Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “Screw the diamond!” he’d heard a woman say to her husband on one particular evening. “It’s a cinch the old guy was a fake. Chrissake, when was the message to Garcia.”

  Whenever the talk turned to the Colonel’s card, and thence outward from the bar to the world and history, Marion usually deserted it. She was there, however, when the woman’s husband, standing behind her chair next to Guy’s, introduced himself as the manager of the new jewelry store downtown, and suddenly took out an eyepiece. “Still think of musself as a practicing jeweler,” he said, looking round him. “And proud of it. Want that stone appraised, do it gladly. Gladly. Looks to me from here that’s no zircon.” He popped in the loupe. “Can’t see for sure through that glass. Lemme see now, howzis case open.” For the first time, Marion’s nod was more negative than—not. Her hand even stayed him. “Don’t let those black spots fool you,” he said genially. “Just carbon. A mine diamond that many carats could still be—” Marion was called away to the other end of the bar, and stayed there for some time. He shrugged, put the loupe back in a pocket, and said to Guy, undertone, “Be surprised how many people have an old-fashioned piece like that, don’t really want to know if it has value.” When Marion came back, he addressed her. “Any time your husband want to buy a modern stone for that pretty little hand, you two come down and see me personally. We merchants stand together, hmm?”

  Sligo, tray in hand, was just behind them, up to fill a bar order for one of the tables. “Oh Elwood!” the jeweler’s wife said quickly, smiling at Marion. Women liked Marion, who always took care of them with a kind of bar delicacy reserved for them. “I think old things are fascinating. That box doesn’t look as if it’s been opened since the day he put it there—no wonder she wouldn’t want it opened. Why even the air in it would be the same as that day!” Marion looked down at her own hand, at her thin, pewter-colored wedding band.

  “Women,” said the jeweler. “She must have seen every gee dee holy relic in Italy, kissed ’em too if I’d let her, dirt and all. Yop, we just back from the tour.” He appraised Sligo. “You folks…you…in the faith, aren’t you?” Again he spoke in an undertone. Sligo, taking the drinks Marion handed him across the bar, bent his grandee stare on him, but left without answering. “No offense, I’m sure,” said the jeweler to anybody handy.

  “Cawnvert,” the woman whispered to Marion. “Turned for me. We’re both each other’s second. And you know, sometimes—” Marion served them sympathetically, but never took confidences from them. She was a good bartender though. The house quickly stood everybody a drink.

  There was nothing of the barmaid about Marion; in her blouse and skirt, with a sweater for nippy evenings, she might have been anybody from around here. On weekends, when the trade slid in on their way to or from dressier places, she sometimes wore one of those matched cardigan and skirt sets which the estate people had once set the fashion for but now meant nothing—even the maids here, copying their mistresses, wore cashmere. He had a theory about that, about Marion. With her short-featured face, trim bones and easily cropped hair, she probably wore clothes of any kind well, giving no sense of touting them. Not tall, because of good proportion, she looked sometimes taller than she was, or smaller. It took a second glance to see that she was middle-sized and slender, well compacted by use—she worked hard—and had looks above the average, though past their prime. In any woman’s face there came a turning point after which, once passed, there was no going back, and Marion’s, in its mid-thirties, had passed it. Under the eyes it had two scimitars of flesh, or in a softer light, of shadow, which put a curious mask there. One could almost see a young, unformed girlish face there, and, superimposed on it the blunter scope of the features as they were now, but never the face as it must have been in its prime. Her voice always surprised him, half because he recognized it, though no one else here seemed to notice. It was that high, rather small voice, babyish but not whiny, not lisping but almost r-less, singsong without being really melodious, which was sometimes “finished” at certain schools but really began earlier—in the never having to speak too loud, from nanny-time on, for service. If the estate people had ever come here, surely they would have been startled by it—one of theirs. And here was his theory—that Marion had once been in service of that kind. It was in the way she tended the women, one of them but still not one of them, in the almost hungry way, as they left the place, her glance looked after them, from her distance. At first he had thought it merely the natural enough envy of the publican’s wife, jealous of their freer household time. But it was in the way also in which she and Sligo were joined (rarely speaking to each other in public or private—if the Mondays he saw were private), not even in sympathy perhaps, but in some one of the wretcheder forms of closeness often to be found in marriage-cellars. For, if they shared something no one was to know and neither spoke of it, the two of them in their way would be as close as many couples who spoke. There were things that joined people far more often than love; one saw or talked to such every day—as he had not an hour ago—people in cahoots over something far less dramatic than hate or murder, some burden that together they had climbed out of, or with. Yes, he was almost sure of it. Sligo had come down in the world; Marion had come up in it. This could well have made them the pair they were.

  It was even in the way he himself had gravitated to them, not knowing precisely at the invitation of which of them, but knowing that he was in some way welcome to both. For him this was relaxing in its turn. They never examined his life in the way of his other friends, and they never asked questions, having instead an air of assuming that any person with any sort of life to him had ghosts also. Or even that all three of them had the kind of life where there were no questions anymore. They included him there, he felt, though perhaps not on their scale. No questions any more—this was what the two of them had in common really, whether it was in some monstrous central arrangement, or only in the collection of bits and pieces and talismans that come from running an inn—like their glass case.

  It must have been shortly after that night, almost four years ago, that he’d begun coming here now and then like today—not as a customer. That night, the jeweler’s wife, after insisting on another round of drinks, had become maudlin and her husband had taken her home. Since then, the wife was sometimes seen in the Canal Zone with a woman crony, but not the husband. As the pair left that evening, Marion, watching them go, had looked speculative, as if she already knew this outcome. The hour was later than Guy usually stayed. He had never before been alone at the bar. As the door closed on the couple, Marion’s chin declined on her hand. Her black hair cast a further shadow on the bowfront of the box that held the Colonel. She looked up at Guy and smiled slightly, as if her speculations had included him. “Mr. Callendar.” It wasn’t a question. “How come you never talk about the diamond.”

  Today, it seemed they weren’t going to be at home to him. He started up the engine. It wasn’t until he had done so that he became aware of the other sound, jumped into relief against it—a faint “plock,” then an interval, then another “plock.” Somebody was playing at darts on the large board that covered one wall of the downstairs games room and hadn’t heard the car approach, even with the room’s door ajar, as he now saw it was. Even with the large darts that Sligo had had custom-made, it was remarkable how the sound of the play carried—“plock,” and yet another “plock.” But anyone who lived on the great maw of the river grew used to its tricks of voices fanning or swallowed, small reports of insects an inch from the eardrum mistaken for backfire on the opposite shore. He turned off the ignition again, slammed the car door, and, smiling to himself, carried the carton with the lamp across the gravel and up the two old grinding stones that served as steps. More likely, Sligo, who had a passion for the games-of-skill he was so good at, and had stocked the room with every known apparatus for them, had found yet another one at which Guy could be trounced.

  Just inside the door he set the carton down on a polished flo
or painted with guidelines like a gymnasium’s, and stood up, a smile on his face for the player standing motionless in the afternoon shadow, on the mat at the farther end of the room. It was Sligo, poised one foot forward, silent and huge as a plaster cast met at a corridor’s end in a museum, pupils as blind, one arm extended, bent at elbow, as if to shake hands with him down the length of the room. On the upturned palm there was a sliver of silver. He had time only to see that Sligo wore a kind of lederhosen whose leathern front came up high, like a scissor-grinder’s apron, or was slung about him like a multiple holster, then the arm trembled, only trembled as the sliver left it—plock—and the hand retracted slowly, two fingers aloft, thumb across palm. His own head, following the flight, swiveled left, toward the nearer dartboard wall. At first he could not take in what he saw there. A painted bull’s-eye normally there had been blanked out by a wooden target-frame just high and narrow enough to receive the shining knives that outlined a figure tensed within them.

  It was Marion, flattened to silhouette but still untouched, the crown of her head held high, her eyes and mouth open, her arms raised from her sides like a prim Joan. In the wooden space between each hand and thigh a knife was imbedded. Her eyes tremored, holding him. “’On’t move,” said the rigid hole of her mouth, “’on’t move. He only has two more.” There were still two vacant spaces in the outline of hafts that enclosed her, one each to the left and right of her neck, between shoulder top and ear. He felt he dared not move his own head; even his eyes must hold their allegiance. Plock. On the left side—safe. Come again, quickly. He prayed for it. He should have lunged for her in the interval. But her eyes held him, saying No. Unbearable, not to know what those eyes saw coming behind him. Make it in these shoulder blades, mine, he said to it. Not in those eyes. He saw them close, slump—in the second before. Plock. On the right. Safe. He reached her.

  When he gripped her arms, she had already raised herself and stepped away from the target, already able to stand alone. She spoke over his shoulder, in a dead voice that told him much. “Better help me with him now, will you. He’s about to fall.”

  Sligo was standing as before, his empty right hand raised in hoc signo, motionless except for the sweat stealing down him everywhere. Only the sweat, patched under his armpit, banded across his forehead, held him up; the hand glistened with it. When he began to topple, his body seemed to lean from the forehead, eyes closed. His boots held him to the floor until they got to him. Once, in their gasping struggle to ease him into a chair, he several times muttered what Callendar heard as “Forty low. Forty low.” Holding him around the waist, they maneuvered his hips into the heavy captain’s chair. Sligo’s hand, braced on the low table in front of it, slid forward on the slick maple, his head cracked upon it, and he rested there jackbent, head on arm. As they stood over him, getting their wind back, their arms hanging, they heard his deep intake, steady as a man in a coma, reassuring as the breath of the dying, calmer than their own.

  “I never thought of it,” said Guy. “I didn’t know. Because there was never anything to—But that dead-white color. I should have known.” It was a slapstick notion, that one of the veined cheek, the carbuncled nose. Those were the genial ones, the harmless ones.

  “No one does. How should you?” she said. “He doesn’t do it like anyone else. He never even smells of it.”

  They were both backing away from him with sneaking step, as from a sickbed.

  “The worst ones don’t.” He knew them from the hospital, not the red ones, here and gone tomorrow, but the white-faced ones, with self-murder like a thirsty knifehole between the eyes.

  “I never knew any but him,” she said. Her voice was prim but echoing, the voice of a woman who says, “I have lived all my life in this town.”

  “Periodic…is he?” He couldn’t help the phrase, like a doctor’s. There were only so many to use.

  “Yes.” Her teeth began to chatter. “Once a week.”

  He got her a chair, leapt about looking for a wrap for her, expostulating with himself. “Let me get you a—” He looked down at her. They both grimaced at the absurdity of it. She nodded. “I’ll get us both one,” he said.

  When he came downstairs from the bar with the whiskies, she had found a sweater for herself and had cowled a thick raincoat over Sligo. He lingered on the stairs for a minute, staring down with a grinding distaste. Upstairs, the late sun was buttering all that cheap brass with a commercial cheer. No, it was impossible; they couldn’t leave him here.

  They sat sipping the whisky. He was sure she felt the same uneasy sense of conniving. Because they had always been three, and still were, they spoke in sickroom voices.

  “What was he saying there?” He glanced at Sligo, including him. “Forty something. Forty throw?” He glanced at the target-frame, and away.

  She leaned on her clasped hands, her glass put aside. “His weight. He’s been ashamed of it ever since—” She cleared her throat. “In recent years.” The little cough made the phrase sound like an obit. “Actually—actually, he must be fifty pounds more than that by now. But when he’s this way, he always says it. ‘Fourteen stone.’”

  He nodded, as if this was always the way men reckoned weight in America. Then there was silence. Some people’s diffidence was helped by it, not hers. She was helpless against the years of her own silence. He felt that she was not to be left with it.

  “Nobody else knows?” It struck him that he wouldn’t be much help to her if he kept to questions to which he already had the answers.

  She shook her head. After a while, she said: “Maybe both of us were—” She grimaced at him, lowering her face in the coyness of agony. “Hoping you knew.”

  “Audience?” he said.

  Now the silence was his.

  “Can you—speak for both?” he said. “Are you that much a pair?”

  “Yes, why not?” she said. Then her face slipped into her hands; she must be exhausted, might want to lie down. He no longer knew anything about the energy of women. Though outside it was August, it was already autumn in this basement, in this summer-kitchen of yore. In that light, dappled from above, the polished racks and mallets and wickets, sets of balls, nets and checkerboards, hung as in an armor room, above the yellow, black, and green stripings on the modern, balsa-colored floor. Games looked ghostly when left to themselves, whether for an hour or a century. When she took her hands from her face, there were no tears on it in the place for them, only those crescents of flesh. “Why not? We suffer the same.”

  He saw into that tiny, stifling pit. Must he envy it?

  She got up from her chair then, and strode away from him. “One gets on better without talking. Pity is fatal.” At the target-frame, she knelt to a long, slender box at its base. “You won’t be coming back now. Better that you stop coming.” Box in hand, she stood up, her back to him, musing over it as people do who recover a memory, good or bad. “I didn’t even know he had these around any more. He tricked me into standing here. After all these years with it, I’m still not very bright.”

  “Where did he ever get things like that, learn them? A circus?”

  “Sligo?” She was staring at the wooden backboard. “By inheritance, you might say. He had a ve-ry rich…sporting inheritance, I’m told—at one time. Polo, fencing—though I never saw him at those. Guns.” For the first time, she switched about to look at the man hunched there. Then she turned back to the target and began drawing the knives from it, one by one.

  He came up and watched, over her shoulder. All haft or all blade, the knives had the elegance of any such balance. The chest she was fitting them into was lined with purple velvet. “Marion? Talk, then. Since I’m not coming back.”

  “What do you want to know?” She was intent on the shaft in her hand.

  “I’m not sure. How can I be?”

  “Ask.” Her whisper went into the box, with the knife. “I don’t know where to—how to. Ask!”

  Another knife went into the box before either of them
spoke.

  “Why does he drink?”

  “He always has.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  “He has no one—no, that’s not true. I left once. I even worked in—it doesn’t matter. Twelve years ago. We’d been married five. Then his landlady called—he had the dt’s. He had no one.” She held a blade over the box. “Neither did I.”

  He watched the blade go in. “Is he often like this?”

  “Comes and goes. Sometimes—more than a month goes by.” Her voice lightened to that.

  All the knives were housed now except the six that had ringed her head, a zodiac sign filled with darkness.

  “He will kill you.”

  “Never has yet.”

  He was silenced.

  “Sorry. I meant—he doesn’t really want to. Or somewhere in between.”

  He shivered. “Maybe you like it.”

  “Maybe, once.”

  “Not now?”

  It came slowly. “Not now.”

  She turned. “Once I wanted him to kill me, but that was only at first—Odd, isn’t it. Ought to be the other way round.” Quickly she dropped her eyes, and knelt to set the box, heavy now, on the floor, straightening its double row of hafts. “Twenty-four,” she said, and closed it. “You see—” she said, before she stood up again. There was something secretive about her face again, if not sullen—the cast of a struggle that could be as much against honesty as toward it. “I—used to be fond.”

  He bent and lifted the box. “They’re heavy. Heavy as silver. Maybe Damascene.”