The Magician's Assistant (19 page)

Of course what struck Sabine right away was the rug, which was a red plaid tartan of the kind used to make kilts for Catholic schoolgirls and dog beds in New England, only this plaid was bigger, more inescapable. How he must have lain in bed at night dreaming of carpets, of nimble, delicate fingers securing a thousand knots per square inch. The rug was the only thing that was unexpected. The twin beds were carved from the same light maple as the furniture in the living room. Between them there was a nightstand with a lamp. There was a desk underneath the window, with a straight-back chair. There was a dresser with eight drawers. There was a bookcase full of Hardy Boys mysteries and volumes A through K of an off-brand encyclopedia, the type that comes from filling up stamp books. There were four plastic horses with removable saddles, the tallest one standing twelve inches at the head. There were three small silver trophies and five blue ribbons commemorating moments of honor in baseball. There was a baseball. Sabine wanted time in that room. She wanted to pull up the rug and look beneath it, check inside the coils of the box springs, see if there wasn’t something taped behind a picture. Of course there could not be a message for her, and yet she thought there would be something, a clue that only she would understand. There was a framed photograph of four people—Parsifal and Kitty, younger than they had been in the photographs Sabine had already seen, and Dot and a man who was tall and square jawed with dark eyes and dark hair. A man who should have been handsome but, for some reason that had to do with the spacing of his eyes or the shortness of his neck, was not. It was a studio portrait taken before anyone had even the dimmest notion of Bertie coming along. They looked regular, friendly, close.

“Look how pretty you are,” Sabine said, and it was true. Dot Fetters was fine boned, her waist as tiny as a doll’s. Her face in the photograph was energetic and bright, hopeful.

“I was pretty then,” Dot said, peering into the small face that was her own face. “But it was wasted on me. I couldn’t see it to save my life, thought I was the homeliest thing going. Then one day I woke up and I was old and fat and I knew. You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.” She stopped to study Sabine for a minute. “I sure hope Guy had the good sense to tell you how beautiful you are. Even if he did go for the boys, a homosexual’s got eyes just like the rest of us. I hope he did that for you.”

He had said Audrey Hepburn’s neck, Cyd Charisse’s legs. He said she should stand in a room by herself in the Louvre. “I wish you could see yourself in this light,” he would tell her, in the bright sun of Malibu or in the kitchen in the morning or beneath the stage lights gelled pink and forgiving. “You are so beautiful in this light.”

“He did that,” she said.

“Good,” Dot said, nodding. “I would have been disappointed in him otherwise.”

Sabine pointed to the frame again. “And that’s Albert?”

Dot looked to make sure and then she nodded. “When Guy went away,” she said, as if the question had reminded her of something else, “Kitty moved into his room. I was pregnant with Bertie then and not feeling so well, and Kitty made her whole room over for the baby and slept in here. She never changed a thing in Guy’s room, never put up any of her stuff. She just made a little place in the closet for her clothes and that was it. Now her boys sleep here when they stay over with me and she won’t let them touch anything. She’ll let them read the books but only in the room, only if they put them right back, and that’s it.” She picked up one of the horses and held it to her chest without looking at it. Its beady plastic eyes stared up at her without affection. “I tell her, I don’t think it’s so healthy. It wasn’t so healthy when she was doing it as a girl but then when her boys came along I thought, Hell, these are boy’s things, let them have them. Not Kitty. Everything concerning her brother has to be just so. That’s why it’s such a shame she didn’t get to come to Los Angeles. If anyone should have been there it was Kitty, maybe even more than me.” Dot looked at Sabine. “There’s something I think I should tell you. I kind of told a lie. Not a big one.”

“To me?”

She shook her head. “To Kitty. When I got back from California I told her that her picture was on his nightstand. I couldn’t tell her it was just in a box, jumbled in with everybody else. You and I know it was something that he had it at all, but it meant so much to her, thinking she was right next to him, that he was looking at her and thinking about her.” For a moment Dot stopped, her words choked down with worry. “I love my children,” she said. “No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop.”

Sabine felt sure that her parents were sitting in Fairfax right this minute saying the same thing about her. She took the horse from Dot’s arms and put it back on the shelf. “What do you say you fix me a drink?”

“Oh,” Dot said, lifting her head from the reverie of sadness. “You are talking now.”

Dot produced a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from deep in the pantry and the two of them sat quietly at a small table in the kitchen with their glasses, thinking of what had been lost. The drink reminded Sabine of the confession in the Sheraton bar, the Nebraska Boys Reformatory, and she might have asked about it then had the back door not swung open. Snow skittered across the linoleum so fast that in a matter of minutes the apple green floor would have been white. Bertie and Haas, back with pizza.

In all the confusion over napkins and plates, Haas stayed by the door, his ice-encrusted hat still on his head. In this, her second encounter with him, Sabine knew that the door was his spot, that in any fire, he would be the most likely to survive.

“I’m heading home,” Haas said. “Papers to grade.”

“Don’t you want something to eat?” Dot asked.

“I got a little something while we were waiting. I’m set.”

Sabine thanked him for the ride and Haas assured her it was nothing. Bertie gave him a polite kiss and then he was gone.

“It looks bad out there.” Dot stood up to serve their plates.

“The radio said ten to twelve inches is all.” Bertie seemed a little put out, maybe that Haas had left or maybe because she had not gone home with him. She was nearly thirty, surely she must go home with him. “Did Kitty call while we were gone?”

Dot shook her head. “Your sister gets busy.”

“The hell she gets busy.” Bertie didn’t so much slam down her fork as place it down decisively. “Howard gets busy.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s call to raise your voice when Sabine is here. Let’s at least put on a good front for one night, show her what a happy family we are.”

Bertie picked her fork up again and absently began pricking holes in the cheese. “I don’t see why we’re not allowed to talk about Kitty.”

“We talk plenty and it does no one any good. You can’t make somebody else’s decisions for them,” Dot said wearily. “I’ve spent my whole life trying.”

Suddenly Bertie turned to Sabine. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, hoping to guide the conversation into more polite terrain. Her curls were wet from where the snow had melted on them and they glistened as if recently varnished.

“Just me,” Sabine said. “My parents seemed to think that that would be enough.”

Dot and Bertie looked at her in silence, waiting for more, when there was no more coming. They had hoped the question would take them away from their own worries and when it didn’t they had no idea what else there was to say. Sabine would have been glad to know the story of Kitty, but if Bertie was interested in telling it, Dot was certainly not interested in hearing it. Besides, Kitty’s story was not the one Sabine had come for. She’d just as soon be in Parsifal’s bedroom now, staring up at the ceiling he had stared at all those years. “You know, I’m awfully tired, to tell you the truth,” she said, and gave a halfhearted stretch.

“The flight will take it out of you,” Dot said, relieved. “And it’s not like your life has been so normal lately. You don’t need to eat this. Have you had enough?”

Sabine said she’d never really been hungry at all.

“Sure, baby. This has been a long day. You go on to bed. If you need anything, sing out. I’ll be up for a while still.”

Bertie looked up from her dinner. “I’m sorry about all this,” she said. “Mama’s right. I could keep it to myself.”

“You have,” Sabine said. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

They all said their good-nights and Sabine headed down the dim hallway, past pictures of people she did not know and some who looked familiar. The voices of her parents stayed in her ears. What, exactly, could she have been thinking of?

But in the room that was his room, Sabine felt different. She felt a rush of that privacy that comes not from being alone but from being with the one person you are completely comfortable with. The door was made of hollow plywood, so light that one good slam would take it off the hinges. It had no lock and there was a full inch gap beneath it where the light from the hall came in. But closed, this door was freedom itself. How he must have hidden in that room, begged to be sent there for punishment. There was not a single corner of it that he hadn’t memorized, no pale water stain on the ceiling or separation of baseboard and wall that he didn’t know. She ran her hands flat over the top of the dresser and felt his hands, small then, reaching for socks inside the drawers. Sabine sat down on the red bedspread. Every night he had slept in one of these beds. On some fortunate weekends, a boy from school had slept in the other, and they would lie awake in the dark and talk about what life would be like once they grew up and left. Parsifal would wake up in the middle of the night and watch that boy sleeping, the warm expansions of his narrow chest, the legs a careless tangle in the sheets; and he wanted to crawl into that bed without knowing exactly why. With his head on that boy’s pillow, he knew sleep would come quickly.

It was a long way from the bedroom she had imagined in Connecticut, the one with the yellow Labrador and the big windows and bunk beds.

Sabine put on a pair of pajamas she’d bought for Phan to wear in the hospital and slid into the small bed. The sheets smelled pleasantly of laundry detergent, though what had she been expecting? When she turned off the light, she listened to the wind circle the house like a pack of howling dogs. The wind made Sabine nervous. She thought of all that emptiness, Nebraska stretching out flat in every direction like a Spanish map of the world. In her mind she tried to conjure the sounds of helicopters and police cars to sing herself to sleep, the reassuring hum of civilization.

During the night she finds herself in the middle of a snowfield. She is not in Vietnam, but she is not afraid because her feet are bare and the snow is deep and the pajamas she bought for Phan that he never got around to wearing are thin as the wind presses them hard against her chest, and still she is not cold. This is how she knows it is a dream. The sky is clear and the moon is so bright against the snow that Sabine could read a letter. As long as it is light and she is not cold, there is nothing to be afraid of. She waits less than a minute before seeing Phan, a small black outline moving towards her. His legs are working hard against the drifts. He is wearing the sable hat that Parsifal bought for him in Russia, the hat that is now lying beside her suitcase, which is on the twin bed she is not sleeping in. “Hey,” she calls out, and waves as she starts towards him. It is like walking through a field of deep, loose flour that forms itself to the impression of her foot after every step.

“I can’t believe you got here first.”

“I was already here,” she says, knowing good and well that even in her sleep she is still in Nebraska. The closer she gets to him through the labor of snow, the lighter she feels. Sabine never had a real lover. There were men she had dinner with, men she slept with, some for long periods of time. But there was never a man she wanted to run to when she saw him, a man in whose neck she longed to bury her face and recount every detail of her day. There was never a man she felt could make every difference simply by holding her to his chest and saying her name. Except for Parsifal, and he was not a lover. Except, now, for Phan, who takes her into his arms and lifts her up above his head, towards the clear night and the stars.

“I have absolutely no reason to be here,” he says. “I just wanted to see for myself how you were doing. Nebraska,” he says, gesturing out to the field. “Can you believe it?”

“No,” she says honestly.

“Growing up, I was Saigon, Paris, L.A. Nothing like this. When Parsifal first brought me here—”

“Do you come here much?”

“Parsifal likes it,” he says. “He’s very interested in his family, very interested in reviewing his life. It’s a phase: At first I was in Vietnam all the time, now I only go because I enjoy the country.”

“Have you been to his house?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “He wants to see his sisters, his mother. One night when we were there we lay down on the beds, those little twin beds.”

Sabine closes her eyes, sees them there in the darkness, fully dressed, their hands clasped formally over their chests as if dead. They were not there with her. They were there together, with each other. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she says.

“There’s a reason. When you can get some distance, you start to see patterns. Everything falls into place.” He lifts his hand to the darkness. From the moonlight on the snow, Sabine can see his face so clearly. Phan is happy, death has given him that. “It’s all so orderly, really, it’s shocking.”

“But I don’t have distance,” she says, her voice failing her for a second. “I’m here by myself. I’m in the middle of it. I can’t make sense out of anything.”

He cups his hand around her neck, skims a thumb across her smooth cheek. She does not mean to be comforted, and yet she is. It is what she wants, to be touched and held, to be promised things regardless of the truth. “Everything will be fine,” he says.

He opens up his coat for her, though it isn’t cold, and she steps inside it and leans against the soft sweater on his chest. When he folds his arm over her back she thinks, Keep me here, exactly like this. Let me stand here forever. “All right,” she says.