by Linda Grant
He had tried playing the video back in slow motion, then had taken it into work and played it back on a professional machine, but he realized Ivan’s own eye had followed the deceit, he had not filmed the place where the deception was happening. Max said nothing. He did not tell his father that a flash of light on a coin makes the viewer believe that it is in the place where it is not. His father was very stupid sometimes.
Stephen would drive himself crazy wondering how each trick was done, ticking off all the possibilities; one thing that would never occur to him was that Max had gone to Ivan and Simone’s house three weeks earlier, and proposed to Simone, the television soap actress, that she play the part of his stooge. And she had giggled and accepted. Of course she would. So when he asked someone to come forward and take a card and he had said, “Lovely lady with the golden hair, what about you?” and she had laughed and first shook her head, and then graciously agreed, they had already practiced the trick together twice a week until they had perfected it. And they had kept it a secret from Ivan. She didn’t tell him until they were walking back home to Gibson Square across Upper Street and Ivan said he wouldn’t have thought the kid had had it in him, he seemed like such a scared mouse, and they agreed they would not tell his parents.
Max understood implicitly that if anyone knew how his tricks were done, they would be crushed with disappointment. Even the most hard-boiled wanted it to be magic, no one likes to be deceived. Magic, he later said, was a hedge against cynicism, it gave you the sense of wonder that is to be found in God and science.
Offstage, he was very good at staying silent, of vaguely evading questions about how David Blaine could take a watch from a passerby on the street and seemingly pass it through the melting window of a shopfront and then point to it behind the re-formed glass, sitting in the display of merchandise. He knew the principles of how it was done. One needed only to think logically and you would soon exhaust all the possibilities. But all he would say was, “Yes, David Blaine is a very good street magician and he’s meticulous with his preparation, but he has a very strong personality and a lot of his work depends on that.”
Andrea, watching the video, was stunned. She had seen her son put on a costume, another self, a little joking mannequin with a patter. He had paid Simone a compliment about her golden hair before stroking her velvet Alice band and producing a scarlet feather from it. He seemed to be wearing another person, and it was so obvious to her that this was not his true self that she felt frightened that he could admit a being so alien into his body. And after he had taken his bow he seemed to peel off the public boy and revert to the quiet child he had been most of his life. And the longer she watched, the more she realized that he craved an audience. He wanted and enjoyed the attention. Because she had not given him enough? That could be the only explanation.
She had taken him every week to magic club because she had thought that it would end his solitary life, that he would be with others and learn social skills, but all that had happened was that he had learned how to behave as if he knew how to socialize. Suppose they took the books and videos away from him, with the sets of cards and the cup and balls, and the boxes with the false backs? What would happen to him then, would he implode back into silence?
Max returned to his room after the show feeling as if he had just had an orgasm. The applause in the dining room, the tricks, which had all worked, the compliance of Simone, who had done exactly as he had told her, and had beautifully acted the part, it all felt explosively climactic and he had to lie down on the bed, exhausted, before he could remove his clothes and put away the concealed cards and other pieces of his apparatus. He slept for a few minutes, and dreamed. He dreamed of Simone and her velvet hairband and the smell of her scent, and awoke wet.
It had been a glorious day. For his birthday he would ask for the vanishing ketchup bottle trick. It was the one he most wanted to do, to make a bulky object disappear. One day, when he was older, he would learn to disappear himself.
Behind the wall he heard his sister moving about heavily. She was in distress, he thought. He got out of bed and knocked on her door but she did not respond. He knocked again. It was like being him when he could not hear, but she could hear.
“Marianne,” he said. “I want to show you a trick.”
She opened the door.
“What trick?”
He was holding one of Grace’s pieces of cloth, it was navy blue. He had gone into her room and taken it when she was downstairs in the kitchen.
“I’m going to make this vanish,” he said.
She knew he had never made anything so large disappear, so she sat patiently on the bed, her arms folded, watching.
“I need to open the window.”
“Go on.”
He pulled up the sash of the lower pane.
“Watch.”
He dropped the cloth out into the garden.
“See,” he said, closing the window, “she’s gone.”
New Year’s Eve
He experienced such dread at the idea of turning fifty. It was all so extraordinarily surprising that he should be older now than his father was when he, Stephen, had set off for England on the SS United States. So unwelcome and unbelievable that he turned down the party, the restaurant meal, the romantic weekend in Paris or Venice, even the gift to himself of a new car, he fancied a Saab. He wished to extract from himself, by violence if necessary, his fiftyness. He understood that he was more than halfway done with his life, unless he lived to be a hundred, but it was more likely to be eighty, and the next thirty years would pass in a flash. The final decade would be full of ill health and dimming eyesight or hearing, he would be sitting in a chair watching TV instead of making TV.
At fifty Jimi Hendrix had been dead for twenty-two years, Jim Morrison for twenty, Elvis for only eight. It was romantic to die young, but not a fate Stephen had wished for himself. He wanted to stay young forever. He had once heard his mother say, looking in the mirror at her lined face and the sagging jowls, “But I’m only twenty-two!” There were photographs of his mother looking impossibly young, but dressed in the styles of wartime. Her youth did not count. His parents’ generation had been adults all their lives, they had had the Depression and the war and responsibilities. They had been born into middle age.
How can I be fifty, he asked himself, when I only just began? The kid who had tried on Marilyn Monroe’s champagne mink in the warehouse felt closer to him than the man in the mirror with the pepper-and-salt hair, the emerging widow’s peak, the brown spots on the backs of his hands and the hairs that had started to grow from his nostrils. His feet hurt when he walked too far. He had developed a gastric intolerance to overspiced foods. If he wasn’t careful with his diet he was prone to constipation. When he looked into the mirror he was taken aback by the absence of his hippie beard and bush of Jew-fro. He was twenty-three and sailing across the Atlantic on the SS United States, experiencing the romance of the sea, having already slept with a girl in Naples and left her by accident his UCLA library card. He was sharing the napkin of petits fours in his cabin with Bill Clinton, Clinton of Univ, currently president of the United States, and a girl whose name he could no longer remember. He had written to Clinton to offer his congratulations on his election, and reminding him of the passage over, but had received a form reply from one of his aides. He doubted that Clinton had ever seen the letter. It was one thing to be fifty and running America, a job fitted only for adults, another still to be the boy burning inside with ambition thwarted, and longings for things which could not be.
Andrea was tired of listening to his neuroses about turning fifty. What concerned him so deeply? Was he facing menopause, as she would in a couple of years? No. It was just a word, a little F word, it was meaningless, he should get over himself. But he was the first of his crowd to turn that corner, what did they know?
Christmas in Islington. Andrea lit candles and put them in the windows, she decorated a tree with lights and baubles, they ate food s
he would not have allowed into the house at other times of the year, and the children walked past the churches and wondered what people were doing going in there, to those cold naves and marble altars with plastic Jesuses lying in wicker cribs.
On New Year’s Eve there were parties all along the street, you ran from one to another. When they first began, the young adults came bringing their babies, then their children, who ran ceaselessly up and down the carpeted stairs all evening. The guests were neighbors, they were parents who had met at the school gates, and the infants had turned eventually into sullen teenagers, smoking cigarettes secretly in the garden until they went to university and returned in the vacations. Consenting to look in “for a few minutes” at these obligatory neighborhood gatherings, yet not managing to leave until late when they had filled up on free food and alcohol and the boldest had scored some dope from Ivan, who was childless, glamorous, rich and brushed off the protests of their mothers and fathers.
You dressed up, you drank champagne, some of the hosts hired young people dressed in black to open the door and take the coats and serve the wine and canapés. At the far end of the garden a few of the men, and women shivering in evening gowns, ventured down to the fish pond to smoke a joint.
Fairy lights hung from the black trees. A line of frost along the fence, and their feet sliding on the wet grass around the pond with its cold carp.
A summerhouse with Oriental cushions to recline on was lit with lanterns, and candles guided the path back to the house, every window ablaze with chandeliers, Christmas trees, fairy lights and only at the top, where the au pair had a whole floor in what had been the Victorian maids’ quarters, were the curtains drawn and dark. They had started in Highgate twenty-five years ago, going to parties, and now they were in tuxedos and the women in gowns. So he had been right, it had gone on being parties, but no one here was going to walk home in the dawn and make out on Marx’s tomb.
Andrea was somewhere in the house talking to her friends, absorbed in preventing herself from touching the tray of canapés that circulated through the house. And this was it, this was where it had all been leading to, this lightheaded feeling of pleasure and too much champagne and the stars.
Sitting in the summerhouse, stoned, nearly fifty, loosening his bow tie, Stephen accepted the company of a woman who came and sat down next to him, a cashmere shawl around her white shoulders.
Mary Bright, tall, fashionably dressed, who said, “We’ve met before, a long time ago, at Oxford.”
She had once walked with her boyfriend down the Woodstock Road to Ivan’s flat to score some acid, and Stephen had been sitting on the floor rolling a joint, the legendary chemist who made Mister Button.
“And did you take it?” he asked, unable to remember her but impressed by the glossiness of her appearance, the high heels, the short skirt revealing the slender legs, the waist belted in patent leather and the smooth face.
“Not me. I was far too nervous. I just wanted to meet you.”
“Meet me?”
“Yes. Because Mike said he was sure you were CIA.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Well, you know, he said what else would you be doing in Oxford?”
“But that’s absurd. Bill Clinton was there at the same time, we were all Rhodes Scholars, not spooks.”
“Yes, I realize that now, but we thought many more absurd things in those days, didn’t we?”
“Very true.”
“Absurdity, it feels so retro now. We live in an age of utilitarian common sense.”
“We do?”
“It certainly feels that way. To me.”
“What were you studying?”
“Law.”
“And did you become a lawyer?”
“Yes, I did, and still am.”
“Did you marry Mike?”
“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.”
“So is he here? I could set him straight.”
“God no, we were divorced years ago.” He looked down at a handful of silver rings, none on the relevant finger. “I used to read you, you know, in that column you did in the underground paper, I don’t even remember its name anymore, it all seems so long ago. What do you do now?”
“I’m in television.”
“How did that happen?”
Someone came down to the summerhouse with a bottle. “Leave it here,” Stephen said.
He told her about the voyage over on the SS United States, and being sent down from Oxford and the squat in Chalk Farm—this story, this novel it seemed now to him. He laid it at her feet like a dog eagerly bringing in a bird from the garden.
“So we had you all wrong.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how I was supposed to be. What about you?”
“I love the law, I’m argumentative. My practice is litigation, personal injury and clinical negligence. The more difficult the better. I’m considered what is called in the profession robust.”
“So I shouldn’t get on the wrong side of you.”
“Inadvisable. How do you know the Pallants?”
“We live two doors down, look, that’s my house.”
“The lights are on. Who’s home?”
“My son, I expect, he’s a bit of a loner. My daughter is in Yugoslavia, or whatever they call it now, taking pictures.”
“How frightening.”
“Yes.”
It was eighteen years since Susie in the van, with the musty smell, the dirty hair and the angelic face, the running away of both of them, but he had turned back, had not gone to San Diego, of course he had not shipped out. His maritime union ticket stayed in his wallet, a lifeline to the sea, but he had never used it since he jumped ship at Southampton. They were inching toward the New Year, he would be wanted very soon in the house to listen to the clock chime, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and kiss his wife. He was expected, he looked at his watch. “Only ten minutes to go,” he said.
“Another year.”
“I’m gonna be fifty.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know what comes to an end, or if anything does. I don’t know what to expect.”
“We’d better go into the house now,” she said. “Your wife will be waiting for you.”
“Yes, she will. Perhaps you’ll remember her, she was at Oxford too, she was often at Ivan’s flat.”
“Did you marry that very melodramatic blonde?”
“God no.”
“Then the plump carroty one.”
“That’s her. Or was. She’s neither plump nor a redhead now.”
“We all change. Here’s my card. Give me a ring if you ever feel like lunch.” She took the card out of her evening bag and placed it in his breast pocket. They walked into the house where Andrea was waiting, holding a glass of champagne, looking at them walk in together, a handsome if ill-sorted couple.
Mary Bright. Mary Bitch. Andrea was forced to endure five months of her before Stephen finally sent her away.
“Do you have to be so fucking obvious?” she said. “I had never thought of you as banal, a midlife crisis, spare me.”
But Stephen was enslaved to Mary Bright’s little erotic secrets, such as her penchant for wearing stockings and a garter belt under her tight bandage dresses and the first shaved pussy he had ever seen. She was not so far from fifty herself, but had an entirely different mental attitude toward this queasy milestone. She was full of life, and she was out there in the world, she did not brood as Andrea did on who she was or where she had come from. Andrea described her as a carnivore. “Well, so am I,” Stephen said. “No you’re not, you just wish you were.”
For years he tried to recollect their first meeting at Ivan’s flat with the large windows and the expensive sound system until one day, in a box of photographs, he saw her. Andrea and Grace were posed standing by their bicycles in their radiant days of pre-Raphaelite hair, colored stockings, ripped cerise skirts, the velvet dress—looking to him now not like women, but plump-cheeked children
. And there she was, Mary Bright, a passerby pushing her bicycle, standing at the side of the frame while the photograph was taken, leaning against the wall of Oriel, looking straight at him, into the future, through the curtain of parted black hair.
There were so many beautiful girls like her at Oxford, seen on the street but never in the Dyson Perrins lab. They were inaccessible to him, the horny lonely grad student who could only look. And he finally had her. She was his reward, he felt like someone who had been on a long diet who finally allows himself dessert.
The five months had nothing to do with Andrea, or their marriage, or the family, the house, his career. He had never had any intention of giving up the gains of thirty years to compensate for the loss of some strands of hair. Mary Bright was the loser, but surely, he said to her, she must have understood that from the outset, being strong, bold, independent and liberated. He had assumed she knew. How could she not know?
Her First War
Everyone was waiting. Day after day, nothing was advanced in the situation, the guests sat under the gilded dome of the Hotel Esplanade drinking coffee, eating strudel and waiting for the dinner hour, when waiters wheeled metal trolleys across the carpeted floors and stood by the white-clothed tables flambéing cherries in liqueur. Blue flames rose from the sizzling pans, illuminating bored faces. The diners walked back and forth restlessly. Was there any news? If there was news, no one would share it. News was a secret you kept to yourself, it was a commodity you did not give away.
Marianne could not afford to dine in the restaurant. She was not a guest at the hotel, nor was she interested in its sumptuous menu, the veal dressed with cream and brandy, the braised pork, the white wine soup, the goulash and the schnitzel. The staff was trying to keep up standards, but only five tables were taken out of fifty and the diners had no idea about etiquette and decorum; they clamored for hamburgers and macaroni dishes, which the chef despised. The maestro at the piano kept his head down, smiling secretively. It was rumored that he was a spy, though for whom it was not possible to determine.