The Magician's Assistant (3 page)

Sabine smiles and sits down with Phan beside the pool, letting her legs dangle in the water. The dolphins’ necks are strung with flowers. The water is the blue of the little mountain bluebird she once saw outside of Tahoe. “What do you do now?”

He takes one of her hands between his. The eczema that plagued his palms for years is gone. “Most of the time I’m with you. I stay with you.” He stops for a minute. Phan was never one to talk about himself. “Now and then I go back to Vietnam.”

“Really?” Sabine is surprised. Phan would hardly speak of Vietnam.

“It’s a very beautiful country,” he says. “There are so many things I remember from when I was a boy, things I haven’t thought of for thirty years—grasses in the fields and the rice, when it first comes up in the spring. It’s difficult for me to explain. It’s a comfort, like listening to so many people speak Vietnamese. Sometimes I stand in the market and cry. You’ll know what I mean someday when you go home.”

“I am home.”

“Israel,” Phan says.

“It isn’t the same,” she says. “I was so young when we left there, I don’t even remember it.”

Phan shakes his head. “This isn’t our country,” he says.

Los Angeles is Sabine’s country, the only one she loves. “Where do you think Parsifal goes?” she asks.

Phan looks at her with enormous tenderness. The wind blows her hair, which is nearly as black and straight as Phan’s. Somewhere beyond the pool a mockingbird is singing. “Most of the time he’s with me,” Phan says. “We stay with you together. We go to Vietnam.”

Immediately Sabine sits up straight; she looks behind her, down a long allée that leads to a gazebo. “He’s here now?”

“He didn’t want to come.”

“No?” She whispers it.

“He’s just embarrassed. And he should be, really, he left you with too much.”

Sabine looks around, hoping that he’s close by, that he will see her there and come to her. She can hardly breathe for missing him. “It’s not like there was something he could do about it. He tried to make things easy for me, he married me.”

Phan pushes his wet hair back with his hands. He is anxious to get to his point. “You’re not the only one who was in the dark about this whole thing. I didn’t know, either. I want to tell you that. Parsifal kept this to himself. It was a decision he made a long time ago, and once he made up his mind he never went back. Not ever. So it was nothing against you or against me. It wasn’t that he didn’t love us enough.” Phan ran his foot lightly over the surface of the water, sending out a long series of tiny waves. Clearly he was thinking about going back in. “This is going to make things more difficult for you. He says he was going to tell you; he just thought there was going to be more time. The aneurism caught him off-guard. I guess that was my fault.”

Sabine has no idea what Phan is talking about, not any of it. “Your fault?”

“The aneurism,” Phan says, and snaps his wet fingers. “Quick.”

The memory is extremely far away and yet she knows this has something to do with her. She uses her hand to shade her eyes from the sun and squints at him. “You killed him?” she asks, sure that the answer is no.

Suddenly it is the old Phan next to her. His head bends down, doglike. He seems naked without a shirt. “Please don’t say that,” he says softly.

“Then explain it to me.” She feels something crawling in her throat.

“You had asked—”

“I had asked?”

“Not to suffer.”

It takes her a minute and then she remembers—how she would hope there would not be too much pain for Parsifal, how she would say it to herself as they drove home from doctors’ appointments. But to hope, to think something, that was nothing like asking.

Sabine’s legs swing out of the pool. She stands up. Her head is clear. “Jesus,” she says. “Jesus, I didn’t mean for you to kill him. I meant for you to comfort him. Comfort. If you didn’t understand you should have asked me.”

“The difference in time was very small.”

“Small?” Sabine said. “What’s small? What do you think is small?”

Phan looks at his feet. He presses his toes hard against the cement wall inside the pool. “Two years.” He shrugs, helpless. “A little more than two years.”

Sabine is dizzy and lifts her hands to her head. For the first time in her life she feels like her head is going to simply break free of her body, sail over the wall that is covered in heavy purple grapes. “How can you say two years is a small amount of time?”

“It is small,” Phan says. “You may not understand that now, but once you’re dead you’ll see. It means nothing.”

“I’m not dead.” Her voice is high. “I wanted that time.” She is crying now, inconsolable. Parsifal could still be sleeping in his own bed. This is all because of something she said, something she did. This is loneliness she has brought on herself.

The breeze over the pool is pleasant and dry, coming in from the ocean. It is a bright afternoon in Southern California. Phan is crying as well. Though his face is damp from the swimming, she can see it. His shoulders are shaking. “I had meant to make things easier for you,” he says. He slips off the edge of the pool and sinks into the water. It is not the water that is blue, nor is the blue a reflection of the sky. The pool itself is painted blue on the inside. Sabine watches him. She is trying to stop her own crying.

“Come up,” she says. Phan is swimming along the bottom. He is swimming in circles. His body is distorted by the depth into something long and dreamy, Phan does not come up because he does not need to come up. He only needs to keep swimming. She knows that he will stay down there all day.

“I’m sorry,” Sabine whispers. “Come back.” She twists her hands around themselves. She is so tired. It’s so long since there has been any rest in sleep. She waits and waits, but she might as well be waiting for a fish. Finally there is nothing left to do but go, and so she walks towards the gate. She is almost out of the garden before she remembers something and comes back to the water’s edge. “Phan?” she says. “What about the rest of it? What were you supposed to tell me?”

Phan is swimming, swimming. She doesn’t think he can hear her; or at least she knows that if she were the one underwater, she wouldn’t be able to hear.

When the telephone rang, Sabine screamed.

“You’re a half hour late,” Roger said. “Does this mean you’re standing me up?”

“What?”

“Sabine? Are you awake?”

She swallowed. Her heart was beating fast as Rabbit’s. “I forgot,” she whispered.

“Don’t clean the house,” he said. “I’m coming over.”

There was no way to make sense of the half sentences of information flooding her head. She felt that she was still trying to dig up from some terrible thickness. She put on Parsifal’s robe and washed her face several times with cold water. She was just finishing her teeth when the doorbell rang.

It is the responsibility of any good magician’s assistant to misdirect the attention of the audience, and Sabine had taken her responsibility to heart. She had worn lipstick to the breakfast table in the morning. She owned cuff bracelets and strappy high-heeled shoes. She had known how to put herself together. That was then, this is now, she thought as she made her way to the front door.

“I meant to come,” she said.

Roger kissed her on the cheek and looped a piece of her hair back behind her ear. “The place has a dress code,” he said. “They wouldn’t have let you in.”

“I’m having coffee.” Sabine walked to the kitchen and Roger followed. The house was swimming in light, but these days Sabine could sleep through any amount of brightness.

He stopped at the brain scan she had masking-taped to the refrigerator. “What the hell is this?”

“Parsifal,” she said, looking for filters.

Roger sat down at the breakfast table and lit a cigarette. He was one of the few people Sabine knew in Los Angeles who still smoked, and the only person she knew who would smoke in your house without asking, something she might have minded at another time in her life. “What do you know about Parsifal’s family?” he asked her.

Sabine shrugged, switching the coffeemaker on. “I know they lived in Connecticut. I know they’re dead. I know he changed his name from Petrie. If you’ve come to break the news to me that he has some long-lost cousins who are looking for money, don’t worry; I promise to take it well.” The pieces of the dream were slipping away from her. Phan. Pool. She wished she could excuse herself for a minute and just sit down to think.

“I always thought of Parsifal as someone I knew fairly well,” Roger said, tapping an ash into a dark purple African violet on the table. “But there were a lot of things I didn’t know. The same things, I guess, that you didn’t know.”

I didn’t know about it either,
Phan said.
I wanted to tell you that.
There. That much she remembered. Sabine stayed between the two worlds, waiting for her coffee. She wanted to be neither awake nor asleep.

“So,” Roger said, tenting his fingertips together like a corporate executive. “Here’s the thing.” He waited for a minute, thinking she would at least turn and look at him, but she didn’t and didn’t seem like she might, and so he went ahead. “Parsifal’s name wasn’t Petrie. It was Guy Fetters. Guy Fetters has a mother and two sisters in Nebraska. As far as I can tell the father is out of the picture—either dead or gone, I’m not sure which.”

She got down two yellow cups and poured the coffee. To the best of her knowledge, there was no milk or sugar in the house. “That isn’t possible,” she said.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“We were together for twenty-two years.” Sabine sat down at the table. She took a cigarette out of Roger’s pack and lit it. It seemed like a good time to smoke. “So I guess I knew him better than you. That’s the kind of thing that comes out after twenty-two years.”

“Well,” Roger said, thinking it over. “In this case, it didn’t.”

The cigarette tasted bad, but she liked it. Sabine blew the smoke in a straight line to the ceiling. There had been a swimming pool. Phan was there. He had said he didn’t know about it either. About? Sabine looked at Roger.

“There was a letter in his will. He wanted me to tell his family about his death. He’s set up a trust for them, the mother and the sisters. You’re not going to miss the money. The bulk of the estate is yours.”

“I’m not going to miss the money,” Sabine said. It wasn’t just Parsifal’s money she had, it was Phan’s: the rights to countless computer programs, the rights to Knick-Knack. Everything had come to her.

Roger ground his cigarette into the soft black dirt around the plant. “I want you to know I’m sorry about this. It’s a hell of a thing, him not telling you. Everybody has their reasons, but I hardly think you need this now.”

“No,” Sabine said.

“What I need to know is if you want to call them. Certainly I plan to do it, but I didn’t know how you’d feel about being in touch with them yourself.” He waited for her to say something. Sabine wasn’t going to be able to keep her eyes open much longer. “You can think it over,” Roger said. He looked at his cigarettes, trying to decide if he would be there long enough to make lighting another one worthwhile. He decided not. “Call me tomorrow.”

Sabine nodded. He took a file out of his briefcase and laid it on the table. “Here are the names, addresses, phone numbers; a copy of Parsifal’s request.” He stood up. “You’ll call me.”

“I’ll call you.” She did not get up to see him out, or offer to, or notice his awkwardness in waiting. He was almost to the front door when she called to him.

“Yes?”

“Leave me a cigarette, will you?”

Roger shook two out of the pack, enough for him to make it back to the office, and left her the rest on the table in the entryway.

Sabine smoked a cigarette before opening the file.

Mrs. Albert Fetters (Dorothy). Alliance, Nebraska.

Miss Albertine Fetters. Alliance, Nebraska.

Mrs. Howard Plate (Kitty). Alliance, Nebraska.

There were addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers. Miss Albertine Fetters lived with Mrs. Albert Fetters. Mrs. Howard Plate did not. Sabine read the letter from Parsifal, but all it told her was how he wanted the trust structured. She wondered if there were a way the letter could have been forged. Which scenario seemed more unlikely? Three women in some place called Alliance, Nebraska, made up a connection to a total stranger in order to get what was, Sabine noted, not such an enormous amount of money; or the man she had loved and worked with for her entire adult life was someone she didn’t actually know? Sabine ran a finger over the names as if they were in braille. Albert. Albertine. She shook her arms out of her bathrobe and let it fall backwards over the chair.

His story had been absolutely clear. They had been working together for two weeks. Sabine had asked before where he was from and Parsifal had told her Westport; but it was when they took a break from rehearsal one day so that they could get some lunch that she had asked him about his family. Parsifal, who had a great deal of youthful melodrama at the time, put down his sandwich, looked at her, and said, “I don’t have any family.”

For Sabine, life without family, without parents, was inconceivable, a hole of sorrow that made her love him even more. The details of the story came slowly over the next year. The questions had to be asked delicately, at the right time. There could not be too many at once, there could not be follow-up questions. What worked best was soliciting the occasional fact:
What was your sister’s name?
“Helen.” To press the subject too hard made Parsifal despondent. She discovered that when he said he did not wish to speak about it, he wasn’t secretly hoping she would try to coax him into conversation.
There must be other family, uncles, cousins?
“A few, but we were never close. They didn’t try to help me after my parents’ death. I’m not interested in them.”

Slowly the small stream of information dried up. The story had been told. It was over, leaving Sabine with only the vaguest details of sorrows best forgotten. Once, many years later, when they were playing in New York, she had suggested that they take the train out to Westport. She wanted to see where Parsifal grew up, maybe they could even go to the cemetery and put some flowers on the graves.