The Magician's Assistant (25 page)

Then Johnny Carson was with them, applauding as he walked across the stage. This was a clear sign of approval. Usually he thanked people from the distance of his desk. They were not stars. They would not be invited to sit on the couch with Joan Rivers and Olivia Newton-John.

“Great,” he said, shaking Parsifal’s hand. “Just great. That’s one trick you wouldn’t want to blow.”

“I haven’t dropped her yet,” Parsifal said. An unrehearsed line. He sounded witty, at ease.

Then Johnny Carson turned to Sabine. “And I certainly hope you’ll come back to see us.”

(In fact, two days later Mr. Carson’s secretary called Sabine at home and said that her employer would like the pleasure of Sabine’s company at dinner. She declined.)

And then came her line. “Thank you, Mr. Carson.” Again the camera held her.

Johnny Carson clapped his hands together, pointed out to the cameras, said blithely, “Right back.” Doc’s band struck up the theme song. More applause. The color field returned, the series of numbers.

How rolled towards the VCR and shut it off. They sat for a while in the darkness, a reverential silence that no one wanted to break. Kitty was right: religion.

“Proudest moment of my life,” Dot said finally, blowing her nose.

“You just happened to be watching Johnny Carson that night?” Sabine asked. What were the chances?

“Mama watched Carson every night,” Bertie said. “When he had his last show, we all sat here and cried our eyes out.”

Sabine had watched the last show with Parsifal and Phan. Parsifal cried. Maybe it was hereditary.

“Johnny Carson grew up in Nebraska,” Dot said.

“So,” Guy said, clicking on the light next to his chair so that he could get a good look at Sabine. “How’d you do it?”

“We auditioned,” she said, knowing what he meant. “We had to go back twice.”

“The trick. How did you balance there for so long? How did he lift you over his head? I’ve been watching this since I was a little kid and I never have been able to figure it out.”

The room pressed towards her. They were all wanting to know. Guy was just the one who had asked. Maybe this was the reason they’d come looking for her in the first place. Year after year of watching the same magic trick and not being able to figure it out would make any family restless. “I can’t tell you that,” Sabine said.

“Why not?” How propped up on one elbow. His face was full of the painful earnestness of a good person receiving bad news.

“That’s the whole point, that’s why it’s a good trick, because you can’t figure it out.”

“You can tell us,” Guy said.

“I can’t. I won’t,” Sabine said. Was this what Parsifal had felt? All of the attention was on her. Everyone wanting the answer that only she had. No one had ever asked her how the tricks were done before, because what would the point be, asking the assistant when the magician was right there? No one asked her because no one even considered that she might know.

“You’re not going to do it anymore,” Guy said, his voice taking on just the slightest edge of a whine. “We’re never going to tell.”

“I was the only person your uncle ever explained the tricks to and he wouldn’t have told me if he didn’t absolutely have to. Magicians take this very seriously. It’s like a code of honor for them.” Listen to her, wouldn’t Parsifal be laughing now. You never told because people wanted so desperately to know. They wanted what you had and therefore what you had was all the power. Who would give that up? What possible benefit could there ever be in telling? A minute of gratitude and then the dull falling away, the boredom that always followed knowledge. For fifteen years the Fetters had wanted to know how Parsifal balanced Sabine on the top of a chair. Waiting for the answer hadn’t done them any harm.

“I bet he told plenty of people,” Kitty said. “I bet they were just people he liked better than us.”

A flicker of hurt went over Dot’s face, a remnant of a very old fight.

“I promise you,” Sabine said. “He never told anyone. He didn’t even tell Phan how it worked.”

The women tensed. Kitty pressed her hands between her knees.

“Who’s Phan?” How said.

So she had made a mistake. Did they think this was hard? Did they think she didn’t know how to get out? “He was my best friend. He came to all our shows. I wanted to tell him how we did some things, just a couple of tricks, but your uncle said no.”

“What kind of name is Phan?” Guy said. The word came out of his mouth like something that tasted bad.

“Vietnamese.”

“Don’t make fun,” Dot said, relieved. “You can bet there are a group of Vietnamese sitting around right now wondering about a family in Nebraska who’ve got people named Guy and Dot.”

“And How,” said How.

“Bertie and Kitty,” Bertie said.

Hearing her own name, Kitty started and looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get you boys home. It’s late.”

How rolled over on his stomach and laid his head down on crossed arms. Guy leaned back in his chair, as if meaning to dig himself deeper into the upholstery. Kitty stood and clapped her hands together as if she were rounding up cattle. “Come on, let’s go.”

Guy stretched, pushing his long arms out in front of him, and then both boys closed their eyes. “For God’s sake,” Dot said, standing up and kicking How lightly on the leg. “Listen to your mother. Get up and go home.”

“I’m not going until she tells us how they got her on her head,” Guy said. Eyes closed, Guy looked like a huge child, a three-year-old whose pink cheeks and round lips were large beyond reason.

“You can sit there all night if you want to,” Sabine said. “It’s fine with me if you stay.”

And they might have. It was impossible to gauge their seriousness. But before there was time to try to talk them into getting up, someone was knocking on the front door, and long before there was time to answer the door, they had barely turned their heads in the direction of the sound, the man who was outside simply walked in, as if the knock had been less a request for entry than an announcement of it. He kept his head down and shook dramatically from the cold, slapping his bare, open hands against his arms, trying to coax the circulation up again. He was wearing a denim jacket over a sweatshirt. It was not enough. “Damn,” he said. “Some night to be out in the cold looking for your family.”

Now the boys’ eyes were open. How sat up. They looked like deer, ears pricked and alert, their noses sniffing the air.

“I said we’d be home by eight.” Kitty lifted her wrist towards the man, showing her watch as proof. “We’ll be home by eight.”

“Well, you said you had company. I thought it would be nice if I came over and met your company.” If he had come to see Sabine, he had not yet noticed her. His attention was fixed on his boots, which were miraculously free of snow.

“Then you’re not out looking for your family in the cold,” Kitty corrected. She held her shoulders back and leaned slightly in towards the man. “Now shut the door.”

Mrs. Howard Plate (Kitty),
that’s what the lawyer’s papers had said. Which would make this Mr. Howard Plate. Mr. Howard Plate was big like his sons, with hair that might have been red when he was their age and now was that colorless sandy brown that red hair can become. But it was his face that drew attention, the way it was fine on one side and collapsed on the other, as if he had been hit very hard and the shape of the fist in question was still lodged beneath his left eye. It had the quality of something distinctly broken and poorly repaired. The bad light cast by the living room lamps threw a shadow into the cave of his cheek, where a random interlacing of scars ended and began. He slipped one hand behind his neck and pulled down hard, as if he were trying to make himself smaller. “Do you want me to go?”

“Sabine,” Dot said, “before this gets any worse, let me introduce you to my son-in-law. This is Howard Plate. Howard, you’ve heard all about Sabine, Guy’s wife.”

“I hear you’ve got a big house in Los Angeles,” Howard Plate said, looking at her. Seen straight on, it was not such a bad face. It was the kind of face that in Los Angeles could make him seem exotic but in Nebraska only made him look poor.

“It’s a good-sized house,” Sabine said. She held out her hand and he shook it. It was a big hand, rough on the palm and cold as the iron railing around the front porch. Did people have something against gloves?

“Don’t bother her about the size of her house,” Kitty said. If she had left five minutes before then her car wouldn’t have been in the driveway and Howard would have slowed down but not stopped. He would have driven on home when he didn’t see her there.

“Well, since Dot and Bertie came back from California that’s all I hear about, what a big house she’s got. There’s no crime in having a nice house, is there?” He looked at Sabine, turning slightly to show her the better-looking part of himself. “I never met Kitty’s brother. We all thought he was dead forever—I mean, a long time before he was dead. So it’s been a real surprise finding out that he’s been alive all this time and doing so well. Most people come and visit their families when they do well. They’re proud of what they’ve got.”

Sabine realized that all of this was meant to insult her, that the great wave of awkwardness that came up from every corner of the room, save Howard Plate’s, was the embarrassment generated on her behalf. But Sabine herself, still standing after the handshake, didn’t feel insulted or embarrassed. She only felt a vaguely tired sort of depression because it wasn’t summer, because she wasn’t sitting next to the pool underneath the shade of the big red umbrella with Phan while Parsifal brought out three tall Beefeater tonics. How he loved to bring them out with a knife and walk to the lime tree and snap one off, slice through the thin green skin right there on the glass-topped table. “You’re really living when you’re living off the land,” he’d say. He stirred the drink again with the knifepoint, the fuzzy effervescence of very fresh tonic looking celebratory although at the time they’d thought there was nothing in particular to celebrate. What she wanted to say to Howard Plate, what she could not say and he could not possibly understand, was this: If you’ve had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins out.

“Well, that’s it for me,” Bertie said, getting up heavily from the couch. “I’m going over to see Haas. You have a good evening.” In her voice there was a tremble of barely contained rage. Every muscle in her body strained to keep her from taking on Howard Plate.

“Bertie, don’t go,” her sister said. She reached up for her wrist, but Bertie deftly moved her hand aside so that even when Kitty stretched, she fell short.

“Take Haas some cookies,” Dot said. “There’s a bag of them on the kitchen counter.”

“I’ll be back by twelve.” They all watched her go. In the lamplight Bertie’s hair seemed like almost too much luxury, all those brown-and-yellow tangled curls. Haas would separate each one, comb it out gently.

“She just can’t wait to get married,” Howard Plate said to Sabine, as if he were saying something dirty.

“I know,” Sabine said. “I remember that feeling exactly.”

Howard sat down on the couch in the warm spot that Bertie had left, and Sabine took her place on the other side of Kitty, but the swap of Bertie for Howard Plate had stripped everyone in the room of their language skills. Even Dot seemed at a loss as to how to rally the conversation. “Did you eat?” she asked Howard finally.

“I did.”

The room fit them snugly now, three women, two such large boys, a man that none of them wanted to talk to. With all the windows locked tight, storm windows down, window seals caulked, curtains drawn, Sabine became aware of how much oxygen they were all taking in.

“Did you watch the video?” Howard Plate asked his wife.

Kitty nodded without bothering to look over, as if the question had been a particularly boring one.

“Sabine had never seen it,” Dot said. “Can you imagine that?”

“You were on television and you never saw it?”

Sabine twisted her wedding ring around and around on her thin finger. “The show wasn’t live. They taped in the afternoon, so we were home to watch it that night. I saw it the night it was on.” But the night it was on they’d had a party. Not magicians, whose feelings were too easily hurt. They would have said that Carson was trash magic and they had no interest in lowering themselves to it. This was years before Phan. Parsifal lived in that bright apartment in West Hollywood, which on that night was full of rug dealers, architects, neighbors, old boyfriends of Parsifal’s, and one or two of Sabine’s, people who whistled at the television set and pounded on the floor when their faces filled the screen. That was what Sabine remembered, not how they looked. When she saw the tape tonight there had been no part of it that struck her as familiar.

“How’d you do that trick, anyway?” Howard Plate said.

All this time the boys had stayed quiet, not crossing their legs or shifting their weight. Even their breathing had seemed shallow, like they were balanced on a high and precarious branch of a tree. But at their father’s question How laughed, and then Guy laughed with him.

“What?”

“I think we should get these boys home,” Kitty said. She looked at her mama’s boy, her favorite. “You about ready?”

“Sure,” How said, the color up in his face.

“Somebody going to tell me what’s funny?”

Kitty reached over and patted her husband on the knee, giving him that small acknowledgment. “We’ll tell you on the way home.”

“I’ve barely met your company,” Howard Plate said. He had not been in the house long enough to get completely warm, and already it was time to go.

Sabine shrugged and smiled, as if the meeting had been a pleasure, as if she would try and hide her disappointment at this early departure. “I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

Howard Plate said he was glad to hear that. The boys drew themselves up to their full standing heights. How was taller than his father, just slightly wider through the shoulders, as he was thinner in the waist. Guy, who seemed to be busy growing while the rest of the group wasted the evening in talk, was fast gaining on them both.