Club Deception

by Sarah Skilton

  It could’ve gone on all night; everyone wanted it to, but the bar manager made a fuss and Cal politely gathered his items together.

  Jessica’s heart stampeded in her chest as she realized it was now or never.

  “Want to get out of here?” she asked.

  He smiled back.

  * * *

  They walked along Lakeshore Drive, Jessica still buzzing off his performance. She’d never seen magic so close up before. She thought of his fingers, long, firm, and dexterous…

  “Are you at university?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to realize he’d asked her a question. “Nah. I figured if there was anything I was passionate about I could teach it to myself, you know?”

  He nodded. “Cheers to that. I felt the same way when I was your age.”

  She swallowed, disappointed. Was pointing out their age difference his way of telling her he wasn’t interested?

  “I’ve been mixing drinks for my mom since I was fourteen, but it’s really just to support my other job,” she said, and told him about her scrapbooking business. It was more than she normally revealed, but Cal was different. She wanted him to know she was more than a waitress. “I started it because I like seeing how other families live.” She paused. “Normal families.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Mine may have been a bit further from the norm. When I turned eighteen, my mom said, ‘All right, it’s up to you now, kid.’ Got this the same week. I’ve always loved magic,” she added shyly.

  She lifted up the back of her shirt to show him her tattoo.

  He traced the outline of the playing card with his fingertip. She arched toward his touch, couldn’t prevent a happy sigh from escaping her lips.

  He rubbed the image of the queen with his thumb, in smooth, tiny circle-eights.

  She inhaled with pleasure. He’s actually touching me. The skin-to-skin contact made the muggy, oppressive July heat feel decadent. The thin sheen of sweat on her back only added to the charged moment.

  “I think we come from the same tribe,” he remarked, never ceasing the steady stroke of his thumb against her skin.

  “Alcoholic mother?”

  “Father.”

  “Was yours around, at least?” she asked.

  “He wasn’t exactly the sort of bloke you wanted around.”

  “Is that why you don’t drink?”

  His thumb abruptly stopped moving.

  Oh, God! Why did I ask that? “Sorry, sorry! Too personal?”

  “It’s probably one of the reasons, yeah.”

  She didn’t push further, but the mood was broken. She pulled her shirt back down.

  They sat on a bench facing Lake Michigan. The skyline to the left was dazzling at night. Jessica’s favorite was the Smurfit-Stone Building, lit up like a diamond.

  To her surprise, Cal returned to the subject of fathers. “He wasn’t around unless you count Saturday Shockers. A phrase coined by my mum, by the way, not me.”

  “Ooh, what were Saturday Shockers?”

  “Saturday Shockers were the one day a month my dad would spend time with us. The first shock was, ‘Would he show up?’ More often than not, the answer was no. The second shock was, ‘Will he be pissed?’ (Yes.) The third shock was, ‘Where will he take us?’ My sister and me. Usually it would be, ‘Hey, I’ve an idea, let’s go down the pub!’ Because we weren’t going to get in the way of his footie-and-drinking schedule, I can tell you that.”

  “Footie?”

  “Soccer. Other times it would be, ‘Off to the cinema, then.’”

  She shrugged. “Movies are fun.”

  “Not Alien. When I was five.”

  She giggled, horrified. “No. With the—?” She mimed “alien bursting out of stomach.”

  His eyes crinkled with delight at her reaction. “Nightmares for months. Another time it was a funeral. We went to a funeral. For someone we didn’t know.”

  She bit back a shriek. “Nooo.”

  “Yeah. Lovely outing, not at all upsetting. He was pleased about the free food. Considered it one of his best shockers.”

  They laughed together and Jessica felt a warmth swim through her veins. In the short time they’d known each other, he’d made her laugh more than her last three boyfriends combined. She could listen to him talk for hours, and she ached for more stories, wanted to learn everything she could about him.

  “Were you always a magician?” she asked.

  “Always,” he said. “First thing I did in the delivery room was ask the nurse to pick a card. And I cut my own umbilical cord with my fingers.” He made a scissoring motion and Jessica grabbed his hand to make him stop.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “I was a layabout, really. Left school at sixteen after my O-levels and crewed on ships, mucking about for five years. Cooking, cleaning, trimming the sails. Saw the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, a bit of Norway.”

  “Wow,” Jessica said quietly. “I haven’t been anywhere.”

  Cal began fiddling with a red silk cloth. Where it had come from, Jessica couldn’t guess. His movements were fluid, unhurried. Staring out at the water, never glancing down, he pushed the thin, long red silk into his fist until it vanished, and opened his hand, revealing it to be empty.

  “Again,” Jessica whispered.

  He looked down, apparently surprised to see he’d been practicing a trick.

  “Sorry, just a habit.”

  “Again,” she repeated, daring to place her hand on his knee.

  The silk was in his breast pocket now, bright and vibrant.

  “I need to get some rest.” He sighed.

  Her shoulders drooped. It was late and he was right, but…it felt like a dismissal.

  Until he pressed the scrap of silk into her hand, and covered her small fingers with his large, warm ones. “You keep it.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  His gaze was dark. “I can think of a few things,” he said.

  * * *

  At work the next afternoon, she opened her purse and saw that her driver’s license was missing from her wallet.

  In its place was a hotel room key.

  * * *

  At eleven twenty-eight, exactly ten minutes after his final show, Jessica slid her key card into his door slot and held her breath. She wore a miniskirt and a cropped biker jacket. His red scrap of silk served as a halter top.

  He appeared in seconds, his tie off, barefoot, dress shirt rumpled, holding her driver’s license like a white flag between his first and second fingers.

  “Here, you can have it, you don’t have to come in, that was awful of me, really, I never should have presumed…” But in the same breath he gasped, “You’re the best thing I’ve seen in years, Jessie.”

  He looked down, embarrassed, and she put her finger against his lips.

  Hearing him call her Jessie in that worshipful voice had cemented her decision. “I didn’t come here for my driver’s license.”

  He looked up and allowed their eyes to meet. “Oh,” he said.

  He pushed the door shut behind her. The click of the lock echoed in the silent room.

  He canceled the rest of his tour.

  She never made it back to work.

  * * *

  Seeing him now, framed by the light of their bedroom doorway at the Standard hotel, brought back a hundred happy memories. With the hotel setting such a distinct reminder of their beginning, all her fears about Claire’s widows and girlfriends dissolved into the ether. They were together, which meant they were home. Any city, anywhere.

  There was Cal, unbuttoning his shirt and placing his slacks on a hanger in the closet. There was Cal, rummaging through his metallic briefcase. There was Cal, retrieving the object he’d promised her eight hours before: soft as silk, strong as cable.

  “Hey, baby,” she called softly.

  Moonlight cascaded over his face as he wrapped the rope around his fists and pulled taut, making a line so tight it vib
rated. “You’ll have to keep quiet, though. We can’t get kicked out of The Standard.”

  Kaimi

  At capacity, the Dorset Theatre in Hollywood held fifty-five people. Today fifty-four of them were men—specifically, magicians—who’d paid a whopping $365 each to attend Landon the Libertine’s sold-out seminar, “Luck Be a Lady.”

  The fifty-fifth audience member (and sole woman) was Kaimi Lee, a freelance art appraiser and broker who’d been invited as Landon’s guest. Landon needed Kaimi to auction off a peculiar item his late father had left him.

  He’d contacted her the week before through her now-defunct email account at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and suggested they grab a bite after his seminar. He promised to make it worth her while, and she was holding him to it.

  A glance at the info sheets and tear-away phone numbers tacked up to the lobby’s bulletin board told Kaimi today was a special occasion for the small, unassuming Dorset. Most afternoons it seemed to serve as a rental space for improv classes or a background for showcases wherein struggling actors bludgeoned their friends, family, and the occasional agent with monologues from Fame and Angels in America. The theater was a bit shoddy, with peeling light-green paint on the walls, and a collection of vases filled with fake flowers resting on every available surface. The squat, 1970s-era building sat on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the army/navy surplus store. Five more uninspiring theaters flanked it, collectively known as Theatre Row.

  Ahead of her in line were hipsters with lopsided bangs, USC frat boys in polo shirts and khakis, and semi-nerdy, earnest men in their thirties who clutched binders with printouts inside. More than a few fiddled with decks of cards. The vibe reminded Kaimi of the comic-book stores she used to go to with her junior high boyfriend; in both places she’d felt like she was on the periphery of a society she’d never understand and never be allowed to join because the only membership requirement was a penis.

  “Luck Be a Lady” must be the name of an elaborate card trick they want to learn, she thought. Better be a helluva trick to justify charging $365. Maybe the ticket price included a DVD or instruction pamphlet. The only magic Kaimi had seen was the Kona Kozy Comedy & Magic Show at the Voodoo Room on the Big Island, so she had little idea what to expect.

  She eavesdropped on an argument taking place behind her in line, between two nasal-voiced young magicians.

  “Red Hot Mama is not a closer. It’s an opener, dude. That’s why it’s also known as Chicago Opener. A good closer should be your strongest piece.”

  “But it still has to fit within the rest of the show.”

  “No, it has to be better. It has to stand out.”

  “Within a theme. Or else it’s random as shit and rapes the whole thing.”

  Violent, sexist hyperbole: It’s what’s for dinner! She couldn’t resist interrupting. “He’s totes right, dude. No one likes random-as-shit closers that rape everything!”

  Before they could respond, the doors opened and Kaimi got swept along with the crowd. There were no assigned seats, so she chose one by the aisle in the back to facilitate a fast escape if necessary.

  The curtain rose right on time, which she appreciated.

  Raucous applause greeted Landon the Libertine, an extremely handsome black man in his late twenties with tight, twisted curls and neatly trimmed facial hair. He exuded the friendly yet brusque confidence of an inspirational speaker trying to convince regular Joes that they, too, could make a fortune flipping houses.

  Clad in tight jeans and high-top Margiela leather kicks, Landon traversed the small stage with charisma and self-possession that would put a faith healer to shame.

  Kaimi was instantly suspicious.

  He was too slick for his own good.

  Intermittent music (Kanye West’s “Stronger”; Drake’s “All Me”; Rihanna’s “What’s My Name”; and of course a remixed cover of Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady”) amped the crowd up further and segued into the seventy-five-minute presentation.

  “Hey guys, thanks for coming out today. Great crowd, great crowd. To kick things off, I’ma quote Jim Steinmeyer, who said, ‘There was no magic ever created without establishing a trust with an audience—without seducing them first.’ Okay, but what does that mean, right? Establish trust, and then seduce? Well, it means your magic game has got to be on. Assuming your magic’s on point, though, and you put the time and effort into my techniques, you will see an increase in the number of dates this year over last year, and next year over this year.”

  Record scratch. Wait, what? More dates than last year? What is this?

  Kaimi looked around at the other audience members, who paid rapt attention to Landon. They’d even ceased shuffling their cards.

  “A dollar a day,” Landon shouted. “That’s less than a Starbucks! Surely you care more about increasing your dating velocity than a jolt of caffeine, am I right?”

  My new client is a goddamn pickup artist.

  Hence the $365 ticket price: For a mere dollar a day in fees (paid in one lump sum, of course), Landon was guaranteeing his audience more dates this year than they’d had last year. She wasn’t at a magic class. “Luck Be a Lady” was a seminar on how to seduce women via magic tricks.

  “Let’s be real, ‘more dates than last year’ is not a fixed sum. It’ll be different for everyone sitting here today. It’ll be different for you than it will be for your neighbor over there. Yeah, look around. The guy with the chinstrap, he looks like a douche to you, but maybe that works for him, you don’t know. On the other hand, if he had zero dates last year, he’ll get at least a date this year. I’m not a miracle worker.”

  (Laughter.)

  She wanted to run screaming into the street. But he was a client, her only client, and beggars couldn’t be choosers. Still, that didn’t mean she had to like it, or listen to it. Unfortunately, all of that charisma was impossible to block out. She wished she’d brought headphones.

  “If you walk out the door right now and, starting today, September first, until September first of next year, you haven’t increased your Rolodex, your little black book, your Facebook honeys, or whatever system you use to keep track of girlfriends, I will personally—personally!—refund your money. You’ve got to give it the full year, though, no welching on that, because only by applying my techniques and perfecting them will you see results. And if your magic’s shit, well, I can’t help you with that.”

  (More laughter.)

  Make it stop, Kaimi thought, grinding her teeth and digging her fingernails into her palms.

  At that point, Landon’s seminar unabashedly morphed into an infomercial for his newsletter.

  “And if you subscribe to the newsletter—sign up today at my website—you’ll get additional information, top-secret bonus information that I don’t have time for today, in your inbox, once a week. Today’s seminar is about the basics. Think of it as an appetizer to get you started. The newsletter material is the main course, the dessert, and the after-dinner drinks. The newsletter is so good, so very good, I can’t talk about it here, because come on, y’all are magicians—don’t tell me one of y’all didn’t bring in a camera phone or mini recording device or spy pen or something. The newsletter contains valuable stuff, I can’t risk giving this information out at the seminar, it’s too detailed, it’s too good to hand out for three hundred sixty-five dollars. But people who’ve attended this seminar will get a discount on the newsletter, so be sure to go to my website after you leave tonight and get all the details on that.”

  The cadence of his words fell into a hypnotic rhythm. Kaimi closed her eyes and started to nod off. Twenty minutes later, she tuned back in—without wanting to—because the call-and-response going on was too enthusiastic to be ignored.

  “Who’s our target?” Landon demanded, his voice breaking.

  “Half plus seven,” the audience yelled back.

  “Half plus seven. You know why?”

  “Because she’s not too young, and she’s not too old.” />
  “That’s right! You’ve been paying attention! Half your age, plus seven. If you’re forty, you should be aiming for twenty-seven-year-olds. If you’re thirty, you should be aiming for twenty-five-year-olds, you get me? If you’re twelve, you best believe you want a thirteen-year-old. She could teach you somethin’.”

  (Laughter.)

  “No twelve-year-olds are here, are they? Shoot, they gonna shut me down if I’m giving love advice to twelve-year-olds.

  “So. Half plus seven, that’s your goal. If you’re fifty, you want a thirty-two-year-old, right? That’s George Clooney’s rule, did you know that? That’s not even my rule! But if you want to be like George Clooney, this is your way in. I’m telling you.

  “Next we talked about using magic as a conversation starter, you know, bridge that gap, have a reason to chat her up. More important, to chat her friends up. You’ve got to flirt with the underdog. Flirt with the friend. Flirt with the enemy. Do not flirt with the target. Make her come to you.

  “Never, ever, ever choose the prettiest girl to help you with a trick. Know why? Active disinterest creates a jealousy plotline. If you ignore the prettiest girl and make her stay down in the seats, she’ll spend the whole set hot and bothered wondering, Why didn’t he pick me? Doesn’t he think I’m pretty? What did I do wrong?

  “You’re making the other girl, the homely girl, laugh, she’s having a great time, you’re being funny and charming with her, and meanwhile the woman you’re actually into is Kermit the Frog with envy, thinking, That should be me up there.

  “She’s into you now, playa. She’s insecure and ripe for the picking!”

  Gross. Kaimi stood up and got the hell out of there.

  She could still hear Landon spewing nonsense as she exited the lobby.

  * * *

  In the bathroom of Eat This Cafe, where they’d chosen to meet, Kaimi was desperate for a shower, or the closest thing to it. She washed her face, rubbed her lipstick off, and pinned her chin-length hair up with a bobby pin to reveal the shaved section on the right side of her head. She didn’t want Landon the Louse thinking she’d made an effort to look nice for him. With upscale clients she was happy to play the part, wear nice makeup, and cover the punk side of her hairdo, but for this guy? Forget it. Pinning her hair up also revealed the fact that she had a quadruple helix piercing in her ear. No need to protect Landon’s eyes from that, either.