He lived and breathed his new act—and with any other new boyfriend, it might have been a problem. But John was doing the very same thing. He understood. He knew. John had been able to share these things with Casey Cornish all those years, but for Ricardo, dating a fellow magician was novel…and wonderful. At the end of the long, physically demanding days, they fell into the narrow bed, and held each other, and were simply together. Content.
All John was willing to say was that his act was going “very well.” But he said it with an eager sparkle in his eye that made Ricardo wish they wouldn’t be performing simultaneously, so he could focus on Professor Topaz’s new act without worrying about his own.
And finally, the day came when they were woken at four a.m. for their charter flight to New Jersey. Although he’d barely slept, Ricardo was too excited to nod off on the plane—and so were all the other magicians. Kevin sat alone. Jia sat alone. But although there was certainly room enough for Ricardo to have a pair of seats all to himself, he sat beside John, instead. If any of the crew had an opinion about it, they didn’t remark on it. The ever-present handheld cameras were there. Ricardo hardly noticed them anymore.
Well…maybe he noticed them a bit, when John slid his hand into Ricardo’s. And Ricardo squeezed it, feeling defiant, and proud.
A bus whisked the magicians and crew to the boardwalk, where separate staging areas awaited them all. Through the divider curtains, he overheard Kevin talking to his stylist in low, surprisingly respectful tones. “You think this works? A’ight, but tighter here…” and Jia saying, “Make sure my hair doesn’t move.”
“Are you nervous?” Ricardo’s wardrobe stylist whispered to him.
“I think so.”
“You’ll be great.” She trimmed a stray thread off his bowling shirt and stepped aside for the makeup crew to take over.
Once Ricardo was painted and powdered and pompadoured, he heard Iain’s voice directing the crowd, giving them instructions via bullhorn. “You’ll have one point to award in each category. First, the magic. How cool are the tricks? Second, the act. It’s a brand new routine, and they’ve had less than a week to put it all together. How successful is it? How well does it fit the surprise theme they’ve been given, historical magic? And third, the magician’s performance skills. Are they smooth? Are they convincing? Do they draw you in? You can award your points to different magicians or the same magician, but be sure to focus on the category and analyze what it is about each act you like. Every five minutes, you’ll hear this sound.”
He tooted an airhorn. Great. Because it wasn’t enough to do a brand new act in a brand new location. Now they’d need to hear an airhorn every five minutes.
“When you hear that sound, switch magicians. We want you take a good look at all four. Any questions?”
Ricardo strained to hear what the unamplified voices were saying, but a PA hustled him off to the side before he could make sense of anything. “The performance area is marked off into four quadrants,” the assistant told Ricardo. “Make sure you stay in your quadrant. You’ll have Professor Topaz across from you, Kevin Kazan kittycorner, and Jia Lee….” She positioned Ricardo in front of a curtain just as another assistant in headphones brought Jia up beside him. He felt like a racehorse in a starting gate, casting sidelong glances at Jia. Red. Very red.
“When the curtain opens, you’re on.”
The assistants turned away, murmuring into their headsets, and Ricardo inhaled deeply and steeled himself to take a good look at Jia. He turned. She was sizing him up, too. And she looked fabulous.
“You went with your signature dress,” he said, surprised. Because she’d managed to take her trademark costume and completely transform it with hair and makeup. Same dress…but now she looked like she’d stepped out of a silent film.
“It’s called a cheongsam,” Jia said. She touched her hair, which had been shellacked into finger waves. It didn’t look like it was going anywhere—much like Ricardo’s pompadour. “This was how they were cut in the thirties. Pretty similar to today.”
“You look great. It’s very…you.”
“My mother hates it. She says it makes me look like a cocktail waitress.”
“Oh.” Ricardo wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to say…but definitely not that. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone else might be anything other than one hundred percent confident.
She gave the fan in her hand an experimental flick. It opened with a loud snap. “Like I told you, people are gonna look at me and see a Chinese girl, no matter how I try to present myself. So I decided that’s what I’m going to give them. A real Chinese girl. Chung Ling Soo, the most famous Victorian Chinese conjurer? He was a white guy from Brooklyn.”
“Actually, I think his biggest claim to fame was getting shot doing the bullet catch.”
“Yeah, well…once people see me, they’re gonna say ‘Chung Ling Who?’”
The assistant brought out Ricardo’s five silver hula hoops and stacked them on his forearm, while out beyond the curtain, Monty’s voice rose and fell, welcoming the crowd to the spectacular live Magic Mansion event. “Maybe he was popular in his day,” Ricardo said. “But now he’s basically known as a fraud.”
Jia snapped her fan shut and considered what Ricardo had said, then shrugged and looked him up and down. “Those jeans look good on you.”
“Thanks.” Even as he said it, Ricardo realized he was standing with his hip thrust out, a posture he’d been working to downplay the past three days. Because his ass looked amazing when he stood that way. And to anyone with a clue, he also looked unequivocally gay. Just as he shifted his weight to center, the curtains parted, and Monty called out, “And here they are, to amaze and astound you: Magic Mansion’s Final Four!”
And as the crowd’s eyes fell on him, and he held his weight carefully balanced so as not to telegraph his sexuality, it occurred to Ricardo…who was he to call anyone a fraud?
Chapter 35
BOARDWALK MAGIC
The sea of faces surrounding Ricardo was less of a blur, and more of a kaleidoscopic jumble of frowns. Hopefully they were just focused frowns, and not “you’re so disappointing in person” frowns. The music was a band organ track from the early 1900’s. It kept all four magicians working at a similar pace, but it didn’t exactly complement Ricardo’s chosen theme. “No one will notice,” the vocal coach had assured him, “if you keep them engaged with your sparkling personality.”
“How’s everybody doing in Atlantic City?” Ricardo asked, smiling broadly. A few answering smiles began, reluctantly, to appear among the crowd. “You’ve all been enjoying Magic Mansion?” He smacked down a hula hoop, and it bounced high in the air. Overdoing the macho? No, stupid Kevin was macho. Ricardo was just exuberant. He caught the hoop and looped it around his neck, and the crowd fell back a few paces to make room for it—but their eyes were fixed on him.
He bounced another hula hoop high, dodged, and caught it on his neck. He’d aimed it wide on purpose. Sometimes, if you made juggling look too easy, the audience got bored. “Anyone here have a hula hoop when they were a kid? You?” he pointed to a woman who looked like she might be game. “Want to try?”
Before she could refuse, he bounced a hoop her way. “Go on,” he said, “go for it. Show everybody how it’s done.”
Timidly, but smiling, she caught the hula hoop, pulled it over her head, and gave it a few experimental twirls. “That’s right, you’ve got it.”
He tossed his third hoop in the air, caught in on his left foot, and twirled it around his ankle. The aqua socks looked spiffy. He picked out a young man. “How about you, you want to try? It’s easy.” He kicked the hoop the guy’s way, and the guy caught it, laughing, but hemmed and hawed about actually trying it out.
“Okay, fine, just hold on to it for me.” Ricardo flicked the two hoops off his neck and spread them on the ground with the third hoop he’d been holding, and began his routine that was part dance, part juggle, snapping up the rings
, catching them, and allowing them to fall. He beat out a pattern, and just before it became predictable, instead of dropping the hula hoops, he tossed them in the air and began to juggle. The crowd ahh’ed and clapped.
It wasn’t that difficult, but the hoops were so big that it looked impressive. And as he juggled three hoops, he caught the eye of the man holding the fourth, and said, “Toss it.”
He’d had the choreographer lob all kinds of lame throws his way to prepare himself, and of course he didn’t trust the guy’s toss enough to actually juggle it in—it would take a trained assistant to make that move work. Instead, he slipped the three he already held onto his arm and began a lasso twirl with them while he caught it. He turned to the woman, then, who’d stopped hula-hooping so she could watch, and said, “When you’re ready, toss it!”
She did…missing him by several feet. But it didn’t matter. He was in the zone. He was enjoying himself. And the audience was enjoying him, too. He sidled over to toe the fallen hoop into the air, which provided the perfect diversion. As the audience was focused on his foot, he palmed a handful of bubblegum out of a pocket the stylist had carefully sewn into the bowling shirt, and said, “How ’bout that? Sweet!” as he pinged it into the laughing audience.
He was breathing hard by the time the airhorn sounded, but the connection with the people had made time slip away. He thanked them, playfully reminding them to “vote Ricardo, Daddy-o!” as they moved along to check out Jia’s act, and the audience who’d been watching Professor Topaz began to filter his way.
As Ricardo raised his arm over his head, his five rings slid down over his shoulder, the beads inside shushing to a stop along his thigh…he looked up and spotted John.
And suddenly, it was as if all the air went out of the world.
John was stunning in an Edwardian cutaway coat and deep burgundy ascot. In his top hat (silk, not satin) and his striped trousers, he looked like he was seven feet tall. But it wasn’t just height he possessed. It was presence. His audience approached him in awe, and when he greeted them, gravely, in his deep and profoundly serious voice, Ricardo could practically see them all break out in goosebumps.
In fact, he did, himself.
Ricardo forced himself to look away, to greet his new group and get them to shift gears from serious and dramatic to lighthearted and fun. But he experienced a niggling of doubt, that maybe he couldn’t win the spectators over. Maybe acting sassy and young simply couldn’t hold a candle to being as profoundly riveting as John.
Part of him was startled—because he’d trained so hard these past few days, put so much care and focus into his act, it hadn’t exactly occurred to him that all the other magicians would do the same. He threw a silver hula hoop high in the air, and while his audience looked up, palmed a 45 from its hiding spot at the small of his back. The crowd laughed with delight as he juggled it in with a huge flourish, then tossed it to the spectators like a Frisbee. His heart was pounding now, in overdrive, as keen as any championship match he’d ever skated in…with the knowledge that his performance here was infinitely more important than any meet.
He did a spin and caught sight of Kevin Kazan—only a glimpse—working his crowd in a zoot suit and fedora—and damn it, that creep looked absolutely perfect. He was confident and flashy in his new costume, doing his new act…even handsome. Not only that, but he had his audience wrapped around his little finger, and the way he moved, shifty and graceful as he startled them by presenting them with their own wallets and watches, it was clear he’d put his own choreographer to good use.
It took everything he had, but Ricardo forced himself to focus on his hoops. He juggled them dangerously high, no longer needing to make it look difficult, because it was difficult—and then he palmed the modern silver dollars from his jeans pocket (no mean feat, given how tight they were) and flipped them into the crowd, declaring, “Hey, where’s Eisenhower?”
The over-sixty choreographer and the vocal coach had thought that joke was a scream. The under-thirty stylist didn’t get it. Unfortunately, a majority of Ricardo’s current crowd was in agreement with her.
The airhorn sounded again, and the audience rotated. Or did it? They were supposed to, but when Ricardo scanned, he saw that the crowds were definitely thicker around John and Kevin. Their acts were so good, their personalities so magnetic, they were keeping the spectators from Ricardo and Jia. Ricardo poured everything he could into his performance, tossing the hoops high, focusing on his patter, smiling so hard his face hurt (although he was battling a sinking feeling that he was not nearly as clever in designing his act as he’d thought he was) and doing his damnedest to draw the crowd away from John, away from Kevin, and over to himself.
Ricardo juggled and palmed and bantered for all he was worth, and the airhorn sounded for the third time. He focused in on specific members of his final crowd—definitely fewer in number than the other end of the boardwalk—and poured his heart into forging some kind of connection with each of them.
When the final airhorn sounded to signal the end of the challenge, and Ricardo caught his five hoops and then attempted to catch his breath, he realized…he was standing with his weight all on one hip. And his elbows turned in.
He kept his posture exactly as it was and tilted his chin up defiantly as applause rippled through the audience. If the crowd didn’t love him for his real self…then what good was winning, anyway?
Monty was talking now, praising the audience, but Ricardo took the opportunity to thank his final group of spectators personally, shaking hands, making eye contact, connecting. The public seemed more eager to meet him now that he was a TV star than they had back when he was working the small-club circuit, when he’d emerge into the cocktail lounge in his offstage garb to vague looks and the question, “Hey, aren’t you that guy?”
No, everyone knew exactly who he was now, and men and women alike seemed eager to shake his hand. He thanked anyone who would listen for coming, and thanked them again when they told him he was their favorite and they hoped he’d win. Maybe it would be enough, winning over this final crowd, if the other votes were split between Jia and Kevin and John. Of all the magicians, Ricardo was the most approachable, and since there was nothing that said he couldn’t keep on schmoozing after the final airhorn blast, then he planned to work his every last advantage to the max.
“You have to beat Kevin,” a middle-aged woman said, how funny. And, “I can’t believe I get to meet you in person,” a younger woman gushed. “You look even better than on TV.” Ricardo gave her hand an extra squeeze, even though Iain was descending upon him, probably to tell him to knock it off. As he took a step back from the crowd and gave them a parting wave, he caught the eye of one of the men, who frowned and said, “Where’s Sue?”
Iain grabbed him by the elbow hard, and hauled him off the boardwalk himself. “Come on, Mr. Magnificent, there’s no time for you to diddle each and every one of them personally.”
“Shut up,” Ricardo said, but only half-heartedly—because Iain wouldn’t be Iain if he wasn’t acting like the world’s most insulting dweeb. Instead what troubled Ricardo was the thought that no matter what he did or said, no matter how hard he worked or how well he performed, Magic Mansion’s viewers saw him as one thing, and one thing only: half a couple, without Sue.
An assistant handed Ricardo a towel, and he blotted his sweat carefully so as not to smear off his makeup in a huge swath down the center of his face. There were still handhelds wandering past, after all. Jia, Kevin and John were already there, sheltered from the milling boardwalk crowd by a wall of divider screens, cooling down. Chairs stood ready for the talent, but nobody sat. They were too keyed up. They all gulped water like they were dying of thirst, though, and Jia was making actual use of her big gold prop fan.
Ricardo’s knees shook. These last few days had been a roller coaster ride—his first real on-air magic performance, his first chance to show the viewers what he actually was, beyond being the guy who’d bled into the w
and pond or crawled through the bounce castle the fastest. His first chance to demonstrate what his actual passion was all about. And now, for good or ill, he’d done it. He’d actually performed. On wobbly legs, he made his way past a pair of assistants and a handheld, and there, finally, stood John. Except “John” was the tender-eyed man who held him in that narrow bed each night as he drifted off to sleep. This striking magician in the burgundy ascot was none other than Professor Topaz.
Although Professor Topaz wasn’t exactly known for the smile he was currently shining on Ricardo.
“I can’t believe that tux,” Ricardo said, and his roller-coaster sensation slowed as he decided that if he did lose to John, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing after all. Because as Jia had said when she stood to be eliminated, there was no shame in losing to the best. “You were amazing out there.”
“Was I?” John replied. “I don’t know how I managed. As usual, ‘someone’ was doing his very best to distract me.”
“No way.”
“Oh, yes. How could I help but stare?” John swept off his top hat so he could lean in close and whisper directly in Ricardo’s ear. “You look uncannily like the first boy who ever slid his hand down my pants. Only more glittery.”
Though the hairs on Ricardo’s forearms were damp with sweat, they managed to stand on end anyway as a delirious thrill raced down his spine. All around them, the crew milled, the handhelds zoomed in and out, the audience surged beyond a few flimsy screens, and Iain stormed around being a dick. But for Ricardo, the world had narrowed down until it consisted of only the two of them, him and John, together.
___
The throng of viewers queued up at the table to receive their Magic Mansion T-shirts and, more importantly, to get their parking validated. “Make sure these ballots are correct,” Marlene told the assistant who was helping her collect them. “One magician chosen in each category, no more, no less. We have exactly one hundred people here. If any of them screws up their voting, the scores won’t add up right in the end.”
Magic Mansion Page 31
