Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  I waited until Mary rang to tell her about Guido's lack of cooperation. I said he was so busy with his own creative work and his teaching that there wasn't a moment to spare. She was quiet for at least twenty seconds, which is a very long time on the phone.

  'I understand,' she said finally. Disappointment dulled the tone of her voice.

  'I'm so sorry,' I said. 'I wish I could persuade him but I don't have that magic, ha!' Oh cringe, said the voice, can you hear yourself?

  'Well,' said Mary, after another silence. 'Are you sure?

  'I never am,' I said, 'but he always is. Practically always.'

  'All right then.' I could hear her trying to rally. 'But you will take the project on, won't you? Perhaps you could just check over the details with your husband – get him to run an eye over the final manuscript?'

  'Yes, okay,' I rushed in, glad to hear the life back in her voice. 'I'm sure he would do that.' It will be all right, I told myself, because by then, with the deadline nine months away, anything could happen: I could be run over, get a brain tumour, spontaneously combust like that woman in India I read about.

  'Okay then, I'll send you a letter of agreement with the details. Nice to have seen you the other day.'

  She'd put the phone down before I'd thought of a proper reply. You should have thanked her for lunch, said the voice. You've got the social poise of a mud wasp.

  Every time I thought of starting the new series I had to go to the toilet. 'Are you doing number one or two?' Clara asked me. 'How long will you be?' At six, she hated closed doors. At thirteen, she wanted to put a lock on her own.

  How can you pin magic down? I asked myself as I washed my hands. I thought of iridescent butterflies in a glass case, stuck through their middles.

  I'd taught the science but not the wizardry of magic. I didn't want to reduce magic to its skeleton. There must be a way to present magic, even its bones, without destroying the illusion. It was the illusion I loved.

  'When can I see a first chapter?' Mary asked me after two months had passed. She sounded brisk, as if she were tapping her fingers on her crowded desk. She was probably wearing those black-framed glasses.

  So the next day, when I picked up Clara after school, we went back to the library. I wanted to sit down with Clara and read Where the Wild Things Are or escape into the new Margaret Atwood novel, but I remembered Mary's tone so I left Clara in children's fiction and went straight to the magic section.

  I ran my finger along the shelf, noting the familiar titles. I'd dipped into several already, but nothing had galvanised me into action. I glanced back at Clara; she'd helped herself to her own pile of books, and was quite absorbed. A glow spread through me as I watched her turning the pages, and it was then, as I struggled to stop looking at Clara, that I saw The Truth and Myth of Harry Houdini.

  It was a large glossy hardback I hadn't seen before. Harry Houdini was on the cover, staring straight at me. The room went silent, like when you dive under a wave. Harry's gaze was so intimate that a flush moved over my body. His eyes were dark and tender with a sizzle of light in them. I felt electrified, as if he'd reached out and zapped me.

  I'd seen pictures of Harry hanging from skyscrapers, working his way out of Chinese Water Torture chambers, German courts, English jails. I'd seen him beaming beside his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, standing between his mother and Bess, his wife. But I had never seen his face naked, like this.

  His eyebrows seemed to levitate, swooping up like a pair of blackbirds. His heart-shaped face was magnetic – clenched, concentrated – like caught lightning, the eyes telling you he cared terribly about something just then, something only barely out of reach. His eyes thrust into mine, past the numbness, the lake, the shopping lists, into the centre of me.

  How could he feel so much, and still concentrate?

  I crouched down next to the shelves and read the first seven pages right through.

  Harry Houdini had more charisma than any other performer of his era. When he performed he was not only exacting a technical escape, he was acting out in public the private fear of all human beings. Houdini's performance possessed the seriousness and total absorption of a religious ritual: he summoned the possibility of death, and with his survival, a moment of power unlike any other.

  I sat down suddenly on the floor with the book on my lap.

  An escape artist must be in such a pure state that he becomes a single conduit of electricity. 'You stand there before a jump,' Houdini wrote, 'swallowing the yellow stuff that every man has in him. Then at last you hear the voice and you jump. Once I jumped on my own and I nearly broke my neck.'

  Houdini's close friend and admirer, Sir Arthur Cobnan Doyle, claimed that Houdini was the greatest risk taker he'd ever met. But in fact, Houdini left nothing to chance. He made sure over and over again that his survival was ensured, testing, practising, timing himself with his locks, shims, keys, all his equipment with the absolute care of a perfectionist. After all, he was also a realist, and the penalty for failure was death.

  In the stillness of the words, it came to me that magic rested on paradox. In playing with death, there was the affirmation of life; in paying attention to the real world, there was the reward of escape into another. And Harry could straddle it all, like a man standing with each leg on a precipice and an echoing abyss between.

  The name Houdini became so synonymous with heroic action that he grew into not only a myth, but a verb! To houdinize meant to escape from an apparently impossible situation.

  Houdini's concentration on the task was so formidable, the book said, it took him to a state of transcendence achieved only by the masters of the ancient practices of meditation and martial arts.

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. Houdini's ability was astonishing. It flew him up above ordinary men – he'd even transformed the English language, just like my favourite poet, Hopkins! He was able to focus entirely on the present moment – there would be no part of him stranded in the past, wishing he'd put more salt in the pasta, or anticipating the future, worrying the butcher would be closed by the time he arrived to buy his lamb cutlets for dinner. In his concentration there'd be just his own being in the hushed universe of his body. And if all his thoughts were gathered together in that one moment, like all the armies of the world putting down their weapons in sudden and unanimous agreement, imagine the energy and power that would be harnessed! In that pure, silent state he would control the warring parts of his mind, have effortless control over his actions. And wasn't that the perfect state, the only state, to perform magic?

  As I made my way to the counter to borrow the book, an image of Guido on stage flashed into my mind. I remembered how hungry I'd been to know him, how his magic had made me hold my breath, go dizzy, go under. Being with him was like living inside a fairytale where the rules of the ordinary world didn't apply. In fairytales you had to discover a person's true name before you could know them; that was the only way to steal their power. I think I'd wanted to own him back then, this extraordinary prince – I'd wanted to take him home and discover his name, his history, his essence. Maybe I wanted to live inside him, to stop being myself. Or maybe I'd just wanted this ability to fly, right out of myself.

  I didn't bother taking any other books out. I wanted to read this extraordinary book in a pure state, untainted by another point of view. This was the right one, the one that struck to the centre of me.

  Clara came up and twined herself around my hips. 'There was a lady storyteller,' she told me. 'She's got black hair under her arms like a man. Why does she got that?'

  'Look at this man,' I said. 'Harry Houdini.'

  'Scary eyes.'

  'No, he's just concentrating. He's a magician, like Daddy.'

  'Daddy's a poet,' said Clara, sticking out her lip. 'Can we borrow a book for me too? I like this one. It's about a pussy cat. Why can't we have a pussy cat?'

  In Truth and Myth there is a photo of Harry naked, biceps clenched, manacled hands furled over hi
s genitals like a posy. He's standing in a police cell, chained at the ankles and wrists. He seems unaware of his iron burden, his eyes looking straight at you, defying you to find an escape tool anywhere on his body. The bars of the jail were drawn on later, together with his bathers. Harry has full lips, soft and vulnerable in his heart-shaped face. Shortly after the photo was taken, probably in under three minutes, he'd sprung himself from that cage like a wild animal.

  In the photo next to this one, we see a back view of Harry, his hands padlocked and held together by a thick iron bar and chain. His ankles and elbows are chained too, and there are no bars or bathers this time. He has perfect round buttocks, like ripe apples. He's looking back over his shoulder at me, I mean the viewer, with a half-smile that is both innocent and knowing. You want to see what happens after the photographer leaves, what he looks like when he turns around; it's so hard, in fact, to leave that photo.

  Harry was always ready to take off his clothes before any performance. He was remarkably honest, as magicians go – he dedicated much of the later part of his life to exposing mind-readers, mediums and psychics who claimed to have spiritual powers rather than good technical skills.

  'But how can you leap from bridges and survive, melt walls, stay buried alive for an hour?' the media would demand. 'You must have special powers!' He always denied it. 'I am not a wizard,' he declared truthfully. 'I just have my secrets.'

  Harry became my secret. The more I read about Harry Houdini, the more I fell under his power, as if I were his personal audience only inches away. His boundless courage, his unfailing ability to resurrect himself was so reassuring. When I lay in bed reading and afterwards when I switched off the light, I fell sweetly into that swoon before proper sleep, half dreaming, imagining, conjuring situations of pleasure. I didn't think of Guido's impatience or Clara's schoolwork or my deadline. I just thought about Harry, and what it would feel like if he reached out one of those hands, sprung fresh from his manacles, to touch me.

  I hadn't thought about sex for a long time. Sex didn't happen very often now and mostly I forgot about my body from the neck down. I walked around like something without a gender. But around dusk my mind clouded over and images of Harry lurked behind the pot plant near the dining table, or in the dark spaces of the linen press. I began to feel warmer around dinner time, moist under the arms and even between my legs, as if in preparation for the hours alone with a lover. I began to look forward to solitude, to being alone with Harry. I had never liked to be alone before – well, not since I was a child.

  But I wasn't alone, I was sure, in being attracted to Houdini. He was a marvellous physical specimen. Harry had a strict exercise regimen which some described as fanatical, but maximum fitness was necessary for his survival. In the photos, his chest muscles look as hard as the iron chaining his wrists. Often he clenched his forearms and torso so that you could see the contour of all the individual muscles, reminding you of God or Noah in a Michelangelo painting. One reporter who was allowed to feel his forearm described it as 'amazing, as massive and hard as a granite pillar. His neck, too, is large, and corded.' Harry had to train himself exhaustively to remain calm and not panic about his breathing. And he was only able to do this if he could rely with absolute confidence on his body.

  Harry used every one of his physical idiosyncrasies to his advantage. He was compact, with slightly bandy legs. This space between his knees allowed him the essential bit of slack needed to get one hand free, no matter how tightly he might be trussed. In his thick wavy hair he hid shims or picks and his prehensile toes could pick up anything.

  The first trick Harry performed for an audience was Metamorphosis. It involved a large trunk that Harry and his partner brought onto the stage. Usually the partner was Bess, his wife, who he married when she was just sixteen. They stayed married all his life, travelling together to perform all over the world. Throughout their marriage he constantly wrote her letters and notes, always addressing her as sweetheart and darling. At the back of Truth and Myth there are some of his letters and poems. I liked the little domestic notes he wrote to Bess most of all. Sometimes I whispered them aloud, imagining I was Bess. Oh, lucky Bess!

  Adorable

  Sunshine

  of my Life,

  I have had my coffee, have washed out this glass, and am on

  My way to business.

  Houdini

  "My darling I love you"

  At first I thought the quotation marks were a printing error and then I saw that he used them often, perhaps to make more emphatic his most passionate declarations. I didn't show Guido, of course, who would have smirked at the cliché and the domestic references. I didn't mind the cliché at all. I could picture Harry at the sink, with perhaps just an apron tied around his waist, washing up with remarkable dexterity. Ordinary tasks would become extraordinary, with Harry. His firm buttocks wouldn't even tremble as he moved. Bess would probably have come up behind him and put her arms around him. She'd have rubbed her breasts against his back. Her nipples would become long and pointed with desire and he would turn to her and pluck them, as if she were a beautiful violin.

  In their Metamorphosis trick there was a sack inside the trunk that Harry climbed into, his hands cuff ed, his body bound. The sack was tied up securely and placed in the trunk, which was then chained and locked. A screen was drawn around the trunk and the assistant went behind it. Only a few seconds later, the screen was pulled back to reveal not the pretty partner, but Harry Houdini himself! Where had Bess disappeared to? Harry invited people up on stage to inspect the trunk and its chains, straps and locks – all still intact. Slowly, painstakingly, he then loosened the ties around the trunk to reveal exactly where his partner had gone – inside the securely tied sack!

  The trick was known in magician circles as the Substitution Trunk, but I found Houdini's title far more romantic. It was as if man and woman had truly merged, taking on each other's shape at will, so similar were they in their essence. I'm sure Harry liked to view the act like this – all his letters and poems show how much he loved and needed his Bess. In Truth and Myth, the author pointed out that 'the Greek gods used to regularly metamorphose into different forms to attain the object of their desire'.

  To the outside world Harry appeared to possess the powers of a shape shifter. He did such perfect magic – there were no seams, no mistakes, not a beat off time. He would have been wonderful to me if he had been magic, but the fact that I understood, with every page I read and digested, that he was so good not because he was a Greek god but because of his dedication and aspiration to perfection – which he achieved! – made him unique. I found his success heavily erotic.

  The photo of Harry in jail highlights his bow-legged stance. That picture was usually the last one I looked at before switching off the light. In the dark, behind my eyes, I saw how my hand would slide over his knees up into the space between his thighs. There'd be the shock of soft ness in the pouch at the top. Under my fingers the flesh would become taut and I'd move up, through the wilderness of his private hair, to trace his hardening length.

  Most nights I watched him undress, hiding behind a stage curtain. It was made of that heavy velvet, dark red like blood. Against my bare shoulders it was soft but weighty. He was stripped down to his bathers. As he bent to pull them off he sensed me breathing behind him. Or maybe he always knew I was there. He picked up the manacles he'd just flung off and turned towards me.

  His mouth opened in desire. He threw me down on the bed and placed my hands above my head. He chained me to the bedposts. I protested but he continued just the same. There was nothing I could do, he was far too strong, so my body relaxed. I submitted. As he reached over me I could see his dark hair curling in his armpits. It was damp and silky, lying in perfect spirals. With his eyes and lips and voice he put me in a trance and my eyes closed. He was chanting the same thing over and over, Adorable Sunshine, like a prayer, and then he went quiet. The air was charged with his breathing. I thought he was lifting
the hem of my skirt. I was floating, holding my breath, hardly there. It was as if he was worshipping at my temple. I could feel his fingers, warm and smooth, inching up my leg. The skirt was above my hips. He was looking at the dark triangle of me, his eyes fixed on the bushy hill sloping gently towards him. His breathing changed, heavy, and he crouched on his knees, on the bed, at my feet.

  'Open your legs,' he commanded. I obeyed.

  'Further,' he said. He put his hands on each of my knees and pulled them apart. I heard him gasp. His eyes were fixed on the centre of me. He pushed up my knees so that they were touching my breasts. His face was so close, his mouth only an inch from the secret part of me. I could feel his breath, hot on my flesh.

  'You are so wet,' he said, 'you are shining. My darling, I love you.'

  With his finger and thumb he pared the lips apart. He slid his finger down, slipping it into the wet flesh. He slid it in and out, in, out, and back up to the clitoris. His finger whirled in circles around it, dipping back down and into the damp opening again. I could feel the bud at the top swelling, my flesh expanding and closing around his finger. I felt such a need to push against him. My darling, I love you! I slitted my eyes and saw him pull his bathers down with one hand while still he rotated me with his finger, keeping the tension. His finger was feathery, insistent. I was the lock he was opening. He grasped his hard penis and spat on it – the spit fell in one long pure line. There was the slick sound of saliva on flesh. With the other hand he opened me. He stared at the pink welling into crimson, the dark hair glinting in the stage light. He grunted and lowered his face. I could feel his tongue flicking, his nose in my hair. His tongue was entering me! The wet sound of rubbing grew quicker. I lay on the bed, my legs open, my mind willing him to enter me. I could feel myself dripping, his hand sliding and slipping over my thighs. But I said nothing. His desire was everything. I rocked against him, the long pole of him corded like his straining neck and then I felt him enter me, massive, filling, and the empty ache was gone. I lay in the dark, my mouth open, receiving the divine.