The Magician's Assistant (40 page)

By the time Dot came home with the boys after school, Sabine was back at work on the house. She had cut all the exterior doors and walls and made her windows out of two layers of freezer bags melted lightly together on a cookie sheet. She did not mention Howard Plate’s visit. She had very nearly made herself forget about him and was only reminded by seeing the boys and their long and lean resemblance to their father. There were so many different angles from which to look at boys. They would look like their uncle, then their mother and then their father, depending on how you turned them in the light.

“That’s the place,” Dot said. She pointed the boys’ attention towards the obvious. “That’s exactly what it looks like.”

“It’s bigger,” Sabine said. “And there’s a roof.”

“I wish you’d been here when my science project was due,” Guy said, running a tender finger over a windowsill.

How sniffed around with moderate interest. “Are you going to show us how to do the cups and balls?”

Sabine nodded and held two pieces of recently glued board together. At home she had a vise. “Do you want to do that now?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” How said, careful in the ways teenage boys can be about not seeming to really want anything you might be able to give them.

So Sabine showed them cups and balls. It was no great betrayal to the secret society of magicians. The directions were, after all, written out in completely impenetrable English on the top of the box. There were diagrams of the trick in every cheap book of magic. But pictures never explained anything. Sabine set up the cups and the balls. “Leave the egg out for now, that’s the tricky part. Basics first.” She showed them how to hide the balls on the tops of the stacked cups, how to turn the cups over so that the balls didn’t fall out, how there was no magic, just planning and acting. How and Guy, fresh from school’s obedience, sat and watched, desperate as they never were in American history to give a perfect mimicking of the facts. “Once you learn how to do it, you never look at your hands. If you look at your hands, they’ll look at your hands. You control the attention of the audience. You direct it. That’s how you hide things.”

Dot came over and stood behind Sabine. “Maybe you boys could learn how to do this, start up a brothers act, make your way in the world.”

“We start a brothers act, I can tell you who’s going to be the assistant,” Guy said, never taking his eyes off Sabine’s hands, which never stopped moving.

“There will be no slighting of magicians’ assistants in my presence,” Sabine said.

“Sorry.”

“I’m ready to try,” How said with great seriousness, his face fixed with the set determination of a batter waiting for the first pitch.

“Good,” Sabine said. “Have at it.” She slid the props across the table. She was pulling for How. She thought he was exactly the kind of boy who could make a decent magician, basically too introverted to do much with other kids his own age and therefore more likely to practice the tireless hours that were required. A boy who would fashion the persona of a magician like another boy might carve a turtle from a bar of soap. As much as Guy wanted the skills, rabbits, hats, assistants, he didn’t sufficiently need them. People would come to him for other reasons. He wouldn’t have the patience for the tedium, the repetition and failure that might one day put him on late-night television.

How took the cups and carefully placed the balls on top, his large, chapped hands trying to appear nimble and birdlike. He set up the cups without any of the balls scooting across the table and onto the floor, then he looked to Sabine for approval and direction.

“And then you say...,” she said.

“We’re going to put this ball”—he held up the ball that he had hidden in his hand. A good palm job, although it was not a ball that needed to be palmed—“under this cup.”

She liked his use of the first-person plural, his eye contact. “Good,” she said. “Good.”

How and Sabine skipped the cups around until Guy got bored and wandered off to watch MTV in the living room. How was tireless, a record set to Replay, so that at the end of every run-through he simply went back and started over again, each time repeating his patter with a musical freshness. Dot claimed a sudden urgent need to go to the grocery store to get away from the never-ending question, “Where do you think the ball is now?” But Sabine could take it. The wild tedium of watching someone else practice, of practicing herself, was a skill she had developed over the years. She spotted him like a gymnastics coach, sticking an arm beneath his back at the most perilous moment of the flip. He did not tire, get frustrated, grow sloppy. He worked.

“Do you think I’ll be able to do the egg sometime?”

Sabine nodded. “You were born for it.”

How put his broad hands down flat on the table. His nails were red, their beds crushed to a fleshy pulp by the constant efforts of his teeth. All his cuticles were stripped beyond the possibility of regrowth. “If you thought you could stay a little longer, it would really help me—I mean, to learn some of this. I should have asked you sooner, I know. I just...” He looked at her pleadingly, his sentence over.

“I really do need to go home, How. I’m sorry. You’re going to be great, though. You’ve got what it takes to do this thing yourself. Your uncle did it. Nobody taught him magic.” Sabine said this without having any notion of whether or not it was true. For all she knew, Parsifal’s math teacher was a Blackstone himself. He may have passed on every secret in the book after the chalkboards had been wiped down.

Over the unbearable strains of electric guitars coming from the television in the other room, Sabine could hear How’s labored breathing. This time of year, everyone in Alliance was breathing with difficulty. “Um,” he said, staring at his damaged hands, his knuckles scraped and scabbed as a fighter’s. “Do you think my mom might go and see you in California?”

“She might,” Sabine said, never really having thought about Kitty in Los Angeles. “I hope she does.”

He waited for a long time, mulling over her reply, preparing his next sentence as if he were culling the words out of an English phrasebook. “I’d like to come.” He said this very quietly, as if he were overwhelmed by the burden of his own request.

“Of course you can come,” Sabine said, and she meant it. She could take How to Disneyland, to the beach. He could lie by the pool. Her parents would like How, his sweet disposition and healthy appetite. She could hear his big feet slapping down the hall, coming in at night to practice magic in front of the mirrors in the master bedroom. The rabbit would be so happy—something to do. “You can come even if your mother doesn’t.”

His eyes turned up, so hopeful and filled with wanting that Sabine could not exactly meet them. “Really?”

“Sure,” she said, and pushed the cups back to him. “Just practice.”

By the time Kitty came home at six o’clock, How had something to show her that was nearly formed. You never knew if a trick was any good until you found someone to pull it on. His mother watched with rapt attention, sitting right down in the chair beside him when he asked for her, not stopping to take off her boots or heavy coat. She picked the cup that she earnestly believed concealed the ball and seemed to be thrilled when she was wrong. He had fooled her and she was delighted.

“Sabine taught you that?” Kitty had both hands on How’s shoulders.

“Every move.”

“I wish Guy could see this,” Kitty said to How, to Sabine, to Dot, who had returned from the grocery. She did not mean How’s brother, who was at the moment stretched across the living room sofa mouthing the words to a Smashing Pumpkins song along with the television. “He would be so proud of you.”

And Sabine confirmed that this was true.

When, after dinner, they watched the Johnny Carson video (now back on the track of their regular habits) it meant something else again. Tonight it was about the possibility of becoming that young magician, and for a moment they each considered How in Parsifal’s role. Sabine could even be his assistant, though How deserved a younger girl, someone who was not an inheritance but completely his own.

“A person would have to work awfully hard to be that good,” Dot said to the room in general, as if she were noticing for the first time that what had been done so many years before in the NBC Burbank studios was difficult.

“I know,” How said, his eyes never for a second leaving the screen.

Many hours later, when everyone was asleep or waiting to fall asleep, and Kitty came quietly into Sabine’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed like a college girl come to tell late-night secrets, the thing she wanted to talk about was How. The thing that Sabine wanted to talk about she didn’t begin to have words for.

“I think he has some real promise,” Kitty said, sitting cross-legged in the dark. “I remember what Guy looked like when he was first doing tricks. He was younger than How, but there were similarities.”

It had only been one trick, one afternoon of cups and balls, which was the place every person who ever had the most fleeting interest in magic began. “It’s not like we’ve just found out he’s Mozart,” Sabine said, speaking rationally. “But I do think he’d make a good magician. He has the right kind of temperament for it.”

“I know he’s not Guy, but I want things to work out for him that way. I want him to be successful, happy.”

“If you’re talking about money, Parsifal was a successful rug salesman, not a successful magician. By the time we paid for costumes and equipment, we wound up making about a thousand bucks a year on magic, and that’s when things were good. If you’re talking about happiness, I don’t know. I don’t know what makes people happy.” Sabine remembered Howard Plate and thought how happy she could have made him simply by telling him that she would soon be returning to California, how profoundly unhappy he would have been to hear the thing she had wanted to tell him, about Kitty and the kiss she was thinking of now. “I saw Howard today.”

“Howard?” Kitty sat up straight, as if Sabine had seen him under the bed. “Where?”

“He came by this afternoon to talk to me.”

“To talk to you?”

Sabine put her hands behind her head. Her elbows stretched past the edges of the pillow. “He said he wanted me to leave town. He seems to think I’m the cause of your problems.”

“Dear God.”

“It’s no big deal,” Sabine said, entirely unsure of whether it was or not.

“I’m so sorry about that.” Kitty laughed. “And to think I was coming in to try and talk you into staying.”

If there was some important information in Kitty’s eyes, it was too dark for Sabine to see it properly. “You know I’m not leaving because of that.”

In the dark, Kitty could have been a girl. She could have been the Kitty of years ago, sitting on her own bed, her brother across the hall. “Still,” she said, “I’ll see if I can’t call off the dogs.”

“You have enough to worry about with Howard. He’s not going to bother me. He didn’t bother me. Like I said, we just talked.”

They sat there quietly for a while, both meaning to say other things. All the things that had made them brave the night before, the dark and the quiet, made them terribly shy now. “I guess I should go on to sleep,” Kitty said.

“Are you working tomorrow?”

Kitty shook her head. “I’m going to help Bertie with a few last-minute things for the wedding.”

“If I can do anything...”

“Sure,” Kitty said. “Thanks.” She stood up and patted Sabine’s foot where it made a small hill beneath the covers. There was between the two of them so much disappointment and relief that Sabine found herself taking shallow breaths. Kitty slipped into the hall and closed the door behind her without stopping or saying good-night, and though Sabine waited, sure that this time she would think of the right thing to say, Kitty did not come back.

There is a tremendous crush in the Magic Castle. The secret panel in the bookcase is open and there are people filling up the foyer and the main lobby. The banister strains to hold back the people packed onto the staircase and they spill onto the balcony and down every corridor. There is a man Sabine cannot see pressing against her back and he pushes her hard up against the man who is in front of her. She can smell the sweet verbena pomade in his hair. Every magician she has ever heard of is here, every magic-store owner, every cabinetmaker and previous audience member, and mixed in with them are a thousand people she does not recognize. The crowd has a steady percolation of movement, although Sabine has no idea where the people want to go. Maybe they are trying to get to the bar, or maybe they are trying to adjust themselves to the ones who continue to flood into the room. Maybe, like Sabine, they are looking for someone. She is fortunate. She is taller than most of the people there, taller still for wearing high heels. There is a large group of Vietnamese surrounding her and she can see over their heads without difficulty. The men are wearing white dinner jackets with black ties, and all of the women are in evening gowns. All of the women except Sabine, who is wearing the sea-foam green assistant’s costume that Phan made for her. She lifts her hand to her chest and touches the satin trim and tiny blue glass beads. She was at the Castle the last time she wore it. She and Parsifal did one last show three months before Phan died. Phan came with them. He was blind by then, but he sat in the front row and held his face up to the sound of Parsifal’s voice as if he were watching. Magic means nothing to the blind, but Phan said he was very proud. Later he touched the beads on Sabine’s costume with the tips of his fingers. “They’re so tiny,” he marveled. “I can’t believe I ever saw well enough to sew all of those on.”

So she is back at the Castle, wearing this costume, which can mean only one thing. With great difficulty, Sabine begins to turn in a circle, looking, looking. What she sees, finally, is not Parsifal but a beautiful picture of him, a poster for tonight’s performance. It is larger than he is. He is painted in front of a flaming California sunset, his feet surrounded by sand and sea grass. He glows from the brilliance of the yellow that is behind him. His face is handsome and very wise. In the picture he holds the rabbit tenderly in both hands,
PARSIFAL IS MAGIC,
the sign says.