself, and he and Lily hadn’t talked to each other much, but she had felt connected to him anyway, and sometimes they had run into each other at the creek, where Martin fled his house to read books and be alone. His father had left the family by then, and his young mother who didn’t look young was sick with leukemia, and his older brother and sister were fending for themselves and, some said, running wild. Mrs. Petersen died during Martin’s last year of junior high school, and there had been a mess with the welfare people. Hard knocks, Lily thought, one after the other. The other Petersen kids had left town, but Martin had stayed on in the family house and was working as a handyman. The word was that he was very good at it. Reliable and honest, they said, and people were calling him all the time to fix this or that, to do some painting or small carpentry work, and Lily had a feeling that life was better for him now that he was grown up.

Martin always wanted the same breakfast — poached eggs on toast — but unlike Lily’s other early customers, he had never been happy with silence. It wasn’t enough to say to him, “The usual?” and let him nod. He wanted an exchange, so instead of Martin stammering out an order and getting flustered, he tapped out a little rhythm on the tabletop with his fingers, rat-tat-a-tat-tat, and Lily answered him with two raps of her own, tat-tat. The tapping had started soon after Lily began working in the cafe and had made them friends again, after a fashion. No one else was in on it. Those beats were a little language all their own, and Martin seemed so happy to order his breakfast in code, it made Lily happy, too.

That morning they went through the routine again. Martin rapped the table.

Lily slapped her index finger twice against the edge of the table and said, “You’ve got it, Cobweb.”

Martin had landed the tiny part of Cobweb in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Lily thought it would be friendly to acknowledge it, although she wondered if Mrs. Wright hadn’t taken charity a little too far by casting Martin in any role, no matter how small. She hadn’t rehearsed with Martin yet. So far practice had been limited to the actors with big parts, but it was hard to imagine Martin as any kind of actor, much less a fairy.

When she gave Vince Martin’s order in the kitchen, the fat man leaned across the stove and said, “Where’s the funeral? It’s so quiet in there, you’d think I was cooking for a bunch of stiffs.”

Lily grinned and shook her head. “You say that every morning, Vince. It gets noisier in an hour. You know that.”

“This is one dead little burg, baby doll. It’s big-time excitement around here when one of them old Lutherans lets out a fart.”

Lily smiled at Vince. He was in a good mood this morning, and she felt grateful. “Go back to Philadelphia then, why don’t you, if it’s so perfect there,” Lily said and picked up the plate of French toast for Mike Fox. “Must be great, people shooting each other in the streets, muggers, pickpockets. I read the papers, Vince. Sounds like paradise.” Lily backed through the swinging doors.

Vince pointed his spatula at her. “At least people talk to you before they shoot you!”

With Mike’s plate in her hands, Lily paused behind the counter. She could feel Martin watching her and glanced over at him for an instant. His sober face was measuring hers. Maybe he does have a thing for me, she thought, and laid Mike’s plate on the counter beside the six cigarettes that he had already lined up in front of him on the Formica surface.

“You’re food’s here when you’re ready, Mike,” she said.

He looked up at her and pushed a strand of long blond hair behind his ear, before he stuck a fresh cigarette between his teeth. Lily watched him light it. Six days a week for a year, she had watched Mike go through the same ritual. The job called for a whole pack of Kents, and when he was finished, Lily would find a row of twenty cigarettes on the counter, each one smoked just a hair shorter than the one before it. Looking at Mike, she felt sure that he was counting his puffs, but she knew he couldn’t be dragging too hard on it either or the butt would burn too fast. Mike lowered the cigarette to the black ashtray and began to snuff it with a gentle turning motion of his wrist and fingers. The first time Mike had left that perfect slant of Kents on the counter, Lily had been scared to throw them away. But Bert had said, “He doesn’t care about it once it’s done. Just sweep the masterpiece into the garbage. He’ll make another one tomorrow.”

Lily walked back to the kitchen to pick up Martin’s food, and Vince started in right where he left off. “And because there’s no talking in this goddamned place, there’s no real sex. Ever think of that, doll? Look at the women in this town, hardly a single one with a speck of ‘cha-cha.’ In the winter they’re all covered up with those god-awful down parkas and in the summer they wear dresses that look like bags. Lipstick’s a sin. Jewelry’s a sin.” The man’s face was red. He had big jowls that shook when he moved his head.

Lily grabbed Martin’s plate. “There’s plenty of sex in this town, Vince. Don’t be a dummy.”

“Yeah, but it’s not fun sex. There’s a big difference.”

Lily groaned. “Come on.”

“You haven’t been around, baby. I’m telling you.” He held his arms out at his sides and wiggled his enormous hips back and forth. “Sex is shmooze in a dusky bar with a jazz band and a girl who looks like she likes it. Oh, honey, the nights I spend dreamin’ about Sandra Martinez,” the man groaned.

“What you don’t know, Mr. City Man,” Lily said, “is that a cornfield can be just as sexy as a jazz club. You just haven’t been around.” Lily rolled her shoulder at him.

Vince opened his mouth and pretended to be shocked. “Why, Lily Dahl,” he said. “You little devil.”

“Don’t ever tell me I haven’t got cha-cha,” Lily said on her way out, and she heard Vince muttering something under his breath.

The rain had stopped and Division Street looked brighter. When she put down the plate in front of Martin, he looked up at her with his serious face and his wide eyes, and she remembered how light his irises were — pale blue — a color that made her feel she could look right through them. As she left the table she felt a vague spasm in her abdomen, heard the screen door open and, turning toward the sound, saw the Bodler boys shuffle into the cafe. She sighed, but not loudly enough for them to hear it, and watched them walk toward the booth in the back just outside the bathroom with the sign Vince had put up that said “EITHER/OR.” If only they weren’t so dirty, Lily thought, as she looked down at the trail of mud on the floor behind the two men. If only it was just their boots that were dirty, and not their arms and legs and heads and butts and every square inch of their whole selves. Lily stopped in front of the Bodlers’ table and took out her order pad. She looked from Filthy Frank to Dirty Dick and back to Filthy Frank. The old coots were just as grimy as ever, only moister. She could see drip lines on their cheeks where they’d been rained on. Lily tapped her toe and waited. Frank would order. He always did. Dick never said a word. The Bodler boys were identical twins who over many years had turned out different. Nobody had the slightest difficulty telling them apart. Dick’s body echoed Frank’s but didn’t repeat it. Punier, balder, blanker, Dick had become a diluted copy of his brother.

Everything they touched turned black. Lily looked down at Frank’s hands. She could already see smudges forming on the white table.

“Well, what’ll it be?” she said.

Neither man moved or even blinked.

She leaned closer to Frank and raised her eyebrows. He smelled like clay.

The man opened his mouth, showing brown teeth interrupted by several holes. Then came the guttural rumble: “Two eggs, scrambled, bacon, toast, coffee.”

“Coming up.” Lily turned away and looked over Martin’s head into the street. The weather was clearing steadily. Martin was reading now. He usually brought a book with him and read for a while before leaving. As far as Lily could tell, Martin read everything. He seemed to like history books, especially books on World War II, but he also liked novels — cheap ones and highbrow ones — and science fiction books and how-to books. She remembered him reading Anna Karenina in the cafe for several weeks, and when he finished with that he had started in on a book called A Hundred Ways to Make Money in the Country. Still, Lily figured all that reading had to do some good. He’s probably pretty smart, she thought, and then on her way to the kitchen she considered the fact that Martin had turned twenty-one and was most likely a virgin. She liked this thought, liked the idea of innocence in a young man. At the same time, she felt sorry for him.

Only a few minutes later, when Lily was serving the Bodlers their breakfast and pouring them more coffee, she noticed a brown grocery bag sitting beside Frank in the booth and asked herself what the dirt twins might be hauling around with them. Then she watched Frank grasp his cup and looked down at his thumbnail — a thick, yellow husk — and staring at the fat, dirty nail started her thinking about Helen Bodler.

No one doubted anymore that old man Bodler had buried his wife alive back in 1932, but at the time people thought she’d walked out on him and the twins. Bodler drank. His small farm, like a lot of other farms, was in bad trouble and the theory was he went mad from the strain. Lily remembered her grandmother telling her the story, remembered how she had leaned over the oilcloth on the kitchen table, her voice tense but clear. “Helen wouldn’t’ve left them two little boys and gone off without a word to nobody. She wasn’t that kind. I knew her, and she wasn’t that kind. Mighty pretty woman, too. People said she ran off with the peddler, Ira Cohen. Talk about rubbish. Cohen had a wife and six kids in St. Paul. Where’d he put her? In the back of the cart? The whole thing stank to high heaven from the start.”

They found Helen’s body in 1950. The twins and another man, Jacob Hiner, were digging up the old outhouse on the property and unearthed her skeleton near it. Bodler had already been dead for eleven years. His two sons had fought in Europe, had come home and started up their junk business. Lily didn’t know exactly when they had stopped washing. The army enforced cleanliness, so it must have been sometime after 1945 that the Bodler twins became Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick. Had they married, the gruesome story of their parents might have aged faster, grown distant with children and grandchildren, but there were no more Bodlers. What the two brothers had felt when they discovered their mother’s bones frozen in a position of panic, a position that showed she had tried to claw her way out of her grave, was anybody’s guess. Illegible as stones, the two walked, ate and snorted out as few words as possible.

Then, as she looked up, Lily saw Edward Shapiro standing on the steps outside the Stuart Hotel. Even from that distance, she could see that he was rumpled, as if he had just climbed out of bed. Lily walked toward the window and stopped. She watched the man scratch his leg, and at the same time, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bert waltz into the cafe and let the screen door slam behind her. After tying an apron around her waist, Bert sidled up to Lily and said, “So how’s the Ordeal this morning?” Without waiting for an answer, she surveyed the booths, nodded at the twins and groaned theatrically.

Lily nodded and moved her head to the right so she wouldn’t lose sight of the man on the steps. Bert followed Lily’s eyes and the two women watched him together.

“Absolutely, definitely cheating material if I ever saw it.” Bert gave her wad of gum a snap. “It’s not often I get the urge to sneak out on old Rog’, but that one…,” and without bothering to finish the sentence, Bert shook her head. Then she whistled and turned to Lily. “Poor Hank, he’s in for it.”

“I’m not married to Hank, Bert.”

“Oh yeah, I thought you two were engaged.”

“Not really,” Lily said and held out her left hand. “No ring, see. Anyway, who says I’d have a chance with a guy like that. He must be at least thirty, and he’s an artist, and—”

“Honey,” Bert interrupted her, “with a bod like yours you’ve got a chance with anything male and breathing.” She paused. “Well, what d’ya know, Mr. Tall, Dark and Mysterious is coming over.”

“Nah,” Lily said. “He never comes in here.”

But Edward Shapiro was striding across the street toward them, and Lily grabbed the coffeepot off its heating coil and began to pour coffee into Clarence Sogn’s cup, even though it was nearly full already, and once she had done that, she wiped her hands on her apron for no reason and felt her heart beating and told herself not to be stupid. She didn’t see him, but she heard him come through the door, and at the sound she straightened her back and pulled in her stomach. Just as she turned to look at him and saw him sitting at the counter, she felt a slow, warm sensation between her legs and knew it was blood. Shit, she thought. I never keep track. She stared at Edward Shapiro from behind. He was leaning forward and the fabric of his blue work shirt had tightened across his shoulder blades. She moved her eyes down the back seam of his jeans that disappeared into the red covering of the stool, and she could almost feel his weight. The man was lean, but the idea of his heaviness aroused her. Even if he did see me, he’ll never recognize me, she said to herself and watched Bert pour him a cup of coffee. She wished she were on the other side of the counter with the coffeepot. She wished she didn’t have to run upstairs to her room for a tampon. She waved at Bert, mouthed the word “curse,” raced to the back of the cafe and through the door to the stairwell.

Sitting on the toilet in her apartment, Lily felt grateful to be off her feet. Her jeans and underpants were lying on the floor, and she was looking down at the blood stain on the white material of her underpants, its red brilliant against the denim and the dull blue floor tiles. She didn’t want to move, but after several seconds she reached for her tampons, unwrapped one and pushed it inside her. She glanced down at the blue string between her legs, at her bare knees and the lines of their bones, and had one of those sudden, curious feelings, more sensation than thought, and more familiar to children than adults, that she wasn’t really there in the room at all, that she had been blown out of her own head somewhere else, and that every thing she was looking at was no longer itself, but a kind of inanimate impostor. Lily changed position to get rid of the feeling and then changed into a fresh pair of underpants and jeans.

She opened the back door to the cafe slowly. She wanted to look in on Edward Shapiro at the counter, but he was gone. Instead, she saw Martin only three or four feet in front of her, standing beside the Bodlers’ booth, and at that very second, he was handing Filthy Frank two twenty-dollar bills. Half a minute later, she would have missed the whole transaction. Frank took the money, picked at his greasy shirt pocket and tucked the bills inside. Then he handed Martin the bag. It was the way Martin took the bag that gave Lily a start. As he reached for it, his fingers trembled with expectation, and his eyes rolled upward so that for an instant his pupils disappeared and all she saw was white. His lips parted, and she heard him exhale. Lily didn’t know what she was seeing, but whatever lay inside that dirty grocery bag, it had affected Martin in a way that embarrassed her. She suffered for him, for his oddness, for his not knowing how to act, for that horrible expression that was much too private for a cafe. She pushed the door open, and in her hurry to get past him, accidentally brushed his elbow. Damn, she said to herself as she confirmed that Shapiro had really and truly vanished. She felt a light touch on her shoulder, turned around and saw Martin staring down at her. He stuttered out her name and said, “I’m leaving something for you on the table.”

She glanced down at the bag that Martin was holding in his left hand. “A present for me?” She knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. The question was prompted by irritation with him, and she heard an edge in her voice.

He shook his head, and Lily turned away from him to avoid his face.

She hurried over to Bert and said, “So, what’s he like?”

Bert looked up. “To whom are you referring?” she said with an artificial sniff.

“Ah, cut it out. Give me the dope.”

“He came and went like lightning, but for the minute he was here, I’d say he was real class, real nice and not stuck-up at all.”

“Yeah?” Lily said. She slid behind the counter and poured Matt Halvorsen more coffee. “Did you talk about anything?”

“He said he’d take a doughnut.”

“That’s deep,” Lily said.

“I said, ‘Which one?’ and pointed at the case. Then he said in New York you don’t get to pick ’em, and I said, ‘Well, this ain’t New York,’ and he said he knew that, and that he’d take the one without the hole, more for your money. He swilled down his coffee in three seconds flat, grabbed the doughnut and ran out the door.”

Lily pressed her lips together. “His eyes are kind of unusual, wouldn’t you say? They go up a little. Did you notice?”

Bert nodded. “Almond shaped. That’s uncommon, at least around here.”

“He’s uncommon, all right.”

Lily and Bert turned their heads to spot the eavesdropper.

Ida Bodine walked toward them, carrying her coffee cup. The tiny woman wore her hair in a towering beehive to compensate for the missing inches.

“Gossip radar,” Bert said to Lily in a low voice.

“He’s got somethin’ goin’ up in his room,” Ida said. “I’ve been hearin’ things.”

“What kind of things?” Lily said.

“Bangin’, creakin’. More than once I’ve had to tell him to cut the racket — opera music blarin’ till it busts your eardrums. It’s my job as night manager to keep things runnin’ smooth-like, and that one’s made my job a regular hell.”

Night desk clerk, you mean, Lily thought to herself. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she said aloud. “A little noise.”

Ida sipped her coffee, her eyes on Lily. “That ain’t all. I seen people goin’ in there when I start work at six, and they don’t go in the front door neither, go in the back from the river side and stay in there with him for hours. And they ain’t what you call ‘nice’ folks neither.” Ida nodded.

“I think a man’s got a right to see anyone he pleases,” Bert said.

Ida looked straight at Bert, cocked her head to one side and smiled with false sweetness. “Tex?” she said.

Lily looked at Ida, who had put down her coffee cup and folded her arms across her chest. It did seem unlikely. Lily conjured an image of the big man — six feet five with long red sideburns, a nose bent from too many fights and a big beer belly hanging over his pants. Vince had banned him from the Ideal a couple of years before Lily started as a waitress, and she rarely met up with him, but Hank knew Tex from the city jail, where he sometimes spent the night in one or the other of the two cells. Hank’s summer job as a dispatcher at the Webster Police and Fire Department had made him an expert on the big redhead’s misdemeanors. It was true that his crimes usually didn’t amount to much more than disturbing the peace, but he disturbed the peace at a pretty regular clip and drove the officers batty. Tex’s last offense had taken place last Thursday, when he barged through the doors of the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall out on Highway 19, howling like Tarzan as he loped down the aisle dressed in nothing but a pair of leopard bikini underwear, a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots.

“I’d say Tex must’ve paid that Shapiro fellow eight or nine visits, and the last time I seen him, he was comin’ out of the room buttonin’ up his shirt.” Ida’s face puckered in disgust.

Bert gaped at Ida in mock horror. “Why, Ida Bodine,” she said. “If the man’s a fruit, I’m a five-eyed alien from the next galaxy.”

Ida sniffed. “I’m just sayin’ what I seen, nothin’ more.”

“Come on, Ida,” Lily said. “Edward Shapiro taught at Courtland. He had a good job there—”

Ida interrupted. “His wife left him, didn’t she? It’s gonna be divorce.” She hissed the last consonant. “Tell me this, if he’s so hoity-toity, big professor and all, what’s he doin’ in the Stuart?”

Lily glanced at Bert, then back at Ida. “I think he’s painting.” Her tone had more vehemence than she had intended.

Ida raised her eyebrows. “You know what they say about the paintings, don’t you? They’re pictures of Webster, and they ain’t none of our beauty spots. I guess he’s done the grain elevator and the tracks and the dump and made ’em real ugly to show all of us here that we’re a bunch of hicks.”

Lily had only seen the backs of Shapiro’s paintings, but she wondered why he would paint outdoor scenes inside.

“Now where did you get that information?” Bert said.

“Around.” Ida narrowed her eyes.

Lily leaned over the counter toward Ida. “And what law says he can’t paint whatever the hell he wants?”

Ida moved her head back from Lily. “Well, la-di-da,” she said. “If you aren’t takin’ this personal.” The woman retrieved a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed either side of her mouth with it. It was a gesture of absurd, extravagant femininity that made Lily want to laugh. Ida lowered the napkin and clutched it in two hands. “What I’d like to know, Lily Dahl, is what’s that New York Jew to you?”

Lily glared at Ida but said nothing. Bert gave Lily an uneasy glance. Then Ida crumpled the napkin in one fist, lifted her coffee cup from the counter and walked back to her stool.

“Windbag,” Bert said.

“He’s Jewish,” Lily said, observing the fact aloud.

“Shapiro,” Bert said. “It’s a Jewish name.”

“Oh,” Lily said. She felt herself blush and wondered why Bert knew such things when she didn’t. She looked at the clock. It was pushing seven. Soon there’d be another rush when the downtown merchants came in for a bite before opening their stores. Lily surveyed the room. She had missed the Bodlers’ exit. “God, Bert, you cleaned the scuz booth.”

“So you owe me.” Bert picked up a stack of dishes, then motioned with her head toward the door.

Hank Farmer walked in and smiled at Lily. His face looked a little swollen, but then all night at the police station would clobber anybody. He gave Lily a quick kiss on the cheek, and instead of straightening up, he kept his head level with hers and said, “I’m going home to sleep, but I’d like to see you later, okay?”

Lily looked into his handsome face. He was so close she could see the faint scars of adolescent acne. A piece of dark blond hair had fallen onto his forehead. She didn’t answer him but looked past his cheek at Martin’s empty booth and studied the inverted letters of the neon sign in the window. She leaned back a couple of inches. “Call me,” she said. “I feel a little low. My period.”

Hank nodded and kissed her again. She watched him bound out the door and across the street. He moved beautifully, and she thought to herself that he looked better from a distance. She stared through the window and fiddled with the pad in her apron pocket.

Bert addressed Lily’s back. “I know you’re juggling love interests right and left here, Lil’, but you better get that fanny of yours back to work.”

Lily didn’t bother to turn around. She wiggled her hips at Bert and said, “It’s seven. I’m going to play something before you-know-who gets there first.” Lily looked over her shoulder toward the jukebox and saw Boomer Wee coming through the kitchen doors.

“Cut him off at the pass!” Bert yelled, flinging an arm toward Boomer.

Lily made a dash for the jukebox, but Boomer was too fast for her, and by the time she reached it, he was leaning over the selections. His T-shirt had hiked up his back, exposing his white skin and bony spine. “Don’t you dare play that song. Get back to the dishes!” she hissed at Boomer, trying to elbow him away from the box. “You’re going to kill me with that song.” But Boomer blocked her and she heard the rattle of the quarter, the click of the machine and then Elvis started singing “Blue Suede Shoes.”

“You little skunk,” Lily said to Boomer, who was smiling innocently on his way to the kitchen. I loved it, too, before I heard it 6,458 times, Lily thought, and walked over to Martin’s booth to clear it.

The dirty plate, silverware, coffee cup and saucer had been stacked and pushed to one side of the table, but lying squarely in the middle was a white napkin, and on it, written in large, cursive letters was the word “mouth.” That was all. Mouth? Lily thought. A thin ray of sunshine eked through a hole in the cloud cover and lit the table at a slant. Lily picked up the napkin and stared at it. Could this be what he was talking about, the thing he was going to leave me on the table? How weird. The ink had bled into the soft paper. Lily shook her head, and then, without knowing why, she glanced around to see if anyone had seen her reading the napkin. No one was showing the slightest interest. Lily brought her hands together, crumpled the paper, and quickly stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she lifted the stack of dishes from the table and headed for the kitchen.

* * *

Lily told Hank not to come that night. When she heard the disappointment in his voice, she felt bad, but Some Like It Hot was on TV that night, and she wanted to watch Marilyn alone. Hank had teased Lily about Marilyn, had said she was dizzy on the subject, and once when Lily had tried to articulate her feelings about her, Hank had grinned through the explanation. After that, she had stopped talking about Marilyn to Hank or anyone else. The Marilyn story had started with Bus Stop. Lily was still living with her parents then. That was before her father’s cancer operation, before they moved to Florida to get away from the winters, and she had stayed up watching the movie until two o’clock in the morning. The coat in the very last scene had clinched it. The cowboy had taken off his jacket and put it around Marilyn’s shoulders, and when she snuggled into it, her whole upper body had moved and trembled as if she were being kissed on her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and when Lily had looked into Marilyn’s face on the screen, she had felt she was seeing a wonderful and dangerous happiness that was so strong it was almost pain. The scene had made her want to act more than anything in the world, and the next morning she had told her parents that she wanted to be an actress. They hadn’t said much. Her mother told her in a gentle voice that high school plays and real theater were two different kettles of fish, and her father said a B.A. prepared you for everything. But Marilyn had made Lily think about acting in a new way, and she started wondering if it wasn’t a way of being very close to the heart of things, that maybe acting actually brought you closer to the world rather than farther away from it.

After Bus Stop, Lily found Marilyn Monroe everywhere: in magazines, tabloids, comic books, on T-shirts and stickers, on posters and flags. She noticed little statues of her in ceramic and metal and rubber and saw her face and body emblazoned on ashtrays, mugs, pencils and clocks. But for Lily these icons were no more than crude approximations of the person on the screen, cheap leering versions of something intimate, almost sacred, and she avoided them. She had her poster, which she had chosen carefully in a store in Minneapolis, deciding against the famous one from The Seven Year Itch of Marilyn standing over the grate, her skirt billowing out from her thighs, for one less well known. She had bought a biography then, too, and had started it eagerly, searching among the details of Norma Jean’s life for the secret she had glimpsed in the movie, but after about a hundred pages, she realized it wasn’t there and stopped reading. As she lay in bed that evening watching Some Like It Hot, Lily laughed out loud at the men dressed as women and listened to Marilyn’s voice, to its halting rhythms and breaths, and near the end, she studied the dress Marilyn was wearing. It was like part of her body, she decided, hardly clothes at all, a magical movie dress Lily imagined herself wearing, not in Webster, of course, but in a faraway city, like Los Angeles or New York or Paris, where women went slinking into clubs and bars in next to nothing. She smiled to herself and took bites of the Milky Way she had bought especially for the movie.

When it ended, Lily tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edward Shapiro’s windows were dark, and she wondered where he had gone. Through the wall, she heard Mabel blow her nose and start typing again. A copy of Glamour lay on the night table, and Lily picked it up. She turned the pages and stared at the clothes she couldn’t afford and then stopped to read a headline: “What Does a Man Want in a Woman?” It was a survey. Lily threw aside the magazine and began to recite her lines in a whisper. “So is Lysander.” She closed her eyes. “I would but my father look’d with my eyes.” She paused. “I do but entreat your grace to pardon me. /I do not know by what power I am made bold.” A breeze blew in through her open window, and the fresh air aggravated her restlessness. I could walk over to Rick’s and have a beer, she thought. She remembered Hank, felt troubled, and then after putting her hand down inside her jeans, she held her genitals for comfort and, still dressed, fell asleep.

Once in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought she heard voices singing far away. Then she fell asleep again. At nine o’clock, she heard the church bells from Saint John’s and opened her eyes. Lily had been dreaming, and the Sunday bells had mixed themselves into the dream, which she had forgotten except that it hadn’t been pleasant, because the repeated clang bothered her. She could almost hear the congregation’s murmuring, that hollow, haunted tone people use to speak to the unseen, interrupted only by the occasional cough or a baby’s cry. As she pulled herself out of the muddy dream, she saw Pastor Carlsen’s face with its permanently sincere expression — an indistinct blend of pity and remorse. His face had always irritated her, not because she thought it was hypocritical, but because she knew it was real.

* * *

Lily never consciously decided to take the route that passed the Bodler place, but she found herself pedaling her bicycle in that direction and dreaming of the car she could buy with the money she had in the bank if she didn’t have to use it for college. Her father’s medical bills had eaten up the savings put aside for Lily’s education, and when Vince offered her a job at the Ideal Cafe and the room upstairs, she took it without complaint. Lily had told herself she needed time to think anyway. She needed to plan. Hank had a plan for himself and for her, but whenever she thought about the imaginary house in Minneapolis and the imaginary children and Hank Farmer forever, a part of her balked. So far she had managed to save $3,476.32 from her job, and that money promised her a life after Webster. Watching Edward Shapiro paint had launched new fantasies about New York, a place she had seen only on postcards and in the movies. Before he had moved into the Stuart Hotel, she had dreamed mostly of Hollywood and California, but watching the man in the window had turned her eastward, and now she imagined herself walking in crowded streets beneath towering buildings on her way to an audition, a script tucked under her arm. Lily pedaled harder with the wind in her face and looked out at the cornfields, the stalks still short but growing taller in the wide, flat fields. The sky had cleared since yesterday, and the sun was hot on her face. When she came to the end of the driveway that led to the Bodlers’, she stopped, climbed off her bicycle and looked at the ruined farmstead turned junkyard.

The Bodler place was such a spectacular eyesore, it was almost gorgeous, a sight that made people whistle in disbelief if it didn’t stun them to silence. A mountain range of refuse had formed in the front yard, great heaps of junk so high they hid the house, garage and fallen barn behind them. These multicolored towers that included parts of bicycles and cars, old appliances, wires, pipes, lumber and innumerable moldering somethings never failed to impress Lily. She remembered searching for toys in the piles when she came here with her father as a child. She remembered feeling both exhilarated and uncomfortable as she dug in the mounds of junk. That was before she had heard the Helen Bodler story, and yet she had known that the old farm with its two dirty men was a place apart. She had never been inside the house. Her father used to go in to speak to Frank, but he had always asked her to wait on the step, as though he didn’t want her to see what was inside. Once, after her father had left her in the yard, she had walked around to the side of the house and pressed her face to a windowpane. She had seen hazy piles of objects and furniture, and then out of nowhere she had seen a face — an enormous, only vaguely human face, its great mouth hanging open, its tongue flickering like a snake’s, and Lily had run gasping from the window. She did not tell her father about it. She did not tell anyone about it, and only years later did she assume that she had mistaken Dick Bodler for a monster.

The brothers’ old green truck wasn’t parked in the driveway today, and there wasn’t a junk picker in sight. Lily listened to the sound of her feet scraping against dirt and pebbles in the driveway and looked up suddenly when she heard a crack above her. A loose piece of canvas from a baby stroller had caught the wind, and she heard it crack again. Otherwise the place was very quiet. Birds chittered, the grass rustled, and she could hear car motors in the distance. When she reached the garage, she paused and looked in through the open doors. The sun cut a sharp rectangle on the earth floor, but beyond that light the interior looked almost black. She could make out a chaos of boxes, old tools and farm equipment, and she inhaled the odor of mildew and cold, damp earth, two smells she liked. Lily had no intention of going inside. The sun and air had made her slow and a little sleepy. But then she saw a suitcase lying on a crate, one corner of it illuminated by sunshine, and she walked toward it. Feeling only vaguely curious, she touched its cracked leather surface, then tugged at its handle. It felt full, and its unexpected weight attracted her. Lily dragged it into the light, hesitated for a second and opened it. The bag was filled not with odds and ends as she had anticipated, but with neatly packed clothes, as if someone had planned a trip, never taken it and then forgotten about the suitcase altogether. The clothes inside had belonged to one woman. They were all the same tiny size, and whoever she was, she hadn’t worn them for a long time. Lily couldn’t date them exactly, but examining a long shapeless dress, she guessed it had been fashionable during the twenties or thirties. Lily seated herself on the dirt floor and pulled out a threadbare camisole with a liver-colored stain. Although she knew it was childish, she pitied the stained garment, pitied it the way she would an unhappy child or whining animal. She folded it, replaced it carefully in the suitcase, and then noticed a fabric pocket under the lid that bulged with something. She slid her hand inside and took out a pair of white shoes. These had held up better than the clothes. Only slightly scuffed, they looked like shoes their owner had saved for church and going to parties. Lily guessed they would fit her. Her mother had always said she had Cinderella feet: size five. Lily pulled off her sneakers, slid one bare foot into a shoe, then the other. The shoes had no tongue, only laces. She tied them quickly and stretched out her legs, examining her feet in the old-fashioned shoes. She liked the curve of their stacked heels and the softness of the leather. They fit snugly. In fact, they pinched, but the tightness around her feet gave her pleasure, a sensation that was almost erotic — tense and warm.

As Lily sat on the dirt floor of the garage, looking at her feet in somebody else’s shoes and pondering that satisfying pressure on her toes, she thought she heard a step outside the garage, then a person breathing. She stopped breathing herself to listen. A car with a broken muffler passed on the road, and she listened as its loud rumbling faded away. Was there someone in the grass outside? Did she hear footsteps again? Lily shook her head. No, she thought. She reached forward to untie the shoes, and when her fingers touched the laces, she was struck by the thought that these were Helen Bodler’s shoes, that she had packed her suitcase all those years ago to run away from her husband. With a shiver of excitement Lily removed the shoes and in that same instant decided to take them. After closing the suitcase and returning it to its original place, she found an old paper bag, dumped the nails out of it and dropped in the shoes. Then she dug in her pockets and came up with two dollar bills, a quarter and a dime. I’ll leave this as payment, she thought.

The heavy inner door to the house stood open. Lily looked through the screen door and into the kitchen. She could hear flies, a low uneven buzz, and inches inside the dim room she made out long rolls of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, crusted black with insects. The room smelled strongly of mold, and when she looked down at the floor, she thought the cracked linoleum squares were oozing liquid. It’s just wet, she thought, from yesterday’s rain. The house probably leaks like a sieve. A couple of feet inside the dark room, Lily could see a table. To run in, slap down the money on the table and rush back would take seconds. Still, Lily hesitated. She listened. The house was silent. Her eyes had adjusted to the murky room within, and she could see a rifle resting against the wall. I’ll count to fifteen, she said to herself, and then run. This method had never failed, because Lily had never cheated on herself. The numbers changed according to the degree of the challenge, but they always worked. The silent count had been responsible for her eating that worm on a dare when she was eight during recess at Longfellow School, for prompting her over the cliff into the ice water of the quarry in May when she was thirteen, and for her greatest triumph — that night only four years ago when she lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train, and then, only seconds before it hit her, rolled out of the way. Bert had been furious, but the boys had all shaken her hand and beat her on the back. The count helped her face more mundane trials, too: like getting out of bed at four o’clock in the morning to go to work. Lily counted, pushed on the screen door, took a step, heard the noise of a car in the driveway, turned her head and slipped. She fell half in and half out of the door, her left arm flat in a pool of cold slime. Coins rolled across the kitchen floor, and she sat up as fast as she could to look at the driveway. With relief she saw that it wasn’t the twins’ truck, but an old blue Chevy with a bashed fender. The floor had left a yellow film mixed with dirt on her arm and Lily wiped it with the bottom of her T-shirt. Then, holding the bag of shoes behind her, she walked down the steps and paused for a second. She saw a dollar bill float over the grass as it caught the wind. I must have dropped it on the step when I fell, she thought. It blew further away. Lily let it go, and began to invent a story for the person driving the car, in case the person wanted to know why she had been sprawled in the Bodler’s doorway. She would say she was leaving money for a purchase and fell. It was true, of course, but also wasn’t.

The Chevy stopped, and Lily watched an obese woman slowly ease herself out the car door. “Give your brother half of that one, Arnie, or I’ll smack you,” she said to the backseat. The woman’s hair had been bleached to a crisp. Lily stared at her enormous belly and thighs in double knit bermudas. She took three heavy steps and puffed. When Lily passed her, the woman said “Hi,” in a dead voice, and Lily said “Hi” back. She glanced into the car and saw two remarkably similar blond boys sitting in the backseat. One was clearly older, but both tanned faces were streaked with tears, snot and Oreos. Lily moved beyond the car, heard its door creak open and the woman say, “Truce, babies. Come and give Mama a hug.” Lily looked back for a moment to see the boys climb out of the car and fling themselves into the flesh of the now squatting woman. When the woman’s arms closed around them, Lily turned back to the road and started to run toward her bicycle.

* * *

Mabel’s room smelled of dust, perfume and the paper of old books. She owned hundreds of them, and they crowded the apartment, bulging from shelves that lined several walls in the living room, bedroom and even the bathroom. Lily breathed in that odor again when Mabel opened the door for her Monday afternoon. Stale and dry, Lily thought, like dead bugs. Mabel was talking, but Lily didn’t listen to her. Mabel’s living room had always made her feel funny. There were two things that didn’t seem to belong in the room. One was a miserable old table that Mabel didn’t dust. The other tables were dusted, but the rickety pine table with those old keys lying on it was never touched. And then there was a bird’s nest that was little more than a pile of refuse. If Mabel had not told her what it was, she never would have known. The rest of Mabel’s furniture was adorned with silk and velvet pillows and woven pieces of cloth. The floor was covered with a beautiful red and blue Oriental rug — the leftovers from her big house on Orchard Street. Lily remembered Mabel saying that she had kept only those objects that had “personal meaning” whether they were valuable or not, and that the apartment was a “storehouse of memory.” Once, Lily had mustered the courage to ask Mabel about the undusted table, and it was then that she had discovered that Mabel could answer a question without answering it. For five, maybe ten minutes, she had prattled on about Cicero and some other guy whose name Lily couldn’t remember, and when she stopped, Lily didn’t know a single thing more than when she’d first asked.

“Lily.” Mabel sang the name.

Lily looked at Mabel.

“You’re lost in thought.”

“Sorry.”

Mabel brushed the sleeve of her black tunic. Expensive, Lily thought. She probably bought it in one of those stores in Minneapolis where they look you up and down before they let you in the door. I wonder where she got her money. Professors don’t make that much.

Mabel poured Lily a cup of tea, her hands trembling as she held the pot in the air. The woman always looked cold. But the room was warm, and Lily had gotten used to Mabel’s tremors and quakes and her constantly moving hands. She wasn’t sick. She was nervous, so tightly strung that Lily half expected to hear the woman’s body hum from the strain. Lily held the translucent teacup and imagined its thin sides breaking in her hand.

A copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lay on Mabel’s lap, and she drummed it with her fingers. Then she leaned forward, stared at Lily and said abruptly, “I’ve always liked the idea of changelings.”

Lily didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a question, so she said, “Why?”

“Because the older I get, the more certain I am that you can’t know who’s who or what’s what.” Lily examined the layer of pale powder coating Mabel’s face. It ended at her chin. “You never get down to the bottom of it. Never.”

Lily didn’t ask why again, although she wasn’t sure she agreed with this. The “changeling” in the play didn’t have a goblin double or anything like that. She turned her head toward Mabel’s bookshelves and noticed a small drawing propped up between two of the volumes. Japanese, she thought. When she looked at it more closely, she saw with a start that it was a picture of a man with his penis halfway inside a woman. The penis was finely detailed and was unusually large, as were the woman’s genitals. Lily looked away. How could Mabel have such a thing out in the open for people to see? An old lady like her? Lily stared at her knees. The picture reminded her of one of those distorted sexual dreams, and its image lingered: the woman resting on her side with her legs open, her head thrown back, and the man leaning over her, their loose robes falling from their bodies. In spite of herself, the Japanese lovers aroused her, and Lily squeezed her thighs together in the chair.

“I’ll cue you,” Mabel was saying.

Lily looked up. “Fine,” she said. The window lit Mabel from behind and whitened the wisps of gray hair on her head. She moved, and the halo disappeared.

“How old are you, Mabel?” Lily tried to make her voice sound quiet and polite.

Mabel laughed. “Too old to be coy. I’m seventy-eight. I’ll be seventy-nine in February.” She smoothed back a strand of hair. “There’s fifty-nine years between us.” She didn’t calculate. She had the number ready.

Lily sneaked another look at the drawing. “You don’t act that old, you know.”

Mabel stood up. “Well, my inside never caught up with my outside.” She took a deep breath. “Now, stand up. Your voice is important, but so is your body. We have to find Hermia’s posture, her walk, her physical expression.”

They worked together that afternoon for two hours almost without pause, but it took just minutes for Lily to sense that Hermia would never be the same. It wasn’t only that Mabel knew the play well and could quote long passages from it by heart or that she could explain words and phrases that Lily had never made sense of before, it was that Mabel’s voice changed when she spoke Hermia’s lines. She didn’t sound young exactly, but she didn’t sound like herself either, and Lily could almost feel the presence of a third person in the room. At one point, she stopped Mabel and said, “Did you act?” And Mabel answered, “My whole life.” And then, before Lily could question her further, the woman had continued, “Remember this,” she said. “Hermia is no more and no less than the words on the page. To speak them is to be her. It’s that simple. How good you are, however, depends on your ability to embody the language. And that”—Mabel shook a finger at Lily—“is spiritual.”

Until then, Hermia’s verse had been as remote to Lily as a song in another language she could memorize but not understand. But that afternoon, she discovered that by watching Mabel closely, by adopting her tone and posture, she felt more when she spoke the lines. In fact, it seemed to Lily that the emotion came from Mabel’s voice and gestures rather than from inside herself, and this made her a little uneasy. Mabel barked orders at Lily, corrected and scolded, and then, all at once, Lily discovered that she meant what she was saying. She meant it as much as she meant anything. It was as if the old woman had cast a spell over her, a magic of comprehension and belief. A couple of times she burst out laughing for no reason and had to start a scene over again. And once, after Lily gave a particularly fiery speech to Mabel’s Helena, the old woman hugged her, and Lily hugged her back. They had never embraced before. Under the black cloth of Mabel’s tunic, Lily felt the woman’s sharp little bones. She’s just a stick, Lily thought, no flesh at all.

That night at rehearsal, Mrs. Wright told Lily that she had made a “major breakthrough.”

* * *

Riding home on her bicycle from the Arts Guild, Lily looked up at the moon in the darkening sky. Clouds as thin as smoke passed over its white surface, and below it she could see the silhouette of the grain elevator rising above the squat buildings of the town. Her bike jolted over the railroad tracks, and then, crossing the bridge, she breathed in the smell of the Cannon River — carp and rust and underwater weeds. She turned down Division Street, glanced up at Edward Shapiro’s window in the Stuart Hotel, saw that his lights were on and felt a surge of hope.

Inside her apartment, Lily walked to the window without turning on her light. Edward Shapiro was talking on the telephone. He sat in a chair with his legs apart and was jiggling his right knee as he talked. Then he stood up and paced the floor with the receiver clamped between his raised shoulder and chin. Most of the other windows in the hotel were dark or covered. A television flickered beneath a half-drawn shade in a window on the first floor, and the lobby glowed behind the glass door. Ida, who no doubt sat behind the desk, was invisible. Lily looked up at Shapiro and saw him stare at the receiver for an instant before he put it down in disbelief or resignation — Lily didn’t know which. Then she remembered Hank and unplugged her phone. When she turned around, she saw the paper bag lying on the floor, reached for it and took out the shoes. She looked down at the two pale forms in her hands and asked herself why she had taken them. In the garage she had believed that these shoes had belonged to Helen Bodler. In her room, this idea seemed far-fetched. Why would she want a dead woman’s shoes, want them enough to steal them? She hadn’t left the money and that made it stealing, didn’t it? “I’m a thief,” Lily said aloud. Then she kicked off her sneakers and put on the shoes.

When she stood up, they hurt. I’m bad, she thought, and at that same moment, she knew what she was going to do. Lily turned on every light in her apartment and yanked open her window so violently that she saw Shapiro turn his head and look toward her. Good, she thought. Good. He walked toward his window and leaned out. Mabel was typing urgently next door. Lily heard the woman pause, then beat the keys again. Lily walked straight to the window and faced Shapiro. She reached for the band that held her ponytail, undid it and shook her hair onto her back. She looked straight at him, although his face was hidden in shadow, and unbuttoned her blouse slowly. Then she threw it on the floor, ran her fingers over her naked shoulder and bit her bottom lip hard, rolling the flesh inward. This is wonderful, she said to herself, and unbuttoned her cutoff jeans. She turned to one side and wriggled out of the tight shorts. She could feel the stiff material slide down her buttocks, and that sensation, along with the fact that she knew he was looking at her, prompted an image of herself as someone else — a party girl crashing a strip show, a girl who never said die and who could bump and grind with the best of them. She had to hold on to her underpants to keep them from gliding down with the shorts, and she did this as gracefully as she possibly could. Then she hurled the cutoffs in the direction of her blouse, tossed her head and smiled. She hoped he could see the smile. All she could make out of Shapiro now was his silhouette — the line of his head and shoulders in the window. Lily unhooked her bra. She was glad she had worn the one with a front clasp so she didn’t have to struggle with the back. She let it fall down her arms and then crossed her hands over her breasts and rolled her shoulders. These were borrowed gestures, but that was part of the pleasure. For an instant she thought about Marilyn, took the bra in one hand and flung it across the room. The bra sailed higher and farther than she had intended. On its way down, it caught the TV’s On/Off button, and there it remained, hanging several inches off the floor. Lily stared at the bra. It was gray. I’ve got to go to the Laundromat, she thought, and looked down at her breasts, then at her feet. Red marks had formed where the laces rubbed into her skin. She felt naked. For an instant she considered making a dash for the bed and rolling herself in the blanket, but instead she covered her breasts again. Oh my God, she thought. Her heart was beating fast now, and she took a long breath before she took off her underpants. You can’t stop now. It would look really dumb, like you lost your nerve. But the sight of her pubic hair sobered her even more — a triangle of dark hair, more poignant than erotic. Lily didn’t touch the shoes, even though they were pinching her toes like vises. Standing at her window wearing nothing but the shoes, Lily looked across the street at Edward Shapiro. He left the window. For a moment she stared at the back of his canvas, at the chair and the black telephone, and she almost cried. But she held back the tears, walked to the window, and after wrapping herself in the curtain, sat down on the sill. She could smell lilacs in the air. The scent probably came from the bushes outside the library at the end of the block. Their last days, she thought. And that was when Lily heard the music. A man started singing in a language Lily didn’t know, and after a short time a woman answered him. Edward Shapiro came back to the window, and Lily looked at him and listened to the man and woman singing together. She leaned back against the window frame. The crackled paint scraped against her shoulder bone, and she adjusted the curtain to protect her skin. It was a duet from an opera. That much she knew, but it was much simpler than she had imagined that kind of music could be. She thought it was the prettiest song she had ever heard, and she wanted it to go on and on because she knew it was his way of talking to her without talking to her, and she didn’t feel like crying anymore. Listening to the voices of those two people, she imagined that the real adventure of her life was beginning now, that after this, anything could happen, anything at all. When the song ended, the man left the window to turn off the record and returned for a second time. Lily looked into his dark face. They could have called to each other or waved, but they didn’t. They continued to look at each other for what seemed like a long time, but maybe it wasn’t. Lily heard the sound of a car up the street, the wind in the tree branches at the end of the block, and then running footsteps in the alley behind the Stuart Hotel. She looked toward the sound, but saw nobody, and then the footsteps stopped. She realized that Mabel wasn’t typing anymore either. Lily took a last look at Edward Shapiro, and then she stood on tiptoe in the painful shoes and slowly closed the curtains.

* * *

When Lily walked into the hallway at five-fifteen the next morning, dressed and ready for work, she heard Mabel’s door open, saw the woman’s head push through the opening, and heard her say in a loud voice, “Don Giovanni.”

“What?” Lily whispered to signal a lower tone.

“Didn’t you hear it?” Mabel brought her voice down a few notches. “The duet from Don Giovanni blasting from across the street about ten-thirty, eleven o’clock.” Mabel narrowed her eyes. “You’d have to be deaf not to have heard it.”

“I heard it,” Lily said. “Don Giovanni.” She addressed the wall. “I didn’t know what it was.”

“Mozart,” Mabel said.

Lily nodded, then turned to the steps.

“He stood in that window like he’d been turned to stone.”

Lily was tempted to look back at Mabel’s face but didn’t. “Who?” she lied.

“Our neighbor from across the street. Shapiro. If it were possible to die standing up, I’d have said that fellow went into rigor mortis right then and there.”

Lily said nothing.

“By the way, how was rehearsal?”

Lily stopped and turned to look up the stairs. Mabel was standing on the landing. Her hair had been pinned into a loose bun. Little wisps flew out all over her head. “It went great,” Lily said. “Thanks to you.”

Mabel looked down at Lily and smiled. “Shall we work again today or tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Lily said.

Mabel said, “Good.” She turned to the door and opened it, her back rod-straight and her arm bent at a graceful angle. Lily knew this was an exit meant to be seen. The door closed with a click, and Lily wondered why Mabel was so interested in her. The woman’s loneliness was palpable, and that explained part of it. No children, she thought. I hope I can have children, at least one, and if it’s only one, I want it to be a girl. Lily had been an only child. It wasn’t that her parents hadn’t wanted more children, it had just turned out that way. Outside the door to the cafe, Lily stopped. She remembered the day she drove home with her father from the lumberyard. He had explained the weather to her in the car, the way it blew through the Dakotas and arrived in Minnesota a day or two later. She remembered walking through the door and calling for her mother, but her mother hadn’t answered her, and she remembered her father picking up a note that lay on the kitchen table. She remembered the stricken look on his face, which she wasn’t meant to see. Mrs. Daily had driven Lily’s mother to the hospital. The doctor had told her that after three miscarriages she shouldn’t get pregnant again. As a child, Lily had often thought about those children that were never born. She had even named them: Reginald, Alexander and Isabella. The names belonged to nobody Lily had ever known. She had stolen them from English novels for children, but the names reverberated even now, as signs of what never was. She remembered her mother telling her that she couldn’t have more children, that she felt lucky to have her Lily, and then she never spoke of it again. Maybe I’ll have two children, she thought, revising the number. She wondered why Mabel hadn’t had children. She wondered why she had moved to Division Street. She had said the house on Orchard Street had been too much for her, but of all the places to come to, why this little brick building with warped floors and bad plumbing? The woman wasn’t poor. And now she had seen Edward Shapiro standing in the window. Mabel Wasley was no dummy. She might be old, but it was obvious to Lily that the woman’s brain was as sharp as ever. Lily had the uncomfortable notion that Mabel might suspect what had been going on last night. At the same time, unless Mabel had hung herself out her own window, she couldn’t possibly have seen into Lily’s. Of course Mabel knows the name of the damned opera, she said to herself and pushed open the door.

* * *

As she moved in and out of the kitchen from table to table, the memory of herself naked in the window filled Lily with awe. Every few minutes, she glanced over at the Stuart Hotel, shabby in daylight, and recalled the way it had looked only hours before — the illuminated window, the light of street lamps on the dark brick — another place altogether. He’s asleep now, she thought, and paused for a moment. She was standing with her back to the counter, a plate in her right hand, a coffee cup in her left, when an image of Edward Shapiro’s shoulders and chest shuddered through her. The plate tipped and a sausage rolled to the floor. Lily ducked behind the counter, picked up the little wiener and plopped it back on the plate. It looked fine. She set the plate in front of Elmer Esterby.

Lily was pouring coffee for Mr. Berman of Berman’s Apparel and still thinking about the man in his bed across the street when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn to see who it was until she had finished pouring. It was Hank. His face looked heavy and tired. Lily supposed he hadn’t slept after his shift but had come straight to the cafe. He spoke to her in a low, tense voice. “We had a date last night, remember? To see each other after your rehearsal and before I went to work. I called and called. Where the hell were you?”

She didn’t answer him. She looked into his face for a couple of seconds, then turned away. Hank was holding her right arm, then he grabbed her left arm and squeezed. Lily knew he wanted her attention, wanted her to look at him, to be sorry, but she wasn’t, and his tight grip on her made her feel stubborn, then indifferent. In response to his grip, she could feel herself go limp. I don’t care, she thought. Her head bobbed forward and her spine collapsed.

“What the fuck?” Hank muttered.

He clutched her upper arms harder to hold her up. If he let go, she knew she would fall. I don’t care, she thought again, and looked up at him with a dead expression. She knew what he saw when he looked at her: the face of an unruly schoolgirl who goes blank when scolded, and it gave her a sensation of defiant pleasure. I’m bad, she said to herself, and with that thought she smiled. Before she knew what she was doing, she was smiling like an idiot into Hank’s outraged face. He started to shake her. Lily’s head flew backward, then whipped forward again. She lost her footing and stumbled forward into Hank, who continued to shake her. His fury amazed Lily, and she heard herself cry out in surprise.

Mr. Berman stood up. “That’s quite enough, Hank,” he said.

The paternal command worked like magic. Hank’s hands flew off Lily. She scrambled to regain her footing, stood up and watched him glance at his raised hands as he turned to the door. His cheeks looked shiny, and Lily bit her lip. On the sidewalk Hank broke into a run before the screen door slammed behind him. The noise felt like a signal that the drama was over. Lily heard muttering, felt people staring at her and took a deep breath.

“Are you all right, Lily?” Mr. Berman said.

She avoided his gaze. “I’m fine.” She shrugged. Her cheeks and forehead burned. She pulled her order pad out of her pocket and pretended to read it.

Bert walked up to Lily and put her arm around her. “Holy shit! What’s his problem? I thought you were going to come sailing over the baked goods any second!”

Lily talked to Bert’s feet. “Forget about it. He was pushed.”

Bert angled her head downward to meet Lily’s eyes. Lily lifted her head, looked at her friend and chewed her lip.

“Listen to me, Lil’. Even if you said you were going to hack off his dick, chop it up in little pieces and eat it for supper, he doesn’t have the right to lay a hand on you. That’s the law. Got it?”

Bert uttered these words in a voice so musical and tender, Lily had to smile.

“Just so we understand each other,” Bert said. She moved her arm in feigned slow motion and pushed a fist gently into Lily’s shoulder.

Thoughts of Hank came and went during the remainder of Lily’s shift. She remembered how old he had seemed in high school, a senior when she was a freshman, and how all the girls had wanted him, and then when he came home from the university last year and she saw him at Rick’s in his letter jacket, and he had asked her to dance, what had she felt, exactly? Flattered, she thought, and safe — after Peter. Peter was the college student she had met in the Courtland Arboretum when she was fifteen. He was twenty, and Lily still remembered the way his pale fingers clutched the book he carried around with him everywhere: Beyond Good and Evil. The title alone had excited her, and she remembered the conviction in his voice when he read to her about dancing and happiness and weak, sickly Christians, and how he kissed her in the damp grass and unbuttoned her shirt and talked about Nietzsche while he was doing it. Peter was thin and white, and Lily could see his naked body perfectly when she wanted to — a hairless boy’s body that smelled of soap and perspiration at the same time. He wrote poems that didn’t make sense to Lily, but she remembered there were lots of exclamation marks and ellipses. Her meetings with Peter had been a secret from everyone but Bert, who could keep all secrets. Eight times she had met Peter Lear in the woods of the arboretum. The ninth time he didn’t come. Lily had waited by the tree for an hour and then gone to his dorm room to find him. It was his roommate who talked to her. Phil knew about Lily, and he had sat her down on one of the narrow beds and told her he thought she looked like a good kid, and he didn’t want her to get hurt, but Peter had a serious girlfriend. He was with her at that very moment, and that he, Phil, didn’t approve of Pete’s exploitation of girls. That was the word he used—“exploitation.” He had gone on about it for what seemed like an hour, and Lily had listened until he stopped. “Are you done?” she had asked him. After he had said yes, she had left the room, walked down the hallway to the stairs and out the front door. She had cried as soon as she felt the air. The humiliation had lasted much longer than the sadness. What she remembered most was Phil’s enthusiasm when he talked to her, the gush of words that made his face hot. She could still see the freckles all over his face, his orange eyelashes, and how he kept looking at her bare legs while he talked. Afterward, Lily had invented speeches for him and for Peter, but she never had the opportunity to deliver them. A month later, Peter Lear graduated from Courtland College and went home to Chicago. During the following year, Lily had turned down every date and pushed away the boys at dances and parties. Kathy Finger had started the rumor that Lily was a lesbian, and she hadn’t shut up about it until Hank came along. Lily had only seen Hank on weekends and during his vacations from the University of Minnesota, and she realized now that it had suited her just fine. She had told herself it would be nice to have Hank around all the time, but instead she felt lousy. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that although she had wanted Hank, she hadn’t wanted him for the same reasons she had wanted Peter. She may have wanted Hank because of Peter. But the truth was that until she saw Edward Shapiro in the window, it was Peter Lear she imagined beside her at night. Peter was a physical memory — his delicate fingers between her thighs and his tongue in her ear.

Around noon, Ida stuck her head through the screen door of the cafe and peeked around it. She gave Lily an extra-long look. She knows about me and Hank already, Lily thought, and pretended she didn’t see the midget clerk with the big hair. Stupid town, she said to herself, full of long noses sniffing for dirt and loose lips yakking about it once they’ve found it. Well, they sure as hell aren’t going to see that I give a damn one way or the other. When she left the Ideal Cafe half an hour later with eleven ninety-five in tips in her pocket, Lily straightened her back and lifted her chin and made a dignified exit for anybody who might have bothered to look.

That afternoon, she wandered up and down Division Street for a couple of hours, looking in store windows and watching the kids who were hanging out on Bridge Square. She bought Don Giovanni on tape and a pair of pink underwear with lace around the legs, and when she walked out the door of Berman’s Apparel with the little bag in her hand, feeling relief that she hadn’t run into Mr. Berman, she paused, looked up at the clouds and realized she had decided to get unengaged from Hank Farmer.

* * *

At six o’clock, Lily walked into the Webster Police and Fire Department. From the driveway, she saw Hank’s head through the wide window over the dispatcher’s desk. She had no speech ready. The conversations she had invented earlier in the day had all sounded like people talking on Secret Storm or As the World Turns.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Hank said.

Lily seated herself on the long desk in front of the window and let her legs dangle.

He looked at her evenly.

“Well, here I am,” she said. Lily stared at her newly painted nails. A piece of hair fell across her cheek. She pushed it away.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Lily avoided his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.” Lily looked through the glass window behind Hank at two uniformed officers who were drinking coffee. Lewis Van Son’s feet were propped up on the desk. Lily waved. Lewis nodded.

“So,” Hank said. “Is there somebody else?”

“Not really,” she said.

Hank sighed. “What the hell does that mean?”

Lily looked Hank in the eyes. “It’s my fault, not yours.”

“Okay,” he said. “And?”

“I’m confused.”

“About what?” His voice was aggressive. He leaned back in his chair, and it rolled with the motion.

“Well,” Lily said. “I don’t know what I want.”

Hank opened his mouth. The telephone rang. “Webster Police Department.” He used his official voice. “Yes, Mrs. Klatschwetter.” He listened, puckered his mouth and shifted in the chair. “Are your sure?” Hank rubbed his forehead. “Could you see clearly? Okay, I’ll send someone right away.” Hank recorded an address, repeating it aloud as he wrote. “Highway 19 to Old Dutch Road, left across the creek. Yes, they know the way. Uh-huh, bye.” Hank hung up and lifted his right hand to signal the officers.

“What was that all about?” Lily said.

“Rita Klatschwetter’s got trespassers again, or so she says. Last week it was some guy dragging trash across her field. Now it’s some guy with a body.”

“A body? Jeez,” Lily said.

Hank tapped his index finger on his temple. “They’ve never found a thing out there. She’s called in the sheriff, the highway patrol and us, and insists on giving me the address every time. As if we don’t know it by heart.”

“That’s the big farm out by the Bodler place, right?”

Hank nodded.

Lewis walked through the door, winked obscenely at Hank and grabbed the piece of paper with the address on it. He glanced at it. “Not again,” he said.

“This time it’s a corpse.”

Lewis raised his eyebrows. “Right,” he said.

Lily remembered the garage, saw her fingers disappear behind the thin fabric of the pocket under the suitcase lid. She closed her eyes for a second, opened them and watched Lewis leave the room. He waddled toward the door, the stiff cloth of his blue pants making a noise as his thighs scraped together. He’s really gotten chubby, Lily thought. Carrying a gun in Webster seemed to authorize fat but not violence. No officer in her memory had ever pulled a trigger, unless you counted the tranquilizer gun they shot that poor moose with in the Courtland Arboretum. A man from the Sheriff’s Department had driven the unconscious beast miles north so he could wake up at home. From behind her Lily felt the light change as the sun sank in the sky.

Hank touched Lily’s hair. “Why are you doing this to me?” he said.

Lily arched her back and felt her bra tighten under her arms. Hank laid a hand on her knee, but Lily didn’t uncross her legs. “Stop it,” she said.

He leaned forward to kiss her. His lips parted. The handsome face looked too eager, too hungry.

“Not here,” she said.

“Come on, Lily.” She heard a whine in his voice and edged backward on the desk.

“Forget it.” Hank’s pale brown eyebrows moved together for an instant, then he exhaled loudly.

“You think that call could have something to do with Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick?”

Hank made a face. “What?”

“What Mrs. Klatschwetter saw?”

“I don’t know.” Hank spoke quickly in an annoyed voice. “It could’ve been anybody, or better yet, nobody. What do you care?”

Lily worded her answer carefully. “I went by there yesterday on my bike—”

Hank cut her off. “By the Bodler place? What the hell were you doing out there? Were you alone?”

“Of course I was alone.”

“Lily, you shouldn’t go out there by yourself. Those dirt-bags aren’t normal. You know that. They almost killed Pastor Ingebretzen, or have you forgotten?”

“That was years ago, Hank. People go out there all the time to look at the junk. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because they’re lecherous old coots, that’s why.” Hank massaged his left hand with his right.

Lily covered her mouth to hide a smile. “Those funny old men? Come on.”

Hank didn’t smile. “Dolores pays a weekly visit out there. Did you know that?”

Lily shook her head. The woman came into the Ideal from time to time. She drank. Lily remembered overhearing Gary Hrbek telling three other guys that she charged five bucks a tumble.

“Probably does them both at once.”

Lily shifted her position and looked out the window into the dusk. “Who cares,” she said. “Everybody needs sex.”

“That’s right,” Hank said.

Lily turned to look at him. His face had fallen and his eyes were closed. She leaned forward and was about to embrace him when he opened his eyes and sneered, “You know who else she visits?”

“No.” Lily edged further back on the desk until her head rested on the glass.

“That guy in the Stuart, Shapiro, the one who taught at Courtland. Ida called the other day, screaming prostitution. She saw Dolores coming out of his room, stuffing bills into her bra. Ida ought to know we don’t bother with Dolores. It’s catch as catch can for her. But that guy?” Hank shook his head. “And I heard he had a great-looking wife, too, or used to anyway. It doesn’t add up.”

Lily stared at Hank. “And you believe Ida, windbag of the century?”

“And why not?”

“Because she’s a one-woman gossip factory, that’s why. She churns out hot air faster than anyone can breathe it.”

“And what’s your problem?” Hank squinted at her.

Lily continued to look at him. She pressed her lips together as she paused. “It’s over, Hank,” she said. That’s what people said didn’t they? It’s over. It’s raining. It’s snowing. The weather has changed.

“What?” His mouth opened. He lifted his hands.

“I’m sorry, Hank.”

“You’re sorry?” His chin bobbed in a series of shallow nods.

The phone rang.

“I’m going, Hank.”

He held up a hand, a signal for her to wait. His face looked red.

Lily pushed herself off the desk and stood up.

“Webster Police Department.”

She put her hand on the door and turned around. Hank’s hand was still in the air. He shook his fingers at her and mouthed the word “Wait.” “Yes, Mr. MacKensie, when did you notice it was missing?”

He paused. “Color?” Hank put his fingers to his forehead.

“No, Mr. MacKensie, not all yard deer are brown. We had a blue one stolen a few months ago. Right.”

Lily walked through the door and down the driveway under the streetlight. She expected Hank to come after her, to call from the door, but he didn’t. This surprised her a little, and as she took a step from the pavement onto the sidewalk, her ankle buckled and sent a pain through her calf. For a few steps, she hobbled, but then it was all right.

Rick’s was slow. Lily ordered a hamburger and a Coke at the bar and talked to Rolf, or rather Rolf talked to her. He was on the Jesse James Days Committee and gave her an earful of plans. “They want to change the name to ‘The Defeat of Jesse James Days.’”

“Why?” Lily looked at her fingers through the glass. She moved them to examine the distortion behind the dark liquid.

“They think it gives kids the wrong idea, turns Jesse James into a hero. I told them it was stupid. Doesn’t sound right: Defeat of Jesse James.” Rolf popped a cracker into his mouth. “I’m Frank in the reenactment this year. Plugged right here.” He pressed his index finger into his chest.

“Yeah,” Lily said. “I’ve seen the postcard. Don’t you think it’s a little tacky to sell those photos of the dead gang members, Rolf? And at the Historical Society?”

“Here’s Frank.” He pulled a bent postcard from his back pocket and slapped it down on the bar.

Lily looked at the grainy black-and-white photograph of the dead Frank James. For some reason he wore no shirt. She guessed they had stripped the corpse for the picture to expose the bullet holes in his chest. His eyes were open.

She shook her head. “Remember when we used to play in the caves, Rolf?”

Rolf leaned his elbows on the bar. “Old Jesse found one hell of a place to hide out. He must’ve known about those caves before the robbery. I’ll bet it was part of the gang’s plan.” Rolf gave himself a Missouri accent. “If it all goes to shit, Frank, I’ll meet ya in them caves outside of town.” Rolf smiled and looked Lily straight in the eye. “Remember the rope swing? That was a gas. Out and over the creek and back again. Daredevil Dahl, remember that?”

“Are you kidding?” Lily said. “It’s my claim to fame.” Lily bit into her hamburger and chewed. “I wonder if you could get in there now?”

“The Jesse James Caves?” Rolf shook his head. “After that boy died, they boarded them up.”

Lily nodded. “What was his name again?”

“Larry Lofti.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Larry Lofti.”

* * *

The following morning Lily spotted the wig in the Bodlers’ truck. She was watching the twins leave the cafe, and when Dick opened the door on the passenger side to climb up beside his brother, Lily noticed a dark shape on the seat. At first she thought it was a dead animal, but Dick slid his hand inside the hair, and she saw the tresses dangling down his arm. After he was seated, he laid the thing carefully on his lap and slammed the door shut.

“Probably ripped it right off the head of some cancer victim,” Bert said when Lily mentioned it to her. “They watch the obituaries, those two, and whenever someone croaks, they come sniffing around to horn in on the pickings the relatives don’t want.” Bert paused. “Do you think it was real hair?”

“I don’t know.” Lily hadn’t thought about it. The best wigs were real hair. She knew that, but on somebody’s head, all wigs were fake. Real or synthetic, it’s dead hair. Still, Lily thought, maybe all hair is dead, and maybe that’s why I didn’t like seeing it — unattached.

* * *

When Lily looked for the pornographic drawing of the Japanese lovers in Mabel’s room the following afternoon, it had disappeared. In its place was a black-and-white photograph of a handsome young man wearing the loose pants of the forties and a white shirt. He held a cigarette between two fingers.

“Do you think your book will be finished soon?” Lily stared at the huge manuscript on Mabel’s desk.

“I’m beginning to think I’ll never finish. I’m beginning to think I can’t finish, or that it will end up finishing me. Do you understand?”

Lily shook her head. She turned to the keys on the pine table. “What are those keys to?” As soon as she said it, Lily regretted the question.

Mabel was silent. Then she said, “They’re the keys to a place where I once lived. I keep them there to torment myself.” She smiled.

Lily narrowed her eyes. She didn’t believe Mabel was insincere, and yet this speech had a prepared quality to it. “You know,” Lily said, “sometimes you talk like a person in a book.”

Mabel eyed Lily for a second, then laughed. “That’s what happens when you read too many.” She paused and said, “I dreamt about the play last night, that I auditioned and was given the part of Bottom the Weaver.”

“Bad casting,” Lily said.

“Well, that’s what I thought in the dream, a part of me rebelled, thought it was unfair and ridiculous. Then I decided it was a good part, and I’d make the best of it. It was one of those wandering dreams, you know, with hallways and stairs and doors that go on and on.”

Lily nodded. “I’ve had those.”

“I was carrying around the Ass head. At first it was very light, and then it got heavier and heavier.”

Lily imagined the papier-mâché head she had seen Mickey Berner working on in the prop room for Oren Fink, and she saw the unpainted form in Mabel’s arms.

“Then it started to bleed.”

“The head?”

Mabel nodded.

Lily changed the image in her mind to a real donkey head with fur. “Was it horrible?”

“No, it was just a fact.” Mabel removed her reading glasses and let them hang from their chain around her neck. “You were in the dream,” she said. “You were in one of the rooms. I didn’t know which. I couldn’t find you.”

Lily didn’t meet Mabel’s eyes. She felt embarrassed for some reason and stared at the bookshelf. After a couple of seconds she said, “Sometimes I remember a little thing, like a picture or part of a conversation, and I think it really happened, and I try to remember, and then I realize it was a dream.”

Mabel straightened her gray blouse and began muttering to herself. “Lost youth, of course, bottom, blood. It’s absurd, really, no subtlety at all.”

Lily had no idea what Mabel was talking about. The woman leaned back in her chair. “There was a man standing outside Berman’s for a long time last night. He was under the awning in the shadows, so I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he parked himself there and didn’t leave for a long time.”

“I heard someone,” Lily said.

“I was sitting by my window, as I often do when I can’t sleep or work, just staring out into the street. Usually there’s not much to see, a few drunk kids, a car or two, that deaf man riding by on his bicycle, but last night this man was there, holding vigil under the awning, and I couldn’t help thinking he wanted something. He looked up at me several times, or so I thought. It’s a wide street. I never saw his face. Then I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up, he was gone, but our neighbor was there, standing in his window just like the other night, without the musical accompaniment. He stood there for, oh, five minutes, and I thought to myself, something’s finally happening on this street, not an event, exactly, but the preamble to an event — two men just watching and waiting. There’s something in it.” Mabel looked at Lily intently for several seconds. “He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?” She paused. “Our neighbor.”

Lily stared back at Mabel to see if the comment was directed at her or was just a general statement. She couldn’t tell. “I guess so.”

Mabel smiled at Lily. “I’ve always cultivated male beauty. I don’t discriminate. I never had a type. I liked them short and tall, thin and stocky — not fat, although there was a fat man once I found very sexy. Of course he was brilliant, really brilliant, and bulk suited him, like Ben Jonson — a big brain in a big body. Dark, light, bearded, shaven, muscular or smooth and skinny.” Mabel sighed. “I’ve fallen for them all. In general, I suppose, stupidity has always alienated me, but there was a stupid boy I met in an elevator many, many years ago that made me weak in the knees.”

“How did you know he was stupid?”

“I found out, my dear.”

Lily opened her mouth at Mabel. “Were you in love a lot?”

“I was always in love.”

Lily laughed. She looked at the manuscript. “Is it in the book?”

“Yes.”

“Will you let me read it sometime?”

“If you’re very good,” Mabel said.

“Last night,” Lily said. “Did he see you looking at him?”

“Which one?”

“Either one,” Lily said.

Mabel smiled. “Why?”

“I don’t know, just because.”

Mabel laughed. “Because why?” she said. Mabel laughed more, and when she laughed, she wrinkled her nose and her eyes looked very small.

Lily laughed, too.

“Why are we laughing?” Mabel choked out the words.

“Because why,” Lily said and laughed harder.

Mabel laughed until she coughed and gasped.

Lily stood up and pounded Mabel on the back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It depresses me to think this old carcass can’t even stand up to a good joke. It’s pathetic.”

“It wasn’t good. It wasn’t even funny,” Lily said.

“Oh, it was funny. We just don’t know why it was funny.” Mabel moved her eyebrows up and down.

“Don’t start that again,” Lily said.

The two remained silent for about a minute. It would have seemed overlong had they not laughed so hard together, but Lily liked that pause. The room was warm, and the heat seemed to make Mabel’s perfume stronger. Its sweet smell mingled with the dust, and the sun shone through the open curtains onto the coffee table. She concluded that Edward Shapiro had gone to the window to look for her, and this made her glad.

Lily heard a sound, looked over and saw that Mabel had slumped down in her chair. Lily leaned toward her. The woman’s eyelids fluttered. She gasped and looked wildly around her. Her hands trembled. “Help me!”

“My God, Mabel!” Lily grabbed the woman’s shoulders. “What’s the matter?”

“Lysander, help me!” Mabel cried. “Do thy best.”

Lily let go of the woman’s shoulders. “Jesus, Mabel. You scared me to death!”

Mabel straightened up in the chair and adjusted her blouse, which had slid up around her waist. She pressed one lock of hair behind her ear, and then with an expression both prim and satisfied, she said, “Good, now you scare me to death.”

* * *

Lily looked up at the roof of the Arts Guild and added a steeple where there wasn’t one. The real steeple had been missing for as long as she could remember. Maybe it had been blown off in a tornado, or maybe someone had decided that acting and actors did not belong in a building that looked like a house of God even if it wasn’t, and had hacked off the spire along with its cross. Running up the steps, Lily heard talking, hammering and laughter coming through the open doors. Then someone shouted, “Quiet,” and the noise stopped. In the vestibule Lily looked toward the stage and saw Martin Petersen sitting under a spotlight that turned his blond hair white and erased the color of his eyes. He looks happy, she thought, happy to be the center of attention even for a moment. Then Martin noticed her and his expression changed. He stared hard at her for several seconds and then nodded, as if she should know what he meant by this, as if they had some secret understanding, but Lily ignored him and looked away. “Thanks, Martin,” someone yelled from behind her. The spot switched off, and the room returned to ordinary, dull brightness.

The place was hot, and even with all the windows open, the heat weighed on the cast. Amy Voegele lost a tooth and was so excited, rehearsal was delayed for several minutes while everybody ran around looking for a container the girl would accept. In the first scene, Lily noticed that Mr. Dugan had poison ivy all over his legs and had smeared the welts with calamine lotion, stiffening the long hairs on his calves into a pink forest. When Jim spoke Lysander’s lines and held Lily’s hand, she saw large sweat spots under the arms of his shirt that she found distracting, but Mrs. Wright told Lily she was finally “natural.” Lily couldn’t help thinking that she had stolen, or at least borrowed, that “natural” performance, that what looked natural wasn’t, and even though Lily felt Hermia’s every emotion as if it were her own to feel, she worried that her performance was somehow counterfeit, that she had no right to be as good as she was. Mabel Wasley inhabited the role, and Lily was enacting Mabel, or rather Mabel as Hermia.

She didn’t notice or think about Martin again until the beginning of Act II, when she was standing offstage fanning herself and listening to Puck. Susie Immel, who had been yawning loudly for several minutes, pulled a rubber lizard out of her pocket and burped loudly. With each noisy, artificial burp, she made the lizard jump. While Lily was hushing Susie, she noticed Martin standing a couple of feet away, waiting to go on. She saw him in profile, his head and shoulders bent, his eyes closed. He breathed in deeply. His preparation struck her as ridiculous — too much for too little — but then he raised himself and walked onstage with the other fairies, and Lily saw that he had changed. Martin Petersen, dressed in his short-sleeved plaid shirt, stiff jeans, thin vinyl belt and sneakers — the staples of his limited wardrobe — moved like somebody, no, Lily thought, something else. Martin towered over the other fairies in the train, all of whom were children, and yet there was nothing overgrown or clumsy about him. He didn’t mince or prance like some of the younger boys.

Jim tugged at Lily’s sleeve and said, “Get a load of Petersen!”

Lily nodded but didn’t answer. She studied Martin’s body, trying to discover what it was that transformed him, but she couldn’t isolate the elements. His posture, his motion, his expression — all of these were different from the Martin who ate breakfast in the Ideal Cafe. Mrs. Wright was watching him, too. And when Martin spoke in Act III—“And I,” he said, “Hail!” and “Cobweb”—he didn’t stutter. Not a single tic or grimace passed over his face, and Lily felt she was witnessing a miracle — like the invalid in the Bible who picked up his mat and walked. And she wasn’t alone. She felt everyone’s amazement. Later, when she met him offstage, she looked into his eyes and hugged him. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Better than that!”

Martin smiled.

And then Lily kissed him. She kissed him on the cheek because she was happy for his success, and she kissed him because she felt guilty for expecting him to fail, and she kissed him because she imagined he would like it. But at the same time, it was a meaningless kiss, and Lily would have forgotten it instantly had she not noticed his expression as she pulled her face away from him. He didn’t smile or blush or look pleased with himself. Pale and solemn, he opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, then closed it tightly.

“Are you all right, Martin?” she said.

He nodded, and studying him for a moment, Lily asked herself why Martin never responded in the way she expected. She wished he would stop looking at her in that meaningful way, but she shrugged off her discomfort and walked away from him.

After rehearsal Mrs. Wright took a champion’s pose, arms above her head, hands clasped, and spouted encouraging nonsense at her actors like “A good start” and “We’ll iron out the wrinkles.” Mothers arrived to fetch their children, and the room emptied fast. Lily was heading for the door when she felt a light touch on her shoulder. When she looked, she saw Martin. He signaled for her to follow him outside and then pointed at the steps. From inside she heard Mrs. Wright say something to Mrs. Baker about “wing wire.” Martin eyed the two women quickly, then turned back to Lily. His lips quivered and he stuttered over an initial D.

Lily tried to hide her disappointment.

“D-d-did you get it?” he said.

Lily looked over at him. “You mean the napkin, Martin?”

He nodded.

“I got it. I can’t say I understood what you meant by it, though.”

Martin shook his head and stuttered again. “It’s what it says, that’s all.” He stared at Lily and moved his face close to hers.

“Is my face dirty or something?”

He shook his head, then stared at his hands.

“What did you mean by it?” Lily said.

Martin talked to his fingers. “W-well, it can only work with that word, you see.”

“Mouth?” Lily said.

Martin jerked his head up and stared at her. “S-s-s-say it again?”

Lily felt her face go hot. “Jeez, Martin. I don’t get this at all.”

He looked at her. “I, I, I wanted your mouth to say the word ‘mouth.’”

Lily wrinkled her nose. “What?”

Martin pressed his two index fingers together. He turned his face away from her. “Because,” he stammered, “the two come together perfectly, the word and what it means.”

Lily was silent. She thought about it. “So?” she said.

Martin looked over his right shoulder. The sound of Mrs. Wright’s key in the lock made Lily glance behind her, and she saw the director and Mrs. Baker step quickly past them. At the bottom of the steps, they paused, and Mrs. Wright waved. “You two were both great tonight. Keep it up!” she said.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wright! Bye, Mrs. Baker,” Lily called after them as they walked to a car parked down the block.

Lily watched Martin’s profile. He opened his mouth and started talking. He stuttered badly at first, but then he seemed to gain momentum and spoke quite fluently. She could hear a lilt in his voice and suspected the music helped organize his speech. “I’m looking for the way in,” he was saying. “I want to find an opening.”

“To what?” Lily said.

“Do you ever feel that nothing’s real?”

Lily looked at him. “Well,” she said slowly, “sometimes I think ordinary things are kind of strange…”

Martin nodded vigorously. “It’s, it’s like there’s a skin over everything, and if you could just get under it, you’d, you’d get to what’s real, but you never can, so you’ve got to look for a way to cut through it. You see?”

Lily didn’t see at all. She felt uncomfortable. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“W-w-well.” He turned a pale face to Lily. He pushed out the M after several tries. “‘Mouth.’ The word isn’t real, but, but you use your mouth to say it, and then the two meet…”

“Martin,” Lily said, and shook her head.

“F-f-fakes,” he said loudly.

Lily looked at Martin. She didn’t like the word. “Fakes?”

“W-words are fakes — just sounds for something, right? Pictures are fakes, the play is a fake. But maybe, if you push them onto the real thing — they can open each other up.” Martin looked triumphant.

Lily just stared.

“But it has to be right. You have to look so hard that your eyes hurt from looking. Most of the time, it’s wrong. But you can’t stop looking.” Martin paused. “Say it again.”

Lily leaned away from Martin. She shook her head at him and looked into the street. The low branches of big elms darkened the pavement and sidewalk. She could see the night sky between their branches and looked up at it. She felt tired and wanted to be somewhere else. “It’s too weird.”

Martin whispered in her ear, “Cobweb.” Lily turned sharply toward him. “What?”

“Hermia’s father is going to put her to death.”

His abrupt change of subject confused her, but she answered him. “He doesn’t do it, for heaven’s sake. It’s a comedy, Martin.” Lily gestured with her hands. “It’s funny, remember? People are supposed to laugh.”

Martin rubbed his hands and then he pressed his two index fingers together. They trembled under the pressure, and Lily took his silence as a chance for her to leave. She stood up and started walking toward her bicycle.

“Will you come and visit me, Lily, come to my house?” he said to her back.

Lily didn’t turn around. “Someday,” she said. “Sure.”

Martin was walking behind her, and suddenly she didn’t like having her back to him.

“Professor Wasley,” he said. Martin seemed to want to cover all territories at once. “She’s your friend.” He said this loudly and clearly in a voice that wasn’t quite his own.

Lily put her hand on the bicycle seat. “Yes, she’s my friend. Why?”

“She’s got the nerves of a bat.”

“What?”

Martin didn’t answer.

Lily grabbed the lock on her bicycle and began to turn the combination. To locate the numbers she had to bend very close to the tiny wheels, and again she suffered from a feeling that her back was vulnerable. She tugged at the lock. It didn’t open. Very slowly, she repeated the combination. The lock clicked, and she pulled it open. She could hear Martin breathing behind her. She turned toward him. “Bye,” she said.

His shoulders moved up toward his ears and he waved his hands in front of his chest as he began to stutter out a word that started with a Th. She felt sorry for him. But enough is enough, she thought, and she wondered where a stutter came from. It must be like wearing a muzzle.

Then he moved his lips close to her ear and whispered, “The Bodler place.”

Lily resisted the temptation to pull away from him, then released the kickstand with her foot and threw her leg over the bicycle. She could feel her heart pounding and hoped Martin wouldn’t sense her agitation.

“B-b-b.” Martin worked the B for a long time. “Before you go, say it again.”

Lily started pedaling. “No!” she said. The “no” seemed to resound in the air and then, in a matter of seconds, she felt her bicycle tires bouncing over the railroad tracks. She wanted to look back at him, wanted to see his dark form standing alone in front of the little building, but she didn’t. Why had he mentioned the Bodlers like that? It was the way he had whispered it that made her feel funny. Almost like he knows about the shoes, Lily thought. She remembered the stillness of the place, the sound of the wind, the big sky, and then the barn, its roof collapsed inward, moss growing between the stones. Had Martin been outside the garage? Had he been the one she’d heard? And then she asked herself whether she would have stripped for Edward Shapiro if she hadn’t put on the shoes. She saw the Bodler farm again, just as it had been that day. A man who looked a lot like Filthy Frank was standing on a mound of newly dug earth. Where were the boys when it happened? Lily asked herself. Were they in school? Suddenly, the story seemed wrong to Lily. The town had turned Helen Bodler’s murder into legend, but what about the details? How could a woman disappear the same day her husband digs a huge hole near his house without making the neighbors suspicious?