The Magician's Assistant (29 page)

“The refrigerator, you mean.”

Kitty blinked, startled awake. “He told you about that?”

He had told her plenty. He told her about taxes and headaches and men he was in love with. “He got trapped in an old refrigerator when he was a kid. He was playing and the door shut behind him.”

Kitty folded her lips into her mouth to have the pleasure of biting down on both of them at once. The face she made was old, empty. “No.”

“Oh, Christ.” Sabine put her forehead down on the table. “This is going to be another one of those stories, isn’t it? Parsifal’s life in hell. Why can’t you tell me all of them in one shot? Tell me the worst of it and let me go home.”

“You already heard the worst of it. Guy killed Dad with a bat in the kitchen. Guy went to reform school. Guy left Nebraska. That’s the very worst of it.”

“And the refrigerator? Where does that fit into the picture? How bad on the scale of bad things is this?”

Kitty seemed to mull the question over, to see if there was some sort of rating system. “Our father locked him in the refrigerator. Guy was nine. Eight, nine. He had eaten something, I can’t remember what it was now. Something he wasn’t supposed to eat. Something my father wanted. He put Guy in the refrigerator.”

“Nobody does that. You can’t.”

“Listen, I’m not making this up to provide colorful stories about the past. This is what happened to Guy. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you. I don’t think about these things. I don’t think about them—and now I do. Do you want me to tell you?”

What Sabine wanted was Fairfax. Jews did not lock their children in refrigerators. She wanted her own parents, who were in their yard now, a thousand miles away, watering the azaleas while the rabbit napped at the end of a leash her mother held with two hands. “Your father put him in the refrigerator.” The words came out slowly, carefully. She remembered that she wasn’t angry at Kitty, though just as quickly she could feel herself forgetting.

“My father had good qualities,” Kitty said, “but I can’t remember them anymore. I know there were moments that I loved him but I can’t remember when they were. With him, you could do something nine times in a row and it was fine, and then the tenth time it wasn’t fine. The tenth time he’d kill you for it. He’d kill Guy for it, or my mother. Sometimes me, but not so much at all. I felt bad about that. Who knows what Guy ate, but when my father asked him, just by his voice you knew this was going to be time number ten. There was nothing to say except, ‘What? Yeah, I ate it.’”

“So he opened up the door and stuffed him inside? That’s a big boy, eight or nine.” It was the magician’s voice, confident, controlling. Pick a card. Sabine could feel her hands starting to shake and she sat on them.

“He made Guy take everything out first.” Kitty picked up the deck and began dealing a single hand; one, two, three, four, five, she counted the cards silently out on the table.

“Made him take out the food?”

“The food, the shelves. There wouldn’t have been room for him otherwise. The refrigerator was full and it all went very slow. It took him a long time. He put the food on the counter and on the breakfast table and the floor.” Kitty pointed as if to say, that counter there. “Guy was crying a little and my father was harping at him, ‘Always stuffing your face, always taking what doesn’t belong to you.’ At one point he called him a fat boy, which just made no sense. When he took his shirt off you could see his ribs, for Christ’s sake.”

Parsifal at the beach had taken off his shirt, raised his arms in the Southern California sun, turned in front of Sabine, who was sitting on her towel. “Tell me the truth,” he’d said.

“So we were scared, but not so scared. It was crazy stuff. We thought, Guy and I thought, that he was bluffing. If things took too long he just lost interest. We thought once everything was out, he’d turn around and tell Guy to put it all back in and that would be that. That was the sort of thing he’d do, give you plenty of time to think about how you’d never eat something you weren’t supposed to again.”

“Did you help him take things out?”

“I wasn’t allowed.” Kitty scooped up the cards and tapped them on the table to straighten them out.

“But you were there.”

“I was always there,” Kitty said. “When I was there things didn’t get so out of hand. Things didn’t usually get so out of hand, but this time, I don’t know. Finally all the food was out. He left the things in the shelves on the door and he left the things in the freezer. It was just one of those little freezer boxes at the top that pretty much just hold ice. He told Guy to take out the shelves and out they came. By now we’re sure it’s over. Dad says, ‘Get in,’ and Guy does. I almost laughed, I was thinking, My father has let this go too far and he’s looking stupid now, it hasn’t been a good lesson. Guy made a face at me like, Hell, I’m in the fridge. Then just at that minute when it’s all supposed to be over, Dad shuts the door. Not even a slam, just a real normal click like he’d just gotten himself a beer. It’s one of those big old refrigerators with the bar across the front like a safe and when it’s shut it looks absolutely locked and I started screaming my head off. I think the neighbors must have heard me. Guy told me later that once you’re in there you can’t really hear anything.”

Sabine did not turn to look at the refrigerator behind her. She knew it to be a Whirlpool side-by-side, ice through the door, in toasted almond. She didn’t know the rest of the story, but she knew how it ended. Parsifal got out.

“My father told me to be quiet. He told me to come in the living room with him, to sit still and be quiet. I’m thinking, How long can a person last? How long until he suffocates? I was a kid, kids don’t have any sense about those things. Hell, I don’t even think I’d know now, how long it would take. I didn’t think he could freeze to death, but it would be cold in there. It was summer when this happened, so he was in there in his T-shirt and shorts. My father picked up the paper and started to read. I look back on this now, I think about it as a parent, and there’s no way to understand what happened. He read the paper and I sat there. I sat there and sat there and sat there until suddenly I did this little gulp, like a hiccup, and I realized that I hadn’t been breathing, and I bolted up and ran into the kitchen and let Guy out. He was sitting on the bottom and you could see the prints of his sneakers on the inside of the door shelves where he’d tried to push it open. He’d cracked the inside of the door. I don’t know, maybe he could have stayed in there another six hours. I have no idea. I remember him being perfectly white, but I don’t know if that was from not getting any air or from the cold or just from being so goddamn frightened.”

“What did your father do?”

“Not a thing. He didn’t even look up. I was supposed to let him out. I really think that was the way he had meant for it to go. I told Guy that I’d put the food back, but he was nervous. He thought it was supposed to be his job, and if he didn’t do it he’d wind up back inside. He wiped out the refrigerator, got everything all cleaned up. We threw away anything that looked rotten, and then Guy and I put the shelves back in and then all the food. Everything had gotten sweaty and wet. It was hot in the kitchen. Guy was real shaky but he didn’t say anything. He wiped off the milk, he put back the milk. I don’t remember where my mother was, but when she came home later she thought we’d cleaned out the refrigerator as a surprise.”

“Did you tell her?”

Kitty pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “Much, much later. Whenever I got mad at my mother, I told her everything. Before my father died, we were all a team, me and my mother and Guy. We were together against him. But after Guy was gone and Bertie was born, I blamed it all on my mother. I thought she could have done something to stop it all from happening. I never thought that at the time, but later, once things were quiet and I could think it all through, I wanted to nail her to the wall.”

Terrible things had happened to Phan. Hadn’t he been sent off alone as a child? Hadn’t his parents, his sisters, been killed in Vietnam? Hadn’t he lost everything? Phan had stayed alone in the world until he found Parsifal, and yet his face showed none of that. His face, bright and smooth in the sun as he slept next to the swimming pool, was peaceful. When he came home from work in the evenings there was always something in his pocket for the rabbit, a carrot stick from lunch, a cluster of green grapes. He made elaborate birthday cakes with thin layers of jam in the middle. He ironed Parsifal’s handkerchiefs. But what about at night? Did they hold each other tightly? Did Parsifal whisper in his ear, “My Love, my father put me in the refrigerator and left me there to suffocate. It was so dark and so cold and I heard the electricity hum.” Did Phan then bury his face against Parsifal’s neck and say, “Darling, they killed my mother. They killed the boys who sat next to me in school. They killed even the birds in the trees.” Did they rock one another then? Was there comfort? Did they stay up until dawn, recounting things too unbelievable to say with the lights on, and then decide in the morning to keep it all a secret? Was there always a brave face for Sabine?

For Sabine there was always a brave face. Where had her parents met exactly? Not at the beginning of Israel, but before that. Was it on a train? Was it before that? They came from different corners of Poland, but then all of Poland was swept together. They were not from Poznan and Lublin. They were only from Poland. They were not Polish, they were only Jews. What did they say to each other in bed in Fairfax? What did they remember late at night, their voices dropping to a whisper to spare Sabine? “Darling, do you know what became of your sister?” “My Love, I cannot be reminded by the snow.” Did they speak in that other language, the one Sabine studied but did not learn. Did they lull themselves to sleep with familiar words?

“I have to lie down,” Sabine said, and pushed out of her chair.

“Don’t.” Kitty took one of Sabine’s hands. She pressed it between her own. “Don’t be mad at me. I don’t know how to tell you these things.”

“Not mad,” she said. “I’m very tired.” Sabine walked down the hallway to Guy’s room, Parsifal’s room. She appeared to be pulling Kitty with her, but it was because Kitty had fixed herself to Sabine’s hand.

“You tell me something,” Kitty said, and when Sabine lay down on the bed, Kitty sat down beside her. “That would even it out You tell me about you and Guy taking a trip or doing a show. Tell me about a time when he was happy.” Kitty meant it.

“I can’t now. I will later, I promise, but not now.”

“I need you to.”

Sabine closed her eyes and turned her face away. She hadn’t realized that she was crying until she was lying down. “Let me sleep for a little while.”

Sabine felt Kitty’s feet down near her feet. She felt Kitty’s chin brush her shoulder as she stretched out beside her. “Something very small is all I’m asking for. You can tell me about him laughing at a television show. You can tell me he was happy when the pancakes turned out well. He was crazy about pancakes. Tell me about when things were good.” Her voice went deep inside Sabine’s ear. “It’s only fair.”

And when Sabine remembered, it was all good. Except for when Phan was dying, except for the loss of Phan, there was something to recount in every single day, twenty-two years of good days. Sabine scanned their life and chose at random. “Okay, this was a long time ago.”

“Tell me.” Kitty’s head settled against the pillow of the single bed.

“He found a Savonnerie rug at the Baldwin Park swap meet, twelve feet, five inches, by seventeen feet, four inches, probably 1840. Absolutely mint. It was in a box under a ratty quilt and a couple of crocheted lap blankets. The guy wanted a hundred and fifty dollars for it.” The day was so hot and the smog had clamped down on the San Gabriel Valley like a lid, but Parsifal had insisted they snake their way through every aisle of junk. He said he had a good feeling, there was something out there for him, that nobody went out on such a terrible day and came back empty-handed. “The rug was huge. Parsifal didn’t even unfold it. The guy who sold it kept saying he had planned on cutting it up into a bunch of little rugs, the size people could really use. Parsifal paid him in cash and we picked that thing up and lugged it back to the car just as fast as we could go, which wasn’t very fast. It was the most beautiful rug I ever saw, before or since. He got more than thirty thousand dollars for it. Every time we went to a meet we looked for that guy. Parsifal wanted to give him more money. He was going to do it, but we never found him again.”

“And he was happy.”

In the parking lot at noon in August, hundreds of cars flashing in a flat, hot sea of metal and glass, Parsifal throws back his head and screams, the millions and millions of delicate wool knots clutched to his chest. His fingers strain under the weight of so many flowers, the creamy colors, peach and salmon, the filigrees in the design, the well-sewn hem. He screams and laughs and kisses Sabine, who knows enough about rugs to understand what has happened, that this will change everything. “That was the money he used to start his own store. He’d worked for somebody else until then, but when he found that rug he said he could see his name on the glass. We called all our friends that night. We drank margaritas. We went dancing.”

“It sounds wonderful.”

“It was heaven,” Sabine whispered. She told Parsifal he was the luckiest person she had ever met in her life, not just in this, but in everything. Things came to him from nowhere. He got what he needed without ever asking, just like he had gotten her. She didn’t say it with any sort of bitterness. She was proud of him. She was thrilled by his limitless good fortune. They were in her car, which had air-conditioning and no radio, as opposed to Parsifal’s car, which had AM/FM and a tape deck and was hot as an oven. They passed the gravel pits of Irwindale with the windows rolled up tight. All the way home they sang “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?,” the rug lashed to the roof of the car like a grizzly bear, shot dead and ready to be stuffed and mounted.
I’m going back to find SOME PEACE OF MIND in San Jose.
Sabine meant to tell Kitty that part, how they only knew one verse and still they couldn’t stop themselves.
L.A. is a great big freeway.
That was the part of the story that she loved, but she had worn herself out, all the telling and listening, and before she could finish her point she fell asleep.