The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  She looked at the pictures, one and then the other, for nearly an hour. She would buy a twin frame and put them with the family pictures on the table. She was just beginning to see the edges of a hunger she didn't know she had. When Parsifal died she lost the rest of his life, but now she had stumbled on eighteen years. Eighteen untouched years that she could have; early, forgotten volumes of her favorite work. A childhood that could be mined month by month. Parsifal would not get older, but what about younger?

  So much time passed that she forgot completely that there was a letter. She didn't find it, half covered in the tumble of sheets, until she was ready to go to sleep.

  Dear Sabine,

  Many thank-you's for our very good time in Los Angeles. Bertie and I have not stopped telling stories about all our fun. I am sending you copies of the pictures we took. I look awful, but the one of you and Bertie is very nice, I think. Do you ever take a bad picture? I am also sending one of Guy, which I have always thought was sweet. I thought that you might like to have it.

  I am still thinking that you should come to Alliance. There's no need to wait until Bertie's wedding. Come now and stay, we have plenty of room. I think that you are maybe sadder than you think and that being alone right now may not be the best thing. Maybe I'm not the person to be giving advice, but I feel like you are one of my own girls, and I know that this is what I would say to Kitty and Bertie and it would be right.

  So now you know that you are welcome. In the meantime, thanks again for your time and generosity and for the pictures, which Kitty was so glad to see.

  Love from Bertie and from me,

  Dot

  The handwriting was schoolgirlish, all the heights and curves evenly matched. It was the handwriting on Parsifal's postcard at the reformatory, it was the handwriting on the backs of the pictures. Had they had a minute of fun in Los Angeles? Sabine could not remember it.

  "They only made things worse for you," Sabine's mother said at Canter's on Sunday. They were sitting near the counter. Sabine stared at the fruit in the display case, fruit salad in parfait glasses next to halved grapefruits. The cavities of the cantaloupes were clean and hollow, everything sealed in Saran wrap. The waitress came by and Sabine's mother mouthed the word "Horseradish" to her. She nodded in complicity and went on. "You're more depressed now than you were before."

  "I'm not more depressed," Sabine said. "I am depressed, same as before."

  "They had no business coming."

  Sabine's father sat in silent agreement, stirring his black coffee to cool it down.

  "I should have brought them over to meet you. I wish I had. You would have liked them. No one was more surprised than me, but I'm telling you, they are very decent people."

  "Decent mothers don't send their sons to some children's prison for being homosexual." Before Parsifal's death, Sabine's mother had always dropped her voice on the word homosexual, but now that she saw it as the source of his persecution, she spoke it clearly; even, Sabine thought, loudly. "I will admit it, I think it is easier to have a child who is not a homosexual, but if I did I would have loved that child, not tortured him. What happened to poor Parsifal was sheer barbarism. A loving mother does not send her son off to be tortured."

  Sabine sighed. It was not her intention to argue in favor of the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility. "It's awful, I know that. I just think it was a different time. I know that doesn't excuse it, but I don't think she understood what she was doing, what it meant."

  "Nineteen sixty-six was not the Dark Ages. We were all alive in 1966. We are all held accountable for our actions."

  They sat together in a family silence, listening to the sounds they understood, heavy china cups against white saucers, forks against plates, ice ringing against the sides of glasses, and everywhere, everywhere, voices. No one could make out a whole sentence; but words, every one a free agent, fell against the sound of the cutlery and made a kind of music. A hand swept over the table, depositing a silver cup of horseradish beside Sabine's mother's plate.

  "I was thinking," Sabine said, her eyes cast down, "of maybe going to visit." She had not been thinking of it exactly, but the minute she said it, it was true.

  Sabine's father put down his knife, which had been raised in the act of putting jam on his bread. "Nebraska?"

  "There's a lot I want to know. Things about Parsifal. There's so much I don't know." Sabine was speaking quickly, quietly, and her parents leaned forward from the other side of the orange booth. "You think you know someone, one person better than anyone else, and then there's all this." She spread her hands as if to indicate that what she didn't know was the food on the table. "What if you found out that Daddy wasn't who you thought he was? What if he'd been married before, had children you knew nothing about. Wouldn't you be curious?"

  Her father looked startled and then confused. When he opened his lips, her mother spoke. "I know everything about your father. You shouldn't even think such a thing."

  "I want to know what happened," Sabine said.

  "He didn't want you to know," her mother said.

  "But I do now. I know part of it."

  "You never should have seen them."

  Sabine closed her eyes and leaned her head back. "I did see them, there's no use in going over that." Even in her frustration, Sabine felt sorry for what she was doing to her parents.

  Her mother pushed her plate away so as to put both hands flat out on the table. "Listen to me, Sabine. You had a long and very unusual relationship with a good man, but that's over now. Parsifal's death was a tragedy and we will all miss him, but you're no girl anymore. There are no more years to waste. Don't pursue dead men." She slapped the table gently, as if to say, enough. "Don't pursue dead men. I don't think I have any advice clearer than that."

  Sabine didn't think of the boy who Parsifal had been as dead. That boy was in Nebraska, waiting for her. He was there with his mother.

  The house got bigger. Every day the staircase grew by ten steps. In another week it would be impossible to climb. Sabine didn't go into most of the rooms anymore. When the firemen came on Tuesdays they ran the vacuum over old vacuum marks, picking up only the most subtle layer of dust and rabbit fur generated by life. What had possessed Phan to buy such a big house? Coming to Los Angeles alone, not knowing a soul, hadn't he rattled around in there? Didn't he find that loneliness was exacerbated by space?

  Sabine tried to think about Parsifal's life, but all she seemed able to remember was the nagging infection in his hep-lock. In her mind, he was always thin. He was already deep inside his spiral of aging. She wanted to think about him in Paris or in the backyard in summer or up onstage in the flattering light, but the thoughts were always crowded out by that last headache.

  In the place where they did the MRI testing, Parsifal had barely opened his eyes. The machine was big enough to be a room itself, solid enough to have its own center of gravity. They must have built the hospital around it. Even broken into pieces, it could never have come through doors, down stairwells. Tiny beads of sweat began to surface on Parsifal's ears. He stayed on his back, on his gurney, next to the sliding tray they would move him onto.

  "It looks like a clothes dryer," Parsifal said to her, and shuddered. "They're going to put me in the dryer." Parsifal was a magician, but magic wasn't escape. Parsifal could make Sabine disappear down to the heel taps of her shoes, but he had no interest in restraining himself. He would not get into the disappearing closet, nor would he lie down in the saw box, even to see what Sabine had to do to make the blades miss her stomach. He was never once padlocked and chained. It was all he could do to see a film of Houdini hanging upside-down over Fifth Avenue in a straitjacket. Magic for Parsifal did not include being stuffed into a milk can filled with water or being buried in a coffin six feet underground. He could not speak of such illusions. Sabine never minded a tight squeeze. Despite her height she could tuck herself into whatever small corner Parsifal requested.

  "I got locked in a refrigerator w
hen I was a kid," he told her once, when they were looking at some equipment that a retired magician was selling. The attic was hot and the ceiling low. Sabine had slipped in between two panels in a magic box that were so close she had to turn her face to the side. "I was playing and the door slammed shut." He sat down for a minute on a stool. When Sabine asked him if he wanted a glass of water, he shook his head.

  At the end of his life, Parsifal was trussed like a mental patient, stuffed, terrified, into a narrow tube so that the doctors might find the source of his crushing headache.

  "You're not wearing a watch. Do you have any metal on your body?" the black nurse said, his voice low but clear, nearly musical. "Do you have a pacemaker?"

  "I really don't want to go in there," Parsifal said. His closed eyelids fluttered from the headache.

  "Nobody wants to go in there," the technician said. He was a Filipino who wore a gold cross on the outside of his blue cotton scrub suit. "Some people don't mind and some people hate it, but nobody wants to go."

  "It doesn't hurt," the nurse said.

  "Doesn't hurt at all," the technician said. "We're going to lift you up, get you over onto the table. The pretty lady here is going to hold your head." He looked at Sabine.

  Sabine put one cool hand on either side of Parsifal's head, and Parsifal cringed. No matter how gentle she was, she was causing him pain and it was something she did not think she could possibly stand. She concentrated on the shape of his ears inside her palms. Beautiful ears. At the count of three they lifted, brought him only a few inches into the air, moved him barely more than a foot. It was gentle, everything was easy, but there were tears pooling up in the corners of his eyes and they spilled into her cupped palms.

  "Not so bad," the technician said. "Raise up your legs now." He slipped a pillow under Parsifal's knees. "Is that comfortable? Do you feel all right?"

  "I'm sorry," Parsifal whispered. Now the tears were running into his ears. "I just can't go in there."

  "He's claustrophobic," Sabine said, stroking his arm. She was worried that she was going to faint.

  The nurse and the technician looked at one another. They were a comedy team, each responsible for half a sentence. "The claustrophobia we've seen in here—," the technician said.

  "—one woman put out her arms and stopped the tray at the last minute—," the nurse said, spreading his arms.

  "—another one just scooted out the bottom and left," the technician said. "Not a word to us."

  For a moment they were all quiet. They were all waiting for different things.

  "This is a problem," Sabine said finally.

  The nurse looked through Parsifal's file. He was clearly mulling things over. "I can give you a little Xanax, under the tongue. It's bitter but it makes you feel better right away. That's going to help you." He stepped out of the room for no more than half a second and came back holding a tiny white cup, as if the pills were kept in a bucket just outside the door. At some point he had put on gloves, or maybe he had been wearing them all along. Then the nurse did something that surprised Sabine: He put his full open hand on the side of Parsifal's face, a touch that seemed almost loving, and for a minute Sabine wondered if they knew one another. Parsifal opened his eyes as if kissed awake. "Open up," the nurse said.

  Parsifal parted his lips and the thin, covered fingers of the nurse dipped beneath his tongue. The technician turned without another word and went back into his booth where he sat behind a glass window. He busied himself at a control panel, not watching.

  "I don't like these machines," the nurse said. "I've been in there myself lots of times. They test things out on us. But it isn't bad." He kept his hand on Parsifal's face. He ran a thumb across Parsifal's forehead in a way that did not seem to hurt him. "You just have to go. Just for a little while and then he'll let you out. The pretty lady, is she your wife?"

  "Yes," Parsifal said.

  "Your wife is going to stand right here at the bottom and she's going to hold on to your foot." He turned to Sabine. "Go hold his foot," he said softly. And Sabine let go of Parsifal's hand and walked to the end of the table and held both of his bare, sheet-covered feet. "All this is is magnets. There's nothing in there that can hurt you."

  "I just don't like being closed in," Parsifal said.

  "Nobody does," the nurse said. "Nobody does. Is that pill gone?"

  Parsifal nodded.

  "Then you're feeling a little better. I'm going to put some earplug? in because it gets noisy in there." He slipped two small foam corks into Parsifal's ears and then began putting padding around his head. "This is to hold you in place," he said, his voice suddenly much louder. "You have to promise to stay still for this so you don't have to do it again later on." He put a strap under Parsifal's chin and snapped the end above his head. "Now, this is the part that I don't like. I'm going to put a trap over your head, just to keep everything in place. Close your eyes." Even raised, his voice was sweet, hypnotic. Sabine knew he would have made a fine magician and she knew that even in his pain Parsifal was thinking the same thing. The nurse reached up and pulled a white steel cage over Parsifal's head. Then Parsifal was Houdini, but he hadn't practiced. "Now, I want you to stay real still, but if you need something, you say it, we can hear you, and you can hear us, and your wife, she's right here holding your feet and if anything goes wrong she'll just pull you out. Is that okay?"

  Parsifal didn't answer. He waved his hand.

  "Okay," the man said, and went behind the door.

  The voice of the technician came over an unseen speaker. It filled the room. "I'm going to move the table now. This is going to be very slow." When the tray moved into the tube, Sabine followed it. Parsifal wiggled his toes and she squeezed them back, and in this way they communicated.

  "He's doing all right in there?" the voice asked.

  "He's all right," Sabine said. Squeeze.

  There is a certain feeling when the spotlight is directly in your eyes. You know the house is full, the manager has told you, but everything in front of you is wrapped in a black sea, so you stop trying. To try and see is to strain your eyes against the light. It will give you a headache. When you look out, you are blind. The only person who knows this is the one standing next to you on the stage. He is all you can see. Together you speak and smile into the blackness. He is blind and he leads you. From this close you think he is wearing too much mascara.

  "You're doing just fine," the technician's voice said. "You are holding perfectly still. Just keep holding still."

  There was a drumming in the room, an industrial rhythm of hammers and gears, low thuds that at times seemed so frantic that it felt like something had gone wrong. The test took half an hour. Sabine watched the clock over the tube click along like an oven timer. She wanted to tell Parsifal something, to keep him occupied, but there was nothing to say. It was all she could do to speak. "Are you doing okay?" she called, and he bent his foot by way of acknowledgment.

  "You're halfway there," the voice said. "You are so still. You're perfect." The sound of bedlam, jackhammers and lead pipes on lead walls. And then later, "Three more minutes. One more set of pictures and then you're out of there." That was when Sabine felt Parsifal's toes flex and pull with happiness in her hands.

  The nurse came into the room, his blue scrubs dazzling against his black skin. He pushed a switch to set Parsifal free. "Over, over, over," the nurse said. "Never have to go in there again." He slid the head cage up and flicked the chin strap loose. It came apart so much quicker than it went together. The padding was gone, the earplugs. Parsifal was free. "You're feeling okay now. Aren't you fine?"

  "My head hurts so much," Parsifal said, his eyes still watering. There were wet stains beside his head.

  "They'll know something soon. Come on and I'll get you back to your room so you can rest."

  "Can I stay here, just for a minute? I don't want to move yet." Parsifal tried to smile at the man for his kindness. "I just need a minute to rest."

  "You wan
t to stay on the machine? Wouldn't you like it better if I moved you onto your gurney?"

  "Not yet," Parsifal said. "If that's all right. Not just yet."

  "Sure," the nurse said, patting his shoulder so lightly that they almost didn't touch. "We'll be right behind the window. We have a few minutes. You take your time."

  Sabine thanked him and the man left. All those people she met on the most important day of her life and never saw again. Sabine took Parsifal's hand.

  "I wish we were home," he said.

  "We will be. We'll go home today. No matter what they tell us, we'll leave."

  "Lean over," he said. "Come close to me."

  Sabine bent forward. Her hair slipped from behind her ears and fell onto his forehead. His eyes were blue like the sky over Los Angeles in winter.

  "Open your mouth," he said.

  And as soon as he said it she felt the cold weight on her tongue and tasted metal in her saliva. She opened her mouth and he reached up to her and took the silver dollar off her tongue.

  "Look at that," he said, and put it in her hand and squeezed her hand tight around the coin. "Rich girl," he said.