The Magician's Assistant (8 page)

“So how long were you two married?” his mother asked. “I should have asked you that before. I don’t even know how long you were married.”

“A little less than a year,” Sabine said, stretching out her six months. “It was after I moved in.”

Mrs. Fetters and her daughter looked at Sabine suspiciously, as if suddenly she was not who they thought she was.

“We worked together, we were together for twenty-two years. We’d just never seen the point in getting married before. I’m afraid I’m not very old-fashioned that way.” She did not wish to lie or explain. It was, after all, her life. Her private life. “I haven’t even offered you anything to drink. Let me get you something. A soda, a glass of wine?”

“So why did you end up getting married? What changed your mind after all those years?”

Sabine put her hand on the banister. These people didn’t know Parsifal. They did not know his name. If there were questions to be asked, she should be the one doing the asking. They were probably wondering why the money was all hers, why she had the house, an interloper married less than a year. “We were all getting older,” she said. She heard her own voice and it sounded clipped, nearly stern.

Mrs. Fetters nodded. “Older,” she said. “I for one am getting older.” They all at once understood that the family reunion was over. Everyone had seen more than they had planned to see, no one had gotten what they wanted. “Bertie, I think it’s time we headed back to the hotel and got rested up.”

“You’re welcome to stay,” Sabine said, following some code of social interaction her mother had drilled into her from birth. She could not help herself.

“I’m tired,” Mrs. Fetters said. “It’s bad enough that I have to ask you to drive us to the hotel.”

Another trip in the car seemed a small price to pay for getting her privacy back. Sabine already had her keys in her hand.

“I told the travel agent I was willing to pay more for something safe,” Mrs. Fetters said when Sabine pulled up in front of the downtown Sheraton Grand. “For what this place costs I think I ought to have a guard standing outside my door. Do you think this is safe?”

“You’ll be fine here,” Sabine said. “I can come in, make sure you’re checked in okay.”

Mrs. Fetters held up her hands. “I wouldn’t think of it. You’ve done too much as it is. I know it was hard on you, going out to the cemetery. I’m afraid I was just thinking of myself.”

“I wanted to go,” Sabine said.

For a minute they all just sat there. Finally it was Bertie who opened her door. “Well, good night, then,” Bertie said.

“If you need anything...”

“We’re fine.” Mrs. Fetters looked at her, everyone unsure of how to part. Finally she patted Sabine on the wrist, a gesture of a distant aunt, a favorite teacher. They got out of the car and waved. Sabine waited until they were safely inside before punching the gas. The BMW could exit parking lots at record speed.

Parsifal’s family, his mother and sister, and Sabine had not invited them to sleep in one of the guest rooms. She had not offered them the enormous amount of food that was waiting in the refrigerator. Would it have been too much to be a little bit nicer? She gunned the engine and cut deftly into the left lane. Let them catch her. Let them try and take her in. She pushed the button down on the power window and let the wind mat her hair. Nights like this, the freeway was an amusement-park ride, a thrilling test of nerves and skill. Sometimes it was all she could do not to close her eyes. She would have to assume that Parsifal wouldn’t disapprove of her leaving his family in a hotel, after all, he had been polite enough to leave them a small inheritance but not warm enough to tell them where he lived. There was a reason he stayed away. Even if it wasn’t exactly evident, she trusted his judgment completely now. There was something wrong. Something that did not concern her or include her. It was dark and Sabine took the Coldwater Canyon exit over to Mulholland Drive. This was when she felt the most inside the city, when it was all broken down into patterns of lights.

There would have been something to gain by having them around. There were questions, giant gaping holes she would have loved to fill in, but when had the moment presented itself in which she could have said, and why, Mrs. Fetters, did you not speak to your son for all those years? Why the sudden interest now? Those were confidences, things that had to be earned. It took intimacy and that took time, and while she had seemingly limitless amounts of the latter, she had no stomach for the former. People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.

At home she pulled out the trays of food and fixed herself a plate. She made a salad for Rabbit and put it on the floor, tapping her foot until she heard his gentle thump down the hall. What, exactly, was it worth without Parsifal to tell it to? How she wanted to find him at the breakfast table, waiting. She would spin it out, the airport, Johnny Carson. He would never believe his mother had a tape of Johnny Carson. In her mind she told him about the trip to the cemetery, how Bertie had stood back while his mother chatted up the grave marker. She told him about how they went through the house as if he were there but hiding, just out of earshot. For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.

“I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn’t even bother to lift his head.

That night, while she sat in her studio carving a hill out of Styrofoam, trying to get the sweep to be gentle, she thought about them. She thought of Bertie’s pale hands, the tiny diamond, and wondered who had put it there. Had Bertie thought about this brother she could not remember? Would it have made a difference in her life if he had been there? Mrs. Fetters didn’t seem like a bad mother, the way she spoke to him at the grave site. She was direct. She was clearly proud of him, even in his death. And what could they know about Los Angeles? Would they go home tomorrow? Would they go back to Forest Lawn? Would they be wandering around the city, in and out of neighborhoods they shouldn’t go to, trying to put together something they couldn’t possibly find? Sabine was feeling guilty that she hadn’t tried harder, asked more; and it was in the distraction of guilt that she slid the knife she used to cut the Styrofoam through the thin skin at the top of her wrist and into the base of her palm. It took a tug to pull it free. She started to say something, to call out, but then didn’t. She closed her other hand around it and sat for a minute, watching while the blood pulsed out between her locked fingers. Then she went into the bathroom.

It was deep, no doubt about it, and it stung like the knife was still in there and very hot when she held her hand under the water, but all her fingers moved properly. The sink turned red. It looked like the kind of cut that would need stitches, but she would rather have bled to death sitting on the side of the tub than take herself to Cedars Sinai. Using her teeth, she tore open five packages of gauze pads and piled them onto her wrist and the bottom of her hand, then she taped them in place. Phan and Parsifal stocked a spectacular selection of first-aid paraphernalia. She could see the blood seeping around the edges and she raised her hand above her head. That’s when she heard the phone ring.

It was nearly eleven o’clock. It would be Mrs. Fetters, though Sabine hadn’t expected her to call. She sat on the floor, hand raised as if she had some urgent question.

“Sabine?” There was noise in the background, music and talking, a party.
Sabine.
“It’s Dot Fetters.”

Dot.
She hadn’t thought of that variation. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m sorry to be calling so late. I’m waking you up.”

“Not at all.”

“Well, Bertie’s asleep and I just couldn’t, you know, so I came down to the bar. They have a nice bar here.”

Sabine was glad she had called. She felt the blood running in a thin stream from her upturned palm down her arm.

“So I was wondering,” she said, “and this is stupid because it’s the middle of the night and everything and I know you don’t exactly live next door, but I was wondering if you’d be interested in coming over for a drink.”

Sabine thought that Dot Fetters had already had a drink or two, but who wouldn’t? How would such a call be possible otherwise? “A drink.”

“It was just a thought—too late really, I know, but I felt bad about the way things went today. I was hoping to have the chance to talk to you, and—I don’t know. You have to bear with me, this is all hard.”

“I know,” Sabine said, her voice small in the room. It was very hard. And though she could not imagine going out to drink with Dot Fetters she could imagine even less being alone.

“All right,” she said.

“Really? You could come?”

“Sure. It will take me a minute, but I’ll be there.”

Sabine changed her shirt, which now had a bloodstain under the arm, and wrapped her hand up tightly with an Ace bandage until it looked like some sort of club with long, cold fingers wiggling out of the end. She didn’t know why she was going back, when only a few hours before she’d been so glad to be away, but this was new territory. There was no reason she should be expected to understand. She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.

The bar at the downtown Sheraton Grand was alive and well, late on a Saturday night. The lights were turned low and the televisions played without volume. A man in the corner picked at a piano but did not sing. Cocktail waitresses in blue suits and white blouses threaded through the tables, most of them were Sabine’s age or older, their heels mercifully low. When Dot Fetters saw her, she waved from a bar stool, and then, as if that had been insufficient, got up, went to Sabine, and hugged her. They had met, had parted, and had come together again, which by some code meant there could be physical contact.

“I want to buy you a drink,” she said, raising her voice a bit over the din of clinking glasses. “You tell me what you want.”

“Scotch,” Sabine said, naming Parsifal’s drink instead of her own.

Mrs. Fetters leaned over and spoke to the bartender, who laughed at whatever it was that Sabine couldn’t hear and nodded his head.

“This is all so much to take in,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Bertie was whipped, went right to sleep. You can do that when you’re young, but I knew I was going to be up all night.”

A man with dark eyes and expensively capped teeth brushed against Sabine, smiled, and asked for forgiveness. She ignored him and took up her drink.

“I didn’t even ask you how long you were planning to stay,” Sabine said.

“Day after tomorrow. Bertie has to get back to work. I work in the cafeteria where Kitty’s boys go to school, but they’re real flexible. Kitty thinks I ought to retire now that we’ve got this money, but I like seeing the boys. They’re good kids, and they’re already so big, I mean, practically grown-up. I want to be around them while I can. Her older son is Howard Junior, for his dad, but her younger boy’s named Guy. Kitty named him for her brother. Now, there’s something I bet you didn’t know.” Something caught her eye in the dim light. She was looking in Sabine’s lap. “What did you do to your hand?”

Sabine looked down at it herself. She had been trying not to think about it, but it was throbbing as if she were holding a small heart in her fist. Perhaps she’d wrapped it too tight. “I cut myself,” she said.

Mrs. Fetters reached down into Sabine’s lap and brought her hand up to the bar. “Either you don’t know anything about bandaging something up or this isn’t just a cut.” Then she took the hand as if it were something not connected to Sabine, a wallet or a comb, and held it closer to the light over the bar. “Jesus,” she said. “This thing is soaking through.” She reached into her purse and tossed some money on the bar. “Come on in the bathroom and let me have a look at it.”

“It’s fine,” Sabine said.

But Mrs. Fetters wasn’t listening, she was off the bar stool, pulling Sabine along like a woman with vast experience in flesh wounds. In the bright light of the bathroom, things didn’t look very good. She had the Ace bandage halfway off before they were down to a solid red wetness whose color matched the flowers in the wallpaper. Sabine felt suddenly dizzy, and she didn’t know if it was from the loss of blood or the sight of it.

“Do you want me to take all of this off and tell you you have to go to the hospital or do you want to save the time and just go now?”

“I’d really rather not,” Sabine said, but in her own voice she heard doubt. She was moved by the sight of so much blood. Part of the cut, she knew, was in her wrist, that delicate network of things not meant to be severed. “I hate that hospital.”

“Well, it’s a big town, there has to be more than one.” Mrs. Fetters looped the bandage back around carelessly. “Come on,” she said, leading again. “I guess it’s a good thing I called you. You probably would have bled to death in your own bed.”

Sabine stopped her at the door. “If I have to go, that doesn’t mean you have to go. I’ll be fine.”

Mrs. Fetters looked at her, puzzled. “You don’t think I’d have you going to the hospital in the middle of the night by yourself, do you? What do you think your mother would say if she ever found out?”

My mother, Sabine thought, would be too busy asking you questions about how you raised your own children.

Good Samaritan was less than a mile from the hotel. There was no need to drive all the way to Cedars Sinai. Could a person really bleed to death from sticking themselves with an X-acto knife? Probably not, but she liked the thought of it, committing suicide while she slept with no intention of doing so.

The lights of the emergency room blazed. The electric doors flung themselves open at the slightest touch. They wanted you here. They pulled you in.

Children lay flushed and dozing in their parents’ laps, a woman with her arm slung in a piece of floral sheeting stared straight ahead, a man with no shirt and a large piece of cotton padding on his chest lay on a gurney in the hall, a woman with blood-matted hair and bruises only on one side of her face sat away from the rest with a police officer. People cried, sweated, and slept. Some people sat next to suitcases and watched through the window as if they were waiting for a bus. Two old men who looked like they should be at Canter’s talked and laughed aloud at each other’s stories. Sabine went to the front. She filled out her forms, had her insurance card copied, and was not reassured that her turn would be soon. She went and sat beside Mrs. Fetters in the waiting area.