The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Look at this," Bertie said, and touched the figure of Houdini wrapped in chains. His eyes looked as if he suffered from lack of oxygen, or possibly a thyroid condition.

  Everything was a prop. Once it had thrilled Sabine, too, now it made her feel abandoned. "Come on," she said. "We need to get to the show if we want a seat."

  The meal was the price you had to pay to see some magic. That was the trick of the Castle. You had to make it past the food and drinks, give them a chance to make their money before you got to see the show.

  "How often did the two of you perform here?" Mrs. Fetters asked Sabine.

  "A week a year, usually, sometimes more if there was a cancellation. It was a lot of work for not a lot of money."

  "But it must have been so much fun," Bertie said. "I can't even imagine it, getting to come here every night."

  Sabine nodded and turned away, pretending to study the framed caricatures that lined the walls. She focused her eyes on the blank space in between Harry Blackstone, Senior, and Harry Blackstone, Junior. Bertie was right. It had been fun. It was a completely different lifetime, one without sickness, without knowledge of past or future. It was just Parsifal, Sabine, and Rabbit. Fun.

  For the lunch crowd there was only close-up magic, mostly card tricks, hoops, and coins, maybe a little mentalism. No one got sawed in half at lunch, no one vanished. Like Parsifal, it was this smaller magic that Sabine had come to prefer, not as showy and, therefore, more difficult. It was always harder when the audience was pressed up against you, the closest row practically pushing on your knees.

  "I can't believe you did this," Mrs. Fetters whispered as Monty came out to introduce Sam Spender. "It's so exciting."

  Spender was a thin, dark-haired man in his middle thirties. He and Parsifal had only overlapped by a year or two, Parsifal winding down from the business just as Sam was coming up. All that Sabine knew about him was that he was two people, one on the stage and one at the bar after the show. His true self, she believed, was onstage, where he was graceful and nearly handsome. He had what Parsifal used to call bravado. But at the bar after the show he was nobody, a man who could vanish in a crowd without any tricks.

  He began the patter, the Ladies-and-gentlemen-I-want-to-welcome-you-to. Dot and Bertie Fetters sat forward in their seats, so thrilled to be entertained that for the moment they forgot that the purpose of their trip was to mourn. But then that was the point of magic, to take people in, make them forget what was real and possible. They were so utterly game that when Sam Spender asked if there was anyone in the audience from out of town, they raised their hands, not knowing that everyone in Los Angeles was from out of town.

  Sabine turned her eyes away. She could not imagine how she'd thought that going to the Castle would be a good idea. She felt the pressure of sadness rising up in the back of her throat. She stared at the bandage on her hand, at that damn engagement ring she had forgotten to take off. Think about none of it. She tried to concentrate on the strip mall she was building. She would need to buy some small-grain veneer, some corrugated plastic. She would make a list of what she needed to buy. But even as she concentrated, she could hear it. From someplace far away, the farthest left-hand corner of hell, she heard her name. Dot Fetters touched her wrist.

  "It's you," she whispered.

  "Sabine," Sam Spender said, and held out his hand to her.

  She shook her head.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, Sabine Parsifal, one of the truly great magicians' assistants."

  One of the truly great hood ornaments. One of the world's best bottle caps. There was applause.

  "Now, when you take someone you don't know from the audience, everyone suspects they're a plant, that person must be in on the trick," Sam Spender's voice chimed and sang. "But when you pull a professional out of the audience, then everybody knows something must be up. Sabine, come on down here."

  She held the armrests of her chair. She would bury herself in that seat. They would never find her.

  "Sabine," Bertie said, and shook her as if asleep. "Go on up, he wants you."

  People never seem to. take into account that they can say no. In Sabine's life she had seen people who truly, desperately did not want to be called onto stage, who begged to be passed over, but when they were pressed, they always went, resigned, as if to their deaths. When the magician asked, no one ever thought to tell him to go to hell.

  She was lifted up, Bertie and Dot Fetters lifted her from her seat. She was not walking. She was being passed hand over hand through the air, above the audience, until she was delivered to the stage. Once their hands were free of her they clapped wildly. Sabine smoothed down the sleeves of her blouse. Sam Spender kissed her cheek, said something about having her back and how it was good. The lights were in her eyes.

  No one had ever been alone this way before.

  "So, are you going to be able to help me out with a couple of things, Sabine?"

  She looked at him, begged him in the secret language of assistants and magicians. There was still time to get out of this, even if it didn't seem that way. She knew the location of every trap in the floor. There were lines in the light scaffolding overhead; if she could only reach them, she could pull herself up. It is a fact about human nature: People look down, not up.

  "What I'm going to ask you to do is just hold on to this hoop, just a plain silver circle."

  He put the hoop in her hand. It was cold, thin, light. It trembled with her hand.

  "You got that there? Now I want you to pull on it. Go on and really give it a good pull, feel it all over and tell me if it's solid."

  It was solid. It would be solid to anyone but Sabine, who knew the trick, knew the hoop like her name. She moved it around and around through her fingers. Parsifal hadn't done a hoop trick in fifteen years. It was a good warm-up, it looked good from the audience, but it had become too easy for him and so he stopped. When things were too easy, they didn't interest him anymore. Some of the things he did that were the hardest didn't even look so complicated, but those were the ones he stayed with and loved. He was that sort of magician. She was that sort of assistant.

  "How does that look to you?"

  The hoop fed itself endlessly through her fingers. She could not see Sam Spender, but she could remember him. A decent magician, a dull man. She and Parsifal were years past hoop tricks, lifetimes past. There was no need to check the hoop. It was rigged, there was a hair catch. Nothing you could see, you just had to know it was there. You knew because someone had told you. But there was nothing to do but check it over and over again. No place to go. Sabine stood there, hearing Sam Spender's questions without being able to answer. She couldn't answer. She couldn't walk off the stage. All she could do was check the hoop, and so, over and over again, she did.

  "Come on, Sabine." She felt something, a tug and then emptiness. The hoop was out of her hands. "Here you go," Mrs. Fetters said, and gave the magician his hoop. "Come on, let's go home." Mrs. Fetters put her arm around Sabine's waist and led her off the stage, down the three short steps. Sabine was crying in a way that kept her from seeing. She would never stop crying. Bertie ran her hand in circles across the small of Sabine's back. They left the magic parlor, the three of them together.

  When people approached them, Mrs. Fetters waved them away. "She's fine," she told Sally. A he so obvious that it said, none of your business, leave us alone. The valet brought the car up without questions and Bertie got into the driver's seat. Mrs. Fetters got into the back with Sabine. She held her there, stroked her hair.

  "Which is worse," Mrs. Fetters said, "that man asking you to come up on stage or me telling you to go?"

  Bertie drove out of the parking lot and safely to another street before parking in the slim shade of a palm tree. "I'm so sorry," she said. "We never should have asked you to take us there."

  "We've been thinking about ourselves," Mrs. Fetters said. "We should be thinking about you. Poor baby, all you've been through."

  Sabine was emba
rrassed in so many different ways she couldn't begin to list them. What had she done up there? What was she doing now? She tried to tell the Fetters it was all right, that she would be fine in just one minute, but she couldn't make the words. Parsifal would never be in the house when she came home. She would never open the door and find him there again. Not even once.

  "I've got some Kleenex," Bertie said, and began rifling through her purse.

  Sabine thanked her, took a deep breath, and tried to sit up straight. "I'm fine, really. I'm sorry." She wiped a straight line beneath each of her eyes. There were dark, wet stains on the front of her blouse.

  "Nothing for you to be sorry about," Mrs. Fetters said.

  Sabine looked at her hands and laughed.

  "So why don't we take you home?" Mrs. Fetters said.

  Sabine shook her head. "We'll go out to the cemetery." It seemed fine, better even, to go to someplace Parsifal was rather than someplace he was not. Sabine opened up the car door and got out. "Come on," she said to Bertie. "I can drive."

  "You don't want to go to the cemetery," Bertie said.

  "Sure I do." Sabine could breathe again. She stretched up on her toes. "Nobody minds a crying woman in a cemetery."

  Bertie scooted awkwardly over the gearshift and let Sabine have the driver's seat.

  "When my husband died, I used to cry like that," Mrs. Fetters said, leaning forward, her safety belt undone. "I cried like that, and I hated the man. I cried just because everything was different. So I can't imagine what it would be like, crying over a husband that you loved as much as you loved Guy."

  Sabine was touched by Mrs. Fetters calling Parsifal her husband. "When did Mr. Fetters die?"

  Bertie looked down at her hands. She adjusted her engagement ring so that the tiny diamond stood straight up.

  "Albert died when I was pregnant with Bertie. That's why I named her Albertine." Mrs. Fetters reached up and patted her daughter on the shoulder. "The only thing this girl got from her father was his name. That's why she's so sweet."

  "How did he die?" Sabine wouldn't normally have asked, but obviously no one was going to be breaking down over this particular loss.

  "He was in an accident," Mrs. Fetters said. "It was a real shock. One minute he's there, the next minute—" She swiped her open hand through the air and then made a fist. "Gone."

  The lilies had opened up. Their white waxy petals made twin bridal bouquets on the grass of the twin graves. Sabine sat with her back against the brick wall that protected them from seeing Lincoln Heights. She watched the flowers and listened to the light music that was pumped in for the wealthy dead while Mrs. Fetters chatted with the marker, retelling the day's events, the rug store, the Magic Castle, what she took to be her fault in all of it. Sabine considered getting up and correcting her, explaining to Parsifal that it, in fact, was not his mother's fault at all. She smiled to know that she wasn't so far gone that she couldn't see what a stupid idea that was.

  Mrs. Fetters licked her finger and rubbed at a tiny spot on Phan's marker. "Everything is so clean around here, there's nothing to do. The people running this place don't understand psychology. People need things to do at cemeteries to make themselves feel useful. It's like fluffing up pillows for the sick. It doesn't make the sick person feel better, it makes you feel better."

  "You want to fluff pillows?" Sabine said.

  "I want to weed something. There aren't any weeds. This is the nicest damn grass I've ever seen in my life."

  Sabine looked down at the grass and saw it was lush and soft and the color of emeralds and so she lay down on it and closed her eyes against the sun. "I like it here," she said, thinking about the empty spot beside Parsifal that was her real estate.

  "How did you meet Guy, anyway?"

  "I was a waitress at a club called the Magic Hat. Parsifal was a magician."

  "Is it still there?" Bertie asked.

  Sabine shook her head. "It's Italian now." She didn't go on. She thought that was the end of the story.

  "You were a waitress at a club called the Magic Hat," Dot Fetters said.

  Sabine rolled over on her side. It was like being in the locked garden of a resort. The tiles in the grass were steppingstones. "This is twenty years ago, more than twenty years. I was going to school during the day to be an architect and waiting tables at night. One night I was serving a drink, and I remember this, I don't know why, a Manhattan with double cherries, and I look up and I see the most beautiful man onstage."

  Mrs. Fetters, unable to stop herself, jumped in. "Guy."

  "Yes."

  "I wish I could have seen him," Bertie said.

  "No one ever looked better in a tuxedo." Sabine was happy to tell them. It was a story in which Parsifal was beautiful and young. It was the moment when neither of them knew what would happen. The beginning of everything. "I put down my tray on the table where I had served the Manhattan, and I just stood there and stared. He was doing something he called the Rabbit Pass, where he'd put a rabbit down his collar and take it out of his sleeve. Put it in his hat and take it out of his pants leg. It was all very graceful, very funny. Parsifal had such beautiful hands."

  "Even as a little boy," his mother said.

  "And then he said, 'For my next illusion I will need an assistant,' and he held out his hand to me. I was all the way in the back of the room but I knew it was to me. So I went up on stage."

  "Did he saw you in half?" Bertie said.

  "I don't think I did anything particularly interesting that night. I think I held the rabbit and drew a card from a deck. I barely remember that part. I was so nervous. I'd never been up onstage before. I wasn't used to the lights."

  "And after that?" Bertie said. She sat down on the grass.

  "After that he gave me a job. He made me promise that I wouldn't drop out of school. I had this idea that I was going to make a fortune as a magician's assistant."

  "And you waited all those years before you got married," Bertie said, her voice saddened at the thought of having to wait any longer herself.

  "When are you getting married, Bertie?"

  Bertie turned over her hand to look at the ring as if it were a watch that would tell her exactly when. "Next month."

  "Bertie's marrying the nicest fellow in Alliance," Mrs. Fetters said. "Finally, someone in this family has good taste in men."

  Sabine shrugged. "Parsifal had good taste in men."

  "Really?" his mother said.

  "Nice guys, almost always, and Phan." She pointed to the grave, as if they might have forgotten. "There was no one better than Phan. That was true love."

  The Fetters looked over at Phan's marker, hoping to be able to tell for themselves. "I love Haas," Bertie said.

  "Haas?"

  "Eugene Haas. But nobody calls him Eugene." She ran the flat of her hands back and forth over the grass. "Maybe you'll come to the wedding, Sabine. I know it's a big trip, but you'd like Haas. And you could meet Kitty. Kitty would love you."

  Sabine smiled at the thought of Bertie in a wedding dress, how the dress would be shining white with mutton leg sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. How she knew that Bertie would be the type to cry at her own wedding. "I've never been to Nebraska."

  "Well, then, you have to come," Mrs. Fetters said. "You're the rest of the family now. It would be like Guy coming to the wedding. Can you imagine that?"

  "What was your wedding like?" Bertie asked.

  Parsifal had wanted to get everything in Sabine's name so that she could avoid being crushed by inheritance tax. "We were married at the house in the late afternoon," she said. "It was a beautiful day. Parsifal had figured out that the light hit the pool in just the right way at four-thirty. Parsifal was always worried about lighting. All the magicians were there, and the rug and antique people, and all the architects. It was a good party."

  "I love you," Parsifal had said. "I want you to be my widow."

  "Did you serve dinner?" Bertie asked. "Was there dancing?"

  Sabine
nodded. She could smell the lilies from the graves. "We ate dinner outside and put a dance floor down on the lawn. There was a lot of dancing." The people who loved them drank too much and cried.

  "If you want to get married," Sabine had told him, "it doesn't mean we have to have a wedding."

  "I want to have a really great party," Parsifal said.

  When the last napkin was collected from the lawn, the host of handsome waiters took the rented dishes away, leaving the house, remarkably, as they had found it. Sabine and Parsifal recounted who was making passes at whom and who looked the best and who seemed not to be doing so well. He took her in his arms and they danced a few steps in the kitchen while Sabine hummed. "My wife," he said. "My beautiful wife." And then he kissed her, one, two, three times, and they both laughed and said good-night and went down the hallway in different directions as they had at the end of any number of parties they had given over the years.

  "Good night, Parsifal," Sabine said.

  "Good night, Mrs. Parsifal," Parsifal said.

  The light was good now in the cemetery. Parsifal would be pleased. He had been right about the wedding. It had helped Sabine. It was a strange piece of comfort he had given her.

  "Did you have a minister?" Dot Fetters asked.

  "A rabbi."

  The Fetters looked puzzled. They both had the same tilt of the head, which made them look like mother and daughter. "Why a rabbi?"

  Sabine laughed because the question struck her as so strange. "Because I'm Jewish."

  There was a light wind coming down from the direction of the Wee Kirk o' the Heather, but the grass was too closely cut to be stirred. "Oh," Dot Fetters said finally.

  "Is that all right?" Sabine asked.

  Her mother-in-law smiled. "Of course it's all right," she said. "I just don't think I've ever met anybody who's Jewish before."