Night Magic (11 page)

As his victim obeyed, Michael stood in front of him, his hands joined at his mouth, a ring adorning each index finger. “Now open your hands,” he commanded.

Samir did as he was told, gasping at the sight of a napkin ring lying on each fat palm. Raising his eyes to Michael, he recognized, with mounting astonishment, his fez, his glasses, his very rings, and began to giggle uncontrollably, his flesh undulating in ripples under the caftan.

“Ah, my friend,” he said, gasping for breath and drying his eyes with the green silk handkerchief he plucked from his sleeve. “Ah, my friend.”

There was applause from the guests, which Michael acknowledged with an elaborate bow, indicating with a wave of his hand that his performance was ended. All his personal items restored to their rightful places, Samir sat in silence for a while, quivering and turning on Michael a look of utter fascination. “You are a miracle worker, my friend. If my doctors knew their art as well as you know yours, my problems”—he tapped his distended stomach—“would be over.”

Exhilarated and energized to the point of recklessness, Michael spoke more quickly than he thought. “I can fix that too,” he said, gesturing at Samir's belly.

“You can? How? Show me, show me how? You are serious, yes? Show me how you can do this.” The man was practically pleading; Michael had suddenly become the glowing center around which all his hope revolved.

Incredulous in the face of such desperate credulousness, Michael decided to play along; one last, quick trick. “It’s a question of visualization,” he said. “Give me your handkerchief.” He took it and began tying knots in it. “Imagine that this is what your intestines look like now. Here, take an end and pull hard.” They pulled together on the knotted piece of green silk. “All tied up, compacted, blocked.” He crumpled the handkerchief into a ball in his hand. “But now imagine the dawn of a new intestine, grand opening, a mighty river flowing”—he opened his hand and lifted the unknotted handkerchief from his palm—“free at last!”

Samir leaped shouting to his feet, clapping Michael in an embrace that made him imagine an enormous, suffocating cushion. Then Samir released him and fell back with a squishy sound into his chair. “What else can you do?” he panted. He seemed to be having difficulty focusing his eyes.

“I’m afraid I’m all out of tricks,” Michael said wearily. “Usually when I’m hired for a party I have my things with me.”

“Ah!” There was a pause while the Egyptian gathered his thoughts. When he looked up again, leaning back against the fan of his chair, his eyes had regained most of their customary shrewdness. “You perform at parties?”

“Children’s parties, birthdays, that sort of thing.”

“But you are wasted on children. No, no, no, no, you shall not perform for children. You shall perform for me at
my
party, my next
real
party. This”—he waggled his fingers contemptuously—“is a mere get-together, haphazard, slovenly. When is my next important party, Gilbert?” he asked, turning to the glossy-haired one who had remained immobile behind his chair the entire time.

Without moving his head, the Arab said, “The night of your birthday.”

“But of course,” Samir said joyously. “My birthday. It falls on Halloween, and I give a special party. That is perfect. On Halloween night you will come with all your things and perform magic for my guests. You will make it truly special. You are free then?”

“Yes. Sure.” Michael turned to Emily, who smiled slightly and shrugged.

“And so you will come? Definitely?”

“Sure. I’ll come.”

“Then it is arranged.” Samir nodded with satisfaction at Beulah Wales, who was hovering near him. “You hear, dear Boo, this marvelous young man will come.”

“I told you he was special, didn’t I, Sami?”

“Yes. You told me so, and he is. Very quick, your young man. And very handsome. He should go far.” Heaving his bulk from the chair, Samir stood before Michael and took one hand, pressing it between both of his. “Far,” he repeated, then broke into a smile, holding up his bejeweled fingers. “If I were a king you should have one of these in payment for tonight.” He dropped his hand and sighed audibly. “Alas, I am not a king. I bid you good night. Come, Gilbert.” Followed by the Arab, he left the room.

As Michael walked over to Emily’s side, he felt the strange tension that had so completely energized him drain out of him and exhaustion fill its place. It must be well past midnight, he thought, a strange day from start to finish—summer in the city. But his watch read only eight minutes to eleven. Odd, Michael thought. This was a particularly reliable watch, and it had never stopped before.

I
T WAS STRANGE WEATHER
for “duck” hunting. The heat persisted, radio and television weathermen predicted continuing excessive temperatures, newspapers headlined
NO END IN SIGHT
. With Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag as his only clue, Michael took refuge in the huge department store, grateful for the air-conditioning. For several days, he staked out the place, moving from entrance to entrance, riding the escalators, the elevators, checking the men’s rooms, going methodically from floor to floor, department to department. Despite the enervating weather, people were buying like crazed creatures, and the store stayed crowded. He saw many weird sights in his days there, but there was no Queer Duck.

He would, Michael figured, be easy to spot in a crowd. Mostly he looked for the umbrella, or for anyone wearing black. He flogged his brain to imagine what merchandise such a person might buy in a department store, especially one so trendy as this. He even checked with the information counter to see if there had been any particular sales or unusual promotions on the “Day of the Frog,” as he now thought of it, but all he could discover were blind leads.

He set up his act outside, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-ninth, doing hocus-pocus, and while he performed his tricks he kept his eyes peeled in every direction. He wasn’t merely observing or noting characters, as was his habit, but looking through them, past them, for one particular character, a Queer Duck dressed in black, with a walleye and an umbrella, a strange-gaited, long-haired, absent-minded professor sort of guy with funny shoes and a secret. Michael went through his routines automatically, letting his hands work by themselves while his eyes examined the interminable parade of faces and his brain kept imagining what it would be like to learn the Queer Duck’s trick, whatever it might be, to acquire that skill, that knowledge, that power.

Busy though he was in body and mind, he found the insistent heat sometimes broke through all the barriers of his concentration, demanding attention, and he envied the nun sitting on a camp stool next to the store’s revolving door, cooled by steady blasts from the air-conditioned interior. She sat there so patiently in her long black habit and her starched wimple, a collection can tilted negligently in one hand and the other tucked under her scapular. She always kept her head slightly angled toward him, watching shyly behind her spectacles as he flashed his silks or did his coin numbers, and he wondered what order she belonged to. He was so busy looking up the street and down the street and across the street that he never noticed the tips of her blunt, shiny, patent-leather shoes, barely peeking out from under the hem of her habit.

Michael couldn’t afford to eat in any of the places around the store, so Emily brought him sandwiches and juice, and when she had time she stood watch at entrances he couldn’t cover. On Thursday evening, when the store was open late, they both stayed until nine and were the last to leave. Even the nun was gone by then.

Emily was by no means an enthusiastic accomplice in this operation. She had been opposed to Michael’s stakeout project from the start, but all her efforts to argue him out of it, to persuade him of the illogicality of such a hunt, to point out that he could ill spare time spent in what must surely prove a fruitless search, to express the nameless dread she felt at the prospect of success, however unlikely, collided with his obstinate determination to confront the strange old man who had undone him. As far as Emily was concerned, Michael’s understandable curiosity had grown into a dangerous obsession; it was beyond reason, and no good could come of it. She told herself the Queer Duck would never reappear; he had, after all, stolen Michael’s wallet and a considerable sum of money. And then she told herself that if he
did
show up, Michael would need her help. That rationale, working in tandem with love, did the rest, and so against her better judgment she stood at the entrance to the store, a loyal sentinel, conscientiously scrutinizing the passing throngs for a bizarre figure she hoped she’d never see again.

On the days when Emily couldn’t help him, Michael would go home by himself, hot, frustrated, and exhausted. He resolved to abandon the search, get back on the street in whiteface, pick up some cash. The whole idea was crazy, the proverbial haystack was too large, no matter how precious the proverbial needle. But then he would remember man-into-frog, the weird, almost obscene thrill he’d experienced, the total “frogginess” of those moments.

Ga-dunk.

On the Saturday night, sluggish from more useless searching, five glasses of wine, and an hour of lovemaking with Emily, he lay in the dark beside her sleeping form. Gazing at the smoky blue halo the dim outside light spread across her black hair, he relaxed completely and let fantasies shimmer across his mind. All over again, he allowed himself to be seduced by the idea of the power he sought, surrendering to the allure of the undiscovered mystery, offering himself false hopes, false promises. Yet, despite his weariness, and perhaps because he could hear Emily’s gentle breathing, he saw with total clarity that he was falling in thrall to a mania, becoming a slave to a dream.

Because Bloomingdale’s was open only during the afternoon on Sunday, Michael yielded to Emily’s pleas and agreed to hang around the brightly gilded Sherman statue at the foot of Central Park. She played her flute while he, not bothering with makeup or miming, performed some simple magic—the cut-and-knot rope trick, the water-in-the-bottle number—and earned a few dollars in the process.

Michael knew, as did any street performer, that working the streets, especially in a city so diverse as New York, was a great challenge. Faced with a crowd whose moods were unpredictable, and over whose movements he had no control, the street magician had to be brave, quick witted, coolheaded, and highly skilled, or he should consider other ways of making a living. But Michael had great confidence in his artistry, and he delighted in winning over a crowd, the more heterogeneous the better. He loved doing the water number, it always got the kids, and he liked the kids best. Kids and magic were made for each other.

First he’d fill an empty Coke bottle with water from a paper cup, then upend the open glass mouth on his palm, announcing that he could “control” water; and so it seemed he could. He would slide the mouth of the bottle off his hand and command the water not to pour, and it would not. Or order it to pour, and it would. Stop. Pour. Stop. Pour. The kids would take it up, chanting and laughing, until the bottle was finally empty. Even the sandwich-board man wearing an ad for the latest Donald Trump book stopped his march up and down the sidewalks and seemed to be enjoying Michael’s performance.

Or the rope trick. Cutting it in lengths and bringing it out whole again from behind his palm. But those were easy dodges; he’d done them ten years ago for the Elks Club of Genesee, Ohio. Crowd pleasers, but trifles.

Michael knew he should have put on whiteface and given them the Mechanical Man number. There was more money in that, but it was too hot for makeup and all those physical gyrations.

And still no sign of the Queer Duck. Sundays at Veterans Plaza in a heat wave evidently wasn’t his style. The sandwich-board man, on the other hand, had stayed on to the very end, hugging the edge of the plaza or General Sherman’s pedestal, watching from behind his dark glasses. Only when it was clear that Michael planned no more tricks did he return to his job of silent sidewalk salesman.

According to an old joke, on any Sunday night in New York, the city’s entire Jewish population could be found having Chinese food. The old rabbi riding the subway with Michael and Emily, however, seemed to be an exception. And then again, maybe he was on his way, Michael thought. They
were
going downtown on the Lexington Avenue line, headed for Chinatown’s Mott Street and Sunday supper with Emily’s parents, the Changs.

Emily had been raised in Chinatown, where her father imported plum sauce and other delicacies from Hong Kong. They were a large, wealthy, handsome family, the boys slim and somewhat aloof, American slang sounding strange in their mouths, and the girls elegant and poised.

Michael could tell that Mr. Chang objected to him, didn’t approve of his not having a proper job, nor of Emily’s joining him in the mimes. Her oldest brother felt the same way. Charlie Chang (Number One Son, as Michael privately called him) was coolly polite, but Michael knew Charlie knew he was sleeping with his sister and didn’t like it. This veiled but palpable hostility bothered Michael only slightly. He by nature sought the approval of others, yet when forced to make a decision, he would always choose in his own behalf, even if it meant alienating others. He loved Emily, and she loved him—he was secure with that. If her family didn’t approve, well, too bad.

Michael’s recent general unease had made him feel more uncomfortable than usual tonight. As soon as it was feasible, he had suggested that he had a busy day tomorrow—a pronouncement that drew smirks from Mr. Chang and Charlie—and had made his escape with Emily. They walked the few blocks north to Houston Street, where they could catch a subway that would take them uptown to the West Side.

The D train was unusually crowded for a Sunday night. Emily and Michael found adjoining seats, but they were soon knee to knee with a young man who stood before them, holding onto an overhead rod and listening to his Walkman. He loomed above them as though enraptured, his eyes half closed, his lips parted, his head thrown back. His earphones fit loosely, and the volume was so high that the sound cut through the whoosh and clatter of the subway. Michael wasn’t sure what the man was listening to, but he was sure it wasn’t Kenny G. The added irritation of malfunctioning air-conditioning in their car served to make what was in fact a relatively brief trip seem interminable. He sat with his eyes closed, clutching Emily’s hand tightly, his only goal to reach Emily’s apartment as soon as possible so they could shut themselves away from the rest of the world. He was too excited by the prospect, too absorbed by his need to escape the subway with its heat and clatter to notice the same rabbi they’d seen before, sitting with his newspaper at the rear of the car.