The Magician's Assistant (2 page)

It felt a little bit like being drunk, the way her knees grew soft from the shock, the very edges of the grief that was coming for her. She had to concentrate to keep from stepping into the bank of rubbery green ice plant along the sidewalk. She couldn’t remember where she’d left the car. She walked down Gracie Allen Drive and when it intersected with George Burns Road, she stopped. Outside a hospital where every building was named for someone, and every floor of the building and every room on the floor, Gracie Allen had a street, something that couldn’t be bought. The street did not call to mind Gracie Allen’s life, but her death, running, the way it did, between two sides of the hospital, the Broidy Family Patient Wing and the Theodore E. Cummings Family Patient Wing, stopping there at the Max Factor Family Tower. Every time Sabine walked down that street she thought that Gracie Allen must have suffered at the end of her life, and that it was her suffering that led the city to give her a street. And maybe her husband had walked down that street some evenings. Maybe when he missed her most he would drive to Cedars Sinai and walk past the ficus trees and the agapanthus bushes and all of the needlepoint ivy, the full length of the street that bore his wife’s name. Then one day when he felt himself getting older and the walks more difficult to make, he had gone to his friends and asked if possibly he could have a street for himself. It was not vanity. It was a marker to say he was in love with her. Sabine wished that streets could be bought, like patient wings, so that she could buy one for Parsifal. She would buy it as for away from Cedars Sinai as she could get it. She would give him that, knowing full well that the street that would intersect it would not bear her name.

It was almost nine o’clock at night when Sabine found her car parked at the emergency entrance. She thought on the drive home that she could use the guest list from their wedding to contact people for the funeral. “Not just for tax reasons,” Parsifal had said in front of the rabbi. “I do love you.” Parsifal said he wanted Sabine to be his widow. And Sabine deserved to be married. She had been in love with Parsifal since she was nineteen, since that first night at the Magic Hat when he had done the passing-rabbit trick, pulling rabbits out of his sleeves, his collar, his cummerbund, the way Charming Pollack pulled out doves. She had been a waitress at the Hat, but on that night she became his assistant, putting down her tray of drinks when he held out his hand, coming up on the stage even when the owner had clearly told her that to volunteer was the God-given right of the drink-buying audience and did not belong to staff. She had fallen in love with him then, when he was twenty-four years old and stood in the pink stage light wearing a tuxedo. She had stayed in love with him for twenty-two years—let him saw her in half, helped him make her disappear—even when she found out that he was in love with men. “You don’t always get everything you want,” Sabine told her parents.

At the turn of the key in the lock Rabbit hopped slowly down the hall, making a thumping sound like loose slippers against carpet. He raised up on his hind legs and stretched his front legs up towards her, his nose pulsing in lapin joy after such a long, dull day alone. Sabine picked him up and buried her face in the soft white fur and for the first time thought of the white rabbit muff her parents had bought for her as a child. There had been many rabbits, but none as smart, or large, as this one. “It’s more impressive to make a tall woman disappear,” Parsifal had told Sabine. “And it’s better to pull a really big rabbit out of a hat.” Sabine was five-foot-ten and Rabbit, a Flemish giant, weighed in at just under twenty pounds. Like Sabine, Rabbit had once had responsibilities. He practiced with Parsifal and learned the tricks. The third of the white working rabbits Parsifal owned, he was by far the smartest and best behaved. Rabbit wanted to work. But since he’d been retired he’d grown fat. He hopped aimlessly from room to room, chewing electrical cords, waiting.

Sabine carried Rabbit down the hall towards Parsifal’s bedroom. Her own bedroom was upstairs. She had lived there since before Phan died, when they needed so much help there was never time to go home anyway. And besides, the house was huge. She had slept in four different bedrooms before choosing the one she liked. She had taken another room as a studio. She set up her drafting table. She brought over her architectural models. At night, after everyone was cared for, after everyone was asleep, she sat on the floor and made tiny ash trees that would one day line the front walkway of an office complex.

Sabine did not turn on a light. She ran her hand along the wall to find her way.

“My funeral...,” Parsifal had begun. He’d said it at the breakfast table, eating a five-minute egg the morning after they were married.

Sabine put up her hand. “I’m sure this is a very healthy thing, that you’re able to talk about it, but not now. That’s a long time off.”

“I’d like to do it the Jewish way, buried by the next sundown. Your people are so much more efficient than mine. Catholics will lay you out in the front parlor for a week, let all the neighbors come by.”

“Stop it.”

“Just don’t do the part where everyone has to shovel in the dirt,” he said. “I find that very morbid.”

“No dirt,” Sabine said.

“I don’t suppose cremation is terribly Jewish.”

“You’re not Jewish. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I just don’t want to offend your parents.” Parsifal closed his eyes and stretched. “Do you think Johnny Carson would come to my funeral? That would really be spectacular. I wonder if he remembers me at all.”

“I imagine he does.”

“Really?” Parsifal brightened. “I had such a terrible crush on Johnny Carson.”

“You had a crush on Johnny Carson?”

“I was too embarrassed to tell you back then,” he confided. “See, Sabine, I tell you everything now that we’re married.”

Sabine put the rabbit down on the floor and switched on the lights. The bed wasn’t made. Parsifal had stayed in bed that morning until he couldn’t stand the headache anymore. When they left, they left together, in a hurry. He wore dark glasses and held her arm.

What she needed now was clothes. Fourteen months and still Phan’s underwear was in the dresser drawers. Phan’s and Parsifal’s clothes filled two walk-in closets: suits and jackets, wire racks of ties. (Did they have any sense of ownership where ties were concerned? Did a tie belong to one and not the other?) The white shirts were first and then the pale blues and then the darker blues. She knelt beside them, ran her hands down the sleeves. The shoe trees held the shape of their shoes. Sweaters were arranged by material and folded into Lucite boxes. Parsifal needed something to wear, something to be cremated in. Parsifal and Phan had talked together about what Phan would wear. When they decided, Parsifal took the suit to his tailor and had it cut down to fit. All of the clothes grew in the night, Phan used to say.

“It doesn’t matter,” Parsifal told Sabine later, his voice thin and light. “It’s all going to be burned up anyway.”

Sabine left the closet and called her parents.

“Shel,” her mother said when Sabine told her the news. “It’s Parsifal.”

Sabine heard her father hurrying towards the bedroom. She thought she heard her mother say, “My poor girl,” but she couldn’t be sure because her mother turned her face away from the receiver.

There was a click on the line, her father picking up the phone. “Oh, Parsifal,” he said. “He wasn’t so sick yet.”

“It was an aneurism,” Sabine said. “It was something else.”

“Are you at the hospital? We’ll come right there.” Her father was crying already, something Sabine herself had not begun to do.

“I came home.” Sabine sat down on the bed and pulled the rabbit into her lap.

“Then we’ll come there,” her mother said.

Sabine told them it was late, she was tired, tomorrow there would be endless things to do. The rabbit pulled away from her, burrowed into a tunnel of sheets.

“We loved him,” Sabine’s father said. “You know that. He was a good boy.”

“Nothing will be the same without Parsifal,” her mother said.

Sabine told them good-night and hung up the phone.

Phan and Parsifal’s bedroom was at the far end of the house, big enough to be a living room. After Phan died, Parsifal and Sabine had spent all their time there. This was where they watched television and ate Chinese food from white paper cartons. Sometimes they would practice tricks in front of a sliding mirror, even though they were no longer performing by then. On the bedside table there were framed pictures—Parsifal with his arm draped possessively around Phan’s neck, the two of them smiling at Sabine on the other side of the camera; Parsifal and Sabine with Rabbit in a publicity shot for the act; Parsifal and Sabine on their wedding day, standing with Sabine’s parents. There was a picture of Phan’s family—his French father and Vietnamese mother, Phan in short pants, three tiny girls with round black eyes, one of them still in her mother’s arms. The portrait was formal, arranged. On each face there was only the slightest indication of a smile. Sabine took the picture from the table and brought it into bed with her. She lay on her back and studied their faces one at a time. The children looked only like their mother. The father, too tall and fair for the gathering, looked hopeful, as if he had just been introduced. Sabine had never talked to Phan much about his family. She didn’t know the names of these people and she didn’t think they were written down anywhere. Parsifal would have known. She had to assume that every person in the picture was dead. She wasn’t even sure about that. She curled herself around the rabbit. She put her hand on his back and held it still to feel the manic beating of his small heart.

After the funeral Sabine moved downstairs into Phan and Parsifal’s room. She slept in their bed. She pushed her head beneath their feather pillows. She slept like Parsifal used to sleep, endlessly. She stayed in bed when she wasn’t asleep. She used their shampoo and dark green soap. The room smelled like men. Their towels were as big as tablecloths. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shoe polish, every item took on the significance of memory. Suddenly Sabine could see just how full the house was, how much they had owned. She was now responsible for Parsifal’s two rug stores, for every sweater in the closet, for Phan’s toy mouse, the only thing he had left from his childhood in Vietnam, who watched her from the dresser with painted-on eyes. She had the IRAs, CDs, money markets, insurance premiums, quarterly tax reports, warranties. She had the love letters that were not written to her, the paperback mysteries, the address books. She was the last stop for all of the accumulations and memorabilia, all the achievements and sentimentality of two lives, and one of those lives should not have come to her in the first place. What would she do with Phan’s postcard collection? With his boxes of patterns for bridal gowns? With the five filing cabinets that were stuffed full of notes about computer projects and software programs, all written in Vietnamese? Closing her eyes, she imagined her parents’ deaths. She imagined her loneliness taking the shape of boxes and boxes of other people’s possessions, a terminal moraine that would keep all she had lost in front of her. She was nailed to this spot, to the exact hour of Parsifal’s death. And then what about when she died? Who was going to look at the picture of Phan’s family and wonder about them then? Who would possibly wonder about Sabine?

The phone rang constantly. It was mostly Sabine’s parents, checking on her. It was friends, people who had read the obituary. It was the polite managers from the rug stores who had a few questions. It was strangers asking to speak to Parsifal. For a while it was the hospital and the funeral home; the director at Forest Lawn, where Sabine had Parsifal’s ashes buried next to Phan’s. When the phone rang at ten o’clock on the fourth morning of his death and found Sabine still in bed but not asleep, it was the lawyer. He asked her to come in for lunch.

“I know there’s a lot to do,” Sabine said, pulling the comforter up over her shoulders, “but not today, Roger. Really, I promise I’ll come in.”

“Today,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“There are some things I need to tell you, and I need to tell you in person, and I need to tell you now. If you can’t come to lunch, I’ll come to the house.”

Sabine put her hand over the receiver and yawned. Roger had been a friend of Parsifal’s, but Sabine thought he was pushy. “You can’t come to the house. I’m not cleaning it.”

“That means you’ll come to lunch.”

Sabine closed her eyes and agreed, only to get him off the phone. She did not have an especially curious nature. She did not care what the lawyer had to say. The worst thing he could tell her was that it was all a joke and Parsifal had left her nothing; and that, frankly, sounded like the best news possible.

If it had been Parsifal, she would have told him he needed to get out. After Phan died she’d had to beg him to even open the front door and pick up the newspaper. She would sit on the edge of his bed, this bed, holding his bathrobe in her lap. She would tell him how much better he would feel if he just got up and took a shower and got dressed, tell him that Phan would never have wanted things to be this way. The difference being, of course, that there was no one sitting on the edge of the bed now. Even Rabbit had gone off somewhere. Sabine got up and found the bathrobe but then dropped it on the floor, took up her old spot in the nest of the comforter, and went back to sleep.

Phan is in the swimming pool.

“You don’t swim,” Sabine says, but clearly, he does.

He is swimming with his eyes open, his mouth open. He shines like a seal in the light. He rolls into a backstroke and comes straight towards her. “I learned,” he calls. “I love it.”

Parsifal’s gray suit jacket is draped neatly over the back of a white wrought-iron chair. Outside it is warm but pleasant. When Phan reaches the edge of the pool, Sabine holds out her hands to him and he lifts himself up and into her arms, the cool water from his body soaking her blouse as he holds her. The gold has come back to his skin and he smells of some faint flower, jasmine or lily, that makes her want never to let him go. Phan is clearly much happier since his death. Even in his best days with Parsifal, she has never seen him so relaxed. In life he was shy and too eager to please, in a way that reminded her of a dog that had been beaten. In the fullness of life Sabine had been jealous of Phan, jealous that Parsifal had found someone else to love so much. Jealous because she had wanted that for herself and so understood. What was Sabine, then, but an extra woman, one who was inevitably dressed in a satin body stocking embroidered with spangles? A woman holding a rabbit and a hat. But Phan was always gentle with her. There was nothing about exclusion that he didn’t understand.