The Magician's Girl (19 page)

‘What will you do now?' ‘I don't know. I can't think about anything but getting her back. I haven't been to work in three days.' ‘What about the children?' ‘The children—well, I don't want them without her.' Minna, who hardly knew the boy and his three-year-old sister, whom they had named, to her horror, Lolita, was appalled at his indifference to the children. He seemed to sense her feeling. ‘What I mean is, nothing matters to me but her. If I can't have her, I don't want anything.' Grant went to bed early. With no practice in communication in the last years, they had nothing more they could think of to say to one another. He slept on the daybed in his old room, which was now Richard's study. Minna told Richard the news when he came home, weary but immediately concerned about Grant, the boy he had loved so intensely and watched over with such overinformed care. Every small illness had been a matter of professional concern. Every psychological latitude had been granted him for fear of repression or introversion. Every toy and record and book he had wanted had been given him on some occasion or other, sometimes even on the pretext of an occasion. Richard was proud of Grant. It had hurt him when Grant turned away from them so early to gaze at Lois Lehmann, to join the chorus of boys who followed her around. He found it hard to accept that his Grant—with the cheerful, independent, little-boy face, the red, unruly curls and the wide, innocent eyes—was among her captives. He saw nothing in Lois, except simpering sexual lure and a radiant body. He saw everything in Grant: Minna's good looks, his own curious and efficient mind, agile fingers and, he had thought, their love of good living.

Grant was asleep next morning when Richard left early for the hospital. Friday? Saturday morning, was it? It was raining that morning, that she was sure of. She had an appointment to have her hair cut at ten, so she left a note for Grant saying she'd be home at twelve and would make breakfast for him when she got back. Waiting in the rain for the bus at her corner of Central Park West, she saw Grant's motorcycle, its plastic cover weighed down with water, chained to the rail beside the delivery entrance to the apartment house. ‘My God. All the way down the Saw Mill River Parkway on
that
?' she thought. Before noon she was back at the apartment. Grant was gone. He'd written a postscript to her note: ‘Thanks for the use of the hall. Grant.' Except for that sentence there was no sign that he'd been there at all. The bed was made, he had not used the towel she had left for him in the bathroom.

Minna pulled off the highway and decided to have some coffee and something to eat. No sign that he had been there at all. Perhaps it had all been a fantasy: his coming, his story, his departure on his Harley Davidson, which, the police told them the next night, Sunday it was … Sunday, yes, was found completely wrecked—‘totaled' was their word—beside the abutment into which he had crashed head on. His cracked helmet was returned to them, the straps inside heavily coated with blood. His wallet, containing fifty dollars; his old draft card; his driver's license and a worn, browned photo of Lois when she was sixteen years old were given to Richard after the inquest. ‘Accidental death,' the certificate read. No pictures of Johnny or Lolita in the wallet, only Lois, the fatally golden girl who was his one love, the unfaithful wife of an eternally faithful lover and husband. ‘Accidental death? Oh no,' she thought. ‘No death was ever less accidental.'

Minna stretched her tired back and stiff legs, leaning against the car. She locked it carefully and went into the fast-food restaurant, the first place she came to after the exit from the turnpike. Over the door the sign said
GOURMET FAST FOOD
. She grimaced and thought she would record the lovely name in her notebook when she had had some coffee. It was five o'clock; the sun was already low. She decided she would not waste much time on this stop but push on until all the light was gone. It was Richard's belief (he always did the driving, feeling insecure, he said, with someone else at the wheel) that trips accomplished in one long push seemed shorter and less onerous. Reversing her earlier plan, she decided to test the theory. ‘Keep going,' she commanded herself. At the counter she ordered a plain doughnut and coffee. The doughnut was clearly a survivor from breakfast, sturdy, solid, tough. She dipped it into the coffee and told herself, ‘I've got to leave Grant behind. From the Pennsylvania Turnpike to this point, he's been in the car with me. I've got to put him out, along with the Beresford, The Rocks, everything that defines the old life I want to inter, to consign to the past.' She stirred her coffee dregs, in which swam the remnants of the doughnut. ‘No further! You come along with me no further,' she said to her son. She repeated the injunction to Mrs. Grant Roman, who stood beside him looking up at her husband's red hair and gentle face. To her grandchildren, who were playing somewhere nearby, she was silent, not knowing them at all well, hardly believing in their existence. They were certainly no threat to the space in the Volkswagen. Now they had become Monhegan Island children, property of a bass player and a stony-hearted girl who could not be reached in time for Grant's funeral and did not cry when she heard of his death.

‘Another cup, please,' she said to the counter girl. She was trying to prolong the time out of the car, relax from the compulsively bent driving posture. During the service for Grant, Minna had not been able to keep her mind on her dead son, who seemed absent, somehow, in both body and spirit from the chapel. She was absorbed in remembering something he had told her about funerals in South Korea. ‘Pallbearers wear cotton masks over their mouths, you know, like people in cities who have difficulty breathing the bad air. Pallbearers believe the
dead
have to be protected from contagion, not the living. It's a funny sight, those funerals, six masked men bearing a coffin in which you know an unmasked dead man lies.' Should they all have been wearing masks, she wondered, to protect poor Grant from the contagion of living?

At nine Minna stopped for the night on the outskirts of Indianapolis. She parked her car at a motel, registered and walked across the street to a place that advertised, in a neon sign,
ALL-NITE HAMBURGERS
. Too tired to eat, she picked at the meat, setting little pieces of it on top of the pickle she had cut up. She forced down the french fries, drank two cups of black coffee and walked wearily back to the motel. At her door—number 13, she noted grimly—she patted the VW that had done so well so far but had seemed, each time she climbed reluctantly back into it, to be growing smaller and less hospitable. At the end of the drive she had been so tired that the three lanes she was traveling blended into one; she found herself driving on the berm of the road. All the distinguishing marks of Indiana she had thought she might encounter melded into one repetitive landscape: low garages, barns, diners, farmhouses glaring in the brutal sun and set back from the interstate in groves of dusty cottonwood trees, rusting implements and old cars left in corners of summer-browned rough fields.

‘Indiana,' she thought. ‘And across the whole state of Ohio'—turning the key in the lock and putting up the little chain. Richard used to say the whole Middle West could be summed up in one word: ‘corn,' and if you wanted to be wordy, you might add ‘soybeans.' ‘Richard,' Minna said aloud to the mirror that hung crookedly over the Art Deco dresser, searching into it for his face. She realized he stood beside her without leaving an image in the mirror. She lay on the bed, too tired to go through the ritual of teeth, washing and undressing. She never knew whether he lay down beside her or not. She was asleep at once.

At dawn she was awake. ‘No sense lying here,' she thought. She got up stiffly, washed her face, left the door of the little box of a room ajar, climbed into the VW, all in one continuous movement because she thought if she gave consideration to these activities she would not be able to perform any one of them. She had gone some miles west on Route 74 before she became aware of Richard sitting beside her, propped up against her boxes of three- by five-inch cards, on which were written, in her careful scholar's hand, her notes for the study of the lives of five factory workers—all women—who had died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in New York City. She realized he had been sitting there since she left Indianapolis, perhaps even since she pulled out of the Manhattan garage with a false sense of total freedom.

‘Richard,' she said, looking straight ahead. ‘I'm ready to tell you what I feel. I haven't been able to before, in all the years of our marriage. We never talked of such things, of anything really except things of use. We were too busy,
doing
for ourselves, for our dinners, for Grant, for our security and our futures, for those we considered our friends, and for our elderly parents. We bought our living spaces, in suburbia and on the coast, all but this last one when we holed up without responsibilities, we told each other, in the Beresford, with Central Park for our garden, the Sheep Meadow for our lawn, the Reservoir for our lake. We decorated, we furnished, we discarded and we bought: coffee makers, and blenders, radios and phonographs as big as coffins, cars that smelled of newness and proud possession. We bought clothes. God, how we bought clothes. We packaged ourselves as attractively as our homes, for our friends' admiration, and when we were finished with our clothes we gave everything, in great gestures of generosity, to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. We traveled often. But somehow I got more pleasure from making plans and plotting projected itineraries than from the places themselves when we finally arrived. Maybe we were tired from the rigorous preparations and purchases. It was always so. The Caribbean had bad food, the south of France was hot, the Cape was crowded, the water in Maine too cold, London too expensive. But in the months of anticipation, all these places had been without flaw.'

Richard made no move to reply or to contribute, made no contradictions. Minna went on, ‘Well, I grant you, we did have fun. We walked, sunned, snorkeled, swam, floated and sailed pleasurably, played with our son and waited anxiously for him to learn to walk, acquire teeth and words, and then sentences. Do you remember reading to him endlessly, talking to him about everything in careful sentence structure because we were told what echoes young children were? But he, choosing his silences carefully, talked back very little. We worried until he managed to learn to swim, to ride a bicycle: what anxiety! We loved him and he lived with us patiently, tolerantly. Even as a boy he started to love someone else. We never had a chance at the grown man.

‘And our work. Well, we had that. We had parallel careers, which never touched at any point. I disliked your colleagues, you were bored with mine. Your profession was of importance to the world, mine much less. Still, we worked long hours, and when we stopped, played as hard. We listened avidly to chamber music, we read new novels and went to the opera and the ballet (walking down Columbus Avenue to City Center from the Beresford and back again) without having to be part of the taxi battle. We barbecued meat on the spit in one kitchen and before that in our Vineyard garden and made elaborate drinks in the blender. Everything we did, you cutting and suturing, I correcting and lecturing, had the same hard, driving conviction behind it. I cleaned when the maid didn't come, we cooked on her night out, we marketed, as my mother used to call it, and cooked for our friends to display our skill, and they marveled at the results. We gave them our recipes with secret pride. (Grant, of course, resisted our culinary accomplishments. He ate only foods he could cover with catsup.) We paid our debts and our charges and our taxes, and when your early-April temper grew too hot we hired someone to figure them for us. Once more childless when Grant went off to Brown, we settled into the grassless, elevated apartment, with no attic and no cellar to leak, with flower beds and herbs restricted to boxes outside the windows and a motorized lift in place of staircases, flagstone walks and mowed pathways.

‘We passed through childbirth, moves, promotions, mumps and roseola, women's monthly plague, drink, too much of it, hiatal hernias and hemorrhoids, wandering desires, sleepless nights, periodontists and psychiatrists, laundry crises (a black sock washed with all the white shirts), athlete's foot, psoriasis and poison ivy, checks that bounced and small gains in the stock market, flus and bronchial phlegms, mosquito bites, yes, and squirrel bites, but no, that was mine and a very long time ago. Baldness afflicted you; my body hair grew sparse after menopause, my temper short; your impatience with fools, nurses and women in general grew noticeable, especially after you passed your fiftieth birthday.

‘But look: we have outgrown our guilts, about our parents, about each other. About Grant: I don't know. Are we responsible? Did some lack in us force him to compensate with a mean girl? We are here, having come through depressions, the Jazz Age, the Crash, wars and the death of Grant. He is gone, a nonachiever from the very start of his life, saved from a war only to succumb to a feminine twist of the knife in the heart. I've outlived my now-famous classmate who surrendered too early, who attained fame with her poetry and by gas. I tell all the people who want to interview me about her that I never knew her well, which surely is true. I understand her better now because I've outlived her, but I had no part in her interior life, for which I feel some guilt. You've outlived your alcohol-sodden college roommate who spent part of every year at a “health farm” drying out. We've got past all the pains and breaks and illicit pleasures.'

At Danville, just over the state line into Illinois, Minna decided to have some coffee and food. The terrible, inexorable demands of Route 74 had set up a percussion behind her eyes. She began to see puddles in the center of the road. She began to wonder if some of the trucks that passed her wanted her VW off the road, whether the low farms, which seemed entirely without people, had been decimated by a bomb just before she passed them. For twenty miles she had not seen a soul on either side of the road. Her imaginings and her paranoia about the trucks grew. ‘I'd better stop, for sure,' she thought, and took the next exit into Danville.