The Rules of Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  She didn’t answer. Perhaps guests nearby had complained. She forced herself to be quiet. But as it turned out, she had left the door unlocked and someone came into the room.

  “Are you all right, miss?”

  It was the bellman. Jet didn’t answer, so the bellman pulled up a chair and sat down. He was young and had a worried expression.

  “When people check in without luggage you never know what they’re going to do,” he said. “And then I heard you crying. I put two and two together.”

  “I’m fine,” Jet managed to say. “Please go.”

  “You’re not going to kill yourself or anything like that?”

  Jet shook her head. It was safer not to speak.

  “Because I would feel responsible. I would be the last person to have seen you. That would mean that I forever would carry this moment around, and think of what I could have done to stop you. My life would probably be ruined. I’d get off track and start to drink and I’d drop out of school and after a while this place would fire me, because everyone would blame me, and worst of all, I’d blame myself.”

  Jet began sobbing anew. She turned away from him. There had been a plan and he was ruining it. She felt the bed sink as he lay down beside her.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. He stroked her hair. “I can get you room service.”

  In spite of herself, Jet laughed. “Room service? Why would that help?”

  “The room service is great,” he protested. “You shouldn’t pass it up.”

  Jet turned to face him. They lay side by side looking into each other’s eyes. His were very dark, flecked with gold. He told her his name was Rafael and he was taking night classes at Hunter College. She told him she had lost the man she loved and that she no longer believed in love and wanted nothing to do with it. He told her he planned never to marry and thought love was probably a foolish endeavor. He had seen what had happened to his mother, who had raised three children without any help, and who worked two jobs, all due to love, while his father went on and married twice more and had other families and never looked back. Jet had found her perfect bitter companion. She felt at ease in his presence.

  “What do they have here for room service?” Jet asked.

  “Everything. You name it, they’ve got it.”

  She wanted roast chicken, string beans, and a hot fudge sundae.

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Rafael said. “Maybe twenty.”

  She fell asleep while he was gone and she dreamed of the Angel of the Waters at the Bethesda Fountain. The angel arose and was free from the shackles of metal and stone. She put out her hand and stopped time, and everything in Manhattan was motionless, except for the swirling stars above the city. It was then Jet knew what she wanted. To go back to that day and relive it.

  When Jet woke, Rafael had returned with a tray that he’d arranged for them. He brought enough for two. They ate together, except for the sundae, which Jet alone devoured. He’d been right, the room service was fabulous.

  “Are you going to get fired?” she asked.

  “No, my uncle is the head bellman.”

  “I don’t want your life to be ruined. I would feel bad if you did get in trouble.”

  “Trouble’s actually my middle name,” he told her. “Rafael Trouble Correa.”

  They both laughed. Then Jet looked serious. She got up her nerve.

  “What if I wanted you to be him?” she asked.

  “The dead man?”

  “And we would never see each other again and it would have nothing to do with love. You would just be him once.”

  Rafael thought this over. He had had many strange requests working in the hotel. People wanted privacy or they wanted women or they wanted drugs or drink. He always said he couldn’t help them, because that was what his uncle, who’d hired him in the first place so he could put himself through school, had said to do. This, however, was different.

  “I think I’d have to be myself. I can’t be a dead man.”

  They had begun to drink the whiskey in the minibar. There were several varieties, all excellent. They’d had quite a few.

  “You’ll be him to me,” Jet said. “That’s what’s important. I don’t want to mislead you.”

  Rafael nodded. “I understand. Can you at least tell me his name?”

  “Levi.”

  “From the Bible.” That seemed to make him feel better about the situation. “Was he a good man?”

  “He planned to go to Yale,” Jet said. “Divinity School.”

  Rafael got up and went to lock the door. When he came back he said he could wait in the hall vestibule while she undressed and got into bed. He felt as though he had wandered into a dream, and sometimes in a dream you just follow the path you’re given without asking too many questions. For once you do, the dream is over.

  “That’s not the way it would happen,” Jet told him.

  So he sat on the bed beside her and kissed her and they kissed for a very long time. This was the way it would have begun. At first she thought she would cry again, but then Jet kept her eyes closed and the bellman was Levi to her. She said Levi’s name. Rafael might have been offended, but inside he pitied the dead man for all he had missed out on. He unbuttoned Jet’s blouse and undressed her gently, just as Levi would have. He had a condom in his wallet, though he hadn’t expected to use it today. Jet kept her eyes closed. When Rafael touched her he expected her to be cold, but she wasn’t. She was hot under his touch.

  “I want you to look at me,” he told her. When she did he said, “I don’t want to be the dead man.” Jet turned away and began to cry, but he insisted. “We can’t pretend. We’re both alive. We have to do this like living people. Otherwise I wouldn’t feel right.”

  She really looked at him. He was a handsome young man who was worried about her even though he didn’t know her. She kept her eyes open as he made love to her. She was supposed to have had her first time with Levi, but instead she was here in a bed with a stranger. They could hear traffic on Fifth Avenue. They could hear the wind in the trees. When she embraced him he was himself, and that was fine.

  “Is this one of these things where I have to be responsible for you for my whole life now?” Rafael asked. “Like when you save someone from death, and then you’re their angel, and you can’t have any peace until you know they’re all right.”

  “I am all right,” Jet said.

  “Then why am I still worried?”

  It was dusk now and the room was dark. Jet was pretty certain Rafael would get fired despite his uncle. “If you lose your job, it would be the reverse. Then I have to be responsible for you.”

  “If I lose my job, it’s fate,” he said.

  “We make our own fate,” Jet said, and then all at once she realized that they did. They could not control it, but they could choose how to respond to what happened. She insisted he get dressed and go back to work. He did so, although he seemed reluctant to go.

  “So this isn’t a relationship,” Rafael said.

  “Absolutely not.” She told him about the curse, and the trouble people in her family had in matters of love. There was no reason not to tell him everything since they would remain as strangers. The truth was, he looked different to her now. He was even more good-looking than she’d thought at first, and he had a concerned expression. He wasn’t Levi and he wasn’t going to be no matter how hard she tried to pretend that he was.

  “We should meet here in six months. Check in with each other,” he said. “Then I would know you didn’t kill yourself.”

  Jet shook her head. “I won’t. But we’re never going to see each other again. Let’s just get that straight.”

  “You miss him,” Rafael said. “Even right now.”

  She did, but the day of the accident now felt as though it belonged to the past. She was glad she had kept her eyes open.

  “I’m glad you were you,” Jet said.

  He kissed her good-bye as himself and then they both laughed. “So am I,” he
told her.

  When Rafael left, Jet took a long bath, then she put on a white robe and finished what was left of the chicken. She got into bed and phoned Franny to tell her where she was.

  “You are not at the Plaza Hotel,” Franny said. “That costs a fortune.”

  “I had to stay here. I needed to complete what should have happened that night.”

  She could see the lights come on along Fifth Avenue now. Rafael would be checking out of work and heading for night class. He had told her he wanted to be a teacher. She went to the window and gazed out. She thought she saw him, but she wasn’t sure. She barely knew him after all.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she told her sister. She’d forgotten how lovely the sky was at this hour of the day.

  “Will you come home in the morning?” Franny wanted to know. “We can’t afford another night at the Plaza.”

  “Yes,” Jet assured her. “I promise I will. After I have breakfast from room service.”

  The Plaza Hotel was the least of their financial problems; there were heating bills and electricity and taxes, things their parents had seen to in the past. Even before the shop opened their savings had all but disappeared. Jet set a paper spell, hoping to bring money their way, burning a dollar bill coated with honey and milk in the fireplace. The only result was an order from a small pharmacy on Bleecker Street for a box of black soap. Franny had altered the recipe, adding city ingredients that were available. There were no blooming roses outside the door, no lush herbs and flowers as there were in Isabelle’s garden. So she made good with what she had. A branch from an ash tree in Washington Square Park, two dappled feathers of a nesting dove on West Fourth Street, leaves from the wavering lilacs in their yard. The result was grittier than Aunt Isabelle’s recipe, with more intensity. Wash with it, and not only were you beautiful, you were ready to do battle. It was especially good for anyone riding the subway or walking down a dark street after midnight.

  The pharmacy ordered several more boxes in the ensuing months, but the sale wasn’t enough to sustain them. When their money ran out they had no choice but to divest themselves of family belongings. They sold their mother’s good Limoges china at a bad price. They sold the French cooking pots, and then the costume jewelry their mother favored, jeweled bugs and starfish and butterflies. One gray day, when they hadn’t enough to pay the electricity bill, they brought nearly all of Susanna Owens’s Chanel suits and Dior dresses to the secondhand store on Twenty-Third Street near the Chelsea Hotel. Franny bargained as best she could, but in the end they collected only a few hundred dollars for the timeless clothes their mother had bought in Paris when she was young and in love. They sat in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel and counted their money.

  “You could have stayed here instead of the Plaza,” Franny said. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be so broke.”

  “My fate wasn’t here.” Jet had a small smile on her face that gave her away.

  “Oh really.” Franny now understood. “What was your fate’s name?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jet assured her.

  Franny narrowed her eyes. “Love?”

  “Absolutely not. We never intend to see each other again,” Jet said cheerfully.

  “Perfect,” Franny said. “Then you’re the new Maid of Thorns.”

  “Oh, no,” Jet said. “You’ll always hold that title.”

  “Will I?” Franny said thoughtfully.

  Jet went to her sister and sat beside her. “Franny, that was a joke. You have the softest heart of any of us.”

  “Untrue,” Franny shot back, though she was near tears. She had hated seeing her mother’s clothes hung on wire hangers in the thrift shop.

  “Very true. This just means I know you better than you know yourself,” Jet said. “But what else is a sister for?”

  Posters were affixed to every lamppost in the neighborhood and Franny took a small ad in The Village Voice, the alternative newspaper whose offices were right around the corner in Sheridan Square. On the day of the grand opening, the shelves were stocked with cures and Edgar the heron was set in the window and festooned with ribbons and bows. By noon, only a smattering of people had showed up, a huge disappointment. Two teenage girls with long straight hair in search of true love sneaked in, giggling, afraid of the stuffed heron, nervous about magic, eyeing the bones and teeth set out in jars.

  Franny threw up her hands, preferring the drudgery of cleaning the storeroom, but Jet found she enjoyed dispensing cures, and was happy to offer the girls the most basic potion: rosemary leaves, anise seeds, honey, and red wine. Since the Plaza Hotel, she had retained a deep empathy for those in love. She told the girls about a home remedy they could use when their money ran out, not wise for a shopkeeper to give away free advice, but true to Jet’s nature. To grow a lover, she told them, they must plant an onion in a flowerpot and add plenty of sunlight and water. The girls were amused to hear that such a plain, smelly thing as an onion could bring love to them.

  “That’s all we have to do?” they cried, delighted.

  Jet told them yes, an onion and a pure heart were the best ingredients. She’d had a pure love too once upon a time. These girls were too young and innocent for doves’ hearts or spells written in blood. They hadn’t the faintest idea of what love could do. Jet, on the other hand, knew only too well, and should she ever forget, should she wake up in the middle of the night and not know where or who she was, there was always the scar on her face to remind her. You had to squint to see its delicate outline, but it was there. Jet could run her hand over her face and feel it and then she thought about the glass breaking and the sound of the thud as the taxi had hit Levi. That was when she would phone Rafael, who at this point knew her better than anyone. It wasn’t love, not at all, but he’d been right. He’d saved her from what she had intended to do at the Plaza Hotel that night and now he felt responsible for her. In some way she was his. He’d known what she’d planned to do. She’d brought along a tincture of belladonna that night, a mixture that quickly induces dizziness and nausea, then weakness and breathing complications. She had planned to ingest it, then get into the bath, and when she passed out she would drown, which seemed only fitting. No one could float after partaking of this tincture, not even her. Rafael had derailed her plans when he came into the room and lay down beside her. He’d reminded her that she was alive.

  The last time they’d met she’d showed him the Alchemy Tree. They’d brought along a six-pack of beer, and after the second bottle, Rafael admitted that he had guessed her plan when she’d said she didn’t need help getting to her room, yet tipped him five dollars anyway. In return he had saved her life. He was her secret, one she kept close. It wasn’t love, but for her it was something more. He was someone she trusted.

  Vincent had stopped bringing random women home, which was a relief to both sisters. They’d never known whom they might find in the kitchen when they went to fix their morning coffees. A teenager from Long Island in her T-shirt and nothing else, a waitress from the Kettle of Fish, a college girl from NYU, all wandering through the house with spellbound, confused expressions.

  “Why do you bother?” Franny had asked once. She was at the table eating toast. Some woman had just made herself scrambled eggs before leaving, without even bothering to introduce herself.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Vincent snarled, defensive, brooding over why he could never feel anything for the girls he brought home.

  “Fine. Never mind.”

  “Why do you bother?” Vincent tossed back at his sister.

  “I don’t!”

  They were not the sort to discuss their emotions, or even admit they had them, so Franny kept her insights to herself.

  “I think we have a disorder. Maybe we should have read Dad’s book,” Vincent wondered. “We might have been more normal.”

  Actually, Fanny had been reading it. She’d expected to find it preposterous, filled with crackpot theories about genetics. But as it turned out, A Stranger
in the House was a love letter to Dr. Burke-Owens’s children, something none of them would have ever guessed. Certainly, Franny was shocked by her father’s warm, loving attitude.

  They may be nothing like you, he had written, they may surprise you, they may even repel you when their behavior is out of control, when they climb out their windows and drink underage and break every rule, but you will love them in a way you had not thought possible before, no matter who they turn out to be.

  All that year Vincent had earned cash by busking on corners and in subway stations. His exceptional voice made people cluster around, especially when he sang of the troubled times. He felt connected when he performed; he found that if he put away his guitar, there was nothing inside him. It was as if when he had been stolen as an infant, he had come back as a changeling, as if someone had reached inside him and grabbed his heart to keep under lock and key.

  He had always been a night owl, but now he had found a coterie of late-night rovers. He frequented the clubs on Eighth Street—Cafe Au Go Go, The Bitter End, the Village Gate—and often dropped by the San Remo, the hangout of poets, both unknown and great, including Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, and Dylan Thomas. Vincent listened to the poets who had no hope of ever making it, and those who were on the cusp of changing the meaning of what poetry was and could be. Whenever possible he caught Bob Dylan at Gerde’s. Dylan was making his mark as a poet and musician with a voice that was unmistakably his own. That was true beauty. That was the map of one’s soul. To do so meant to reveal some inner part of yourself, and that Vincent was unable to do.

  By now he was known in the clubs. Some people knew him from the Jester, and when they called him the Wizard the nickname stuck. When he spoke his voice was so soft that whomever he was addressing had to lean in to hear, and then some sort of enchantment happened. He was more handsome than ever, but that was only part of the spell he cast. Rumors began. People said he could pick your pocket without ever touching you. He could swipe a song lyric right out of your head; he seemed to know what you were thinking or maybe you’d blabbed a chorus to him and when he added a few words he made it so much better than anything you could ever dream up, that in the end you wouldn’t even recognize your own music. He carried a book of spells with him, and for the right payment he could make things happen for you. The unexpected became real before your eyes. A girl who never looked at you before would follow you home. A job for which you weren’t qualified would be yours. A letter would arrive informing you of an inheritance from a relative you hadn’t known existed.