The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

All of Sabine’s other memories were of Fairfax, a place where a person could live in America without going to all the trouble of figuring out the country.

And in that quiet, Sabine felt very clearly that she would not mind dying on this night, with these people, in this plane. The memory of Los Angeles seemed to pull away from her, thousands of tiny houses on neat curves, their roofs glistening like dimes in the bright sun as she looked out the window after takeoff. It looked like a world she would build herself, the order and neatness of miniature.

Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting. They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here.

Over and over again Sabine tried to fix her eyes on a single flake hurtling towards them, lost it, and found another. It made her head ache but she couldn’t make herself stop.

Cold, like heat, quickly became the only thing possible to think about: how to get out of it, how it was going to kill you.

“I love my children,” she said. “No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop.”

She felt a rush of that privacy that comes not from being alone but from being with the one person you are completely comfortable with.

Sabine closes her eyes, sees them there in the darkness, fully dressed, their hands clasped formally over their chests as if dead. They were not there with her. They were there together, with each other.

There was nothing like waking in an unfamiliar darkness.

She came right to Sabine and took her in her arms. Sabine had been held minutes ago and it was like this and not like this.

“I cry all the time these days.”

There was a time when Sabine believed in keeping what was private to herself, but now everything that mattered to her felt spilled. It had all gotten away from her somehow.

Why did there seem to be such a difference between being Guy’s wife and being Parsifal’s wife? Sabine didn’t know Guy. She felt like she was lying, setting herself up for another evening of revelation

For years he was younger, for a while they had been the same age, and then, at the end of his life, he was older again.

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.

What reason did he have to lie to her? But in Nebraska, in this kitchen, it didn’t seem so much like lying. He had remade his life, and when he was finished it was the only life he knew. In Nebraska this seemed reasonable, smart, a wool coat with toggles.

In every direction there was sleep and stillness and dark. There was no time like this in Los Angeles. It was never this late.

It was not the city children dreamed of leaving. It was the one they dreamed of coming to.

Parsifal was afraid of death but he was never afraid of Phan. He loved him. Every minute he loved him.

Outside the window was divided into two planes, blinding blue and blinding white. The snow was snapped down over the field like an ironed bedsheet. It was a clean, orderly world.

Everything in the story had been reversed. Los Angeles was the place to kill someone, Nebraska was where you went later to forget. The openness would hide you. No one would look in Nebraska.

Where we are born is the worst kind of crapshoot. Sabine was not entitled to her birth in Israel, to the loving nest of Fairfax. This could have been her house. She could have picked up the bat, felt the coolness of the wood in her hands. And if she had, she would have cut off the past as well, clipped it like an article from the newspaper so that people might see that something was missing but no one would know what it was.

Your husband beats you, your father beats you, you take it like it’s your duty. And if you lift a finger back, well, the law is going to be so deep down your throat you’ll feel it in your stomach.

There were no examples to follow. No card that read, I’m so sorry your son killed your husband.

“I’m feeling sorry for myself all the time these days.”

In Nebraska, where she had never imagined him, she could see him everywhere.

“Angel,” he said. “You’ll never guess who’s here, who is sitting right on my lap helping me read the newspaper.” “You’ll spoil him.” “No such thing as a spoiled bunny. This is an animal who possesses a limitless capacity for affection.”

It wasn’t a bad set of rings. Thirty years ago there was more integrity in a cheap box of tricks than there was now.

There was no such thing as being a magician’s assistant without knowing the trick. People are misguided by the assistant’s surprise, the way her mouth opens in childlike delight as her glove is turned into a dove.

And if, in some impossible, unimaginable circumstance, the trick was not explained to the assistant, she would get it sooner or later out of sheer repetition: The egg comes out of your ear, the rabbit is between your breasts, your head is sawed off, it happens over and over and over again. Sooner or later you are bound to know it like your name.

Most people can’t be magicians for the same reason they can’t be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn’t come naturally. They want to be caught.

This was the cut? The terrible accusation? What could be better, she thought, than a mama’s boy?

She possessed an intrinsic understanding of men. It was from a lifetime of being beautiful, even to children.

“I had never met your mother before, but she was so much like her brother that I felt like I knew her.”

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.

I wouldn’t want to have kids now. There’s too much going on in the world. It would all be too hard for them.” As if harder things had been invented since her children were growing up.

In Southern California there was very little that went unsaid. People lived their lives, heads up, in the bright sun. Take it or leave it.

Trial lawyers wait for their first murder case, painters for a show at the L.A. Contemporary. Actresses wait for feature films, weekly sitcoms, cat food commercials, or a well-attended party. Magicians waited for Carson.

Kitty, shushed, slipped her hand over Sabine’s and squeezed. Sabine was surprised to find she felt the touch travel all the way up her arm.

he had that particular glow of celebrity that everyone recognized but no one could quite identify.

Parsifal shone with health. It came like light from his skin. He was an advertisement for milk. For fresh air and sunshine. For life in beautiful Southern California. Sabine had forgotten that such health had ever existed, in him or in the world. It hurt her.

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.

Sabine looked hard at the face. She could identify it as beautiful because it knew nothing.

Look at the tenderness on his face, the tenderness for her!

No one had ever asked her how the tricks were done before, because what would the point be, asking the assistant when the magician was right there? No one asked her because no one even considered that she might know.

You never told because people wanted so desperately to know. They wanted what you had and therefore what you had was all the power. Who would give that up?

She was not accustomed to this kind of quiet, the kind that grew and flourished on the spread-out outskirts of an already too-small town in the deadest part of a dead state, buried in the insulation of snow.

Maybe he had forgotten. She never saw a trace of past in him. Maybe he had put every scrap of it to bed, including the woman sitting in front of her now.

“And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That’s the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That’s the thing I’ve lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that’s when you came.”

Nobody’s going to ask you to live in Nebraska. You have to be born in Nebraska to want to stay here, I know that. Half the time that doesn’t even do the trick.