The Magician's Girl (24 page)

‘I have been distracted from writing that your youth is not unnatural to me. I envy your finding love, a boy with the fine, poetic name. I hope all your evident pleasure goes on for a long time, a very long time. Forever, I almost wrote, but of course, not forever. The odds are never very good for an enduring relationship of any sort, let alone this one. Enjoy it while you can. How great it must be to have something so good now that you might have expected only at the start. Relish your illusion of being young. I used to have a dream, a queer one, that I found myself growing younger by the moment. I could see the changes in my face, my body. The spots and wrinkles left my hands, like a film running backward. But I always woke up before the regression stopped. I never have that dream now. Reality has invaded even my sleep.

‘Some small personal news: I have a new exhibit at the House of Photography in Manhattan. Hilton Kramer, who is now very taken with photography, was complimentary in the
Times
. A few other reviews were effusive and so, naturally, gratifying. All the signed prints were sold the first evening, which augurs well for the book Aperture will publish next spring. So it goes, in that department of my life.

‘The sad news is that in July Helene returned to Kings County Hospital to be told she had a recurrence of her cancer. We thought she was safe, had beaten the odds, but then, who ever beats mortality? Her second breast was removed, but there was evidence that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. She stood the second operation well, considering that she is almost seventy and radical surgery is not simple at her age. In a few weeks she was back home. Since then we have had four extraordinary months together. With the heavy sense of fatality hanging over us, we were able to renew physical and psychic ties I thought had been worn out in the more than thirty-eight years we have lived and loved together. She jokes about her new, flat-chested physique, saying she is now the boy she had always felt she would like to be. The scars are dreadful, but I forget them when I lie close to her, luxuriating in her brave and humorous person.

‘The prognosis is poor, we both know that, even the time we have is in deep shadow. So we are now living a kind of crammed, charged, encapsulated life with each other. We feel suspended in time and space, we are re-creating an unnatural youth, as you say. And as with youth, we know it will pass quickly. Quality of time and love has been offered us, not quantity.

‘Thank you for the postcard. I had not seen the giantess photograph. I love it, especially the rapacious hooded vulture look in her eyes, as if she were about to consume all the lesser, shorter mortals around her.… Write when you can, and remember us in your prayers, if you have some good ones. I have none, but every now and then I shut my eyes and ask the powers that be to be kind to Helene. Beyond that, I don't know much to ask for. Love, Liz'

Every Sunday morning Richard telephoned Minna. ‘How are you?' ‘Fine,' she said. ‘How are you?' ‘Oh, very good. I miss you. How's the new car doing?' ‘Very well. It's a great car, but it's cold here now so the top has to be up all the time. Even with it up, the canvas doesn't keep out the cold.' There was a long silence, and then Richard asked, ‘What do you think of that supersonic plane that went from New York to Paris in three hours, and goes regularly?' ‘Amazing.' ‘We ought to plan a vacation to France on it, maybe over New Year's. What do you think?' Minna was silent. ‘I may not be back by then.' ‘What? Why not? When does the semester end?' ‘Before Christmas, but there's other things, the research I am in the middle of.…' Richard said nothing. Then he said, ‘It's a season of disasters, isn't it, first the flood in India that now is said to have killed thousands, and then the earthquake in Iran. Twenty-five thousand died, the
Times
says.' ‘Yes, we get the
Times
here every afternoon. Even out here.' ‘Oh, of course.' ‘Have you seen
The Deer Hunter
yet?' Minna asked. ‘No. Why? Is it good?' ‘Not very, but it made me think of Grant. I could hardly sit through it.' ‘I avoid war movies,' said Richard in a dry voice. ‘Well, when can I expect you home?' ‘I don't know, Richard.' ‘
Are
you coming back, Minna? Is that what you're trying to tell me? ‘I just don't know.' ‘I see. Well, good-bye. Do you want me to call you next Sunday?' ‘If you wish. Good-bye.' ‘Good-bye,' he said, and hung up.

Minna dressed for her luncheon appointment with a new acquaintance, the painter Lester Dickens, whom she had met the week before at a dinner party. Her closet was filled with proper skirts, blouses and dresses. These she pushed aside to reach the twice-washed blue jeans that hung at the back. She kicked against the bottle of gin on the floor, sending it farther back against her row of shoes. ‘Good shot,' she said to herself. Hanging over the blue jeans was a heavy wool turtleneck sweater. She put it and the jeans on, and pulled on her leather boots, which laced up the sides. Her Eskimo jacket with its warm fur hood was hard to maneuver over the sweater but she managed it. With scarf and fur mittens she felt like some small child being sent out into the snow bundled up so tightly she could barely move. ‘All I need is clips to hold my mittens on to my sleeves,' she thought. When she was ready to leave she reviewed herself in the bathroom floor-length mirror. She saw, as if by X ray, her twenty-year-old self, slender and delicate-looking within the layers of clothing, straight and vigorous. There was no extra flesh, she imagined, her arms and legs had their old languorous curves, the skin on her face was devoid of the marks of age or weather, her eyes were very bright. She smiled at her image: her mouth still curved tenderly, in the old way. What she saw, she understood, was what she remembered, what she believed existed under the heavy winter clothing, what Lowell had persuaded her he saw. Only her hair. She smiled at herself and looked closely, understanding why his vision failed him. Strands of her hair escaped the hood. It was not Lowell's night-blinded, love-besotted light blond, but white. ‘
Sein und Schlein
,' she told herself, and went out, slamming the door behind her.

Lester Dickens ordered a large pizza and two beers for them. Angelo's was a favorite eating place for students and rushed teachers. It offered three choices of food, but pizza was its specialty. Lester, a heavyset fellow with a protruding belly and a cheerful, homey, uncomplicated face, had intrigued Minna at dinner one evening with his talk about circuses. He in turn had silently admired her sparkle, her luminous, interested blue eyes, her slender liveliness ‘at her age,' as he put it to his daughter when he got home. ‘She must be sixty or so. Yet she has the grace and movements of a young woman. Something uncommon about that. Even odd.' His daughter had looked puzzled and unconvinced.

Minna looked at her watch. ‘I thought this was to be an instant pizza.' ‘Nothing is that fast at lunchtime in Iowa City. Do you have a class or something?' ‘No, but I want to get to the pool for my daily workout. I overslept this morning.' Lester watched Minna doodling on her napkin with a ballpoint pen. Her drawing was unusually regular, he thought, and in perspective. She was covering the rectangular paper with steps, the treads colored in, the risers carefully striated up and down. While she doodled, she asked him to tell her about his circus paintings. ‘I've been mad for circuses all my life, boy and man, and now in middle age, my passion for them is even greater. I go whenever there is one within three hundred miles. My preference is for the small traveling circuses with sideshows. By now I know many of the performers, animals, the wonders and oddities. I've painted many of them, the half-man/half-woman, a sword-swallower, a snake charmer, a contortionist.' ‘I've seen those paintings at the museum. Strange, isn't it, how we feel such sympathy for what a friend of mine calls “singular people?”' ‘I often think about that. A bear by itself is not interesting to me, but a performing bear, centered in a spotlight, all four feet planted on a small ball, muzzle pointed into the air, incredibly poised:
that
is something. It's as if his presence were raised to a special height. He is reaching beyond his animal self, to the act.' ‘Yes, I like that. It's the same, I suppose, with the eccentrics of the world. We, the onlookers, the painters, and photographers, are commonplace and ordinary. The fat lady, the midget, the giant, they are the exceptional departures. We are cold and contained, they are full of the passion of their differences, on proud display. They give it away in their acts, too.' Lester said there was something in that. ‘Everything in the circus is stretched and charged. Nothing is real. Normal life is scorned, really, at every turn. The lights, the round formation of every act, the tinny music and drums, the clowns making fun of the acts, of themselves. For me there is a heightened sense of idyllic, innocent life. I love it. I'm never bored when the acts are poor, only full of sympathy. I breathe faster, my heart beats hard. And later, when I am in my studio painting the sounds, the lights, the people and animals, I feel the same way.'

Minna said, ‘When I was in college I used to go with a friend to a place in New York, a Forty-second Street basement under a penny arcade. Hubert's, it was called. Downstairs there were sideshow freaks. I thought they were wonderful, monarchs in a kingdom of one—proud, aloof people who would never talk to us, or even look at us. They allowed my friend to photograph them because it was proper, fitting, for the special people they were, to have a photograph taken. They must have led bleak lives, but there was a kind of childlike cheerfulness about all of them.'

The pizza and beers arrived. They began to eat quickly. Lester said, between bites, ‘You seem to like Iowa City. You look wonderful in those student clothes. Are you as happy as you look?' ‘Yes, I'm foolishly happy, in a way I can't believe. Like an adolescent girl.' And then, as she wiped her fingers and finished her beer, she said, surprising herself as she spoke, ‘I'm in love. Isn't that absurd?' ‘
Well
,' said Lester, offering her another napkin from the container on the table, and taking a handful himself. ‘That's something. I haven't fallen in love since I was almost thirty and met my wife-to-be in art school. How did you manage to do that?' Minna, confounded by what she had revealed, laughed and said, ‘It's an illusion, I'm sure. Like the girl who is sawed in two by a magician onstage. Nothing more. Self-delusion and audience deception. Forget I said that, will you, please?' ‘Okay. But how I envy you. Even if it is an illusion. Some valuable things are invented by belief. I haven't even had the illusion I was in love for so long. You look at if you—felt fine about it.' ‘I do. But that's all there is to it.' ‘Yes, I'll remember.' They figured their checks, gathered up their belongings. From the pile of soiled napkins, Lester pulled one out. ‘Is this your usual doodle?' he asked. Minna looked at it. ‘Yes, I guess so. I always draw stairs. It's about all I know how to do.' ‘Do you start from the bottom and draw up, or from the top?' ‘I start from the top. What does that mean?' ‘No idea,' said Lester. He took the checks and their money and pushed Minna through the line of waiting students. ‘I enjoyed that,' he said as they stood on College Avenue, buttoning their jackets. Minna wound her scarf around her neck, and agreed. ‘We'll do it again,' he said. ‘Indeed we will. And, Lester, add me to your list of interesting freaks.' ‘I will. I'll put you in a painting if you like.' They both laughed, at nothing in particular, and went their separate ways on the street.

In the middle of December the weather turned hostile. Wind from the river tore through the wide streets. Snow fell sporadically, freezing like treacherous piecrust along the edges of the streets. At once, new, clean snow fell to cover it. Ice frosted the top of the snow. Minna had not moved Maud since the night she had left it in the parking lot across from the Joint. She worried about denting the shining new fenders or being collided with on the hazardous streets. Lowell suggested he meet her wherever she was in the evening and drive her home. He knew she was afraid of the ice on the streets. Minna had never known such cold, such unremitting snow and ice. With very little warning, the kitten had turned tiger. The gentle, humane landscape of southern Iowa had become threatening, frightening, untamed and wild. Minna's every move, day or evening, was ruled by the weather.

One Friday evening, under cover of the early dark and cloud-burdened black skies, Minna and Lowell went on foot through heavy snow to the Hamburg Inn. At the door of Schaeffer Hall she had taken his arm. He responded to her concern about the footing by holding her hand firmly in his. Because of the bad weather, the popular place was almost empty. They found a booth, shed their layers of jackets and sweaters and ordered chicken, biscuits and gravy, ‘the house specialty,' Lowell advised her. In the booth he found a dog-eared copy of Friday's
Des Moines Register
. While they waited for their food, Lowell read the funnies to her. He was good at accents and dialects. Minna laughed at and with him. He was a boy, she thought, with a boy's fondness for
Peanuts
and
Pogo
. When he had fully explored the page for his favorite strips and their political and social implications, which he explained to Minna, he moved on to the sports page. He lectured to her on the scores of last Sunday's professional games and Saturday's college football, especially the excellence of the Iowa Hawkeyes, to whom he was devoted. With his usual humor he commented on quarterbacks' skill or lack of it and the proficiency of the ‘wide receivers' and the ‘tight ends.' These were terms Minna had never heard before. To her mind, emptied of everything these days but the enormous love for him that flooded it, the unfamiliar vocabulary of the funnies and football rang with the music of lyric poetry. Her standards of intellectual conversation, raised and strengthened in her years as an academic wife of a doctor, relaxed and sank contentedly into Lowell's preferred areas of thought. During the weeks she had known him, she found herself directing her attention down instead of the usual straining upward. This lack of intellectual effort, the wit with which he infused all his popular interests, made her feel, for the first time in her adult life, easy and comfortable. She was Lowell's peer, no more. She enjoyed every moment of his smiling dissertation on the merits of the Green Bay Packers, his favorite team. Especially did she enjoy his smile.