The Magician's Assistant (30 page)

***

“Even when Paris is horrible, it’s fabulous,” Phan whispers into the back of her neck. He is behind her on the Pont Alexandre III, the most beautiful bridge in Paris, and when she turns he kisses her, first on both cheeks and then, quickly, on her lips. “Continental and American. Beautiful Sabine, look at you. Maybe prairie living agrees with you after all.”

“It’s killing me,” she says, and wraps her arms around his waist, feels the soft cashmere of his coat with her bare fingers. She is not surprised to see him. She is not surprised that he is there or that she is there. Paris does not surprise her. She knows the heavy statues on either end of Pont Alexandre III, the lights that look like candles at night. It is a city that Parsifal loved. It seemed like every time they left the country they managed to work in Paris. They had their rituals, la Pomme de Pain for bread, Les Pyrénées for café au lait, a Mont Blanc at Angelina’s when they were feeling reckless. Sabine knows which evenings the Musée D’Orsay isn’t crowded. She knows the hidden sale racks at Au Bon Marché. There is nothing left to surprise Sabine.

“Paris is the perfect antidote for Nebraska. I come here whenever I’ve been spending too much time in Alliance, even if it’s just for a minute. They balance each other out. One probably couldn’t exist without the other.”

“Paris would survive quite nicely without Nebraska.” Together they lean against the railing and stare down into the Seine, which is gray and sluggish in the cold afternoon, and even then it is beautiful. The bare trees and the iron lampposts and the grates that cover the windows, everything that should not be beautiful is that thing exactly.

“I thought about taking you some place where the weather was better.”

“The weather is better here,” Sabine says. The women wear their dark hair pulled back. They wear fur coats or fur collars on dark wool coats. Their lips are smooth and red. They have never gone to sleep and dreamed that they were in Nebraska.

“If you really stretch, you can almost see where I used to work.” Phan points far down the west bank, past so many gray palaces or annexes to palaces. “I did very good work. They were scandalized, these old French women, giving a sewing job to a boy. A boy touching their bridal gowns. It helped that I was Vietnamese. It made me seem more like a girl to them.”

“How did you ever get the job?” The air always smelled of perfume. It smelled of the beautiful women who passed them.

“I said I would work three days for free, all handwork, and then I would go if they wanted me to go. I was so terrified, sitting in the back of that store, all those women watching me. I never spoke to anyone there. They didn’t want me, but they couldn’t resist either. The French will always take something for free. At the end of the three days, they needed me.”

Sabine thinks of Phan coming home from eight-hour meetings at Microsoft and getting down on his knees to pin up the hem of her skirt. He had her stand on a wooden footstool. He did not ask her to turn, but crawled in a circle around her, his mouth full of pins. “Who taught you to sew?”

“My mother, my grandmother, my aunts. We all sewed. They wanted to keep me close, with them, all the time. Children weren’t out roaming the streets then in Vietnam. The women sewed to pass the time and then they let me sew. My mother never knew what she was giving me, a means of taking care of myself, paying my way later on when the money ran out. Everyone needs to have something that he knows how to do, something that can support him.”

“Did you tell Parsifal?”

“That I could sew? I sewed for him all the time.”

The couple who is walking towards them stops and kisses without ever looking out at the water. He cups the back of her head in his hand. For a minute Sabine wonders if she and Phan look like lovers, the way they are pressed together on the bridge, but then she remembers that he is dead and she is asleep in America. She remembers and then she puts it out of her mind. “Did you tell him about living here? I know that he knew, but did you talk about it? Did you tell him how you felt, not hearing from your parents anymore, being alone, having to go to work? Did you talk about the things you were afraid of then?”

Phan runs his thumb back and forth across his lower lip. “It’s so hard for me to remember. I’m sure I told him most of it. I know there was nothing I meant to keep from him, but did I tell him about those days in particular? Did I tell him about sewing seed pearls onto the train of a gown for ten days straight, the bride who wanted tiny bumblebees made out of seed pearls all around her hem? My stitches were so even that the woman who owned the shop said she could have worn her dress inside-out and still have had the most elegant gown in France, and I said she couldn’t because then all those little bees would have stung her. It was the only time I ever made a joke in the three years I worked there. Maybe I didn’t tell him that. It seems like there wasn’t ever time to talk about the past. Those were such good days, when we were all together, but everything happened in a rush. When I think back on it now, I want to find a way to slow things down. I have so many memories of leaving the house. It seems like I was always walking away. We went out to dinner, we drank by the pool, we went to work, saw friends. Now I wish we had always stayed inside. We were so in love with each other, we were so relieved that the past was behind us, I don’t think we wanted to talk about it.”

“I used to think he told me everything,” Sabine says, even though it is not her lover she is speaking of. It is her husband, her friend.

“You were his life. There was no one he trusted more than you, but no one tells anyone everything.” Phan puts his arm around her and together they watch the river of tourists snaking its way towards the Louvre. “There isn’t enough time.”

“Kitty tells me,” Sabine says. “She’s trying to tell me what she remembers. It’s hard for her, too. She does it because I ask her.”

“I like Kitty. I like her face.”

“It’s Parsifal’s face,” Sabine tells him. “At first you can’t even see her, she looks so much like him.” As she says this Sabine looks up and sees Kitty walking towards them over the bridge. She is wearing a long dark coat and her hair is pulled away from her face. Her hands are buried in a white muff. Sabine stands up straight and shades her eyes with her hand, even though the day is overcast. For a second it is clearly Kitty, and then she folds into the crowd again. Sabine knows Kitty has never been to Paris before, that she may be lost or confused. “Phan.” She points as if she has spotted a crime or a rare bird. “Look.”

Phan looks and then he smiles. He stands behind Sabine and wraps his arms around her. He puts his face against her hair, whispers in her ear. “
Sabine, regard. Qui est-ce?
”

And she does. It is easier and easier, because with every second there is a step and they are closer and closer together. It isn’t Kitty at all. That is not a muff but a rabbit. She breaks from Phan, whose arms bloom open to let her go. She runs and runs through the crowds of beautiful men and women who are walking towards her holding hands. He is beautiful, as beautiful as he was that first night in the Magic Hat, as beautiful as he was on Johnny Carson. Good health has made him young again. Sabine’s crying has started and it blurs her vision, but it doesn’t matter because he is coming towards her as well. He is with her. He is catching her, holding her, as she cries and cries against his chest. It is overwhelming to feel such relief, the abrupt end of pain. This is everything she has wanted, this instant, the sound of his heart beneath his sweater.

“I’m so sorry,” Parsifal says, his voice warm and kind and completely his own, his fingers lacing into her hair. He has put the rabbit down and it waits at his feet. Bosco, a rabbit from so many years ago. It has a brown spot between its ears like a toupee.

She shakes her head no, buries her head against him. She wants to crawl into his chest, to live inside him, to find a hold from which they can never be separated.

“I’ve put you through so much,” he says. “Sabine, Sabine, I should have told you everything. I wanted—”

The bedroom door closed, making a heavy click. At the click, she opened her eyes.

“They’re asleep,” a voice called down the hall, a voice that should have been quieter since she was sleeping. How’s voice?

Sabine closed her eyes and tried to slip back. She had been dreaming, it had left a taste in her mouth. Her pillow was damp from crying. She wanted not to remember but to sleep, to be inside again. Where was she now? Nebraska. Parsifal’s room. This should be the dream. The place she had been a minute ago was more familiar. She dug herself into the pillow and took the regular breaths of sleep, but there was no going back. Bit by bit the real world surrounded her. Dot and Bertie were home now, and the boys? She could hear their faint noise down the hall. Dot was laughing. They would wonder
what she was doing sleeping in the middle of the day. Sabine felt guilty whenever she was caught napping. Not like Parsifal, who flaunted his naps, stretched out over the sofa in the middle of the day, the ringer on the phone turned off in anticipation of a long voyage. Sabine shifted her weight slightly, rolled forward on her hip, and that was when she noticed the warm breathing on the back of her neck, the weight of an arm across her waist. She was in Parsifal’s bed. She had fallen asleep. Kitty had been telling a story, another horrible story. Kitty was in the twin bed, both of them on their sides, Sabine facing the window, Kitty facing Sabine. Of course she could hear her now, the nearly undetectable sounds another person makes when she is at her quietest. She could feel the warmth on her back, warm enough to fall asleep without a blanket. Though she would have been embarrassed if Kitty was awake, for this one minute she was grateful for the luxury of having someone to lie next to. Sabine tried to remember the last time she had slept with another person. She had lain down with Parsifal in the weeks after Phan had died. She had held him when he wanted to be held, but she had never fallen asleep. When she was a child there had been nothing better than sleeping in her parents’ bed. They allowed it in cases of thunderstorms, nightmares, and mild earthquakes that did not require them to stand underneath doorways. But when was the last time? In all the nights that came to mind she was alone. It must have been the architect, the one who had the sailboat. She had stayed the night because he always wanted to cook her dinner. He never managed to get anything on the table until ten o’clock, so that by the time they had made love she was too tired to drive herself home. He planned it that way. He wanted her to fall asleep, to spend the whole night—his sheets and blankets, the glass of water he left for her on the windowsill above the bed just in case she should wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. A few times Sabine went along, but there was something wrong about it even as there was something nice. Sleeping together, she believed, was about love, which was what she knew the architect wanted. Which she knew she did not want with him. In the morning he squeezed fresh juice for her breakfast, wanted to brush his teeth while she was in the shower.

Kitty stirred, pressed her forehead against the back of Sabine’s neck, moved her knees closer to Sabine’s knees. “I fell asleep,” Kitty said, her voice thick.

“Kitty,” Sabine whispered.

Kitty pulled back and then raised up on her elbow. “Oh, my,” she said slowly. “This is a surprise.” She sat up and ran her fingers hard through her hair. “I don’t usually fell asleep like that. I must have been dead tired. It must have been all the talking. We wore ourselves out.”

“They’re home. I heard them.”

“Who?”

“Dot, Bertie. I think the boys.”

Kitty stood up and stretched. Her shirt had slipped out of her jeans and showed a thin strip of white stomach. “I guess I’d better go on out there, see if anybody needs mothering.”

Sabine nodded but she did not get up right away. Who would have thought there could be so much room in a single bed? Room enough to fell asleep with someone and forget that they were there.

“We are too skinny,” Kitty said, as if she had been thinking the same thing. She slapped her own stomach. “The two of us sleeping in that little bed.”

Sabine got up and followed Kitty down the hall without her shoes. She felt stupid, stupid from the sleep and stupid from the dream, which she thought had been good even though she had been crying. Mainly she felt stupid trailing behind Kitty like a silent sheep when she wanted to touch her arm and tell her something, thank you or that they were friends now, absolutely. They had been alone all afternoon. They had gone out and told secrets. They had fallen asleep. Shouldn’t there be a moment when they whispered something to each other instead of simply walking single file into the kitchen’s throng?

“There are my girls,” Dot said. “Sleeping in the middle of the day.”

“It did me a world of good,” Kitty said, tucking her shirt down. “Is there coffee made?”

“Two minutes.” The television was playing in the other room. The theme to
Headline News
was their background music.

“Don’t,” Kitty said. “Not if there isn’t some.”

Dot waved her off and picked up the percolator. Who still used a percolator? In Phan’s house on Oriole there was a cappuccino machine and an espresso machine, a Melitta, a plunger, and a two-potted Mister Coffee for dinner parties so that they could make regular and decaf at the same time. Parsifal kept the beans in the freezer. “I want a cup.”

How and Guy sat at the table. They seemed to be having a peaceful moment, reading two separate pages from the sports section, eating toasted cheese sandwiches. As much as they hated one another, they seemed to be bound at the waist by a three-foot invisible rope. They had finished exactly half of their sandwiches, and the two glasses of milk that sat beside their respective plates were at suspiciously similar levels.

“The Lakers are dead,” Guy said in a disgusted voice. “They should have their ball taken away.”

“Everything go okay at school?” Kitty asked. She leaned over and pushed back a lank piece of hair that blocked Guy’s left eye.