We Had It So Good (21 page)

Max was so absorbed in the practice of magic, alone in his room with the door locked, that he rarely bothered masturbating. It seemed a waste of time to do that with his hands, and he was too afraid of injuring them. His highs and lows rocked between the sense of terror and shame if a trick went wrong and the exhilarating power of its working.

He had been promised that the dining room table would be pushed back against the wall and two rows of chairs laid out. It hadn't happened. He had come down, on cue at 2:45, and they were bickering.

“It's time for my show,” he said. “Everyone has got to go back into the dining room.”

“You,” Stephen said to Grace. “The only sound I want to hear from you is your fucking hands clapping.”

The guests rearranged the furniture to make an intimate little nightclub in the broad daylight of a summer Saturday afternoon. They sat down in chairs and waited for the children's entertainment. Max entered and smiled. It was an expression of vulpine cunning, the trickster's smile of fake sincerity.

He understood at once that this was his first failure, he had not pulled off what he was hoping for, he had failed to relax them, instead they were startled.

Ivan took up his position by the mantelpiece with his video camera. The next day Stephen and Andrea would play the tape of
the performance over and over again until they relinquished it to their son to study his mistakes.

“He's doing what is logically impossible,” Stephen said, “you know that it's impossible yet it has just happened. So it has to be based on lies, but it's more than that because the brain is colluding with the lying, it seems to be wired to
be
deceived, this has to be the reason, you don't seem to be able to force yourself to look the way that's not intended.”

He had tried playing the video back in slow motion, then had taken it into work and played it back on a professional machine, but he realized Ivan's own eye had followed the deceit, he had not filmed the place where the deception was happening. Max said nothing. He did not tell his father that a flash of light on a coin makes the viewer believe that it is in the place where it is not. His father was very stupid sometimes.

Stephen would drive himself crazy wondering how each trick was done, ticking off all the possibilities; one thing that would never occur to him was that Max had gone to Ivan and Simone's house three weeks earlier, and proposed to Simone, the television soap actress, that she play the part of his stooge. And she had giggled and accepted. Of course she would. So when he asked someone to come forward and take a card and he had said, “Lovely lady with the golden hair, what about you?” and she had laughed and first shook her head, and then graciously agreed, they had already practiced the trick together twice a week until they had perfected it. And they had kept it a secret from Ivan. She didn't tell him until they were walking back home to Gibson Square across Upper Street and Ivan said he wouldn't have thought the kid had had it in him, he seemed like such a scared mouse, and they agreed they would not tell his parents.

Max understood implicitly that if anyone knew how his tricks were done, they would be crushed with disappointment. Even the most hard-boiled wanted it to be magic, no one likes to be deceived.
Magic, he later said, was a hedge against cynicism, it gave you the sense of wonder that is to be found in God and science.

Offstage, he was very good at staying silent, of vaguely evading questions about how David Blaine could take a watch from a passerby on the street and seemingly pass it through the melting window of a shopfront and then point to it behind the re-formed glass, sitting in the display of merchandise. He knew the principles of how it was done. One needed only to think logically and you would soon exhaust all the possibilities. But all he would say was, “Yes, David Blaine is a very good street magician and he's meticulous with his preparation, but he has a very strong personality and a lot of his work depends on that.”

Andrea, watching the video, was stunned. She had seen her son put on a costume, another self, a little joking mannequin with a patter. He had paid Simone a compliment about her golden hair before stroking her velvet Alice band and producing a scarlet feather from it. He seemed to be wearing another person, and it was so obvious to her that this was not his true self that she felt frightened that he could admit a being so alien into his body. And after he had taken his bow he seemed to peel off the public boy and revert to the quiet child he had been most of his life. And the longer she watched, the more she realized that
he craved an audience.
He wanted and enjoyed the attention. Because she had not given him enough? That could be the only explanation.

She had taken him every week to magic club because she had thought that it would end his solitary life, that he would be with others and learn social skills, but all that had happened was that he had learned how to behave as if he knew how to socialize. Suppose they took the books and videos away from him, with the sets of cards and the cup and balls, and the boxes with the false backs? What would happen to him then, would he implode back into silence?

Max returned to his room after the show feeling as if he had just
had an orgasm. The applause in the dining room, the tricks, which had all worked, the compliance of Simone, who had done exactly as he had told her, and had beautifully acted the part, it all felt explosively climactic and he had to lie down on the bed, exhausted, before he could remove his clothes and put away the concealed cards and other pieces of his apparatus. He slept for a few minutes, and dreamed. He dreamed of Simone and her velvet hairband and the smell of her scent, and awoke wet.

It had been a glorious day. For his birthday he would ask for the vanishing ketchup bottle trick. It was the one he most wanted to do, to make a bulky object disappear. One day, when he was older, he would learn to disappear himself.

Behind the wall he heard his sister moving about heavily. She was in distress, he thought. He got out of bed and knocked on her door but she did not respond. He knocked again. It was like being him when he could not hear, but she could hear.

“Marianne,” he said. “I want to show you a trick.”

She opened the door.

“What trick?”

He was holding one of Grace's pieces of cloth, it was navy blue. He had gone into her room and taken it when she was downstairs in the kitchen.

“I'm going to make this vanish,” he said.

She knew he had never made anything so large disappear, so she sat patiently on the bed, her arms folded, watching.

“I need to open the window.”

“Go on.”

He pulled up the sash of the lower pane.

“Watch.”

He dropped the cloth out into the garden.

“See,” he said, closing the window, “she's gone.”

H
e experienced such dread at the idea of turning fifty. It was all so extraordinarily surprising that he should be older now than his father was when he, Stephen, had set off for England on the SS
United States
. So unwelcome and unbelievable that he turned down the party, the restaurant meal, the romantic weekend in Paris or Venice, even the gift to himself of a new car, he fancied a Saab. He wished to extract from himself, by violence if necessary, his
fiftyness
. He understood that he was more than halfway done with his life, unless he lived to be a hundred, but it was more likely to be eighty, and the next thirty years would pass in a flash. The final decade would be full of ill health and dimming eyesight or hearing, he would be sitting in a chair watching TV instead of making TV.

At fifty Jimi Hendrix had been dead for twenty-two years, Jim Morrison for twenty, Elvis for only eight. It was romantic to die young, but not a fate Stephen had wished for himself. He wanted to stay young forever. He had once heard his mother say, looking in the mirror at her lined face and the sagging jowls, “But I'm only twenty-two!” There were photographs of his mother looking impossibly young, but dressed in the styles of wartime. Her youth did not count. His parents' generation had been adults all their lives, they had had the Depression and the war and responsibilities. They had been born into middle age.

How can I be fifty, he asked himself, when I only just began? The kid who had tried on Marilyn Monroe's champagne mink in the warehouse felt closer to him than the man in the mirror with the pepper-and-salt hair, the emerging widow's peak, the brown spots on the backs of his hands and the hairs that had started to grow from his nostrils. His feet hurt when he walked too far. He had developed a gastric intolerance to overspiced foods. If he wasn't careful with his diet he was prone to constipation. When he looked into the mirror he was taken aback by the absence of his hippie beard and bush of Jew-fro. He was twenty-three and sailing across the Atlantic on the SS
United States,
experiencing the romance of the sea, having already slept with a girl in Naples and left her by accident his UCLA library card. He was sharing the napkin of
petits fours
in his cabin with Bill Clinton, Clinton of Univ, currently president of
the
United States, and a girl whose name he could no longer remember. He had written to Clinton to offer his congratulations on his election, and reminding him of the passage over, but had received a form reply from one of his aides. He doubted that Clinton had ever seen the letter. It was one thing to be fifty and running America, a job fitted
only
for adults, another still to be the boy burning inside with ambition thwarted, and longings for things which could not be.

Andrea was tired of listening to his neuroses about turning fifty. What concerned him so deeply? Was he facing menopause, as she would in a couple of years? No. It was just a word, a little F word, it was meaningless, he should get over himself. But he was the first of his crowd to turn that corner, what did they know?

Christmas in Islington. Andrea lit candles and put them in the windows, she decorated a tree with lights and baubles, they ate food she would not have allowed into the house at other times of the year, and the children walked past the churches and wondered what
people were
doing
going in there, to those cold naves and marble altars with plastic Jesuses lying in wicker cribs.

On New Year's Eve there were parties all along the street, you ran from one to another. When they first began, the young adults came bringing their babies, then their children, who ran ceaselessly up and down the carpeted stairs all evening. The guests were neighbors, they were parents who had met at the school gates, and the infants had turned eventually into sullen teenagers, smoking cigarettes secretly in the garden until they went to university and returned in the vacations. Consenting to look in “for a few minutes” at these obligatory neighborhood gatherings, yet not managing to leave until late when they had filled up on free food and alcohol and the boldest had scored some dope from Ivan, who was childless, glamorous, rich and brushed off the protests of their mothers and fathers.

You dressed up, you drank champagne, some of the hosts hired young people dressed in black to open the door and take the coats and serve the wine and canapés. At the far end of the garden a few of the men, and women shivering in evening gowns, ventured down to the fish pond to smoke a joint.

Fairy lights hung from the black trees. A line of frost along the fence, and their feet sliding on the wet grass around the pond with its cold carp.

A summerhouse with Oriental cushions to recline on was lit with lanterns, and candles guided the path back to the house, every window ablaze with chandeliers, Christmas trees, fairy lights and only at the top, where the au pair had a whole floor in what had been the Victorian maids' quarters, were the curtains drawn and dark. They had started in Highgate twenty-five years ago, going to parties, and now they were in tuxedos and the women in gowns. So he had been right, it had gone on being parties, but no one here was going to walk home in the dawn and make out on Marx's tomb.

Andrea was somewhere in the house talking to her friends,
absorbed in preventing herself from touching the tray of canapés that circulated through the house. And this was it, this was where it had all been leading to, this lightheaded feeling of pleasure and too much champagne and the stars.

Sitting in the summerhouse, stoned, nearly fifty, loosening his bow tie, Stephen accepted the company of a woman who came and sat down next to him, a cashmere shawl around her white shoulders.

Mary Bright, tall, fashionably dressed, who said, “We've met before, a long time ago, at Oxford.”

She had once walked with her boyfriend down the Woodstock Road to Ivan's flat to score some acid, and Stephen had been sitting on the floor rolling a joint, the legendary chemist who made Mister Button.

“And did you take it?” he asked, unable to remember her but impressed by the glossiness of her appearance, the high heels, the short skirt revealing the slender legs, the waist belted in patent leather and the smooth face.

“Not me. I was far too nervous. I just wanted to meet you.”

“Meet
me
?”

“Yes. Because Mike said he was sure you were CIA.”

“Why would he think that?”

“Well, you know, he said what else would you be doing in Oxford?”

“But that's absurd. Bill Clinton was there at the same time, we were all Rhodes Scholars, not spooks.”

“Yes, I realize that now, but we thought many more
absurd
things in those days, didn't we?”

“Very true.”

“Absurdity, it feels so retro now. We live in an age of utilitarian common sense.”

“We do?”

“It certainly feels that way. To me.”

“What were you studying?”

“Law.”

“And did you become a lawyer?”

“Yes, I did, and still am.”