The Illusionist (9 page)

And that night, for the first time since I had known him, he didn't make love to me.

I couldn't sleep. I lay next to him, listening for his breathing. And he seemed to fall asleep without difficulty, as if he didn't need me. But it was hours and hours before sleep came to me.

*  *  *

Then, the next night, he made love to me again, as if nothing had happened, as if all his anger had disappeared. We had finished making love, and though I was satisfied, I felt only half complete,
that there was this whole other realm of pleasure—
his
pleasure—to be explored. I whispered, “What about
you?
” These were things we talked about only in darkness.

“Doesn't matter,” he whispered, smoothing the hair back from my forehead. Then he kissed it. “What counts is seeing you happy.”

December 10. We are a little family! Bobby has a daddy now. We've got our little routine down. It is real winter now. The pipe in the bathroom froze in the night and we had to go to Dad's house. My dad likes Dean, maybe he doesn't see so well, Dean is just one of my friends to him. It's funny how the brain gets dull with age to protect people, and everything is concentrated on your own survival. There was not much damage to house from the water. Mr. Jukowsky put in a new pipe section I feel like we got the asthma under control because of the mask at home. Dean lost his job. Now I have to support three of us but that doesn't matter because we are all together now.

Saturday mornings, I'd see Dean and Terry and the boy shopping at Food Mart. Or on Washington Street on one of those bright winter Saturday mornings when the sun is shining and there is a surge of happiness in town and everyone is released at last from their overheated homes where they've been fighting with each other and the kids have been driving them crazy with cabin fever and they come out joyously into the sunny winter morning.

Some stores on Washington Street were boarded up, but people still came downtown on Saturday mornings. As if they were trying to recover something that had been lost, the sense of a real town, a vital community.

Dean would glance up and spot me and give me that secret smile. He would help Terry with the boy. Reach inside the truck for the child, carry him like he was his own. Really loved that kid, it seemed.

I'd see them go in the balloon shop on Washington Street, then they'd stop in at Uncle Dom's Pizza.

Terry had a grave way of walking, she was taller than Dean by about an inch. Terry was so serious, and you could see the weariness on her face sometimes. Always focused on her boy, worried about her boy. She'd held herself together after her boyfriend, Eddie Lasko, the father of her kid, took off and left her stranded with the kid. She'd gotten herself a job and raised the boy
basically by herself, with a little help from her dad, and her dad was sick too.

They were a weird trio—Dean and Terry and Bobby. But not any weirder than the deadbeats who hung out in downtown Sparta. The young women without teeth, the retarded people. The obese people with their pale bodies. People leaning out of their windows over the street, shouting at one another across the way, fighting. Women worked up on drugs, with their tottering, swaying gait and their arms flaying out, hookers stumbling on high heels. All those people left behind in Sparta because they couldn't get jobs elsewhere. People with something wrong with them. Mutationally speaking. Genetically speaking. The people who lived off the dirt roads in the countryside, in worn-out farmhouses and trailers under strange circumstances, trailers you weren't even sure were inhabited when you drove by them, because there wasn't even a car parked outside and the windows were shuttered. But then, if you looked closely, you could see a thin column of smoke rising from the metal vent on the roof, and you'd know that someone must be home.

So what did people know about Dean? Did they guess? One moment, you were looking at a boy. The next, you shifted the angle of your sight just a little and—and lo and behold—he was a girl! And you were left squinting and wondering. But maybe people just didn't want to know the actual truth. It was more fun that way anyhow. Dean was like going to the movies. He was entertainment. Watching him was something to do, he was someone to look at and smile about if you saw him on the street, or at night when you were drinking at the Wooden Nickel.

If you were an old person, and sitting there in the window of your house day after day looking out onto the street, you'd see Dean strutting down the sidewalk, handsome and cocky, in his cowboy hat and boots with their thick heels. He'd catch you staring at him and he'd grin and he wouldn't let go of your eyes, he'd force you to look at him, and you'd just keep staring and staring, in spite of yourself.

At work, Terry was private about Dean. Terry knew I was Dean's friend, but she tried never to mention him. If I brought him up, she'd respond as briefly as she could. Maybe it was the overwhelmingness of her love for him. Sometimes I'd talk about Dean deliberately, just to see Terry look uncomfortable. And because it gave me power over her. As if to say, “You better be nice to me, girl, because I'm his
original
friend, I introduced you.” I liked having power over Terry. It would be harder, I thought, for Terry to discipline me now if I were late or something, because I was his original friend.

One night, Dean brought the boy to the Wooden Nickel. Terry was working nights that week to get the differential because she was supporting them both now that Dean had lost his job at the Laundercenter. Dean must've gotten bored being home alone with the child. It was eleven o'clock when he came in with Bobby. You weren't supposed to have kids in the bar really, but Carl didn't say anything. I saw Dean carrying Bobby along the bar, showing him all Carl's crazy clocks and objects, the deer head with the tinsel hanging from its nose.

Then Dean started dancing with him to the noise of the jukebox, holding both his little hands in his.

The boy was getting overexcited, his eyes were too bright and wet, his cheeks flushed. He looked up into Dean's eyes and Dean made faces back to him and stuck his tongue out and wiggled it at him. Then he sat the boy down on his lap at the bar, and they watched the TV news together, the boy leaning back against Dean like he trusted him completely, was comfortable with him, like Dean was his family. Dean was showing him off, like this was his real, biological son.

People walked over to them, touched Bobby's hand, as if they'd never seen a kid before. “Hey fella, how ya doing, little guy?” The kid was special because he was small for his age, and yet he was intelligent and alert like an older child. He had long fine dark wavy hair, dark eyes, long eyelashes. The discrepancy
between his small size and his mental capacities intrigued people. Someone offered him a sip of beer, and he took it, then made a terrible face and spat it all out and it made everybody around him laugh. It was as if he were a pet monkey or something, a little performer, a conversation starter. He had replaced Dean's magic tricks as the attention-getter.

I was sitting at the end of the bar reading my book that night. “Terry know you got Bobby here?” I asked Dean. “It's late.”

“She knows,” Dean said. He jiggled the boy on his knee, looked at him. “He loves me, don'tcha, guy?” he said.

Bobby giggled, slid off Dean's lap, scampered into the other room in his little denim overalls and his red sneakers, his curls bouncing.

“Hey you!” Dean cried. “Come back here to Daddy!”

So, Bobby was calling Dean Daddy now.

In the middle of the room, the child stopped and turned. He spotted Dean watching him and his face lit up. Back he ran—too fast, he was going to trip. “Daddy!” he shrieked. “Daddy!” And then, right in the middle of the room, he did trip, and he fell right down on the floor.

Next thing, he was crying hard. His voice rose to a wail. The sound of a child weeping was incongruous in the bar, drowning out the noise from the TV and the jukebox. Everyone had stopped what they were doing and were staring at Dean and Bobby now.

Dean lurched off the bar stool, ran to Bobby, picked him up, and held him. The boy was sobbing like his heart was broken now, his little chest heaving, rubbing his eyes with his fists.

Dean pulled the boy's snowsuit on, trying to soothe him, and hustled him out the door of the bar. As the door slammed behind them, you could still hear Bobby wailing from out in the parking lot.

The first snow came, falling silently and steadily on Washington Street, fresh and pure, announcing itself with a purpose. All day long, it kept on coming. Like a baptism. Below my apartment window, kids ran outside to play, shrieking, opening their mouths to the sky to swallow the flakes, sliding down the sidewalk on toboggans.

Throughout the day, the snow built up on the sidewalk. It swirled across the street, drifted up the steps of buildings, blocking front doors in windswept motions.

As evening came, the children came inside for dinner, and outside my window, the quiet deepened, the only sounds now were the scraping of metal shovels on the sidewalk. Nothing moved. There were no cars. The snowplow hadn't come through yet. There were lights in the windows of the building across the way, but the street itself was empty.

I put Mariah Carey on the tape deck.

There was a knock on my door. The buzzer downstairs was broken. “Who's there?”

“Me,” he said through the door. He didn't even have to say his name. He expected that everyone would recognize his voice, that he was at the center of everyone's thoughts even when he was absent.

I opened my front door and he stood there, snow melting on
the brim of his cowboy hat and the shoulders of his jacket. His cheeks were bright red from the cold, his green eyes shining, his gleaming teeth resting on his full red lip. “Mind if I come in?”

But he already knew the answer, and he stepped right across my threshold.

“What're you doing here?” I asked.

“Nothing. Haven't seen you in a while.” He threw his jacket and his hat on the floor, and the snow from them melted on the floorboards in little puddles.

He sat down on the futon and pulled off his cowboy boots, his big socks steaming in the air.

Then he stood up, walked over to the refrigerator, opened it as if this was his own house. He took out a can of Mountain Dew, and in one quick gesture popped the tab up with his thumb. I could never do that, but Dean had all those cool guy gestures down. Better than any guy.

“Got anything sweet?” he asked.

“Nope. Your teeth are gonna fall out from all that sugar.”

“My teeth are fine,” he said, baring them to show me. His teeth were big and white.

It was very warm in the apartment. The old boiler downstairs overheated us sometimes.

“What's up?” he asked. Sometimes he just made me laugh. Just looking at him, he was like a little juvenile delinquent, mischievous and seductive.

“Fine,” I said. “I'm doing homework.”

“What homework?”

“English. I'm reading this.” I showed him
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Dean would never read a book. All that seemed to matter to Dean was sensation—drinking and sex and any other pleasure.

“How's Terry?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“And the boy?”

“Cute.”

“So where's Terry at?”

“Working double shift. B.J.'s out sick.”

“Where's Bobby at?”

“I left him at her dad's. I needed a night off from baby-sitting.”

He moved about the room, the can of Mountain Dew in his hand. His jeans were drawn tight at the waist with his belt, the pants legs loose over his skinny legs.

On the floor by the phone lay my address book. He bent down, picked it up, then sat down on the futon next to me and began paging through it.

“What're you looking at?”

“Names.”

“Names of what?”

He reached into his jeans pocket, took out his weed. He rolled a blunt, lit up, and dragged on it, offering it to me. I took it from him and sucked.

He said, “Show me who's in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to meet someone.”

“What about Terry?”

“Just looking,” he said, and smiled.

Terry had power over me, she made me toe the line. Terry was my supervisor. I felt guilty.

I said, “I thought you were with Terry.”

“I just want to see what else is around.”

I snatched the address book from him, feeling a sudden guilt about Terry, slammed it shut. But then suddenly . . . I liked the idea of going around Terry.

I opened the address book again. “Let's see,” I said, studying it. “Shannon Attwood.”

“She pretty?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me.”

“She's got black hair . . .”

“Don't like black hair.” He laughed. “Tell me who's the prettiest of them all—all your girlfriends. Go through the book and tell me. Describe them—each one.”

I came to the B's. “Cindy Betts.” For a moment, I imagined him making love to Cindy Betts. Then I stopped the thought.

“What's she like?” he asked.

“Pretty. Blond hair—”

“How does she wear it?”

I tried to picture it. “Shortish, I think.”

“I like it long.” I realized that his remark cut
me
out—he didn't even realize what he was saying. I, Chrissie, wasn't even in the picture for him because I had short hair.

Dean had never come on to me. I guess I would've been surprised if he had. Always the friend, I thought. I was an insider, almost invisible. But I let it happen that way. Maybe even encouraged it.

I kept on going. “Long hair,” I said. “Ummm . . .” I paged through the book. He must like the long hair because it was a challenge. Someone truly feminine he could deceive. “You're so bad!” I said. He laughed again. I came to the S's. “Here's one,” I said.