Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

We descended from our room singly the next weekend, my husband in too-tight lederhosen and a walking stick, myself in a veil but tightly cinched, and Lucchesi led us to separate tables. My husband was now Heinneman who owned the vines in the next valley, and I was Miss Maria Holzenfeiffer, a student on holiday. We managed. Later I bleached my hair or reddened it with shoe polish or pinned it up in wild tufts. The colonels and generals often brought less sophisticated girlfriends and I didn’t want to make them feel out of place. On occasion I discouraged the uglier aides-de-camp and wore a turban and floured my face to look quite ill, or flaunted a stomach, pillow-pregnant, with a black eye, courtesy of the kitchen charcoal. One late afternoon Mr. Lucchesi brought his brother’s car around to the front of the hotel, billowing smoke, and we disembarked with a cat on a leash. That week’s officer much admired the cat and did not object to the taste of its meat the day we waved goodbye.

  Some weekends we hid in our rooms in complete silence without food. Mr. Lucchesi knew when it was best for us to vanish. Not much of an informant, he turned in only those already dead. For example, he claimed to the officers that he had found a bachelor with an arsenal in his basement and wasn’t it fortunate he had caught him? when the man had died of a heart attack hours earlier. Through my efforts he continued to think positively toward us, although he chided me often in our rendezvous about the difficulties of his position.

  Once an officer did surprise me. His heavy boots beat down the hall toward the back room where my husband slept on a sofa and I smoothed my nails. Before he could shove the door open past the chair leaned against it, I tore off my blouse and threw myself at my husband with a moan. I knew my Germans. The officer muttered, Entschuldigung in embarrassment and backed out in a hurry. Alas, my husband hit his head so hard on the arm post due to my fervor, he drew blood. When recounting the scene in vivid detail to the townspeople, he referred to it as his war wound.

  He would play the loyal German when he had to, and spring to his feet and salute the moment a commandant entered the foyer. It was good for his gout. He would bow to the man and then cross into the dining room, to approach me with great hesitation and shyness. I wouldn’t look up until he spoke, sitting there pretending to read my book, turning pages, staring at its wavering photos through a pair of half-glasses left behind by an elderly waiter. Then I would greet this stranger in front of me with my best French, while he stumbled, searching for words he knew very well. Mr. Lucchesi applauded with his eyebrows, delivering the stew of the night to the commandant.

  As Mrs. Lucchesi had predicted, the Nazis, with their comings and goings, couldn’t be bothered to keep track of us. They treated us with amusement, sometimes with deference, but mostly ignored us. They had a war to fight. However, one evening a colonel sent an emissary over to our table. I was seated across the room in a suit stitched from the sitting-room curtain, pinned in peekaboo folds around the front, with a peacock feather in my hair from the dead fowl guarding the hotel not three months earlier. My husband had come in with me, this time carrying a brass-knobbed cane and wearing a mustache we’d concocted out of the fur of the cat. He was not that much older than the man standing in front of us, but the heavy lines I had drawn near his eyes suggested otherwise but were smudged where he had leaned onto his knuckles and sighed in nervousness.

  The colonel would like to send you a bottle of champagne, said the emissary. His day has gone well and he wishes to fill the room with celebration.

  We did not, as we sometimes had in the past, pretend we couldn’t understand what he had proposed. Champagne! We accepted. Mr. Lucchesi opened the bottle and poured every glass to the top. When the commandant waved at him to move our tables closer, Lucchesi rushed off to attend to a kitchen emergency.

  Sieg Heil! we sang anyway, our glasses raised.

  Mrs. Lucchesi told us after dinner the colonel’s accomplishment was to order the execution of the only other Jews in the city.

  By now many of the townspeople knew of our situation and a few had chosen to help. Some days I had too many costumes to pick from, and once an old woman died and left me her wig. Our weekly act endeared us to them; our appearances were all the theater they had. People ordered Lucchesi’s dreadful meals to exclaim and guffaw over the Nazi stupidity in private.

  Once in a great while I would play to my audience. I would drop a glove or a napkin not far from whatever commandant had arrived and the whole dining room would turn. These dalliances with danger made my husband furious. He would refuse to retrieve it, playing the jealous husband perfectly, despite himself: He would chew at his mustache or gnaw at a nail for the rest of the meal, and thereafter, sometimes for days. I complained that he would betray us, seeming always to be the same nervous man. I had to pick fights until he forgot his fear.

  We carried on like this for thirteen months. Who were we? Not even actors. We couldn’t keep track of who we were in such desperation. We had passed beyond stage fright, we were permanently frightened. Early one morning, my husband hung himself from the rafters. The belt that he’d twisted around his neck Lucchesi had found beside the railroad tracks after the passing of one particularly long set of sealed cars. My husband had begged him for it, saying it would give him courage. It gave him courage—to despair. My less discreet performances had made it increasingly difficult for him to remain unmoved, and the pressure to act had overwhelmed him.

  Mrs. Lucchesi heard me wailing in the hall and had to slap me quiet. I spent the day in the room. So I slept with a few of the officers and the hotelier. My husband had made the choice not to leave at the beginning when we had a chance, what else could I do? I had played my part.

  The next evening I walked into the dining room dressed in widow’s rags. The commandant, whom I’d met the night before, saluted me and extended his condolences but then ate his kraut without another word. Had we just amused him and all of the other commandants? I laughed out loud after he left the dining room—he must’ve heard me—then I ate alone for several days thereafter without noticing he no longer appeared, staring out the window where I could just see the packed earth that hid my husband. I missed him dearly, far more than my apparent lack of remorse might suggest. Our pas de deux was over, no one’s arms stood ready to catch me. I would be caught. I prepared for it, I stopped displaying myself in costume, I let my hair alone. In my grief, the planes overhead and the moving of troops did not register, although Mr. Lucchesi informed me at least three times that week that the town and indeed the country were now free. I could leave.

  When I returned, years later when I could once again afford it, I came not as a tourist, for you are never really a tourist after you have lived so long and so vividly in one place, but as someone who had never left. I passed the town’s bakeries, now changed into expensive cafés, and several smart shoe shops. Happy to see the town in good form, I waved at the tuba ensemble assembling in the cupola, and walked to the hotel, which now advertised for both dogs and people. In front stood a statue of the restaurateur to commemorate his service during the war as a spy. Well, he had gained plenty of information from me. I had come not to honor him but my husband, he who could not wait for the curtain call, who could not see past the stage light glinting off the audience’s jewels as they turned toward the exit, nor the ushers unlocking the doors, who could not imagine the freshly rained-on pavement outside, with the sidewalk so crowded beside the emptying theater, the bright moon pressing down so gaily on the clustering cabs.

  Of course no one knew me.

  Caesar’s Show

  Yannick Murphy

  “These?�
�� the boy says, rolling two race cars across the wooden hallway floor when his mother, Sarah, asks him where he got them. “My teacher gave them to me,” he says. Outside, the dog barks and whines. The dog is in the yard, his nose against a chain-link fence, wanting to get closer to a litter of stray kittens whose eyes are still closed. Rats are scurrying across the phone line that runs to the house, their shapes black in the dying light.

  “Really? Your kindergarten teacher gave you those two cars? Why?” Sarah says while standing at one end of the hall.

  “I don’t know,” the boy says. Sarah wishes that her husband, Benjamin, were home so she could tell him that she thinks their son has stolen the cars. She would like to discuss what to do about the stealing and about the lie. Sarah never feels confident reprimanding her son. She always thinks she is being too easy on him. But Benjamin will not be home for a while. He is at the airport, waiting for a foreign client he’s supposed to pick up and escort to a meeting with the senior partner. Sarah hears the rats jump from the phone wire to the top of a palm tree. The palm-tree leaves rattle and shake. Everything in the yard sounds like it’s moving because of the Santa Anas. They blow and the hot air moves across her yard, shaking the grapefruit tree. Its fallen leaves skitter across the paved walkway.

  Sarah picks up the phone and calls Benjamin. “How much longer?” she asks.

  “An hour at least. The plane’s delayed,” he says.

  She picks up the broom. The house is so dirty, there are bits of food on the floor, and balls of hair, but just as she lifts the broom she hears the dog barking again. He won’t stop barking at the kittens that were born on the other side of the chain-link fence where rough grass grows in clumps and bare old tires lie. With her broom she goes out to where the dog is, his nose in between the diamond-shaped spaces of the fence, and she tells him to hush, just hush. “I’ll hit you with this broom if you don’t,” she says, but she knows she would not and instead she sits down beside Bob. She pets his fine broad head and runs her hand down his thick black fur. She looks at the kittens too. “Oh, they are cute. No wonder you like them. Yes, you would be a good father to them if they were on our side of the fence,” she says. Her son comes out with the cars and sits down next to her. They all look at the kittens and her son shows the kittens his two cars and then he rolls the cars up and down the dog’s back, which spreads the fur apart so that the dog’s pale skin shows brightly against the black fur. Sarah still holds the broom and looks down at the bristles, noticing how they are bent backward, as if every time she ever swept she swept too hard, as if everything she tries to sweep up is ground in or stuck on the floor and will not come loose.

  The phone rings and it is Benjamin saying, “The good news is the plane is landing now. The bad news is, Rogers, who is supposed to meet him for drinks, just got a flat tire on the expressway, and it looks like I’ll have to be the one taking him for drinks.” Sarah can hear the rumble of the planes flying low. “Call you later,” Benjamin says.

  The two cars are on the table at dinner. Her son slides them between the salt and pepper shakers and Sarah asks again, “Did your teacher really give you those cars?” The boy doesn’t answer. He decides to put his fork in his mouth instead. “She did not give you those cars, my love,” she says. The boy continues eating. He takes his fork and pierces as many pieces of chicken as he can onto the tines, then he stuffs the forkful in his mouth. Sarah can see the white pieces between his lips because there is no possible way he can fit all of the food in his mouth and keep his mouth closed.

  “When your father gets home I’ll tell him that you stole the cars. I bet he’ll say that tomorrow, at school, you will have to give the cars back,” Sarah says. The boy continues to chew. Later, when she clears the table, and her son has gone into his room, she notices the cars are gone. When she is finished with the dishes she goes to his room to check on him. He is reading on his beanbag chair, but she does not see the cars and the cars don’t seem to be in his pockets either. She feeds the dog after dinner, because someone told her once that dogs should always be fed after the family is fed because that puts them in their place and they know they are not the alpha dog and that you are the alpha dog. Really, though, she has no interest in being the alpha dog and likes to feed the dog after the family eats because after dinner there are always scraps from their plates she likes to give the dog and the dog’s food that they buy is like rolled-up balls of chewed cardboard and who can live on that? Not my dog, she thinks, not a dog who is still so protective over the newborn kittens that he has not even come into the house for dinner but is still out there in the darkness, still barking, but barking with a sore-sounding throat that sounds very sad to Sarah and seems to strike a chord inside of her and for once she knows exactly how that expression came to be, because she feels as if somewhere inside of her that sore-sounding bark is resonating against a piece of her, such as her breastbone, so that she feels the bark as much as she hears it.

  “Let’s jump,” the boy says and he takes Sarah by her hand and leads her to her bedroom and tries to get her up onto her bed with him. It is close to the boy’s bedtime. She should not be letting him jump because he will become too excited and sleep will take too long to come to him, but she is feeling sorry that she accused the boy of lying and so she takes off her shoes and starts to jump with him. Holding hands, they are jumping high, the bed covers beneath them becoming jumbled under their feet. “In circles, Mommy,” the boy says and so they jump going in circles now and she’s laughing with her son, because she is out of breath and her son is saying, “Higher, Mommy, higher” and so she is trying to jump higher now and when she does she sees that she can see into the neighbor’s bedroom across the way. It is easy to see because it is such a short distance from their house that if she was to open the window and lean out she could probably touch the window of the neighbor’s bedroom. The neighbor is Caesar, who does not have children or a wife. His wife died a year ago. At first it looks like Caesar is watching a television show, but then she realizes it is Caesar on the screen having sex with a woman in his bedroom. Sarah knows the woman. She realizes that Caesar filmed himself and his wife having sex years ago, that he must have set up a tripod and a camera and let it roll. Sarah, when she realizes what she is seeing, falls down to the bed, bringing her son down with her.

  “What? Let’s keep jumping!” her son says.

  “No, we’re done jumping. It’s your bedtime. Tomorrow is a school day,” she says.

  When she tucks him in, she says, “Close those brown eyes and we will see each other in the morning.” She puts her mouth against the top of his head to kiss him, feeling with her lips the softness of his hair. Outside again they can hear the dog barking and whining.

  “He loves those kittens,” her son says. “Can’t we go to the other yard and pick those kittens up and give them to Bob?” her son says.

  “No, they are not his kittens. It’s best if we leave them over there. The mother of those kittens would not want us touching them. If we do, she might not take care of them anymore.”

  “Why?” the son asks.

  Sarah shakes her head, “It’s just what mother animals sometimes do,” she says.

  After she kisses her son good night, she leaves the door open for him because sometimes he gets scared. Then she goes to her bedroom and she turns off the light. She stands on her bed and peers out through the window. The Caesar in the show, the Caesar who was once married, is getting head from his wife on the screen and the Caesar who is now lying on his bed watching his dead wife giving him head is touching himself. When the phone rings and Sarah answers it, she whispers, “Hello,” and Benjamin says, “What are you whispering for?” and so she tells him what she is seeing right now outside their bedroom window and Benjamin says that is so sad, and Sarah says how it is also disgusting, the man should buy some curtains, and she w
onders if that makes it more sad that it is also disgusting or if it is less sad.

  “Well, my client’s plane landed and I’m waiting for him to go through a long line at customs,” he says. “Tell me, what else is new there?”

  “Your son is a thief,” she says. Benjamin laughs, “Really?”

  “He stole two cars from school. He said the teacher gave them to him.”

  “Well, maybe she did,” Benjamin says.

  “No, she did not. He practically admitted to stealing them in his own way. What should we do about it?” she asks.

  “Do about it? Nothing. He knows you know he did something wrong. He won’t do it again.”

  “Nothing? Shouldn’t we punish him in some way?”

  “I suppose we should make him return the cars,” Benjamin says. Sarah hears the dog now, he is no longer barking. Now he is wailing.

  “Maybe he should do something more. Maybe he should write about it. He should write fifty times that he will never steal cars again,” Sarah says.

  Benjamin laughs, “Does he even know how to write that?”

  “I’ll show him,” Sarah says. “I’ll write the first sentence down and then he’ll write the rest.”

  “What else is going on?” Benjamin says.

  “Our dog thinks he’s a cat,” Sarah says.

  “A cat? Oh here’s my client, that was fast,” Benjamin says. “I’ve got to go.”

  Sarah hangs up the phone. She thinks having her son write fifty times that he will never steal cars again is a good punishment. She wishes Benjamin had agreed with her, or told her he thought it was a good punishment too. She decides that she will definitely make her son do it. I’m his mother, I can decide my own son’s punishment, she thinks, and then she wonders if her son wakes up early, will he have enough time to write fifty times on a sheet of lined paper that he will never steal cars again before she has to take him to school.