The Magician's Assistant (11 page)

Sabine looks behind her. Nothing could hide in this field. “Is Parsifal here?”

Phan reaches up, rubs her neck in the exact place it has been bothering her. “Not this time. He’s back in L.A. He stays very close to you. It’s just that he’s so—well, so embarrassed about all of this.”

“But he shouldn’t be. My God, with all that happened to him.”

“Ah,” Phan says, “things happened to you, to me. He shouldn’t have kept this to himself. I understand, but still, he should have thought it through.”

“You may be underestimating things,” Sabine says, but her voice is kind. It is very important not to frighten Phan off, never to hurt him. For one thing, she has no idea how she would get home from Vietnam.

Phan smiles at her. “Death gives a person a lot of perspective.”

“Well then, Parsifal should know that he can talk to me, that he should come to see me.”

“He will,” Phan says, “he’s getting there.”

Sabine reaches down and brushes the top of the rice with the flat of her palm. The bottom of her nightgown is soaked and it clings to her legs. “But now you want to talk to me about his mother.”

“It comes back to perspective,” Phan says, “the larger picture. There is a woman with, a good heart. A woman who maybe didn’t make all the right choices, a woman who’s told a few lies, but really, when did any of us get everything right?”

“But if Parsifal didn’t want to have anything to do with her, why should I? I like her fine, I do, but when I think about all of it...” She can hardly make herself think about it. Parsifal not in heaven, not in Vietnam, but in hell.

“In his life Parsifal, like his mother, probably did the best he could. But in his death he wants better. He looks back and sees where there could have been reconciliation, forgiveness. These are the things you think about. But what can he do?” Phan looks away, as if he is looking for Parsifal to walk up out of the field, and Sabine looks, too. “What he can do, Sabine, is ask you to do that for him, and even though he wants it, he can’t ask because he knows it’s too much. So what does he do? He asks me to ask. That is the way we are joined, you and me: We don’t know how to turn Parsifal down. His heart is perfect. It isn’t that he wants to take advantage of either of us, but what he wants to do he can’t, because he’s dead.” Phan stops and looks at her closely to make sure she’s following everything he’s saying. “That leaves you.”

“It’s all right,” Sabine says. “So I take them out. So I forgive her. She says she doesn’t need my forgiveness, but I know she does. If that’s what Parsifal wants, forgiveness and a day’s tour of Los Angeles, I can do that. Tell him I can do that.”

Phan puts two fingers to his lips, and then, as if he remembers he no longer has a need to bite his nails, drops his hand. “That’s good,” he says. “And if—if something else was needed, something you felt you could do, you’d do that, too, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re not giving me much information here.”

“I don’t know the future. I have my suspicions, but who can really say for sure? All I care about now is that we understand each other. You know what Parsifal wants—forgiveness, support. And if it took a little more time to achieve this...”

Sabine waits, but he never finishes his sentence. “Of course,” she says.

Phan hugs her again. “He does believe there will be a benefit in all of this to you, and so do I.” She can hear the relief in his voice. “We worry about you. You spend too much time alone. Too much time on grief.”

“It’s only been two weeks,” she says.

“Still,” Phan says. He looks at the bandage on her hand, touches the white tape around the stitches. “I was sorry about this. I saw that knife go straight into your hand. Did it hurt much?”

Sabine thinks about it, but it all seems so far away. “I can’t remember,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Phan says, and he kisses the bandage over her hand. “That’s what we like to hear.”

Sabine slept late. Despite the sun in the room and the rabbit nudging at her, wanting food, she did not wake up until after nine. When she did wake up, she felt better about everything. What else was she going to do today, anyway? Work on a shopping mall? Go through the dresser drawers again? Sleep? Why not call Dot and Bertie? All she knew for sure was that the story was complicated, it happened a long time ago, and she was only getting part of it. Parsifal had taken care of them in the will, he had been helping them for years. Wasn’t that a sign, a kind of forgiveness? Besides, whatever it was, it was one day. Tomorrow they would be going back to Nebraska.

The phone hadn’t made it through one whole ring when Bertie answered. “Hello,” she whispered, her voice low and suspicious.

Sabine had almost forgotten about Bertie, who had slept peacefully through all the revelations of the night. “Bertie, it’s Sabine.”

“Sabine?” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Your mother and I talked last night about going out today. I could drive you around, show you some places that Parsifal liked.”

“Mom’s not up yet,” she whispered. “It isn’t like her, but the room is so dark, and the time change and all. Maybe it just threw her off.”

It was an hour later in Nebraska. “We were up pretty late,” Sabine said. She found that she was whispering back and stopped it. “After you went to bed, we got together and talked. Have you been out yet? You’re not just sitting there in the dark, are you?”

“I don’t want to wake her,” Bertie said.

Sabine thought about how often she had sat in a dark hotel room, waiting for Parsifal to wake up. All the endless places she had sat, waiting. It must be a family trait. Half of them sleep, half of them wait. “Put your mother on the phone.”

“She’s sleeping.”

“Well, she told me to call her in the morning and wake her up so we could go. I’m just doing what I said I’d do.” Enough of waiting for Fetters to wake up.

“Um,” said Bertie. The line was quiet for a minute, as if she were really thinking it through. “Okay,” she said finally, “hold on.” She put the phone down softly. Sabine could hear her cross the short distance between the two hotel beds. “Mom?” she said, her voice still a whisper. “Mama, wake up. It’s Sabine. She says we’re going out today.” There was a pause, most likely for a touch to the shoulder and then a gentle shake.

Sabine wondered how much longer Mrs. Fetters had stayed on in the bar. Last call had only been minutes away, but clearly that bartender liked her. Maybe she should have let her sleep.

“Mama?”

“Hum?”

“Sabine’s on the phone.”

“Sabine?”

“She’s taking us someplace, she says. She wants to talk to you.”

There was rustling, the click of the light switch. Sabine could almost feel Dot’s bones shift as she stretched. “Hello,” Mrs. Fetters said. It was the voice of a late sleeper, someone who would not be awake for at least an hour after they were up and dressed.

“It’s Sabine. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“You didn’t wake me,” Mrs. Fetters said.

Just like Parsifal, who slept more than anyone in the world and always lied about being asleep. “I just wanted to tell you, yes, I’d be happy to take you and Bertie around today if you’re still interested.” It was easier now. They had found something out about each other. They knew, to some small extent, what they were dealing with.

“How’s your hand feel?”

Sabine looked down at her hand and was half surprised to see it taped up. She had forgotten about it until the question was asked. “It’s fine,” she said. She lifted it, turned it side to side. “It feels much better.”

Even under these difficult circumstances, Sabine was glad to show off her city. Los Angeles, she felt, was maligned because it was misunderstood. It was the beautiful girl you resented, the one who was born with straight teeth and good skin. The one with the natural social graces and family money who surprised you by dancing the Argentine tango at a wedding. While Iowa struggled through the bitter knife of winter and New York folded in crime and the South remained backwards and divided, Los Angeles pushed her slender feet into the sand along the Pacific and took in the sun. The rest of the country put out the trash on Wednesday nights and made small, regular payments against a washing machine and waited through the long night for the Land of Milk and Honey to get hers. And, oh, how America loved it when it happened. They called in sick to work and kept their children home from school so they could watch it together on television as a family, the fate of a city too blessed. The fires shot through the canyons, the floods washed the supports out from beneath the houses that lined the hills over the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. There were earthquakes. There were riots. America leaned over: “Dangerous,” they whispered to their children. “I always told you that.” It was true, in the orderly city the boys packed together and murdered one another and then themselves in brutal festivals. There were places you could no longer go at night and then places you could not go during the day. The city kept its head down. Everyone would say,
It is not the same.

But Sabine never thought in terms of having allegiance to her country. She loved Los Angeles. Sabine would always choose to stay. She had lived through every tragedy and shame and they only served to draw her and her city closer together. What would she be without the palm trees, without the Hollywood Hills? She had been born in Israel, but she was shaped by tight squares of regularly watered lawns, by layers of deep purple bougainvillea blooming on top of garages. She heard languages she could not identify and they were music. She smelled the ocean. She loved to drive. After she and Parsifal finished a show, they would almost always drive the long way home, up and over Mulholland, to watch the lights in the canyon. “Try getting that in North Dakota,” he would say to her. They lived in the magnificence of a well-watered desert where things that could not possibly exist, thrived. They lived on the edge of a country that would not have cared for them anyway, and they were loved. They were home. Do not speak badly of Los Angeles to Parsifal and Sabine.

Dot and Bertie Fetters, rested, washed, fed, and dressed, were back in Phan’s car. They were ready. They gave no hint that they had thought all along that Sabine would come through. They never said she owed them a ride in Los Angeles. On the contrary, they were overwhelmed. They trembled with gratitude that she should give them such a gift.

“Really,” Bertie said from the backseat. “This is so nice of you.” The top section of her hair, whose curls today appeared more gold than brown, was pulled away from her face in a mock-tortoise barrette. It was a pretty face, though it took some getting used to. The spikes of her eyelashes had left tiny black dots of mascara beneath her eyebrows. Of all the different styles represented in Los Angeles, the Midwestern look was rarely seen.

Mrs. Fetters, either not fully awake or just slightly hung-over, kept touching Sabine’s arm as a way of expressing her thanks.

Sabine had not forgotten what had been said the night before. She kept the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility close to her heart. But this morning she felt unable to pin it on the small woman who sat beside her in the car. All that had stayed with her from the conversation was the sadness. The blame, somehow, had gone. “So is there anything in particular you want to see? Any place we should go first? We can go to the studios, the tar pits, the ocean.”

“Where did Guy work?” Bertie asked, leaning over the seat. “Is there one main place magicians work or do they go from place to place all the time?”

“He was only a part-time magician,” Sabine said. “We never made our living at it.” She thought she saw a look of disappointment cross Dot Fetters’ face, as if her son were a failed magician. “Nobody makes a living at it, maybe a few dozen people in the country. It’s a terrible life, really, you have to travel all the time. Parsifal had two rug stores. That was his job.”

“A rug salesman?” Dot Fetters asked.

“He worked in an antique store when I first met him, then he got into fine rugs. The stores are very successful. He had a wonderful eye.”

“I thought you had awfully nice rugs in your house,” Bertie said, happy to have put something together.

“Then we’ll go to the rug store first,” Mrs. Fetters said. “And if there’s someplace he did magic, then we’d like to go there, too. And back to the cemetery. But we don’t have to go every place. I don’t want to be taking advantage of you here.”

Sabine told them no one was taking advantage.

Sabine hadn’t been to the stores in a long time. When Phan was sick and after he died, she went often, ferrying papers that needed signatures and couldn’t be faxed. Parsifal would ask her to go and look, at the color and the weave on something that had just come in. Again and again she said she knew nothing about rugs. “You have eyes,” he would say. “You have good taste. I want you to tell me if you like them. I want to know if they’re pretty.”

They were pretty, always pretty, because Parsifal knew his business even when he couldn’t go to the store. And in truth, over time, Sabine had picked up some things through constant exposure. She never had Parsifal’s talent, but she had been with him on how many buying trips? She had been to Turkey. She had sifted through piles of prayer rugs in Ghiordes and Kula, stood in the sun until her sweat had made mud out of the dust on her legs. Maybe she had missed some subtle values, some rugs that were fine although possibly drab, but the great rugs she could always spot. She could read the patterns, knew at a glance a Melas from a Konya, a Ladik from a Sivas. She loved the Ladik. Parsifal said Sabine was invaluable because she had classic American tastes. Whatever she loved would be the first rug to sell when they got home.

It wasn’t just her taste that was helpful. She was strong, though you might not know it to look at her. Sabine could hold up in the heat longer than Parsifal (“Yours are a desert people,” he would tell her as he went to sit in the shade) and she could lift the rugs, peel them back, separate the piles. Back in the old days, when there was only one store and the host of healthy young men Parsifal was given to hire had not yet been found, Sabine would climb the ladder and attach the rugs to overhead displays.