The Magician's Assistant (6 page)

At the airport, limousine drivers with dark mustaches and darker glasses held up pieces of paper with names. Sabine wondered if she should have brought a sign that said
FETTERS,
but she imagined they would be easy to spot. They would look confused. They would look like Parsifal. Sabine blotted off her lipstick on the side of her hand and rubbed it into her skin. People poured off the plane. Some were embraced warmly, some passionately; some strode towards the main terminal with great purpose; some consulted the overhead monitors for connecting flights. There seemed to be no end to the number of people coming down the ramp.

“My lord,” a woman said to her. “You’re the assistant.”

She was short, maybe five-foot-two, with a corn-fed roundness. Her gray hair had been recently permed and Sabine could see the shape of the rollers on the top of her head.

“Mrs. Fetters?”

The woman took Sabine’s arm and squeezed hard. There were tears puddling behind her glasses. “On the plane I said to Bertie, ‘How are we going to know it’s her?’ But of course it’s you. I’d know you anywhere. Look, Bertie, it’s the assistant.”

In Bertie Sabine could see the slightest trace of Parsifal, but it had been very nearly scrubbed out of her. She was almost thirty but did not look twenty-five. Her face was pretty but blank. Her hair had also been recently permed and was a tangle of brown curls highlighted in yellow that came halfway down her back. “Nice to meet you,” Bertie said, and shook Sabine’s hand hard.

Mrs. Fetters put her hand up to Sabine’s face as if to touch it but then pulled it back again. “Oh, you’re so pretty. His life must have turned out okay if he had such a pretty wife.” The tears had dammed at the bottom of her glasses but suddenly found free passage out the sides. “I wish I’d known that you were the one he’d married. Did you meet him on Johnny Carson?”

“You know me from Johnny Carson?” Sabine said. People were knocking against them in the race down to baggage claim. A family of Indians walked by and Bertie turned to stare at a woman in a gold-flecked sari.

“Well, sure. I didn’t know you were together, though. We thought maybe they gave people assistants at the show. Everybody we knew said you looked like one of those girls who hand out the Academy Awards.”

“No,” Sabine said, feeling confused. She was trying to take it all in.... Parsifal’s mother. She had on a green wool coat with a line of wooden toggles up the front. She held a rectangular overnight bag in one hand, the kind of tiny suitcase Sabine had taken to slumber parties as a girl. “I’m surprised that you saw that show, that you remember me.”

“Saw it?” Mrs. Fetters said.

“She watches it almost every night,” Bertie said.

“My daughter Kitty got it for me on video. It took forever to track it down, but they found it for her. All you say is one line at the end, you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Carson.’”

“Do I? I don’t remember.”

“Don’t you watch it?” Mrs. Fetters asked. Sabine tried to guide them out of the path of an electric cart coming down the concourse.

“No, we don’t have a copy,” she said, taking the overnight bag from her mother-in-law’s hand. Of all the urgent things there were to talk about,
The Tonight Show
didn’t even make the list. “We should go downstairs.”

“Were you on television all the time?” Bertie asked.

Sabine shook her head and took a few steps towards baggage claim in hopes of getting them to move. “Just that once.”

“Well, I’ll make a copy for you,” Mrs. Fetters said. “You won’t believe how pretty you are.”

The airport engaged the Fetters. They could barely make it three steps without stopping to look at something and usually someone. Every race and nation was fairly represented in the domestic terminal. They stopped and whispered to one another, “Do you think they’re from—?” “Mother, did you see—?” But when they reached the escalator they were silent. They stretched their arms to grip the moving rails on both sides and would not let go when a man in a black suit and a. cellular phone wanted to get past them. It was a long ride down, past the finalists of the junior high school “California in the Future” art contest, tempera paintings of orange trees encased in plastic space bubbles. Sabine did not look back. She was trying to sort through the information. Had Parsifal broken with his family out of boredom? Could this really be his family? She couldn’t make a picture in her head. She saw Bertie’s hand beside her, a pinpoint diamond on her ring finger. She was engaged. Sabine had worn her own ridiculous engagement ring, a four-carat D, flawless, that Parsifal had bought in Africa ten years ago as an investment when someone had told him that diamonds were the way to go. She kept meaning to put it back in the safety deposit box. It looked like a flashlight on her hand.

“I didn’t know they made escalators that long,” Mrs. Fetters said to no one in particular when they got to the bottom. Her face was damp. A man dressed as a priest held a can that said
BOYS’ TOWN
on it, and Bertie stopped and fumbled with the clasp on her purse. Sabine slid a hand under her arm and steered her away.

“He’s not really a priest,” Sabine whispered.

Bertie looked horrified. “What?” She glanced back over her shoulder. In Los Angeles there were no laws against pretending to be something you weren’t. Behind them, twenty Japanese men in dark suits compared their luggage claims. Clearly there had been some mistake.

The wait at the luggage carousel seemed endless. Bags flipped down the silver chute as the crowd pressed forward, everyone ready to be the next winner. No one ever knew what to say while they waited for their bags. “How was your flight?” Sabine asked.

“I couldn’t believe it, mountains and deserts and mountains. It all looked so dead you’d have thought we were flying over the moon. Then all of a sudden we go over one last set of mountains and everything’s green and there are about ten million little houses. Everything’s laid out so neat.” Mrs. Fetters looked at Sabine as if perhaps she had answered the question incorrectly and so tried again. “My ears got a little stopped up, but the stewardess said that was normal. I wasn’t half as scared as I thought I’d be. Do you fly much?”

“Some,” Sabine said.

Mrs. Fetters patted her arm. “Then you know how it is.”

“Here we go,” Bertie said as a red Samsonite hardside made its way towards them. Together they walked out of the terminal and into the rush of traffic and light. Mrs. Fetters made a visor with her hand and looked in one direction and then the other, as if there were someone else she was looking for.

“It’s so warm,” Bertie said, pulling down the zipper of her coat with her free hand.

“It was awfully nice of you to pick us up,” Mrs. Fetters said. “I can tell now it would be pretty confusing coming in by yourself. Have you lived here your whole life?”

Sabine said
yes.
She didn’t see that there was any point in getting into her family history.

She had brought Phan’s car to the airport because it was the biggest. It was also a BMW, which made it the nicest. “Mouse,” Mrs. Fetters said, looking at the license plate. “Is that a nickname?”

Every question, no matter how unimportant, exhausted Sabine. It felt like a turn onto a potentially never-ending off-ramp. “No, it’s a pet. It’s the name of a friend’s pet.”

“A pet mouse?”

“Yes.” Sabine slammed the trunk. She needed some basic parameters. She did not have the slightest idea who these people were. She did not know why she had offered to pick them up. When they got in the car she turned to Mrs. Fetters in the front seat. “Just when was the last time you saw Parsifal?” she said.

“Guy?”

Sabine nodded.

“Two days after his birthday, so February tenth.” Mrs. Fetters looked straight ahead out of the cement parking garage. “Nineteen sixty-nine.”

Sabine did the math in her head. “You haven’t seen him since he was seventeen?” For some reason she had thought that maybe Parsifal had sneaked away at some point and gone for a visit, at least one visit.

“Eighteen,” Bertie said from the backseat. “It was his eighteenth birthday.”

“And I saw him on television,” Mrs. Fetters added in a sad voice. They sat quietly with that information, the car idling in reverse. “I’d like to go right to the cemetery. If that’s okay with you.”

Sabine pulled out. She would take them to the cemetery. She would take them to the hotel. And then she would get these people the hell out of her car.

Los Angeles International Airport was a pilgrimage, a country that was farther away than anyplace you could fly to. They exited and made their way down Sepulveda, past the dried-out patches of grass along the sidewalk and fast-food restaurants that lined the way to the 105 east. With three in the car they could forgo the light and ease out into the diamond lane, where they sped along past a sea of traffic waiting anxiously to get out of the city. Angelenos were loners in their cars. That was the point of living in the city, to have a car and drive alone. They got onto the Harbor Freeway north. They passed the Coliseum (“Look at that,” Mrs. Fetters said) and the University of Southern California; went through downtown, where they had to crane their necks backwards to see the housing of the criminal justice system. Sabine stayed left through the bifurcation, moving smoothly towards Pasadena and the series of tunnels where murals marked Latino pride and African-American pride and the pride of a washed-up Anglo movie star turned boxer, his fists wrapped in tape and poised beneath his chin. Sooner or later it all gave way to graffiti: some twisting, ancient alphabet legible only to the tribe. The senseless letters arched and turned, their colors changing with mile markers. They took the Harbor to the Pasadena to the Golden State Freeway, north towards Sacramento, though no one ever went that far. The median swelled with deadly poisonous oleander bushes. Sabine went to the Glendale Freeway and then took the first off-ramp on San Fernando Road, which she took to Glendale Avenue, which left them, when all was said and done, at the towering wrought-iron gates of Forest Lawn Memorial Park,
UNDERTAKING, CEMETERY, CREMATORY, MAUSOLEUM, FLOWER SHOP. ONE CALL MAKES ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS,
the sign Said.

“Oh,” Bertie whispered.

In the fountain, bronze frogs spit water onto the legs of bronze cranes, which spit water straight into the sky. Real ducks and one adult swan paddled serenely, doing their job. Forest Lawn was Mecca for the famous dead, the wealthy dead, the powerful dead. They were buried beneath the tight grass or in their beautiful sarcophagi. George Burns was now filed away beside his beloved wife in a locked mausoleum drawer. All of the headstones were laid down flat, which the cemetery claimed gave a pleasing vista but in fact just made the hills easy to mow. Tourists ate picnics on the lawn. Lovers kissed. The devout went down on their knees at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. There was politics in where you were buried, under trees or near water. The cheap seats were beaten by the sun or sat too close to the edge of the drive. Phan and Parsifal had decided on the best, a center courtyard behind an eight-foot brick wall with locked bronze doors that made casual viewing impossible. When they told Sabine, they were practically giddy—twin plots! Who would have thought there would still be two left? They reeled through the living room, arms around each other’s waists, laughing.

“Forest Lawn?” she had said.

“It’s so beautiful,” Phan said. He had spent twenty years in this country and still cynicism eluded him.

“It’s so crass,” Sabine said.

“This is Glendale Forest Lawn,” Parsifal said. “That’s the original of the five. It’s so-o-o much nicer than Hollywood Hills. The shade is stunning.”

“Glendale isn’t even close.” They were moving too far away. “You don’t want to go there.”

“It’s Los Angeles,” Parsifal said. “This is our city. If you truly love Los Angeles, you want to be buried in Forest Lawn.” He leaned back into the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. “We can afford it, we’re doing it.”

Sabine decided to drop it. Who was she, after all, to say where another person should be buried?

After dinner Phan found her alone by the swimming pool. He sat down beside her. The night sky was a dark plum color and in the distance it glowed from the streetlights. “I bought three,” he said.

“Three what?”

“Three plots.” His voice was gentle, always asking a question. It grew softer every day he was sick. Phan’s hair, so black and beautifully thick, had turned gray in a month and he wore it cut close to his scalp now. “We should all be together. That is the truth, the three of us are family. I don’t want you to be alone.”

Sabine kept her eyes down. Through the generosity of the offer she saw that she was alone. Even in death she would be the third party, along for the ride.

It got darker every minute they waited. The birds were almost quiet. Phan patted her hand. “It is a very difficult thing to discuss. I imagine that when we are gone your life will only be beginning. You could marry, have a child still. You have so far to go before you’ll know how things will end. So this plot is only insurance. It says that Parsifal and I love you always, that we want you with us; and if you don’t come, it will always mean the same thing. It will stay for you.”

Sabine nodded, her eyes filling with tears. Thoughts of their deaths, her life alone, an amendment to twin plots, overwhelmed her. Though she and Phan had very few moments when they could be close out of a true fondness for one another, instead of their mutual fondness for Parsifal, she dipped her head down to his shoulder.

“I can’t imagine this,” Mrs. Fetters said, looking out over the rolling hills of the cemetery, dotted with the occasional winged angel, marble obelisk, Doric columns. “I’m looking at it hard as I can and I can’t imagine it. California and Nebraska shouldn’t even be in the same country. Do you think there’s someplace I could buy flowers?” Her voice had an almost pleading sound to it. “I don’t want to go without bringing something.”

“Of course,” Sabine said.

“I appreciate your being so patient with me.” She touched her hand to the window. They passed a statue of the Virgin, her bare feet balanced delicately on top of a globe. “Bertie, do you see how beautiful it is?”