Stephanie towed him onto her lap, closing her arms around him. “Shhh,” she told him. “Shhh.”
“How did we get stuck with him, Mom?”
“Oh, sometimes people aren’t who you think they are. And sometimes people are exactly who you think they are, but then they go and change on you. It will take you the rest of your life to figure it out, honey.”
“But I’m scared of the rest of my life.”
“Why?”
“What if I turn out like him?”
“You won’t, Micah. You know why? Because you’re going to turn out just like me.” She kissed the crown of his head. “Either me or Fatty Arbuckle, I’m not sure who yet,” and though he did not laugh, she felt him sagging contentedly into her body.
“How did you think your life was going to turn out when you were little?” he asked, sniffling.
This was something he liked to try every so often—making a sudden hairpin turn midway through a conversation to ask her about her childhood. He thought that if he did it quickly enough, without warning, he could surprise her into remembering. “I wish I could tell you, M.,” she said, and she scratched at the back of his neck, twining her fingers through the wispy commas of short brown hair. “Sorry, kid. Maybe next time.”
A few weeks later, not long before the state magic exhibition, Lentini was waiting outside the bicycle shop for her when she delivered Micah for his lesson. He jogged to the curb, rapping playfully on her window, and asked if he could treat the two of them to dinner that night. “In celebration of our act and its finishing touches,” he said.
“Sounds good,” she told him. “I’ll be back at my usual time. Six o’clock,” she said, “ravenously hungry.”
When she drove to the park, she found it almost deserted. She walked across the cushion of pine needles to the bench by the playground. It was late December, and the wind was blasting so hard that she could hear airborne pieces of gravel pinging against the bars of the jungle gym. The mothers and their children had all gone home for the afternoon, and a small group of teenagers, balancing on the seesaws, was laughing and smoking marijuana cigarettes. She decided to pass the hour in the public library across the street, browsing through the catalogue of books and other printed matter. Then, shortly before six, she collected a dress she had dropped off at the dry cleaner’s. When she carried it over the ventilation grille on the sidewalk, the pliofilm bag fluttered and bellied open like a balloon, and she imagined for just a second what it would be like to rise into the air clinging to its hem.
By the time she returned to the studio she was so hungry she could feel it as a swelling tug at the back of her throat. Lentini was waiting with Micah on the stoop for her, and he drove the two of them to Alouette’s, the only French restaurant in town. As soon as they passed through the door, Stephanie caught the mingled scents of bread and coffee and butter, and she heard her stomach complaining audibly. “Are you sure you don’t want to check your coat?” Lentini asked as the maître d’ showed them to their table.
“No. I’m still freezing.”
He shrugged—“It’s your sauna”—and guided her by the elbow into her chair. The table was lit by a white candle in a curved silver dish, and Micah began making impressions in the pool of wax around the base, peeling the crust from his skin as it cooled and tossing it back into the flame. After the waiter had taken their orders, Stephanie said, “So, you guys are ready for the big show?”
“We are,” Lentini said.
“But you won’t tell me what happens?”
“We won’t,” Micah said. “But—” He turned to Mr. Lentini. “Can I ask her?” and Lentini nodded. “We need a volunteer for the final trick, and we were hoping you would let us pick you.”
She asked Lentini, “I don’t have to eat crumbs out of your mustache, do I?”
He smiled. “No, nothing like that. I promise we’ll take good care of you.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s settled, then. I’m your volunteer.” As the waiter delivered their salads, she allowed her eyes to wander through the restaurant—the polished wooden walls that held a tapered reflection of their bodies; the smoke-blue tiles of the clay floor; the pale stars of the candle flames, swaying in unison whenever the kitchen door opened. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I ate in a restaurant like this,” she said. And she couldn’t. She had been on few dates since her divorce—none at all in the past two years—and they had always ended early in the evening, shortly before her son’s bedtime, after a few hours of conversation at a coffeehouse or bar. She subjected each of the men she went out with to a single question, Could this person be a father to Micah?, and they were transformed before her eyes, every one of them, into walking repositories of damage.
“That’s a shame,” Lentini said. His hair was hanging in a tattered line across his forehead, and it looked something like the whisk of oscillating brushes at the automatic carwash. She couldn’t help but find the effect comic (as she found everything he did—though why was that?), but she was touched that he had taken her advice. “I try to go someplace nice at least once a month. But, you know, a magician’s pay. I can’t always manage it.”
“Lentini,” she said. “That’s Italian, isn’t it?”
“Sicilian.” He drank a sip of water. “I’m named after my great-great-grandfather, Francesco Lentini. He immigrated to the United States when he was just a boy. He was a circus performer—a three-legged man, actually—fairly well known in his day.”
Micah looked up from the candle. “No way. You never told me that.” He was shaping the soft wax of the brim into crenellations.
“You never asked.”
“What did he do when he needed to buy shoes?”
“Well, believe it or not, I know the answer to that. He always bought an extra pair. He would give the fourth shoe, the one he didn’t need, to a one-legged friend of his.”
“I don’t believ—ow!” Micah snatched his hand from the candle. “Ow. Dang it. I burned myself.” He plugged his ring finger into his mouth, then pulled it loose and showed it to Stephanie. It had a tiny red mark the size and shape of a wood spider on it. Lentini dipped a corner of his napkin into his water glass, righting it just before it toppled. He pressed the napkin to the burn, and Micah surrendered a groan. “I’ll still be able to perform on Saturday, won’t I?” he asked.
Lentini gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry. It’s not your thumb, and it’s not your index finger, so there’s no real loss of dexterity. You should be fine.”
Stephanie found a Band-Aid in her purse. “Here you go, honey,” she said, and after Micah had taped it around his finger, she asked, “So you’re really not going to tell me what I’ve volunteered for?”
“We’re really not,” said Micah. “It would spoil the surprise. I can only tell you—” But before he could finish, the waiter arrived with their meals, and he lapsed into a grinning silence.
Stephanie had ordered the escargot, Lentini the salmon filet, and Micah the inevitable hamburger from the children’s menu. As she smoothed the napkin over her lap and reached for her plate, Micah took hold of her wrist. He shook his head, then leaned in as if to confide a secret. “What is it, M.? Ready to tell me?” she asked.
“You know those are snails, don’t you?” he said.
Later, when she was finally home from the magic show, the cut on her neck bandaged and the soot washed from her face, she would read about the fire in the newspaper. A trio of Central American acrobats had been invited to perform as the exhibition’s final act, and they were assembling their props behind the curtain when an arc light burst overhead. A spark, or perhaps a fragment of hot glass, touched the ring of flash paper they had prepared, igniting it. The fire ought to have died away then and there, but the safety curtain had been removed for cleaning, replaced with a curtain of untreated cotton, which collected the flame and carried it into the rafters. Live cinders and feathers of ash began raining down over the audience, and within minu
tes the entire auditorium was ablaze, the air weaving and swaying in the heat. The fire inspector attributed the conflagration to “the careless employment of flammables,” and the State Office of Recreational Safety promised to lobby the legislature for the prohibition of flash paper, “the inventor of which,” the newspaper reported, “himself died in such a discharge while drying sheets of the material in his cellar.” Two people were killed and dozens more injured in the blaze. The wooden joists of the Shrine Convention Center rose above the ashes like a blackened rib cage.
But on Saturday afternoon, as she changed into her blouse and skirt, Stephanie was anticipating the show with the same blend of fear and nervous excitement as Micah. She had watched the signs of his restlessness all week, absorbing scraps and pieces of it into herself. He spent the better part of Saturday morning tossing a rubber ball onto the roof while she dusted the recesses of her keyboard with a Q-tip and then cleaned between the tines of her comb with a straight pin and then organized the books on her bookshelf according to the color spectrum. As he muttered to himself in his bedroom, rehearsing the act one last time, she found herself pacing between the stove and the refrigerator, singing a song about a giraffe that she must have learned in Micah’s nursery school days.
A few minutes before they left, she came out snapping a loose thread from her skirt and discovered Micah waiting for her in the living room, paging through a magazine in his magician’s outfit, a tuxedo with tails and a long black cape. He looked up at her. “You’re not going to wear that, are you?”
“I was planning to, Micah.”
He shook his head. “No, no, no,” he insisted. “Wear pants,” and so she went back to the closet and changed into a pair of khakis.
It had been raining lightly, intermittently, for most of the afternoon, and as she drove to the Shrine Convention Center she watched the drops stippling the pavement, a network of shifting white splashes that resembled a swarm of gnats flickering around each other in the sunlight. She found it hard to keep a watch on the traffic. It was as though her center of awareness had traveled in a split line from her brain to her eyes. She would be the perfect audience today, she thought, the ideal mark, easily distracted by flashes of color and light.
She let Micah out beneath the covered drive and then parked the car and walked back inside, carrying the two umbrellas she had brought, one hooked over each arm. The rain was at a lull, with only the barest scattering of drops blowing from the trees, and she did not need to cover herself.
Lentini was squatting precariously in the foyer, straightening Micah’s bow tie. He braced himself every few seconds with his palm. When he noticed her, she said, “This is for you,” and handed him the extra umbrella. It was a mahogany cane umbrella with a thick plaid canopy, and she had knotted a ribbon around the handle. “It’s a good luck umbrella. Guaranteed to last you through even the worst weather.”
He stumbled to his feet, his cape brushing grit from the floorboards. “It’s the perfect present,” he said, his eyes shining with a sidelong light. “And I mean that. Thank you.” He took her hand. “But we have to go backstage now.”
“Okay. I’ll be ready for my moment in the spotlight.”
“We’ll look for you in the audience.” And he bowed to her, prompting Micah to do the same.
After they had left, Stephanie took the back door into the auditorium and selected a seat along the center aisle, two-thirds of the way from the front. The chairs were made of an old, yellowing wood with strips of lacquer curling from the armrests like pencil shavings, and she could feel the bristles scratching against her skin whenever she shifted her posture. Someone had pulled a strand of carpet loose at her feet, and it stretched halfway across the aisle, a zigzagging brown ligament with hanks of white matting at the twists. The other chairs filled slowly around her. Just before the lights dimmed, she felt a rough hand grasping her upper arm and heard a voice say, “Ruth.” She turned to look.
It was the man sitting behind her, his arm extending through the gap between the seats. “Oh my God. I’m sorry.” His face lost its color, and he retrieved his hand. “It’s just . . . from this angle . . . I thought you were someone else. Please excuse me,” he said, and he hid his face behind his program.
This sort of thing happened to her all the time—more often, she suspected, than it did to most people. She would be waiting in line at a restaurant or testing the tomatoes at the grocery store when someone would stop short and call her by the wrong name, mistaking her for some old friend or cousin or ex-lover. Once, on a trip she took to New York City, an older man had caught hold of her sleeve in the lobby of a hotel and asked her if she was somebody named Sheila, or Sally. Even when she told him she wasn’t, his gaze remained peculiarly insistent. He repeated the name a few times (was it Sheila or Sally?), striking hard at it, like a hammer rapping a nail, and when he reached for her cheek she had fled to the elevator. She had seen him walking toward her as the doors closed. There was a haunted look about him, as though he couldn’t quite decide if she was real. This was years ago, on her last vacation with Micah’s father, and when she told him about the incident, he had laughed as though it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. She had not been back to New York since.
She could hear the conversations around her dwindling to whispers as the auditorium fell dark and an overlapping chain of spotlights blazed onto the stage. There were more than thirty performers in the exhibition, and every time one of them finished his act a crackling of applause would fill the air, thousands of palms meeting and parting in delight or polite obligation. Every single seat in the room was taken, and when Stephanie swiveled around to look up the aisle, she saw a clutch of bodies standing against the back wall. Where had all these people come from, she wondered. She saw conferences advertised almost every weekend on the marquees of the local hotels—PINEWOOD LODGE WELCOMES THE REGIONAL SCRABBLE–PLAYERS CON– VENTION . . . GREETINGS FROM BUDGET INN TO THE RETIRED AUTOWORKERS ASSOCIATION—but she had always imagined them as just a few tired bodies gathered around a card table or a cheese tray. Were they always this crowded?
Late in the second act, the curtain drew shakily closed and the emcee announced, “Now, before our final performers, the Acróbatas Puntarenas, we have one last act. Please welcome local magician Frank Lentini and his assistant Micah.” At that, Lentini wheeled a long, shallow cabinet onto the apron, and Micah followed behind him carrying a pedestal. Most of the earlier performers had been true professionals, more than merely capable—there was the man whose clothing changed color each time he turned his back to the audience, and the woman who made her three large collies disappear through a pair of hoops— and Stephanie was worried that Lentini and Micah would embarrass themselves. The only blunders they made, though, were so ridiculous that she was sure they were deliberate.
First Lentini covered the pedestal with a scarf and called upon “the dove, symbol of purity” to appear, but when he whisked the scarf away a pigeon was strutting around there, preening in the white disk of the spotlight. “Marlboro!” Lentini scolded. “How did you get here?” Lentini wandered to the other side of the stage, where he told the audience, “We call him Marlboro because he’s always looking for another light, folks. Micah, will you do the honors?” The pigeon pivoted its head around, nibbling sourly at a ruff of feathers, and Micah draped the scarf back over it. When he pulled it away, the pedestal was empty. Then he said, “Rise,” and tapped the pedestal three times with his wand. To Stephanie’s fascination, it gave three lunging hops across the stage, hovering in midair for a second each time before it landed. Though she looked carefully, she could not see the glint of wires around it, their finely drawn slant through the dust and the light, and she wondered if Lentini had concealed some sort of motor-and-spring arrangement inside it.
When the pedestal had arrived at his feet, he said, “Now let’s see if we can convince our friend the dove to join us,” and he placed his top hat on the stand and struck it with his wand, then reached ins
ide and pulled out an upright cane umbrella, the same one she had given him earlier. “That’s strange,” he said, scratching at his scalp. “I could have sworn I put that dove in there.” He batted his hand around inside the hat and found nothing, but when he opened the umbrella, absentmindedly twirling it over his head, the dove dropped out onto his shoulder. The audience laughed.
Every so often the curtain behind him would give a weak ripple and then bulge forward suddenly—it reminded Stephanie of nothing so much as a swamp releasing bubbles of methane—and she was watching for it to happen again when she heard Lentini saying, “And now for our final illusion, we need a volunteer,” and before she knew it, she was standing next to him on the stage.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked.
“Stephanie. Stephanie Burch.”
“Okay, Stephanie Burch. Are you ready to see what it’s like when one part of you is over here and the other part is waaay over there?” he said, pointing across the stage, and then he put his hand to a long, shallow cabinet, patting its side. “Are you ready, that is, to see yourself cut in two?”
Oh, Lord, she thought, and she had a fleeting vision of herself spilling great cataracts of blood from her waist. But she said, “I guess so,” and Lentini led her to a stool at the head of the cabinet.
Micah was waiting to hold the top half of the lid open for her. “Curl your knees to your chest,” he whispered as he escorted her inside. “You’ll be okay. We’ve got another lady in there.”
She felt her feet pressing up against a ledge as she slid inside, and a pair of hands took her ankles from below, securing them safely behind it. She was surprised by how much space there was around her, a sort of hidden basin that curved around her back, deep enough for her to sink into quite comfortably. When she stuck her head out the end of the cabinet, she saw Lentini hovering over her. The glare from the footlights bleached the tips of his mustache into a glistening white trail. She could have sworn she heard the sound of breaking glass, and then a sizzling rush of air, but when nobody else seemed to notice, she decided she must have been mistaken.
The Truth About Celia Page 13