The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

It felt a little bit like being drunk, the way her knees grew soft from the shock, the very edges of the grief that was coming for her. She had to concentrate to keep from stepping into the bank of rubbery green ice plant along the sidewalk. She couldn’t remember where she’d left the car.

She imagined her loneliness taking the shape of boxes and boxes of other people’s possessions, a terminal moraine that would keep all she had lost in front of her.

There were some letters in a box in the closet. There were letters she had written to him when she was much younger. She knew what they said and didn’t open them.

But it was Phan who should have been the widow. He would have cleaned the house himself, washed the windows with vinegar. He didn’t know the meaning of catering. He would have spent the day at the market buying fresh mussels and rosemary. Phan should have lived to see this through. His gentleness put people at ease. He would not have been angry. He would have had these people in his home out of some genuine warmth, a common bond of loss, not a twisted need to prove who had loved Parsifal best.

I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone.”

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.

Whatever was said, Salvio took it as something expected, something completely natural, so he did what any person would do when meeting family, even though he knew Parsifal’s family was dead. He held out his hand.

She handed it to Sabine, who took it carefully and put it in the breast pocket of her blouse, not because she wanted it, but because she understood the gesture to be important.

What had happened to this little boy while she was sitting in Canter’s after Hebrew school on Sunday, drinking cream soda and reading the funny papers while her parents divided up the Los Angeles Times?

Sabine felt confused, suddenly remembering that she had been dreaming and thinking that this was part of the dream: She goes to Nebraska to find Parsifal but he is a woman. The woman was wearing a sweatshirt and slim jeans, socks but no shoes. She was Parsifal’s mother, the one Sabine had made up, the one who worked crossword puzzles in the car in Connecticut, the woman Sabine made from his rib while he slept.

No one knew more about practice than Parsifal. Work a routine until it was inside you, until you could feel all fifty-two cards in the deck as separate pieces in your hand. Work it until it no longer looked like work. “You can’t always trust what you think, what you know,” he would tell Sabine. “But you can always trust your nature. You have to make the tricks your nature.”

Children wanted to change their names and move to New York? She, who had been read to every night, whose hand was held at the crossing of every street, did not understand. Sabine in Los Angeles, where everything in the world was available to her, peaches in January, a symphony orchestra, the Pacific Ocean. It was not the city children dreamed of leaving. It was the one they dreamed of coming to.

When Sabine spoke the room froze. She possessed an intrinsic understanding of men. It was from a lifetime of being beautiful, even to children. “Your mother? I met your mother last night. Did you know that?” The sound of her voice soothed them, made them nearly sleepy. The boys dropped back in their chairs. “The middle of the night, I woke up and she was in the kitchen. She reminded me so much of your uncle. They look so much alike. You look like him when he was young,” she said, giving that prize to How. “I had never met your mother before, but she was so much like her brother that I felt like I knew her.” They did not hear her words as much as absorb them. Magic was less about surprise than it was about control. You lead them in one direction and then come up behind their backs. They watch you, at every turn they will be suspicious, but you give them decoys. People long to be amazed, even as they fight it. Once you amaze them, you own them. What was nearly a fistfight on top of the kitchen table was now completely forgotten. Like the flash floods in Twenty-Nine Palms, it surprised them both coming and going.

The audience had been applauding thunderously, screeching their appreciation for two unknown performers who had done nothing to earn it. Sabine hadn’t understood at the time. She was afraid they were mocking. But now she could see it was their youth that was being cheered, their beauty. That was why they got the job. It was her legs, the sweep of his hair off his high forehead. It was something they projected together but not apart. They were in love, or at least that was how it looked on television.

What she wanted to say to Howard Plate, what she could not say and he could not possibly understand, was this: If you’ve had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins out.

Dot tapped her finger hard in front of Sabine’s glass, nailing her point in place. “Not in a lifetime. They’d spill before the question had been all the way asked. But Guy, hell, you felt lucky if he told you what time it was. He was like you. He kept things in because we all wanted to know them. He was always entertaining us, juggling baseballs, doing impressions of people from his school or famous people or us. Guy never was a bully, but he stood up to people, he got his way. Howard could have barked at Guy all night and Guy would have never lost his head, just like you. That’s what made his father so crazy.” Dot closed her eyes and watched it all spread out before her in bright colors. “No matter how much Al screamed, how much he kicked Guy around, it always wound up looking like Guy was the one in charge. Plain and simple, Guy was smarter than Al, and god, did it make Al mad. There was no amount of punishment Al could dole out to stop him. Guy just wasn’t afraid. And I’ll tell you what, he should have been. I told him all the time. ‘Be smart,’ I’d say, ‘be afraid of your father.’ That’s all he really wanted from all of us, a little fear.”

“Do you think Bertie’s doing the right thing? He seems so solemn.” “Did you look in his basket? Almond Roca. Bertie loves that stuff and it’s not cheap. He’ll buy a couple of notebooks as a cover but he was over here to get her a present, you can bet your life on it. He loves her and she loves him. If you ask me, Bertie made him wait way too long. Even if the women in my family don’t have such a good track record with men, she’s never had anything to worry about with Haas. He’s always going to be good to her.” That’s what Parsifal had been, good to her. It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you.

It seemed like every time they left the country they managed to work in Paris. They had their rituals, la Pomme de Pain for bread, Les Pyrénées for café au lait, a Mont Blanc at Angelina’s when they were feeling reckless. Sabine knows which evenings the Musée D’Orsay isn’t crowded. She knows the hidden sale racks at Au Bon Marché. There is nothing left to surprise Sabine.

Not that there was any sense in trying to understand another person’s marriage or to say, after two weeks of careful observation, that it seemed like the jig was up. The things that went into keeping people together and tearing them apart remained largely unknown to the parties immediately involved. Recently discovered sisters-in-law visiting from Los Angeles were more useful packing sweaters into suitcases than offering opinions.

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.

Sabine hid the balls on the tops of the cups and they watched her do it and did not see her. It was something that Parsifal figured out when he was halfway through his career as a magician: People don’t pay attention. They don’t know how. They can smell guilt or fear from the other side of the Dodgers’ stadium, but if you simply go about your business with authority no one can tell.