The Magician's Assistant (36 page)

“I’m not coming over for the tour,” Sabine said. The day was bright and blue, but there was a terrible wind pressing down on them from what felt like every direction. There was no real stand of trees to speak of between where they stood and Wyoming to slow down its roaring advance east. Sabine felt the metal hook on the back of her bra freezing into her skin, the finest knifepoint against her spine. She wanted to get inside the house, no matter what the house looked like.

But Kitty just closed her eyes and in the next moment covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

“Hey,” Sabine said. She put her arm around Kitty and felt slightly warmer. “Stop that.”

“I’m sorry,” Kitty said.

“Why in the world are you telling me that you’re sorry?” As close as she was, Sabine had to raise her voice slightly, as the wind seemed to carry the words directly from her throat and down the block.

“Sometimes I feel like you’re Guy,” Kitty said from deep inside her gloves. “All these years all I’ve wanted is for him to come back, to talk to me, and now that you’re here everything is going to hell. You’re going to go and that’s going to be it. You’re going to think, Thank God I got out of there. I won’t see you anymore.” The tears on Kitty’s face froze onto her gloves and left glittering paths on her cheeks. A thin sheet of ice formed in the dip of her upper Up.

Every time Kitty had come into the room, Sabine had thought of Parsifal, the way he walked, his lovely face. “Of course you’ll see me,” Sabine said. “You have to forget about that. There are too many other things to worry about here.”

“Don’t worry about Howard,” Kitty said, and sniffed. “I know he went to work.”

The thought that Howard Plate might be inside had never even occurred to Sabine. She was talking about worry in a larger sense, worry down the line as opposed to the more immediate worry of an angry husband hiding in a closet. “Then open the door before we freeze to death.”

Kitty looked up as if to notice the weather, tilted the broad planes of her face into the wind so that her hair wrapped around her neck and slapped into her eyes. She turned the key in the lock.

There was nothing so terrible inside the house. It was a private life left lying around, because no one had thought that Sabine was coming by to see it. Breakfast dishes from exactly one breakfast sat unwashed in the sink, a handful of plates were broken onto an otherwise very clean linoleum floor. In the living room there was one pillow, one peach-colored blanket, and one very faded comforter with the shadowy image of Superman making an upward departure, crumpled onto the sofa. The cushions from the back of the sofa were scattered on the floor. Everywhere they went there were clear signs of boys, tennis shoes, hockey sticks, assorted textbooks that one could easily imagine should have been taken to school.

Sabine pressed her hands against her ears, hoping that the blood would return. “It looks like a house,” she said. “Like anybody’s house. I promise I won’t break off all contact because of it.”

Kitty rubbed her cheeks, knocking the ice away. “What I mean is, I don’t want you to think of me like this. I’m not always like this.” Kitty collected two startlingly large tennis shoes from opposite sides of the kitchen and set them next to one another by the back door. She crouched down beside them and for no reason evened up the laces. “Or I am always like this and I don’t want to be. Or I’d like you to think I’m not always like this. Hell.”

“You have it all wrong,” Sabine said. “I’m the one who worries. ‘Who is this crazy women who married my gay brother before he died? How did she wind up in Nebraska when we’d never even heard of her?’ If anybody’s suspect here it has to be me. I’m not always like this, either, you know. I used to be a lot happier than this.” She started to pick up the pieces of plate on the floor.

“Leave those,” Kitty said. “Howard threw those.”

Sabine looked in her cupped hands, heavy everyday china broken into chunks, the chunks covered with flowers and raspberries. She set them back down on the floor in a neat pile.

“So what were you like when you were happier?” Kitty said.

Sabine thought about the days before Phan was sick or before they even knew Phan. “I don’t know how to say it. It had something to do with being younger.”

Kitty apologized at the doorway of every room they went into—unmade beds, socks and underwear thrown on top of the clothes hamper, towels rolled into damp balls next to pillows. “Dear God,” Kitty said, picking up handfuls of clothes off the floor of Guy’s room. “Couldn’t you just wait in the kitchen for an hour or so?”

“I’ve seen it now. I’ve been initiated.”

Kitty shook her head, left the room, and returned with a box of lawn-and-leaf bags. “I’m just going to make a pile and you shovel it in. We can wash it when we get back to my mother’s house.” Kitty started throwing things in the direction of the single bed. Above the bed was a large black poster of the word
PHISH
, whose green letters formed into the shape of a fish. Sabine thought it must be some kind of inside joke she could not possibly understand.

Kitty bent over and started digging around on the floor. “When you’re young and you want to have a baby because babies are so cute and everybody else has one, nobody ever takes you aside and explains to you what happens when they grow up. Maybe they all think it’s obvious. I mean, if you know enough about biology to know where babies come from, then you should know that sooner or later they turn into teenagers, but somehow you just don’t ever think about it, then one day, bang, you’ve got these total strangers living with you, these children in adult bodies, and you don’t know who they are. It’s like they somehow ate up those children you had and you loved, and you keep loving these people because you know they’ve got your child locked up in there somewhere.” She stopped with two pairs of jeans in one hand and a windbreaker in the other and looked at the wreckage that she couldn’t seem to make a dent in. “You love them so much and yet you keep wondering when they’re going to leave.”

Poor Dot, Sabine thought. She’d had five whole days to herself after forty-six years and even then she had a house guest. Sabine nosed the butt-end of a joint safely under Guy’s bed with the toe of her boot. “I like your boys. But I’m glad they’re your boys, if you know what I mean.”

“Of course I know what you mean. I like them, too, but I wish they were yours.”

Sabine looked into the tumble of clothes in dark green plastic. “There are no socks in this bag.”

“Socks,” Kitty said. “Right.”

The point was never to take everything, just a cross section of the essentials, just enough to keep them from coming back to the house for a few days while everyone calmed down. This trip was for clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, things to meet immediate needs. Photographs, letters, the pretty blue glass vase shaped like an ostrich egg that had been her grandmother’s, stayed exactly where they were. Kitty and Sabine each tugged a lawn-and-leaf bag out to the car and slung it into the backseat. As soon as the weight was out of their hands, they felt better, freer. For a moment it was as if they were loading up the car to go on a vacation. They would find a map in the glove compartment and head due south, not stopping until they got to Mexico. In Mexico there was no family. Sons, husbands, mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers were the sole property of the United States. In Mexico there was only warm weather, only beaches, tequila, Kitty and Sabine.

When they got back to Dot’s house, Sabine made lunch out of what was left of last night’s chicken while Kitty sorted the laundry by color and type of fabric into huge piles on the kitchen floor.

“Every time I stick my hand in a pocket I hold my breath,” Kitty said, and slid her hand into a pair of jeans. She pulled out a folded paper napkin covered in phone numbers, held it for a moment up to the light, and then tossed it onto the counter. “Piece of cake.”

“Are the boys going to be very upset about this?”

“It’s a break for them, too, a couple days of peace. They don’t like to move around, have their routine upset, but the fighting wears them out. They’ll worry about their dad, Guy especially. He’s afraid of him, but he thinks Howard is basically misunderstood. Maybe he’s right.”

“You don’t understand him,” Sabine said, laying out four slices of bread. She had convinced Dot to switch over from white to whole wheat.

“I always thought if Guy had been around, my Guy, your Guy, it would have been easier for them. They could have had another man to watch, somebody else to try and be like. My father was dead, and thank God for that, and Howard’s parents have both been dead for years. I thought at first maybe Haas could fit the bill. They like Haas fine, but he’s so shy. It’s almost like he’s too small for them. But Guy could have taught them things, how to have a sense of humor for one.”

“You can teach them that.”

“It’s different when you’re a boy. It has to come from a man, preferably a father.”

“Well, it sounds like nothing came from Parsifal’s father, and he turned out fine.”

“Guy was different,” she said, her hands sorting in an automatic rhythm. “He had so much to him. Hell, he went off to California and rewrote his whole life history. He could be his own father. My boys aren’t like that. At heart they’re followers, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but they’ll stay exactly where they are for the rest of their lives unless somebody shows them what to do.” Kitty scooped up a bundle of white clothes with both arms. “I’m going to get started on this,” she said, and headed down to the basement.

Of course the father Sabine would pick as a general role model to all boys would be her own. How happy she had been on the days he picked her up from school as a surprise and took her with him to CBS to prepare for the nightly news. Sabine sat quietly in the darkened editing room, watching him slice away at world events and tape them back together. President and Mrs. Kennedy stepping off the plane in Paris, waving to the dark and boiling crowd below them. Her father ran that piece back and forth, back and forth, again and again because Sabine could not get enough of them, his handsome smile, her delicate wrist disappearing into a buttoned glove. Once Walter Cronkite was in Los Angeles on special assignment and while Sabine sat on her stool he peered around the door. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here!” he said to her. “We need you to read the news tonight.” He managed a look of such sincere desperation that Sabine wanted to say yes. His famous face was thrilling in person.

“I can’t read the news,” Sabine whispered.

“Are you sure? Plenty of good stories tonight.”

Sabine shook her head. Walter Cronkite wore the loveliest suit.

“What do you say?” her father asked her.

“No, thank you, Mr. Cronkite.”

“Well,” he said, his mustache spreading into a smile, “if you change your mind...” And then he waved good-bye and closed the door quietly behind him.

“That’s the boss man,” Sabine’s father said. “Maybe you should think it over.”

After the work was finished, Sabine’s father said good-evening to everyone, secretaries, newsmen, copyboys, janitors. She loved the giant cameras that watched them pass with their lone eyes. She loved the clicking of typewriters down every hallway. She held his hand all through the building and down onto Fairfax Street, where they walked the four blocks home. “Here, you can walk,” her father would say. “Here, the weather is always like paradise.”

It was years before Sabine realized that her father only picked her up on the days when the news was especially good, when the film he had to edit was beautiful, so that Sabine grew up believing that the evening news was a daily reflection on the world’s wonders. Her father did not speak of unhappiness. He did not brood late at night, alone in the living room. “What fortune,” he said to Sabine when she finished her dance recitals, showed her report card, walked into a room. “What fortune,” he said when her mother brought the Sunday brisket to the table on a wide oval platter. “What fortune,” he said on the day Parsifal married Sabine. Her father took Parsifal in his arms, kissed his cheeks. “Now I have a son.” They all laughed, but he stuck with it. “Let me speak to my son,” he would say to Sabine on the telephone.

“Forty-five years old and I have a father again,” Parsifal would say.

Now Howard Plate’s sons were moving two miles across town to live in their grandmother’s house.

Kitty and Sabine did the laundry and did more laundry. They stripped the beds, folded underwear. Kitty ironed a few shirts and hung them in the closet in Parsifal’s room while Sabine carried her clothes in neat stacks across the hall and laid them in Bertie’s dresser.

“I hate to kick you out,” Kitty said. “But you couldn’t put those boys in a double bed.”

“Of course not,” Sabine said. “Don’t even think about it.” She did not look back over her shoulder as she left, but she felt the loss. She would miss the terrible plaid carpet, the baseball trophies with his name etched into the small metal placards, the nights of lying in the little bed and thinking about Parsifal. She found the bag of building supplies she had bought at Wal-Mart and moved them out with everything else. “I should make the boys a house,” she said to Kitty. “I could make them a model, the White House or Monticello. I could even show them how to do it.”

“Make them your house,” Kitty said, dumping rolls of socks into a drawer. “That’s what they’d like to see.”

“Phan’s house?”

“Your house, Phan’s house. They’d be thrilled with that.”

Dot brought the boys home at three o’clock. The three of them crept through the back door silently, unlaced their boots, and slipped across the floor in their sock feet. She had told them in the car coming over. It was the only thing that could account for such quiet.

“Hey,” Kitty said, coming from Parsifal’s room where she had just finished making up the beds. “You’re home.”

“We’re home,” Guy said, his tone and manner completely devoid of a living pulse.

“So you know.”

How nodded his head while Guy slid towards the refrigerator, opened the door to shoulder width, and buried the upper half of his torso inside, looking for nothing in particular.