The Magician's Assistant (12 page)

Sabine had no plans to keep the stores and run them herself, but she hadn’t yet thought of letting them go, either. She drove the way Parsifal liked to go, down Santa Monica Boulevard, past Doheny, and through the abundance of boys. They roamed the street like beautiful moths in tight black jeans and draping trousers, their white T-shirts absorbing light. Blond curls dipped naturally; straight black hair, recently trimmed, swept into eyes. So many white teeth, so many square jaws. Black-brown skin pulled taut over biceps, heavy lashes fell softly on pink cheeks. They walked arm around thin waist, chin nuzzling neck. Bertie put both hands on the windowsill of the car. She started to say something, but then didn’t.

“‘Parsifal’s on Melrose. Fine Rugs,’” Mrs. Fetters said, reading the neat gold letters of his name on the front window. How happy he had been the day the painters came. Sabine had taken his picture that day, standing next to his name. Where was that picture? “Will you look at that.”

The fan of bells that Parsifal bought in China bumped against the glass and sang out when they opened the door. Salvio nearly cried when he saw Sabine. He put down his coffee and walked all the way across the store with his arms stretched out towards her, and she stepped into those arms like a woman stepping into a coat held out to her by a man.

“My angel,” Salvio said. He kissed her neck beneath the straight line of her hair. “We’ve all been hoping you would come down when you were ready. We miss you, everybody misses you so much.”

Sabine nodded and touched his head. She knew who he was missing. Siddhi and Bhimsen, the two men from Nepal whose job it was to unfold the rugs for customers, came and shook her hand warmly, offering sympathy in sketchy English. Mrs. Fetters and Bertie stayed by the door beneath a towering arrangement of tightly wrapped calla lilies, watching.

Sabine squeezed her eyes shut for a second and then pulled back. “You’re never going to guess who I’ve got with me,” she said. She held out her hand and they came to her in shy obedience. “Salvio Madrigal, this is Dot and Bertie Fetters. Parsifal’s mother and Parsifal’s sister.”

Salvio was a champion. He would not engage in price haggling but always let the rugs go out on trial. He was helpful but never made anyone feel crowded. Whatever was said, Salvio took it as something expected, something completely natural, so he did what any person would do when meeting family, even though he knew Parsifal’s family was dead. He held out his hand. “Mrs. Fetters, it is such an honor to meet you. Your son was a dear friend of mine, one of the best men I ever knew. I am very sorry for your loss.”

Mrs. Fetters held his hands and looked at him with such tenderness a passerby would have thought this woman had finally found her son.

“Salvio runs the store,” Sabine said. “He does everything.”

“Did Guy ever run the store?” Mrs. Fetters asked Salvio. “Did he work in here?”

Where did he stand? Which chair did he sit in? May I hold the phone that he held? Show me the way he held it. Did he stand here and look out this window? Was there something in particular he watched for? Tell me, and I’ll look for it, too.

“Guy was Parsifal,” Sabine told Salvio.

“Parsifal,” Mrs. Fetters said, repeating a difficult word she was trying to memorize. “It’s right there on the window.”

Salvio didn’t throw one questioning look to Sabine. He picked up the dance step, followed the lead. “He used to be here all the time, seven days a week. But then there was another store, other things going on. It was good for him to take some time away. Everybody knew he worked too hard.”

“Once Phan got sick,” Sabine said, because Salvio couldn’t, wasn’t sure, “Parsifal turned it all over to Salvio.”

“Did you know Phan?” Bertie asked. Mrs. Fetters had clearly brought her daughter up to speed this morning: The History of Your Brother as I Know It, over breakfast. And Bertie, in all her sweet Midwestern dullness, had taken it in, made the information part of her so that now, a few hours later, she was asking about the dead lover of the dead brother she did not know.

Salvio dressed like an aging tough boy—black jeans, black T-shirt, his black hair, just now gray at the edges, slicked back. “I knew Phan well. I was here in the store on the day that they met. He was a very sweet man, thoughtful, generous. Very quiet.”

“They met here?” Mrs. Fetters said.

“Phan came in to buy a rug. I think it was”—he looked at Sabine—“was it a Vietnamese rug?”

Sabine nodded.

“They never did find that rug,” Salvio said.

Los Angeles gleamed. January and sixty-eight degrees. A light breeze hustled the smog out towards the valley and left the air over Melrose as fresh as a trade wind in Hawaii. The streets were so wide it felt like luxury. It was not Manhattan, nothing pressed close together, nothing strained. Instead it stretched, relaxed, moved slowly. It was not Alliance, Nebraska. Everything beckoned. Every store was a store you wanted to step inside of. Every girl was a girl you wanted to kiss.

“I thought we’d go to the Magic Castle for lunch,” Sabine said.

“Castle?” Bertie said. She was looking over her shoulder, watching the rug store recede behind them. She had been happy there. She had wanted to stay.

“It’s a club where Parsifal and I used to perform, a magicians’ club.” Sabine was glad it was Friday and they could go to lunch and not dinner. There would be fewer people she knew there for lunch, but there would still be too many people she knew no matter when they went. Magicians were notorious for hanging out. Each one had his own very specific seat at the bar, a drink that everyone was supposed to remember. They wanted to perform, they wanted people to see them, they wanted to steal each other’s tricks. The thought of the Castle depressed her.

But people loved it, the massive old house on the top of the hill, all the cupolas and leaded windows, the secret rooms and sliding walls. They made the place feel haunted by leaving it dusty and dim. Even at a quarter to twelve on a bright afternoon it felt like the middle of the night in there, dark wood and heavy blood-colored carpets, chandeliers turned low.

They squinted as they stepped inside. The woman at the desk was on her feet and coming at them before their eyes had fully adjusted to the dark. “Sabine!” She hugged Sabine hard around the neck. “Monty!” she called over her shoulder. “Sabine’s here.” She touched Sabine’s face, touched her arm. “Look at you. Look how skinny you are. We’ve all been wondering when you were going to come down.”

“I haven’t been getting out much,” Sabine said.

“Well, it’s early yet. It hasn’t been any time at all.”

Sabine introduced the Fetters to the woman, whose name was Sally. Sally had worked the door at the Castle for the twenty years Sabine had been coming, and in that time her hair had become blonder and her eyeliner darker, but the woman was still essentially the same. She didn’t know that Parsifal didn’t have a family, so meeting them was no surprise. Monty came down from the office, kissed Sabine, shook everyone’s hands.

“People ask about the act all the time,” Monty said. “Everybody wants to know when Parsifal and Sabine are coming back.”

“We won’t be coming back,” Sabine said. Wouldn’t that be a trick.

“I know, I know that,” he said, and draped an arm over her shoulder. Monty had taken off his tie because lunch wasn’t so formal. “All I’m saying is that people remember. Everybody loved you guys. Really, Sabine, you should think about coming back on your own, when you’ve had a little more time. We’ve got lots of women magicians now. It’s not like the old days.”

But everything in the Castle was the old days. It was forever a Hollywood set, a soundstage for some Dean Martin film. Parsifal was always telling Sabine he wanted her to take over the act, start performing on her own.

“There’s no reason that you couldn’t do this,” Parsifal had told her. “You know all the tricks. All the props will be yours, you know everybody at the clubs.”

“We haven’t done a show in two years.”

“Those people haven’t all died, Sabine. You could go back to them. You could get someone to help you. You could even get an assistant of your own.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“Because I did all the work. I made those tricks.” He spoke so loudly he frightened the rabbit, who flattened himself down to scoot underneath the sofa. “There are things I do that no one else but you knows how to do. I don’t want all that work to be lost. It was a good show. There’s no reason you couldn’t do it.”

“Except for the fact that I’m not a magician. I’m the assistant. It isn’t the same thing.”

“You’re the one that does the tricks,” he said bitterly. “You just refuse to see it. You do the tricks hanging upside-down in a box.”

Sabine shook her head. “I couldn’t even think of it,” she said to Monty. “That’s not what I do.”

“Well, you should think of it.” He winked at Mrs. Fetters, who looked flattered. “She should think of it. Sabine’s great.”

“You go on in,” Sally said. “Get lunch over with so you can come down for a show. Sam Spender is doing close-up. You know Sam.”

“Sure,” Sabine said.

Sally nudged Bertie and pointed at the stuffed owl perched inside the bookcase. “Go up to the owl and say ‘Open Sesame.’ That’s how you get in.”

Bertie looked shy. She didn’t want to speak to the dead owl. Sabine herself simply refused to do it. She would always wait and slip in behind someone else. “Go on,” Sally said. “It’s the only way.”

But Bertie just stood there. “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Mama, you do it.”

So Dot Fetters, without giving it a thought, walked up to the bird and did what needed to be done. If you had to say “Open Sesame” to get through the door, then that’s what she would do. The bookcase slid open.

“They really want to give you a job,” Dot Fetters said, taking Sabine’s arm. “You should be flattered.”

All through lunch there was a steady stream of people at the table paying respects, giving condolences, heaping Parsifal’s memory with lavish compliments to honor the Fetters. One by one, magicians left their scotch-and-sodas at the bar and came to sit with them for a moment, tell a few stories, as if these women were some leftover Maña wives. The Fetters were overwhelmed by the attention. They let their hands be kissed by showmen. And Sabine was glad to do it, glad to show them how greatly Parsifal was loved, but for herself she felt like the secret panels in the walls were closing in.

“So now I’ve taken the guy’s watch,” the magician at the table next to them told the magician he was eating with. “I do a few little tricks for the other people and I’m waiting and waiting for this fellow to notice his watch is missing, until finally I got to move on so I say to him, ‘Can you tell me the time?’ And the guy looks at his wrist and he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not wearing a watch.’”

“He doesn’t know?” the other magician said.

“No idea. So I say, ‘Did you have one on earlier?’ I mean, hint, hint, and the guy touches his wrist, like maybe he’s double-checking, and his wife pipes up and says, ‘He can never remember anything. He’d leave his arms at home if they weren’t attached.’”

“Now there’s the kind of broad you want to have around. What kind of watch?” the other magician asked.

“It’s a Sea Master. It’s no Rolex, but still we’re talking a grand.”

The other magician whistled.

“Well, you know this trick. I got the watch sealed up in an envelope inside a zipper wallet in my pocket. Perfectly done. A sweet trick, if someone misses their watch.”

“But in this case...”

“Exactly. I can’t just give it to the guy, say, ‘Oh, in fact you did put your watch on this morning, you idiot.’”

“So?”

“So I turned it in to the lost-and-found, thinking sooner or later he’d wise up. Stayed there for a month and then they gave it to me.” The magician pushed up his shirtsleeve to show the watch. “Omega,” he said. “Keeps time like a Swiss train.”

Sabine sighed and accepted a refill on her coffee. A magician’s assistant was flatly nothing without a magician. There would never be a night when the assistant took the stage alone. “Look how well she holds the hat,” they would say as she stood there, hat in hand, her face one bright smile. No one wanted to watch her put herself in a box and take herself out again. No one cared how gracefully she moved, how good the costume was. She held the rabbit tenderly. She caged up the doves. Who cared? They didn’t know how often she was the one working like a plow horse while Parsifal fluttered his hands through the spotlight and smiled. Back in the old days, before Parsifal decided the three-part box was an exercise in misogyny, she was sliding around inside a platform on her back, sticking up a leg, popping her seemingly disconnected head into the top box, waving her hand through a trapdoor. And when Parsifal finally reconstructed her, she could not appear sweaty or out of breath. She had to look surprised, grateful. By professional standards, Sabine was much too tall to be an assistant. The little women, like Bess Houdini, could squeeze themselves into anything, while Sabine had to be vigilant to keep herself thin and limber. Still, Parsifal said, better to have an assistant who looked like a stretched-out Audrey Hepburn, and there were plenty of tricks she didn’t figure into at all. Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost. Even if Sabine had never loved magic the way she loved Parsifal, she realized that it was one more thing that was over for her. She had been a brightly painted label, a well-made box, a bottle cap. She was never the reason.

After lunch she took them to the Houdini’séance room, the Dante room, the Palace of Mystery. They went backstage, where Mrs. Fetters tapped her foot suspiciously on the floor. What a night it had been when Parsifal first took Sabine to the Castle, how impossible it was to think that someday they would perform there. Inconceivable that one day they would get tired of performing there.

“Look at this,” Bertie said, and touched the figure of Houdini wrapped in chains. His eyes looked as if he suffered from lack of oxygen, or possibly a thyroid condition.

Everything was a prop. Once it had thrilled Sabine, too, now it made her feel abandoned. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get to the show if we want a seat.”