Magic Mansion (18 page)

John shuddered as if someone had stepped over his grave. Jia sounded suspiciously like his mother—his mother in 1970. She looked a bit like Rose, too. Especially when she took a punishing drag off her cigarette.

“I need to win this. And I could really use your help.”

“I’m sorry,” John said. “You’re not my type.”

“It’s not because I’m Chinese, is it?” John didn’t dignify that with an answer, and Jia said, “I didn’t think so, since you’re Hawaiian or whatever yourself. Look, I don’t care if you’re actually into me or not. I know I’m young enough to be your daughter. But I think you’re classy enough to carry off a little pretend-fling without making yourself look like a creep.”

John gazed up through the trees and looked for the stars, but the nearby floodlights blotted out his view of the heavens. “Who else have you asked?”

“No one. Who else is there? Fabian’s married, and Ricardo’s a flaming queen.”

John smiled sadly. “I suppose it’s all a matter of context. In my social circles, Ricardo wouldn’t even be considered particularly effeminate. The flaming queens I know wear short-shorts and sing Barbara Streisand showtunes and call each other ‘Miss Thing.’”

Jia stared at him for the duration of three long drags, then finally said, “Oh. No offense.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

She stewed for a while, then said, “And then the other two straight single guys got themselves eliminated.”

“What about Kevin?” John suggested.

“What about him?”

“I can’t imagine he’d turn down an alliance.”

“I can’t imagine I could resist kneeing him in the balls if he even
thought
about touching me.” She crushed out her cigarette, pulled out her pack, and shook it to see how many more were left.
 

“This undercurrent of animosity the two of you have—”

“All the animosity’s on my part, Professor. He’s nothing but nice to me. In a leering, macho, idiotic way that I’m sure he has absolutely no control over.”

“This…tension, then, if that’s what you want to call it. I’m sure it will make much more interesting drama than some trumped-up affair. I think people can tell the difference between what’s genuine and what’s contrived.”

“Says the guy whose livelihood depends on illusion.”

“Well. I still think authenticity matters.”

She considered putting her cigarettes away, then changed her mind and lit a second. “So what about Ricardo—is he your type?”
 

John looked to the invisible stars, and said, “I might not have thought so a few weeks ago.”

“But now he is. Wow. I didn’t pick up on that at all. Is it mutual?”

John thought briefly about what he stood to gain or lose by admitting it, and nodded.

“Then you’d better watch yourselves. Remember that guy on Genuine Friends who turned out to be gay? Once his whole past came out, they raked him over the coals for the rest of the season.”

True, but that participant had been dating a woman on the show, then was discovered to have done gay-for-pay Internet porn. That was different, intrinsically unsavory; the woman he was sleeping with felt deceived, violated and confused. Surely, two unattached gay men coming together simply because they were drawn to each other wouldn’t invoke the same condemnation?

Jia shook her head as if she’d lifted the whole rationalization right out of John’s mind, and said, “Maybe you can afford to throw caution to the wind—and given the way you don’t seem to be trying particularly hard, I’m guessing you agreed to get voted off before the end.”

“I agreed to nothing of the sort.” Though it had been implied, hadn’t it?
 

“Well, I’m pretty sure Ricardo didn’t, either. Kevin’s been going apeshit trying to figure out how to knock Ricardo out of the show before it comes down to the Final Four. So even if being outed doesn’t make any difference to you personally, there’s Ricardo’s career to consider.”

John reminded himself, as Jia said it, that Ricardo could very well win. Not only was he young and handsome, talented and charming—but he was a True magician. John looked down at Jia and sought her eyes, and she exhaled a stream of smoke and looked back at him. There was no Truth in her. Only ambition.

If Ricardo did take home the trophy, what then? Would he be free to go, or would he be obligated to continue living a sanitized persona where everyone essentially knew he was gay, but the subject would be tacitly avoided?
 

John and Casey had never needed to downplay their relationship. Neither of them had been famous enough to worry about sweeping the strides they’d made at Stonewall under the carpet by concealing their sexuality.

Magic Mansion’s victor wouldn’t be nearly as famous as the winners of, say, National Treasure—but within the magic community, whoever conquered the Mansion would be an instantaneous superstar.

A superstar who may or may not want to deal with the fumbling start of a publicly gay relationship.

Something to ponder, John supposed, as Jia finished her cigarette and they moved to rejoin their team.

___

“I did set construction both junior
and
senior years of high school,” Sue told Iain. “I won’t need some guy to run my circular saw.”

“Sorry,” Iain said, without sounding particularly sorry. “The word’s come down from on high. You guys don’t get to handle sharp objects bigger than a breadbox. Not after what happened in the garden.”

“C’mon, kiddo,” Muriel said, steering Sue into the Gold Team women’s dorm room. “Be thankful for small favors. It’s bad enough we need to draw up some kind of plan that’ll actually work.”

They piled into the room, five team members and a cameraman with a handheld, and proceeded to attempt to formulate a game plan. No actual construction could begin until morning, when a union carpenter would be on hand to work the power tools. But even though it was late, a majority of the planning would need to be done then and there, before some guy in a toolbelt was waiting for the Gold Team to give him orders. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them could fall asleep without assembling and disassembling a Zig-Zag Cabinet in their mind until the wee hours of the morning. They might as well get it on paper.

Because Red Team sure as hell wasn’t waiting until morning.

Faye took the pad of paper they’d been given and split it into five parts so that everyone could sketch while they talked, and Ricardo handed out the pencils. They pulled a pair of beds closer and sat on the edges facing one another, three teammates on one side, two teammates and the cameraman on the other. The plain white paper on their laps formed a blank mosaic waiting to receive their ideas.

Muriel began by drawing a rectangle and dividing it in three. “I take it there’s some kind of frame involved. Maybe fitted with channels, like a dresser drawer. Something that’ll let the middle part slide over without flopping onto the floor.”

“Right,” Sue said. “They’ve got one of these at Magicopolis.” She reached over and drew a wide frame around Muriel’s rectangle. “But the frame is kind of thick, see? The eye doesn’t really pick up on the thickness. It just looks decorative, like it’s part of the design. But that’s where the assistant stands while the box is split up.”

Ricardo stared at the rectangles. They could have represented anything. A TV dinner. A medicine cabinet. Until Muriel drew a smiley face in the top section to indicate where the magician’s face would show through—though, as smiley faces went, it looked misshapen and perhaps a bit unsure of itself, with one eye higher than the other and a lopsided, lackluster smile.

Its expression seemed strangely apt. Ricardo was not currently experiencing the pinnacle of his own confidence. It was one thing to know how the trick worked. But it was something else entirely to figure out how to build it.
 

“So,” Faye said, “we need three boxes with fronts that can open and close, with cutouts for a hand, a foot and a face. We need the center to slide sideways on a track. And we need two channels to hold the blades.”

Overwhelm washed over Ricardo. He’d be lucky if he could put together a plain box and have the sides stay level and plumb, let alone making something that could open and shut, and slide around.

“How deep?” Bev asked.

“Deep,” Ricardo said…although representing three-dimension depth on a 2-D sheet of paper was beyond him. “So there’s room for the blades.”

“And how tall?”

The Gold Team members all looked at each other.

“It matters,” Bev said, “because if we build the box for Ricardo, who’s maybe what, five-ten and a half? Then it won’t work for Faye, who’s five-two. Her head won’t reach the top cutout.”

Ricardo was actually five-ten and a quarter…though with the product currently shaping his coiffed hair courtesy of Eliza Watt, he probably was closer to Bev’s guess. Which she’d made without even looking at him. While he was sitting down.

“We’ve been so busy worrying about building the box,” Ricardo said, “that we never asked who’d be inside it.”

Faye clucked her tongue. “That’s probably exactly what they were hoping for.”

“I’ll go ask,” Sue said. As soon as she climbed over everyone’s knees to get to the door, Bev’s pencil was flying across her paper.
 

Ricardo couldn’t have said how long Sue was gone. He was too busy watching the cabinet take shape on Bev’s sketchpad. She worked quickly and decisively, and the drawing took form so fast that it seemed like it had been filmed with a time-lapse camera, and in such perfect perspective it looked as if it could leap right off the page. Sue returned at some point during the rendering, but everyone was so mesmerized by the strokes of Bev’s pencil that no one even bothered to look up, let alone ask her what she’d learned, until finally Bev drew a set of casters on the bottom of the cabinet and finished the the final wheel with a dot in the center.
 

Everyone sat back in a daze. Even the cameraman.

“Wow,” Sue said reverently.

“I’ll still need to add the dimensions,” Bev said. “Assuming they told you who needed to fit inside the box.”

Sue shook her head no.

Bev scanned her teammates and said, “Fine. Then we build it for the shortest player,” she glanced at Faye, “and the fattest one.” She indicated her own thick middle. “Assuming Ricardo can scrunch himself down into it if he needs to.”

“Sure.”

Bev’s pencil hit the paper again, and a series of numbers, lines and arrows cascaded from it as quickly as if she was just doodling nonsense loops.

“You need to figure in the thickness of the plywood,” Faye said.

It seemed to Ricardo a bit like informing a duck that water was wet, but Bev just said, “Three-eighths inch,” as she continued to jot down her dizzying spill of figures. Ricardo considered offering to go and check—Bev had only seen the stack from across the room—then again, he tended to get the eighths and sixteenths on a ruler all turned around, so it was just as likely he’d screw it all up by reporting back with the wrong measurement.

When Bev was finished, she scowled at the drawing for a moment, then said, “The optical illusion won’t be nearly as good as it would be in a taller, thinner box. But we don’t even know if the visual effect is what we’re competing for, do we? It could be another timed competition. Or it could be that we don’t even perform with the darn thing at all. They might trample them with a team of elephants to see which one’s the first to break. We just don’t know.”

“You’re right,” Faye said, “we don’t.” Why was she being such a Debbie Downer? Most likely, she saw Bev as nothing more than a dowdy, middle-aged woman, and not a “real” magician. She took the sketch from Bev and looked it over critically, top to bottom and side to side. And then, as Ricardo steeled himself to leap to Bev’s defense, she added, “But we can’t prepare for everything. They
might
have us perform. And if they do, we’ll be damn well ready.”

___

When John rounded the top of the stairwell that led to the dormitory, voices carried into the hallway through the closed bedroom doors. Not just any voices. Red Team voices. Fabian and Kevin.

“Great,” Jia told John, “I’ve got a headache already. Do you care if I just hide in my room?”

Personally, he didn’t. And, in fact, he wanted to go with her…though that might be construed as an overture toward a fictitious on-screen romance he had no desire to pursue. “You’d better join us. There’ll be a camera there, after all. You don’t want to look like you’re not contributing.”

“Please. Like they’d take woodworking advice from the only woman on the team, anyway.”

“Even so, it would be in your best interest to stay. In case things don’t go well.”

Jia turned and looked up at John, cocking one eyebrow quizzically.

He elaborated, but only vaguely. “In case we happen to need a three to one vote. For any reason.”

“Vote?” she said as she turned the doorknob, “Ha. Where’d you get the idea that the Red Team was a democracy?” John shrugged. “Too bad you don’t want to be my fake boyfriend,” she tossed over her shoulder. “I could do with having some of your optimism rub off on me.”

With that, she opened the door, and Fabian’s raised voice bellowed out. “You don’t know that.”

“Know what?” John said.

Fabian and Kevin had converted the Red Team men’s dorm into a war room. Beds and luggage were piled against the walls. Four nightstands pushed together formed a large table in the center, the surface of which was covered with hastily-scrawled diagrams. Fabian and Kevin stood on opposite sides of the table, both of them palms-down, leaning in menacingly, hovering over their plans. The cameraman stood between them at the far wall, focusing momentarily on the doorway with John and Jia framed in it, and then widening its angle again to monitor Kevin and Fabian.

John stepped around Jia and considered repeating himself—drawn up to his full height, and twice as loud—but he opted to reserve the machismo in case he needed to pull it out later on in the competition. After all, one didn’t pull every last silk out of one’s sleeve the moment the footlights came up. Instead, he simply said, “Fabian?”

“This fool thinks he can outsmart the show.”