Reluctantly, Micah stood and walked to the magician’s side. “You’re ten years old?” the magician asked, and Micah nodded. “Hm. That’s really something. I would have guessed you were at least twenty-seven.”
“Ten,” Micah insisted. “On the button.”
The trick the magician performed was a simple one: he displayed his hands to the room—they were empty—and then cupped them together and told Micah to strike them with his “two best fingers” while he said the magic words. “And a gold nugget will appear. Are you ready? One, two, three—abracablat!” He opened his hands, and an egg was resting on his palm. The children laughed. “No, that’s not it. How does it go? One, two, three—abracablam!” This time it was a plastic novelty whistle. “No, that’s not right, either. Ah, yes. One, two, three— abracadabra!” and he removed a lump of pyrite—fool’s gold— from his hands. Stephanie wondered for a moment if the man’s earlier ineptitude had simply been part of the act, but when he offered the fool’s gold to Micah it bobbled off his fingers, made a dinking noise against his belt buckle, and went rolling away.
Micah chased after it. “What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.
“You can keep it, of course. Happy birthday.”
“Well, I don’t really want it,” Micah said. But nevertheless he slipped it into his pocket.
The magician had taken his bow, then mopped the sweat from his forehead with the tail of his cape. It looked as though he planned to gather it around himself and disappear, like a real magician, in a swelling crack of smoke, but instead he let it fall back to his waist, its loose threads clinging to his shirt so that the fabric dimpled and hooked on him. He handed each of the kids a chocolate sucker shaped like a top hat with a rabbit inside it. Then he collected his check from Stephanie, which he had her make out to “Frank Lentini, Magician,” and he headed for the front door. Just before he left, Micah took his sleeve and asked him a question: “You’re not me coming back from the future to tell me about my life, are you?”
Instead of laughing as Stephanie expected him to, the magician frowned and cocked his head. He seemed for all the world to be thinking about it. “No, son,” he finally said. “No, I wish I was. Some tricks even a magician can’t perform.”
That night, as she was preparing their supper, stirring the ground beef, onions, and chopped green peppers over a flared gas flame, Micah asked her whether his father had called. That was the word he used—the word they both used, always—father. He was sitting on a high stool by the telephone, swiveling from side to side on the metal discus of one of the legs as he gripped the kitchen counter. Stephanie’s ex-husband had moved to the West Coast shortly after they divorced, taking a promotional job with a movie studio to escape what he called “the change in the weather.” This had been his nickname for her from the very first days of their marriage: the weather. How’s the weather today? he would ask when he woke her up in the morning, running the pads of his fingers over her stomach, or later, when things started to go bad, Uh-oh, I feel a chill coming on in the weather, and I hardly wanted to leave the office today, the weather has been so lousy, and Always the same old weather, isn’t it? Then he would drum his knuckles against the nearest hard surface, making the rimshot and cymbal sound that comedians always use to punctuate a joke. Within a year of moving away he had remarried, and within two years he was raising a second son, Jacob, and sometimes Stephanie thought that he had forgotten about Micah altogether. “Your father phoned during the party,” she wanted to tell him, “but you guys were having so much fun that we couldn’t bear to interrupt you.” But the two of them had made a compact: he wouldn’t lie to protect his skin if she wouldn’t lie to protect his feelings.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t call. I’m sorry, M.”
To which he said, “I want to take magic lessons.”
He hoisted himself onto the counter, allowing the stool to spin out from under him and totter across the floor. It shivered in a tight circle like a quarter. Stephanie watched it come to a stop on its legs, still upright.
“Wow,” she said. “How on earth did you do that?”
And Micah said, “Magic,” and gave a theatrical flicker of his fingers.
The next day Stephanie phoned Frank Lentini, Magician, and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon thereafter she delivered Micah to Lentini’s studio above the bicycle shop for a ninety-minute lesson. She picked him up at exactly six o’clock, parking by the thin, balding locust tree on the sidewalk and honking twice. He would come out smelling of butane and flash powder, and though she barely noticed the scent when he first sat down in the car, it would intensify as she drove him home, a bitter perfume, until she felt it as a thornlike pinch high in her nostrils. He began to accumulate magic supplies, which he carefully shelved in his bedroom: decks of cards and compressed streamers and even a palm-sized guillotine that could chop a cigarette in two or leave it whole depending on how he manipulated it. “So you’re enjoying this, huh?” she asked him one day. “These magic lessons?”
“They’re okay. So far none of it’s real magic, though. Just a bunch of illusions.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The Great Lentini says you have to start small.”
Stephanie laughed. “You call him the Great Lentini?” She remembered the way he had fumbled with the check she gave him at the birthday party, miscreasing it so that the corners formed jutting triangular wings.
“Uh-huh,” said Micah. “I call him the Great Lentini, and he calls me the Great Zakrzewski.”
Zakrzewski. This was his father’s name, which Micah shared. During the long months of their engagement, after hearing him wearily correct someone’s poor pronunciation of it for the thousandth time, Stephanie had decided to keep her own name, the simple Burch. Still, every time she introduced Micah to a new teacher or took him to the doctor’s office, she found herself parroting the exact same words: “No, it’s not Zak-ruh-zoo-ski, it’s Zuh-krev-ski. No, it’s not Zak-ruh-zoo-ski, it’s Zuh-krev-ski.”
While Micah was taking his magic lessons, she usually went to the park a few blocks away, where she walked beneath the trees, listening to the hissing sound her shoes made as she kicked through the pine needles. That was the summer when it rained every day between four and five o’clock, big drops that left coin-sized impressions when they soaked into the ground, but by the time she stepped outside, all the standing water would have drained or evaporated and nothing would remain but the fresh green smell of leaves in the air. Hundreds of seed-like insects went twitching and flying through the grass, a sight she had always loved, and children ran in packs through the playground. She would sit on a fiberglass bench and watch them.
Though much of her childhood was still a shining path to her, one she could walk down at will, she remembered nothing at all of her life before the age of seven, when she woke in her bedroom from what her parents told her was a high fever. Most people, it was true, did not remember their life before the age of seven, but they were connected to it by a long thread of tastes and associations and family stories, so that they did not notice the loss so readily. In her case, Stephanie felt, that thread had snapped and fallen away in the heat of her fever. She had gone sailing off into her adulthood like a kite. She had a rich life, a bountiful life (I want her to be happy), but when she sat watching the children in the park, running and swinging, shouting and crying, she sometimes wondered about those missing years and whether part of her hadn’t gone missing as well, some small shape inside her no bigger than a girl.
When the shadow of the playground structure reached as far as her bench, she knew that it was time to go, and she would head back to the studio to collect Micah and drive home. She would wait for him to come barreling down the stoop, linen scarves fluttering from the zipper of his backpack. He did not like her to come upstairs to the studio, some hocus-pocus about “breaking the magician’s code,” and so she rarely did— only the afternoon of his very first lesson and the time she had to pick him up early for a dentist’s app
ointment.
And on one other occasion. It was a muggy evening near the end of the summer, so hot that the line of red ants on the sidewalk had all but stopped moving, waiting for the shadow of the locust tree to slant back over their path. Micah had not come out when she honked her horn. She sat through an entire cycle of the traffic light, honked again, and then locked the car and went upstairs. She found him in the anteroom of the studio, kneeling beside Frank Lentini, who was tied to a wooden chair with three long tendons of gray-green rope.
“Hello, Ms. Burch,” Mr. Lentini said.
“Hey, Mom.” Micah let loose of the knot he was trying to unpick with his teeth. “He was showing me how to escape from a chair, but I tied the ropes too tight.”
Stephanie covered her grin with her hand. “I see.” She helped Micah free the man, loosening the knots with a hairpin she found in her purse, and after the ropes had fallen away, she told Micah to run and get his backpack.
“Thank you, Ms. Burch,” Lentini said, standing and picking the bristles of rope from his shirt.
“You know,” she shook her head, “you might be the single worst magician I’ve ever seen.”
The sight of his face wincing and draining of color made her stomach plunge. “Oh, I’m sorry, I—”
“No need to apologize,” he said. “I know. It’s these damn hands.” He held them out like two gloves frozen on a clothes-line. “Most mornings it takes me more than one try to even get my shoelaces right.”
“Then why on earth did you decide to go into magic?”
“It’s always been this way,” he sighed. “Everything I really like is just out of my reach. When I was Micah’s age, believe it or not, I wanted to perform with an orchestra. But, well . . .” He shrugged and smiled. “Let’s just say the world lost a fourth-rate pianist when it gained a third-rate magician. I try to make up for it by being funny. Forgetting people’s names, letting the dove eat crumbs out of my mustache, things like that.”
“You mean that thing with the dove is part of the act?”
He laughed. “Of course it is. I’m not that incompetent.”
By this time Micah was standing in the doorway windmilling his backpack from side to side. “Come on, Mom. I’m ready to go. Goodbye, Great Lentini.”
“See you next time, Great Zakrzewski. And thanks for setting me free, Ms. Burch. I’ll try to repay the favor sometime.”
“Likewise,” Stephanie answered, realizing only a moment later that what she had said—what both of them had said—had made no sense.
Before they were halfway home she had to stop in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant. She told Micah he could run inside and order a to-go box for himself, though she herself waited in the car. For some reason she couldn’t stop laughing.
That fall, the night of the first hard frost, a water main ruptured in the movie theater, emptying several thousand gallons of water into the lobby. The pipe that burst was behind the snack bar, at the loose socket of one of the elbow joints, and the force of the evacuating water shattered both the candy case and the popcorn bin. When the pool spread into the VR machines, the discharge short-circuited the building’s electricity, so that the manager had to open the doors manually the next morning. The water poured outside in a single collapsing wall, he told the newspapers, knocking him off his feet. Cardboard packages of Milk Duds and SweeTARTS surfed past him into the parking lot. “It was like in a cartoon,” he said. He closed the theater for remodeling and rewiring and did not reopen it until the new year.
Earlier that same night, a derelict lost half his left arm in an accident at the bowling alley. He had been living in the ball-and-pin retrieval room, it was discovered, sleeping on a blanket behind the machinery and sneaking into the lobby at night to steal hot dogs and pickles from the snack bar. He had been there for weeks, ever since the weather grew cold. Every few days, out of boredom, he would borrow a pin from the belt, drawing a happy face on it with a tube of lipstick before replacing it. No one ever seemed to notice. Late one night, though—a league night—he caught his hand in the rack as the pins shuffled and locked into place. When the apparatus surged forward, it wrenched his arm loose, tearing it off at the elbow. The State Office of Recreational Safety shut the bowling alley down the next day for multiple violations of the occupancy code.
It was three weeks later when a group of college fraternity pledges punched a hole in the ceiling of the Aerospace Museum. They had broken in through the service entrance with a twenty-gallon gas drum, intending to “fly” the Sopwith Camel that was on loan from the Royal Air Force into the gift shop. But they forgot to disconnect the steel cable securing it to the rafters, and when they gunned the engine, the plane made a swinging curve into the ceiling. One of the propeller blades was fractured in the collision, and a strip of canvas was torn from the starboard wing. The boy in the pilot’s chair sprained his ankle, but the other pledges were unhurt by the accident. The college placed the fraternity on extended probation.
Stephanie was in her living room, watching a Web report about the event, when the doorbell rang. It was a bleak Sunday afternoon, sheets of rain falling from a mouse-colored sky, and she was wearing three pairs of socks on her feet and a heavy goosedown jacket. She always seemed to be colder the last few weeks of autumn, before the ice and snow began to threaten, than she was in the depths of winter. It was as if the weather became so humiliating after a while that she no longer even felt it. The doorbell rang again and she shouted, “Hold on,” muting the volume on the monitor before she answered it.
It was Frank Lentini, dripping wet and holding a capsized umbrella, its metal braces locked inside out in a broomlike cone. “I’m sorry to bother you, but can I come in? I won’t take much of your time.”
“Of course,” Stephanie said. When he stepped inside, the light spread across the sheen of water on his face, sharpening the angles and filling in the planes, so that he looked for a moment like one of the movie stars of her childhood—Ewan McGregor, say, or Hugh Jackman. He squeezed the rain from his hair and let it hang down over his eyes in a dark tangle. Stephanie had to shake her head to clear it of the vision. “You know, you should wear your hair like that all the time. It suits you.”
He stared into the middle distance, considering. “I will,” he decided. And then: “Listen, is Micah home? I wanted to talk to you two about something.”
When she called for Micah, he came pounding down the hall from his bedroom. Lentini asked the two of them to sit on the couch, though he himself remained standing, a pool of water threading off his clothes onto the floor. He told them that he had been asked to participate in the state invitational magic exhibition, which was to be held this year at the Shrine Convention Center. “That’s probably why they asked me,” he said. “I’m a local practitioner. Anyway, it’s a real honor, and I want you to come as my assistant, Micah. That is, if you’re up for it. The problem is it’s the first weekend of January, and that doesn’t give us much time. We’d have to start rehearsing three or four times a week instead of just Tuesday and Thursday. I don’t want us—me . . . I don’t want me to botch this one up.”
“Well, what do you think, M.?” Stephanie asked.
He actually looked excited. “Sounds good to me.”
Lentini nodded. “Great, great. So I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon? At four-thirty?” He was still carrying his umbrella, and when he looked at the pierced fabric, hanging off the wires like a bat’s wings, he frowned. He asked Stephanie, “Do you have someplace I can get rid of this before I go?”
“Are you sure? I thought it went with the hands—a matching set.”
He attempted a smile, but it sickened and fell almost immediately. A deep groan rose from somewhere inside him. It sounded like a rockfall echoing through a system of caves.
“I didn’t mean that,” Stephanie said. “Here, I’ll take it,” and after he handed it over to her, he showed himself out the door.
The next day, when Micah had finished school, she dr
opped him off at the studio, and after that he began to meet with Lentini four afternoons a week. He wouldn’t tell her anything about the act they were preparing, just that it was going to incorporate “each of the five categories of illusion,” and whenever she pressed him, he would say, “You’ll have to come see it for yourself. You’ll be there, won’t you, Mom?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” she’d answer, and he would pinch off an impulsive grin, saying, “I know you won’t. I see all things. I know all things. I am the Great and Powerful Zakrzewski.”
Now and then, half an hour or so before he went to bed, he would show her a simple card trick. He was becoming nimbler and more practiced by the day, and soon, she had no doubt, he would be better than Mr. Lentini. He had taken to rolling a quarter over his knuckles to exercise his fingers, and as she drove him to school in the morning or watched the Web with him at night, she would sometimes catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye, a somersaulting flash of silver, though she could have sworn he was sitting perfectly still. She thought of this diligence, this unexpected skill, as the first feature of his adulthood, rising up in him like a fire climbing a rick of wood, and she found it both fascinating and disturbing. Would she recognize him at all, she wondered, once it had consumed him?
One night, while he was studying for a quiz in long division, his father telephoned for him. Stephanie stood in the kitchen sorting through the expiration dates on the canned goods, trying hard not to listen in as they talked, but she couldn’t help but overhear the occasional yes sir and Saturday and why not? After a few minutes, Micah came out of his bedroom and said, “So guess what? He won’t be able to make it to the magic show.”
“I’m sorry, Micah. Is that why he called?”
“No. I think he called because he’s mad at Jacob. They had a fight or something. Jacob called him a liar, so he sent him to his room. But that’s okay, he says, because I’m his real son. I’ve always been the better one.” He bit his lower lip, and all at once he was crying.
The Truth About Celia Page 12
