The Magician's Assistant (10 page)

Sabine took a sip of her drink. It was something like relief. What she did not have in life she would not have in death. It was only fair. “Yes,” she said, “so was Parsifal.”

Mrs. Fetters nodded like a satisfied detective. “So now where does this leave you, exactly? You’re too pretty to just be faking it for somebody.”

“We were very close,” Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts. There was no answer, not unless you were willing to sit down and look at all the footage, sift through the ephemera. “We worked together, we were friends. After Phan died, I think we both had a sense that it was just going to be the two of us, and so we got married.”

“But why didn’t you marry somebody else?”

There was a votive candle in a pale orange cup burning between them on the table. A whole host of somebody-elses stretched out in front of her, all the men who were in love with her, who begged her to be reasonable. Architects, magicians, rug dealers, the boy who bagged her groceries at the supermarket—none of them were right, none of them came close. “I was in love with him,” Sabine said. Everyone knew that.

“Everyone was in love with that boy,” Mrs. Fetters said, making Sabine’s confession common as ice. “But weren’t the two of you ever”—she tilted her head to one side, as if straining to hear the word—“together?”

“No.”

“And that was okay with you.”

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know,” Sabine said. “No, not at first.” It embarrassed her even now, and Parsifal was dead. “When I was young I guess I thought he’d come around, that it was all about having patience. I’d get angry at him and then he’d get angry at me. Finally we broke up the act. I was maybe twenty-five then. We were only apart for a week, but—” She stopped and looked at Parsifal’s mother. Maybe she could see him there, just a little bit around the mouth. “When we were apart something changed for me. I missed him so much I just decided it was better to take what I had. To accept things. I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone.”

“It seems to me that you got a bad deal,” Mrs. Fetters said.

“I had a very good deal,” Sabine said, and picked up her drink.

Mrs. Fetters nodded respectfully. “Maybe you did. There are a lot of things in this world I’m never going to understand.”

“Do you understand why Parsifal told me you were dead?”

Mrs. Fetters polished off her drink in a clean swallow and caught the bartender’s eye, which was easily caught. “I do.”

“Good,” Sabine said. “Tell me about that. I’m tired of confessing.”

Mrs. Fetters nodded, looking as if the late hour of the night was finally catching up with her. “I was born in Alliance. I lived there all my life. When I was growing up, if you had told me there was such a thing as a man who loved another man—” She stopped, trying to think of something equally impossible, cats loving dogs, but it all fell short. “Well, there was no such thing. There were two men I remember worked for the railroad who lived together just outside of town. There were lots of fellows worked for the railroad that lived together, but there was something about these two made everybody nervous and after a while they were run off, and even then I don’t think folks could put their finger on what it was, exactly. We were a backwards lot, and I was way out there in front, the most determined to keep myself backwards. I was a grown married woman before someone told me what it was to be gay and it was a while after that before I believed it. And yet all the time I knew something was different with Guy, and he was only three or four before I knew that was what it was. I never exactly said it to myself, and I sure never said it to anyone else, but I knew.”

The bartender arrived with two fresh drinks. “Coming up on last call,” he said helpfully, picking up the used glasses and damp napkins.

“We’ll think about it,” Mrs. Fetters said. She drank while Sabine waited. “I’m taking too long to get to my point. That’s because I’m not so interested in getting there. By the time Guy was fourteen there was a little trouble, him messing with friends, playing games that I didn’t think were games. I sent him to Bible camp, I got him saved, but all over him I saw his nature. I thought it was something that could be changed, a sickness, and so I sent him away when I was pregnant with Bertie. I sent him to the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility up in Lowell to get cured. I sent him into the worst kind of hell so that what was wrong could get beaten out of him. The day he turned eighteen he came home, packed up his things, and left. That was that. He didn’t want anything to do with us after that, and once some time had gone by I couldn’t say I blamed him. I never knew what happened to him, not until fifteen years later, when I saw the two of you on the Johnny Carson show. You can’t imagine what that’s like, thinking your child is probably having some miserable life somewhere because of what you’ve done to him and then seeing him on television, a big famous magician. I liked to fell out. I wrote to the people at the show and asked them to forward a letter on to Guy—Parsifal the Magician. Oh, I was sorry and I told him how sorry I was and how we all wanted him to come home. I just about held my breath every day going out to the mailbox. Then, sure enough, I get a letter with no return address and a postmark from Los Angeles. It was very polite. He said all was forgiven and forgotten and the past was in the past, but the past needed to stay right where it was. He said he just didn’t want to think about it, not ever again, and would I please respect that. He sent us some money. Every now and then more money would come. In the last few years it was a whole lot more money, but he didn’t write to me again and he didn’t write to Kitty, which I think was wrong of him no matter how mad he was.” Mrs. Fetters looked right at Sabine and Sabine did not look away. “So that’s what I did.”

Sabine tried some of her drink, but now it tasted spoiled in the glass. “Well,” she said.

“I’m not looking for your forgiveness,” Mrs. Fetters said. “I haven’t even come close to forgiving myself. I’m just telling you what I know. He should have told you. You’re a nice girl. You deserve to know what’s going on.”

“I appreciate that,” Sabine said. Parsifal in prison. Parsifal in hell.

Then, for the last time that night, Mrs. Fetters surprised Sabine. She reached across the table and picked up Sabine’s good hand and held it tight inside her own. “I’ll tell you straight, Sabine, I’ll tell you what I want from you. Give me and Bertie one more day. Take us around to the places he went to. Show us what he liked. I want to see how it was for him, give myself something good to think about for a change. Even if it’s not good, it will be good, because it will be the truth. I’ll be thinking about him, how he really was, not just some idea I had. I want that to take back to Nebraska with me.” She smiled at Sabine like a mother. “It’s a long winter out there, you know, lots of time to think.”

Sabine looked down at the table where her hand was swallowed up. Suddenly she was tired enough to cry, tired enough to sleep. She knew it would come sooner or later. “I need—,” she said, but could not finish.

“You need to think about it,” Mrs. Fetters said. She squeezed the hand and let it go. “Of course you do. You know where you can find me.”

Sabine nodded. “I can tell you in the morning. It would be wrong for me not to give this some thought.”

“Sure, honey,” Mrs. Fetters said.

Sabine pushed back from the table and stood up. “Good night,” she said. She waited but it looked like Mrs. Fetters planned to stay for a while, contemplating last call.

“I’m glad you came over,” Mrs. Fetters said.

Sabine nodded and got to the door before she stopped. There was no one left in the bar. Just the bartender. The music was off. It was like speaking across a dining room. She did not raise her voice. “Thank you for going with me,” she said, and held up her hand.

“That?” Mrs. Fetters said. “That’s nothing.”

In the car Sabine turned the music up loud. Parsifal kept the glove compartment stuffed with cassettes, mostly operas, scratchy recordings from the twenties. He liked Caruso. He liked Wagner, the story of Parsifal he had named himself for years before he had listened to the opera all the way through. The name sounded so much more like a magician than the more traditional Percival. The brave underdog knight. The one who finds the grail. The only one, in the end, who is left standing. She did not think of Lowell, Nebraska, then, sailing over the empty freeways home. She did not think of it driving on Sunset Boulevard, which was always awake, the billboard advertisements for new films bright as movie screens, the twenty-foot feces of famous people staring vacantly in her direction. She did not think of it as she drove into the hills of bird-named streets, or locked her car inside her own garage, or walked down the dark hallways of her own house. She did not think of it at all until she was in bed and it was quiet. Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility. Facility. Boys who habitually stole from grocery stores. Boys who loved fire and burned up dry grass fields in summers, hay barns in the winter. Boys who would not stop fighting, broke the noses and jaws of smaller boys. Mean, stupid boys who could not be taught the difference between right and wrong, never having seen it themselves. Boys who took girl cousins down to the creekbed at family reunion picnics and raped them. Boys who held those same girl cousins under the water later on to keep them from talking. Boys who knew what to do with a lead pipe, knew how to make a knife from a comb. The authorities locked them together in Lowell, Nebraska, let them discipline each other. And then they disciplined them. Parsifal, in his white tuxedo shirt of Egyptian sea-combed cotton. Parsifal, who walked out of the theater when the space alien split through the lining of the astronaut’s stomach. He gave money to Greenpeace. Where, exactly, was Greenpeace when the seven boys in the shower went to put their shoes on before kicking you in the stomach, in the back? But he never let on, not for a minute. He picked up checks, wasted time, slept late. In Los Angeles he was never afraid. So maybe that was why he didn’t tell her. Maybe it was better to keep it that far away, to never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget.

But Sabine would never know for sure. This was one more legacy. Something else to keep watch over.

The field is so flat that she cannot judge its size. It goes on forever and in every direction it is flat. There is no point on which to fix her eyes, just green, a green so tender and delicate it makes her want to bite into it. Sabine is standing in warm water, the new green shoots surrounding her ankles, her feet sinking into a soft mud she cannot see. There has never been so much flatness, so much green.

“Sabine!” Phan says, and waves. In his hands he is carrying a bouquet of Mona Lisa lilies. Their slender leaves reflect the brilliant sun. He walks towards her like a man who knows how to walk through rice. He moves without losing his balance or damaging the plants. His pants are neatly rolled to his knees. They are dry and clean.

Sabine loves him. She cannot remember ever being so happy to see anyone in her life. “I am not alone,” she says. She doesn’t mean to say it aloud, but it makes Phan smile hugely. The air is humid and sweet. Like the water, it seems to be alive.

“I behaved so badly,” he says. He leans over and floats the heavy bouquet beside them in the water and then takes her hands, but she pulls her hands away so that she can hold him in her arms, put her arms around his neck. She can almost smell the sun on his skin as she presses her lips to his ear.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “To think that I could have blamed you for anything. I know you were doing what you thought was best.”

“I should have explained—”

“Sh,” she says. “Don’t think of it.” It is such a strong feeling, the joy of being with Phan, who understands, the joy of not being alone, that for a minute she thinks she is in love with him. In love with the dead gay lover of the dead gay man she was in love with. She laughs.

“What?” Phan asks.

“Just happy.” Sabine steps back to see him. He looks even better now. He is perfect in this field, breaking the line between the green shoots and blue skies. “Where are we?”

“Vietnam,” Phan says proudly. “I was going to come back but I thought, Sabine should really see this.”

“Vietnam,” Sabine says. Who would have thought it could be such a beautiful place? All the times that Sabine had heard about Vietnam, thought about it, no one had mentioned it as beautiful. “I can’t believe it.”

“My father came here from France in 1946. Did I ever tell you that?” Phan takes her arm and walks her down the long wet path through the limitless fields. “He was a contractor. He was supposed to come here for two years and build roads but he stayed and stayed. He married my mother, they had a family. In his soul, my father is Vietnamese. He loves it here.”

“Your father still lives here?” Sabine says, her toes tracing through the soft muck.

Phan laughs. “Good Lord, Father has been dead forever.”

Sabine nods. Clearly condolences are not in order. “When did you leave?”

“My parents sent me to study in Paris in 1965. It was a difficult year. 65. I never came back until now.” He stops and looks out at the landscape. “I had a little white dog,” he says. “The dog had a red leather collar.” When he turns to her there are tears in his eyes and he touches her hair with the very tips of his fingers. “Isn’t it funny, the things we miss the most, the things that really can break our hearts?”

“What was the dog’s name?” she asks.

“Con Chuot. Mouse. My father said I couldn’t take the dog and so he gave me the mouse, a tin mouse to remember my Mouse at home. Do you still have it?”

“Of course,” she says.

“I was very loyal to that mouse,” he tells her. “I took it everywhere with me. All the time I wanted my dog.” He sighs and then smiles. “I’m happy in Vietnam, Sabine. I find it relaxing. We keep saying once things settle down we’re going to spend more time here.”