The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  As Ariane speaks she glances occasionally at me, but most of the time stares past me at the crucifix. She is, I feel, talking primarily to herself, recalling events which took place just months before as if they'd happened in the distant past.

  "There were rumors about Dome, that he was violent. Still we decided to go ahead. He'd always been correct with Timmy, and during our Zamantha he was fine. We got him hot, got him off, twisted his brain into a pretzel. Afterward he was so grateful it made me want to puke."

  She stands, goes to the fireplace, tosses a fresh log upon the embers. Sparks fly. She gazes at them, smiles as she watches them die.

  "Want a drink?" she asks. "Joint? All of the above?"

  I shake my head. She shrugs. "Excuse me while I indulge."

  She leaves the room, comes back with a snifter of cognac in one hand a lit joint in the other, takes a short sip from the glass, a long drag from the joint, resumes her seat, smiles at me, continues with her tale:

  "Few days later Dome goes to Knob, asks him to arrange a scene with me alone. You're willing to pay you get to play, so I go up to his love nest, we start getting into it, he makes a few suggestions, some I accept, some I don't, I make a few to him, we take it a little further and. .. suddenly he's out of control. Bam! He hits me! Bam! He socks me in the eye. I fall to the floor, then he's all over me, sitting on me, pinning back my arms, slapping me with his free hand.

  "I'm not like you, Kay, not a fighter; Timmy told me you train in martial arts. Dome's big, powerful. The only way I know to get through a scene like that is go limp, take it till he tires. What I don't want to do is make it fun for him by crying out or begging him to stop. It was a while before he quit. Afterward I lay there hurting. Then he threw a bunch of money at me and told me to get out."

  She takes a long drag from her joint.

  "Back home, looking in the mirror, I was appalled. My face was a mess, both my eyes were black, my lips were all puffed up. I didn't go out much those next few days, just hunkered down at home.

  "Soon as Timmy saw me he went bananas, announced the time had come for us to quit The Life. 'Why do we keep doing this?' he sobbed. 'We got money saved, our place down in San Miguel. We don't need this shit anymore.' But first he was going to stick it to Dome, go to the cops, file charges. 'He's married to this society bitch. I can ruin him,' stuff like that. I told him forget it, just spread the word and no one'll touch the guy again. But Timmy was furious. He loved me, introduced me to Dome in good faith. Dome injured me. Timmy wanted revenge." She stands again, goes to the fireplace, takes a final drag on her joint, flicks the butt on to the coals, then stands with her back to the fire.

  "When I counted up the money Dome threw at me, it came to a fairly decent sum. I pointed out to Timmy that ruining Dome's reputation would hurt him, sure, but wouldn't do anything for us. On the other hand, reparation money would.

  "Timmy didn't like that, said blackmail wasn't our style. I told him how silly that was, seeing as how we'd done things far worse. I also reminded him that, far as the cops and public went, I wouldn't be the most sympathetic victim in town. Finally he agreed to meet with Dome, squeeze him for as much as he could get. Take Dome for a bundle—that was the plan. Then be on our way."

  She returns to her chair, sits, extends her feet toward the footstool, which, in her absence, I've been using to rest my own. My first instinct is to relinquish the space. Then, recalling David deGeoffroy's words about her need to dominate, I move my feet just a bit. She notices, smiles slightly to herself, carefully positions hers so they're beside mine, not quite touching but close.

  "I was with him when he phoned you that afternoon," she says. "He was going to introduce us that night. He'd told me a lot about you, your work, what you were trying to do. He'd spoken of getting us together for weeks. After you photographed him nude, he had this notion you should shoot us nude together. He wanted that, and after I saw your photos, so did I."

  She finishes off her cognac, bends to set down the glass, then partially straightens herself so our heads are just inches apart. I occupy her now. She no longer looks out across the room. Rather her eyes, filled with candlelight, bore into mine.

  "I thought you could take some really great shots of us. You know, shots that would show people what we were really like. No one ever saw us clear. We were either this sordid incestuous pair or this weird couple who were so much fun to fuck. There're plenty of close twin sister-brother couples, but we knew we were special, did things no one else had ever done. Our mentalist routine, for instance. There'd never been another twin sister-brother act like ours. Then, when we grew up, became sex magicians, we offered our Zamanthas, a unique experience, providing bedazzlement, gender-bending rapture. We were King and Queen, God and Goddess. Who else offered anything like that?

  "Sure"—she shakes her head—"we were paid for it! After all, that was our work. But for us it was so much more. We loved the street, anonymous sex, being so hugely desired. We were explorers discovering new ways of leaping out of our skins—transcending, exchanging, the one becoming the other, the other the one. Sister, brother, separate yet the same. Two! One! Two again!" She snaps her fingers. "Zamantha! Twins!"

  She moans. "It couldn't go on too long. We both recognized that, knew one day we'd burn ourselves out. But always there was our plan to come down here, start out fresh and clean." She sniffs to mock the notion. "We even planned to write a memoir, the story of our adventures. Perhaps a little like Saint Augustine's, you know." She grins. "A confession of all our sins."

  She leans back, eyes still locked to mine. She has me spellbound. We sit in silence for a time, then church bells start to toll. I wonder: Why did she send Tim off to blackmail Crane alone? The number-one rule of the street, Knob said: Never threaten a john or try to blackmail him; do that and you're as likely to get killed as paid.

  "I waited two hours for him that night," I tell her. "Finally I gave up, went home. Crawf called me early in the morning, said the cops had found—"

  "Sure. His head."

  Though she winces I'm struck by her lack of affect. "Like the Zamantha," she adds. "Except this time it wasn't an illusion. The child wasn't made whole at the end."

  "How did you hear?"

  "Gulch telegraph, same as you. At first, when he didn't come home, I wasn't too concerned. We both did a lot of overnights. Then, early in the morning, when I got the word, it was already all over town." She smiles. "I was on the landing just above when you and Crawf went into his flat. Soon as you left I went in myself."

  "It was you who cut up his bedroll." She nods. "What were you looking for?"

  "His passport, letters, money, an album of photos of us when we were kids. I took one of your portraits, too, the one he liked best, took it down, rolled it up. When I got here I had it framed." She smiles. "Now it's hanging over my bed."

  "I'd like to see it," I tell her.

  She brightens. "My bed?"

  "My photo above it actually. All the rest too, if that's all right."

  "Sure," she says, "the grand tour."

  She smiles as if to herself, flicks the stereo back on. Again the voice of Maria Callas fills the room. Explaining that the apartment occupies an entire floor of a subdivided eighteenth-century mansion, she leads me from the living room into a sumptuously proportioned dining room, then into the kitchen. Here we pause while she refreshes her cognac, and fills a fresh snifter for me. Then on to the two studies, each furnished with a daybed, to which she and Tim could retreat when one or the other desired privacy. Finally to the doorway of a large dark room with fireplace. "The bedroom," she announces, gesturing me in.

  We enter. She lights a long match, applies it to wood set in the grate. Seconds later kindling erupts, the flames throwing our shadows upon the walls, also revealing various strange furnishings arranged like sculptures about the room—an open coffin on a platform, a sword box big as a steamer trunk, pieces of large-scale magical apparatus, a scaffold, a guillotine, a set of Pilgrims' sto
cks and a huge rotating wooden disk.

  I'm taken aback. Looking around, I find Ariane sitting on a huge carved bed, watching me, enjoying my bewilderment. Above her head hangs my Angel Island portrait of Tim magnificently framed like an old master painting.

  She tries to lure me. "Look!" she says, flinging herself back upon the bed, pointing upward at a skylight. "Lie down beside me, Kay. You'll see a wonderful sight. The moon, the stars—the sky's magnificent tonight."

  I decline, instead take a step backward, then raise my camera to my eye.

  "Oh, yes! The Photographer!" she announces, amused. "Want me to pose, strip?"

  "That won't be necessary." I prepare to shoot.

  "No nudes . . . oh. . . ." She feigns disappointment, then, like David deGeoffroy, starts to pose.

  "How's this?" She turns onto her belly, grins like a pinup girl. "Or this?" She curls back a leg. "Just tell me what you want and I'll do it. I'm like that, you know, happy to oblige."

  I ignore her, start shooting, fascinated by the strange double portrait revealed by my strobe—Ariane writhing mock-seductively on the bed beneath the photo I took of Tim bare-chested on Angel Island late last summer.

  She's disappointed, I can see, wants my full attention, is annoyed at my refusal to approach. Or perhaps she understands it's the image of them together that interests me, for suddenly she gives up the pinup poses, sits erect, rests her back against the carved backboard, draws up her knees, clasps her arms about them, then eyes me solemnly like an owl.

  "This more like it?"' she asks.

  "Better." I crouch to enhance the drama of the shot. Whap! "Tell me something, Ariane—was it all that wise to send Tim to see Crane alone?"

  "Huh?"

  Whap! I shoot again, leaving my question hanging in the air.

  "What're you talking about?"

  As my strobe dies, I catch a flicker of anger in her eyes. "Something Knob said when he confessed."

  "What?"

  "That you should never try and blackmail a john, that's the number-one rule of the street."

  Whap!Whap!Whap! I work the motor drive to catch the astonishment on her face.

  "Dome killed Timmy for love," she says.

  Whap! "How come you're so sure?"

  I feel her studying me, evaluating my gullibility. "It's clear enough."

  Whap! "Clear how?"

  "Since he knew he'd never have Timmy again, he made sure no one else would either."

  "Oh, so that's it." I nod. "Then it wasn't fear of being blackmailed again and again, the worst nightmare of a john, especially when he's closeted and prominently married like Crane, dependent too on the wealth of his wife."

  She tosses her head. "Dome had tons of money. He could easily have paid us off."

  "So he killed Tim for love?"

  She nods. "A kind of love."

  Right, I think, a kind of love.

  Through this colloquy, a feeling has grown in me, a suspicion so horrifying that at first I reject it as absurd. Perhaps Ariane knows what's in my head, for, as if to distract me, she suddenly exposes her torso by opening her silk robe, extracting her arms, then retying the arms of the robe at her waist.

  I don't comment or react, recalling Maddy's theory that by leaving a portrait subject to his/her own devices, the photographer can inevitably force a revelation. Fine, I think, go ahead! Show yourself! Perform!

  "This is what you want, isn't it?" she asks, standing beside the bed so that her bared upper body is parallel with Tim's. "I can imagine the caption too—'The Lovsey Twins: A Study in Narcissism and Incest.'"

  Whap!Whap!Whap!Whap!Whap! I fire away, my strobe creating such potent light that soon it floods the rods in my eyes. No matter—I continue shooting blind, my Contax automatically adjusting exposure. For me the scene has become albescent, but in my blindness, the suspicion returns. Did she send Tim to his death? Could that be possible? What could have been her motive?

  I shoot out the roll, stop, wait for my rods to clear, reload, Ariane watching me the whole time.

  "Something's always bothered me," I tell her. "Maybe you can help me out?"

  "Sure."

  "Why didn't Tim tell me about you? Even casual acquaintances knew he had a twin, but he never said a word to me and I was supposed to be his friend."

  "That hurt you?"

  "Still does."

  She shrugs. "Last summer we tried to separate. We'd tried it before, it didn't work, but still, last September, we tried again. It was just impossible, you know—needing each other so much, yet each of us wanting desperately to live his own life. Of course this time it didn't work either. A twinship like ours was too powerful, not something you can just walk out on, escape. Only death can release you." She pauses. "And sometimes even that won't do it. So, you see, if Timmy neglected to mention me, that was just his way, you see, his attempt."

  As she talks on, I resume shooting, moving closer, framing her head and Tim's together, disengaging the motor drive, taking individual shots now, seeking moments when her expression matches his, moments too when she shows herself as his darker half.

  She's speaking about David deGeoffroy, and what she's saying doesn't jibe with his Magician's Tale. In her version, their affair went on far longer than a few weeks. Even more surprising, it was merely an afterthought, she says, to David's seduction of and affair with Tim, his primary object of desire, which started a full year before the twins escaped.

  "It was like I was this little puppy dog," she says bitterly, "and David was throwing me a bone so I wouldn't get jealous."

  "What about Bev?"

  "What about her?"

  "Did she know what was going on?'

  "Why would she?"

  "I thought, since she was his girlfriend, she might have picked up—"

  "Girlfriend! What a hoot! Bev was his stage assistant, not his lover. David deGeoffroy's a bisexual pedophile. How pitiful he can't admit it. How contemptible!" She guffaws. "Listen, we had no choice but to run away. As for stealing, we only took what was rightfully ours."

  Suddenly the design I thought I'd grasped changes form. Like looking through a kaleidoscope, then giving it a tiny twist—inside, the pieces need only shift a bit for a completely different pattern to emerge.

  The link I could never grasp, between the Lovsey twins as children and what they later became, now comes clear. From child magicians performing the disconcerting Zamantha Illusion, then passing the hat, they mutated to grown-up sex magicians performing Zamanthas for well-paying clients. Seduced in childhood, robbed of innocence, taught to fascinate—magic was the only way they knew to gain love, feel desired. David deGeoffroy taught them to perform sex as he had taught them to perform magic, forging a chain of shackles that would forever bind their souls.

  Ariane's speaking now of their childhood, the imaginary universe they created, their fascination with magic which predated their fateful meeting with David. The best aspect of being twins, she says, was the fun of confusing others. Thus David's Zamantha Illusion was but a formal rendering of the switched-identity games they'd always played. If David hadn't entered their lives, she says, they'd probably have given the games up. But once they joined his magic show, the game became theirs for life. This, she tells me, was their glory and also their shame: their feeling that they were inseparable, caught up in a force field which bound them so tightly existence apart became impossible.

  Another turn of the kaleidoscope, another new design. There, I think, is Ariane's motive. Sending Tim to Crane to do blackmail alone, she put his life at risk. If Crane killed him she'd be free; if Tim returned, they'd both be rich.

  "I still miss him terribly," she moans, as if reading the awful thought in my mind.

  "But isn't there a side of you that's also relieved?" I ask.

  "Oh, no!" Her eyes enlarge. Whap! My camera, I think, will catch the truth: her lie.

  "You want to know what he was really like," she whispers. "I can show you. You can know him through me."


  We're resting in oversize chairs on either side of the bedroom fireplace. Music from the main room wafts to us, echoing off the plaster walls, the great voice of Maria Callas singing of the torments of love.

  I'm tired now. I close my eyes. It's the cognac, I think, also my exhaustion, the fatigue that comes when a great quest ends in anticlimax. I feel myself slipping into a semi-somnambulant state, like a person hypnotized, subordinate to another's power.

  "Kay . . ." Her whisper, low-pitched, seductive, enters my ear, then, like a snake, seems to twist its way into my brain.

  I don't want any part of what she's offering. The truth, I recognize, is that I find her sinister. Yes, I sought her out, hoping to find Tim again through her. But though I recognize there's much that's attractive about her—her strangeness, the intensity that fascinated her lovers at Hard Candy, the fervor that struck the nuns at Atotonilco—still she's too hard, dark and frightening, too willful. I now see nothing of Tim in her, nothing at all.

  "Come!" Her voice jars me. "Turnaround's fair play. You had your fun, took your pictures. My turn now. Time for a little magic." She glances at the array of magical apparatus across the room. "Yes, I think . . . the wheel."

  Even as she guides me to the great wooden disk, I feel apprehension. I only play along in the hope of getting more out of her—something she's holding back yet needs to confess, the burden of guilt that required such strenuous purgation at Atotonilco. Perhaps, I think, if I let her play out her little game, she'll open up and tell me what I need to know.

  So, reluctantly, I accompany her, don't even resist as she helps me slip out of my shirt, spread-eagles me against the rough cork surface of the disk, then binds my ankles and wrists to the embedded steel rings. Funny, I think, how each of us has her weapon—mine my camera, hers this huge piece of magical apparatus.

  After securing me, she stands back, squints critically, makes several small alterations in my position, then an adjustment that causes the wheel against which I'm pinioned to tilt back.