by Laird Koenig
She looked back to find Mario’s black eyes staring into hers.
"She won’t even let her own creep son drive it. Or my father—even after he tunes it."
"Well, she lets my father," Rynn said petulantly. Abruptly she changed her tone. "Look," she said, "you really are being awfully stupid."
"Tell me, does it hurt your throat to talk that way?"
The girl went scarlet.
"Talk about stupid. Wow. I mean what do you call it when you’re the one who’s asking me to do you the favor?"
The girl pulled her wallet from her coat pocket and drew out bills. "Here. Five whole dollars."
The boy turned from her and headed for the tree where his bicycle leaned.
"I’m already late for my magic show."
"Your father told you to drive this car!"
His hands on the bicycle’s handlebars, Mario raised his black eyes slowly. "What’s wrong with you?"
"Nothing’s wrong!” Rynn would have given anything to have kept her voice from sounding so desperate.
"Like what time does your father’s train get in?"
"Right away."
"You see?" The black eyes were still holding her.
"There isn’t a train till after six."
"Look. If I offended you about the money, I’m sorry. But it is true about the car."
“No it isn’t."
He wheeled the bicycle from the tree. He adjusted a strap that held a large canvas bag marked MARIO THE MAGICIAN full of his show equipment on the back fender.
In the distance a crow complained in the mist.
Mario put his cane across the handlebars and climbed onto the bicycle. "I’ve got to do my show."
Rynn placed her boot in front of the tire to keep the bicycle from moving. "Come back after?"
Mario stared into her face.
"Please?"
She knew the boy was waiting for her to tell him the truth.
She reached out to straighten his moustache, but he twisted away.
"I’ll fix it when I get there."
Rynn’s eyes sought the boy’s for as long as it took her to speak. "I need your help."
Mario looked down at his handlebars. He could have been a very little boy. "Maybe. I mean after I do my show.”
"You promise?"
The bicycle rolled across the leaves and out into the lane.
9
THE FIRE crackled in the hearth. The gateleg table was set for dinner for two.
Rynn, tearing lettuce leaves and dropping them one by one into a salad bowl, looked across the counter to Mario’s black cape which hung on the hall peg. The bicycle leaned against the wall. The boy himself had taken the telephone on its long cord and sat near the hearth talking to his mother. "The new trick really went over big. I’m still at the birthday party. They asked me to stay for dinner. Just hamburgers and cokes. Some of the kids in my class at school are here."
Rynn cut a tomato into wedges and dropped them into the bowl. She looked at the boy silhouetted by the fire. She had not asked him to lie about where he was, but she was glad he had.
"Tell Tom he can take her to the horrible movie for a change. It’s his turn anyway. Bye." He hung up and brought the instrument to the kitchen counter and Rynn. "One thing about a big family, you’ve always got a little brother you can make drag your horrible sister to the horrible movie."
With a swiftness and expertise the boy pronounced sleight of hand, the girl sliced a cucumber.
"Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?"
"No." She reached for the oil and vinegar.
"Wow. I mean that’s something I can’t even imagine,"
"Will you light the candles, please?"
Until he returned to the coffee table she had forgotten the boy limped. He took matches from the cigarette box.
"You smoke?"
"Sometimes," she said tasting the salad dressing.
"You don’t worry about cancer?"
She did not answer.
At the table Mario lit the candles, straightening them in their pewter candlesticks. The two flames wavered into life, the glasses and the silverware reflected their sparkle.
The barefoot girl carried a tray to the table. She had changed into her long white sheath with the blue border at the neck and sleeves, and as she moved from the dark kitchen into the fire’s glow she knew she looked her best, She felt an added pride when she found Mario staring at her,
The match flame burned his finger and he quickly shook it out.
"You got all dressed up for dinner," he said,
"Changed from my Levis is all."
"Very pretty dress,"
She looked down at the white sheath as if she had never noticed that it was, as he said, very pretty. "My father and I bought it in Morocco."
"They smoke a lot of hash there."
"They do a lot of things there." She managed to sound very worldly, an impression she enjoyed giving the boy.
"You ever smoke hash?"
The girl put the salad bowl on the table.
"Hundreds of times."
"Really?" Mario’s admiration was undisguised.
She found something so touching, so innocent about his awe that she shook her head.
"Not really."
She hoped her honesty would put him at ease. He was being overly polite, showing with every move how eager he was to please, trying so hard to do the proper thing. Too many manners.
Rynn wondered, because his behavior was so forced—and remembering the way he asked his mother’s permission to stay at the birthday party—if tonight might not be the first time Mario had ever eaten dinner with anyone but his enormous Italian family.
"You go ahead and sit down," she said running back to the kitchen.
But Mario stood, as she knew he would, until she brought the broiled lamb chops, buttered broccoli and parsley potatoes. He pulled back her chair, and after several awkward maneuvers they both hoped their laughter covered, he managed to settle the girl at the table.
Across from one another, they dropped napkins into their laps and smiled self-consciously.
She pointed to his black tie.
"You’re very formal."
"How about you?" He indicated her long dress.
With candle flames between them they both felt they were entering a new and rarefied world of men and women who dressed for dinner and dined by candlelight.
"We should have music," Rynn said.
She ran to the stereo, and when Julian Bream’s guitar filled the parlor Mario looked in wonder at the source of overhead sound. Rynn was turning out all the lights till only the fire and the candles lit the room.
"You want wine?"
"Do you?"
“I hate it."
"Me too."
She saw that Mario was waiting for her to sit and begin eating, and she scrambled into her chair before he could help her. She made a little display of eating in order that the boy might begin with his broccoli and potatoes. They were easier to handle with a knife and fork than the two lamb chops. She knew he was watching her, fascinated by the way she held her knife and fork in what, to Americans, were the wrong hands. She was happy to show him the English had not the slightest difficulty getting the lamb off the bones.
They sat for a long moment without speaking—a silence filled by guitar music. At last Mario managed to get one bite of lamb on his fork.
"Very good," he said.
"Thank you."
She picked up a bone in her hands and nibbled. Mario again watched closely, then followed her example. She knew he was truly enjoying his meal now that he got fuller bites of meat.
"You’re a really great cook."
"What’s so surprising about that?"
"I only meant—for being thirteen and all."
Rynn tossed the lamb bone to her plate, and he realized he had said something to anger her. But what? She was glowering at him. He stopped gnawing his lamb bone.
"You’re just as
bad as the rest of them."
Mario was wise enough to say nothing.
"How old do you have to be before people treat you as a person? Cooking’s not like a piece a clever child stands up and recites or a parlor trick one performs for the adults. Of course I can cook."
"I only meant that not even all grown-ups can cook."
"Anyone who can read can cook."
Rynn picked up her other chop.
Had the crisis passed?
"My Mom can’t," Mario said. "She buys Italian spaghetti sauce. Frozen." He looked at the girl. Was she smiling?
He wished she would smile.
"Like we’ve got this big family joke." He looked across the candlelight. "You and your father have family jokes?"
"Of course."
"Well ours is that when my Mom’s out in the kitchen getting dinner, we always say ‘dinner’s thawing.' Then we always say, "But Mom isn’t."
Rynn did not laugh.
"Because of all the frozen food she uses."
"I understand."
The boy put his meat on his plate and wiped his greasy fingers on his napkin.
"Supposed to be hysterically funny." He looked at her. "The English got some kind of law against laughing?"
"That was very funny," she said without conviction.
Now it was Mario who threw his napkin on the table.
"Shit."
Julian Bream’s guitar evoked a summer night in Spain. For a long moment Rynn sat and Mario pushed his fork at his broccoli. Then she spoke, her voice as quiet as a whisper, "Mario the Magician?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. About the car I mean."
"That’s okay."
"Then eat your chop."
"It’s very good."
But he did not eat.
"You don’t like to smile, do you?" Evidently he felt it was his turn to be cruel. "I mean that way you have to show your chipped tooth."
"Let me worry about that."
"You think I care? My oldest brother got all of his upper front teeth knocked out playing football. He smiles. He smiles his goddamn head off."
"Eat your chop."
"Okay."
Mario picked up the meat.
"I wasn’t really all that certain you would come back." Rynn scraped up a drop of warm candle wax.
"Your big hang-up," Mario said from around his lamb, "is that you don’t trust guys."
"Why did you?"
"Come back?"
"No. The other."
"The car?"
"You didn’t have to."
"Damn right I didn’t."
Mario leaned back in his chair. He could see his father settling back at the dinner table, demanding silence, working up to the Big Man statement. His father had the advantage of a cigar.
"If you really want to know, it’s mostly because you may be very smart, but you’re stupid. Look—if you really wanted to get her car away from the front of your house why go to all the hassle of taking it to the station? See, the trick in magic is to do the one thing that’s so simple and so obvious no one ever thinks of it."
"What’s so simple and obvious?"
"What’s simpler than putting it back where it came from? I mean you did say her office is where she drove it from."
Rynn knew she had not thought out this part of the plan very well. No, it was not a plan. It was an emergency, and he had helped her. He had done what she asked him to do. He had done what he felt he could do. Still, she hated not having a plan, not being in command, not knowing every single step of what had been done.
"Anybody see you leave it at her office?"
"Jesus," he said, abandoning his lamb bone. "You think I want to get busted for ripping off Old Lady Hallet’s most prized possession? Like if I’d been dumb enough to get caught she’d have my ass in jail for eight hundred and twenty-seven years." He pushed his knife and fork across his plate with a clatter. "I mean if you don’t trust me, why the hell didn’t you do it?" He folded his arms. "But you don’t even trust me enough to tell me why I did it."
"You did it to help me."
"Yeah." The boy shrugged. Somehow the simple truth no longer seemed enough now to cover the enormous chance he had taken. There was also another truth of which he did not speak, that he did not know any other girl who had ever asked him to do anything.
"You should have put the keys through the mailbox in the office door."
"No I shouldn’t."
Rynn poked at her lamb, then laid her knife and fork across the plate.
"Here I am," Mario said, "sitting there in her Bentley in front of her horrible goddamn office. In the horrible goddamn dark. Trying like mad not to have anybody see me. Trying not to get busted. 'Keep it simple,’ I said to myself. Yeah, that sounds easy, then all of a sudden it hits me. Okay, so I may not know why Mrs. Hallet didn’t drive her own car back, but one thing I do know. Mrs. Hallet wouldn’t put her own car keys through no horrible goddamn door mailbox. Not for her creep son to get. She’d keep her keys. They’d be wherever she is.”
"When you left, you locked the car door?"
"All four." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the keys and jingled them in front of the girl. "They’d be wherever she is. Since you won’t tell me that—here, you take the horrible goddamn keys."
They fell with a clink where he dropped them on her plate.
"Give them to her the next time you see her."
Rynn picked up the keys, jingled them as if to feel their presence, and closed her fist around them. All at once, as if she had had all the talk of the car she could stand, she pushed back her chair and rose to her feet.
"I feel like wine."
"Me too," said Mario as she ran into the kitchen.
"Red or white?"
"Anything but dago red."
A cupboard door banged. Rynn hurried back to the table holding a bottle.
"Voila! You be the father and open it."
"Very fancy. Like this one doesn’t unscrew. Got a cork and everything."
She handed him the opener.
Digging into the cork, Mario stopped smiling. Now, not having to look at her, he was again about to ask the question she did not want him to ask.
"Rynn ..."
"One rule with the wine. We can’t discuss anything serious."
He was not going to be stopped that easily.
"You haven’t told me why ..."
Rynn stepped back from the table and her bare feet turned in half a dozen steps of a dance as she lifted her hair and piled it on top of her head.
"My darling," her voice was a fluting parody of a very-upper-class-English-woman she had laughed at in a play on television in London. "That just so happens to be an extraordinary vintage, so do—do show the greatest, the utmost care."
"How come she didn’t drive it back?"
Rynn insisted on maintaining her fantasy as one hand wafted in the direction of the bottle. "A nineteen-oh-two."
Rynn?"
At once, she let her hair fall, and her voice took on a surprisingly sharp little bite.
"I told you. You did it because I asked you to."
"You made it sound like a matter of life and death. You said we didn’t have time to talk about it—then!"
"You didn’t have to!" Her voice was shrill.
"I risked my goddamn ass for you’"
She glared at him coldly. "All you did was drive her car back—"
"Why didn’t she?" Mario had never sounded more demanding. "Look. You better tell me what the hell’s going on. Because if I had left that car of hers at the station like you told me to, everybody in the village would have recognized it."
"They’d think she’d taken the train into New York!'"
"No they wouldn’t. Everybody knows Mrs. Hallet hates New York. Too many foreigners. Mrs. Hallet wouldn’t set foot in New York." He caught the girl staring at him. "You didn’t know that, did you?"
Rynn grabbed the bottle from his hand, splashing wine on her
white caftan. She poured a glass and gulped its contents.
"I hate it," she said banging the glass down.
"You don’t trust anybody, do you?"
"My father."
The boy shrugged, and took a sip of wine. "Yeah, well, lots of luck." A glance at the girl told him she had not detected his sarcasm. She had left the conversation and was miles away. He picked up the wine bottle.
"More?"
She shook her head.
"Don’t like it?"
"Sour."
In defiance he drank more wine.
“Another lamb chop?"
When he answered he watched the effect of his words. "How about saving some for your father?"
"I told you. He’s not coming home till later."
"Shouldn’t we still save him some?"
"He’s staying in New York."
"You never said that."
Mario’s eyes never left her. She rose from her chair and brought a plate with more meat from the kitchen. With a serving fork she dropped a lamb chop on his plate.
"I’m glad you’re here," she said. She stood beside his chair. Mario did not turn to speak; he looked straight at the gnawed bone.
"You ever stayed alone before?"
"Hundreds of times."
"Like all those times you smoked hash?"
The stereo clicked off. In the corner Gordon’s sharp little claws scrabbled on the wire of his cage.
"You’re not scared?"
"Of what?"
"Being alone."
"Haven’t you ever been alone?"
"With eleven brothers and sisters?"
She sat.
"You must have a big house."
"What we have," he said, "is that bunch of rooms that used to be a motel in back of the garage. The only time we’re all together is when we sit down for one of my Mom’s rotten dinners. You should see all of us. Wow. Nice and squalid."
"Twelve kids plus Mom and Dad feeding their faces? I should hate it."
He picked up the lamb chop and gnawed it to the bone. "Better than being alone."
Rynn moved from Mario’s chair to the fireplace.
"Never less idle than when completely idle, never less alone than when completely alone." She did not seem to be talking to him so much as reassuring herself.