The Magician’s Assistant

  Sent with Love from your Mother.

  Sabine turned the card over and over again. The picture on the other side was of a grassy field with some snow-tipped mountains in the background that said “Beautiful Wyoming.” This made it all true, truer than anything Roger could have told her. All she could read of the postmark was “MAR 1966,” which meant that this new sister, who must be Albertine, was fifteen years younger than her brother. What was Parsifal doing away from home in February? And what was NBRF? Sabine flipped through the box again. One lousy postcard from an entire life? This was all that was sent? Sabine wanted to know where the pictures were, report cards, wedding announcements and obituaries clipped from the paper. Where, exactly, was the proof?

  Those were long and quiet days for Sabine, every one sunnier and more relentlessly beautiful than the last. A week passed and then another one started right behind it. In the backyard, limes and avocados fell to the ground, rolled under the low palms and rotted. Hot pink azalea blossoms clotted the pool skimmer. She went back to work on the strip mall in her studio. She made shrubbery for hours at a time while Rabbit slept on her feet. When it was finished she went back and covered the bushes in bright red inedible berries. The work was good because she knew what to do, how to mix the glue into a thin wash, how to cut the steel. She studied the floor plans. She made a rare interior, a boardroom for an office building with deep blue chairs that swiveled beneath her fingertip, a cherrywood conference table whose tiny planks she sanded and stained. She did not decide what to do about the rug stores, although they told her there needed to be a buying trip. She did not look over the papers that Roger sent, and she did not call the Fetters of Alliance, Nebraska, to ask them what the hell had gone on during childhood. What stopped her was her mother’s voice in Canter’s saying that, clearly, Parsifal had not wanted her to know. If she had found a way to respect his wishes at nineteen, surely she could do it at forty-one; but she kept the postcard on her desk, the words face-out.

  Parsifal did not believe in magic. Everything was a trick and some tricks were better than others. He was openly hostile to any magician who claimed to have powers above and beyond good acting and good carpentry. He couldn’t even speak of Uri Geller’s spoons. But Sabine was a little more sentimental. She knew that there was no such thing as a true Indian rope trick, but she thought that maybe death was not always so final, that sometimes it was possible for someone to come back.

  “Dead is dead,” Parsifal had told her. “Period.”

  She said she believed in telepathy, in a few rare cases. She believed that she had it with Parsifal.

  “No such animal,” he said.

  But then how did she always know what he needed? How did she always know it would be him when she picked up the phone? How was it she so often knew what card was on the top of the deck when he held it out to her?

  So on the ninth day alone in the house, when the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon Sabine was so sure it was Parsifal that she tripped over the rabbit while lunging for the phone. On the second ring she remembered he was dead. On the third ring she knew it was his mother. On the fifth ring she got up off the floor and answered the phone.

  “Mrs. Fetters?” the voice asked, not stating a name, but requesting one.

  “No,” Sabine said, as confused as the voice.

  “I’m calling for Mrs. Guy Fetters. Mrs.—The lawyer said there was another name.”

  “You’re Mrs. Fetters,” Sabine said.

  “Yes,” the voice said, friendly, Midwestern, relieved. “Yes, that’s right. Is it—Mrs. Parsifal? That’s the name I have here. He was Parsifal the Magician.”

  “I’m Mrs. Parsifal,” Sabine said, and it was true, she had taken his name when they married. She had answered to that name to the doctors, to the coroner, to the undertaker. She said it with authority now.

  “Oh, well, I’m glad I got you. I’m glad.” But then she was quiet. Sabine knew she should assume some responsibility for the conversation, but she had absolutely no idea what to say. “This is very awkward for me,” Mrs. Fetters said finally. “Guy was my son. I guess you know that. I want to tell you how sorry I am about his dying. I mean, sorry for you and me both. There’s nothing in the world that compares to losing a child.”

  Sabine wondered if she meant losing him now or all those years before.

  “Do you have children, Mrs. Fetters?”

  “Mrs. Parsifal,” Sabine said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Parsifal,” she repeated. “That’ll take some getting used to. You get used to thinking of your children by one name. You don’t expect that to change. ’Course, I shouldn’t say that. It changes for your daughters. How long ago did he change his name?”

  “Twenty-five years ago,” Sabine said, realizing that she was not entirely sure.

  “Fetters is not such a pretty name. I can say that, I’ve lived with it long enough.”

  Sabine would admit to curiosity, but she wasn’t comfortable making idle conversation with a mother who could manage no better than one three-line postcard to her son over the course of a lifetime. She felt the weight of all of Parsifal’s loss and loneliness married to her own. “Mrs. Fetters,” said Sabine, “you’ve received the information from the lawyer. I’m assuming that’s why you’re calling me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then tell me how I can help you.”

  “Well,” she said. Sabine thought she heard a catch in the voice. “Let’s see. I’m sure you don’t think so much of me, Mrs. Parsifal.”

  “I don’t know you,” Sabine said. She pulled the sleeping rabbit off his pillow and into her lap. He was as warm as a toaster.

  “Then I guess that’s what I’m calling about. I hadn’t seen my son in a long time, and I missed him every day, and now I know that I didn’t do anything about it so I’m going to be missing him, well, from now on. My daughter Bertie and I were talking and we decided to come to Los Angeles and look around, see what his life was like, see where he lived, at least. Kitty can’t come, she can’t leave her family. Kitty, she’s my oldest girl. We weren’t asked to Guy’s funeral. I’d like to at least see where he’s buried.”

  “I didn’t ask you to the funeral because I had no idea where you were. All of that information was in the will. It wasn’t opened until later.” Sabine couldn’t quite bring herself to say that she had thought Parsifal’s parents were dead.

  “Where to find me?” Mrs. Fetters laughed. “Well, I’ve always been in the same place.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t tell you. There’d be no sense in that. All I want is to come down and see where my son is and to meet his wife—that is, if you’ll meet us.”

  Sabine’s studio was large and mostly empty. She was far away from the light over the drafting table. She would meet them. She might not have called them, but she would certainly meet them. “Of course.”

  “I went ahead and made reservations. We’ll be in on Saturday. I figured I’m coming if you’ll see me or not, but it makes it a lot better this way. I’ve got your address, the lawyer gave it to me. We’ll rent a car at the airport and come by your house, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Have you been to Los Angeles before?”

  “I haven’t been farther than Yellowstone,” Mrs. Fetters said. “There hasn’t been much reason to travel until now.”

  “Give me the flight number,” Sabine said, leaning over for a pencil. “I’ll pick you up.”

  Sabine would not go to bed until she was so tired that she was making mistakes, putting windowpanes in backwards, spilling glue. She drank coffee and played Parsifal’s Edith Piaf records loud to stay awake. She liked the music, the pure liquid sadness in a language she could only partially understand. With proper diversion, there were nights that things didn’t start going wrong until after four A.M. Only then would she put down her angle and X-acto knife and stretch her legs. She would take Rabbit, who was already asleep on an old pillow
left in the studio for that purpose, under her arm and head down the long dark hallway to Parsifal’s room. The rabbit’s back legs hung down and gently tapped her side while she walked. Those nights she would lie in the big bed and say Guy Fetters’s name aloud. Was that Guy Fetters in the photograph, his cheek pressed close to Phan’s cheek, or was Guy Fetters someone else entirely? Did Guy Fetters live in Nebraska and work at a Shell station? Was his name embroidered over his heart in a cursive red script? Did he wear fingerless gloves in the winter as he stood at the window of your car, counting out change? She could not make out his face beneath the white cloud of his warm breath. It was one thing to have spent your life in love with a man who could not return the favor, but it was another thing entirely to love a man you didn’t even know.

  Some nights she was kind. What if you were born in Alliance, Nebraska, only to find that you looked your best in a white dinner jacket? What if you found that the thing you knew the most about wasn’t cattle but the ancient medallion patterns in Sarouk rugs? What place would there have been for magic? Could he have sawed apart waitresses in all-night diners along the interstate, could he have made sheep disappear without someone reporting him? “Guy,” his mother would say. “Leave your sister alone. If you pull one more thing out of that girl’s ear, so help me God.” At school he would beg for art history and they would tell him, Next year, next year, but it always got canceled at the last minute, replaced by a section of advanced shop; this semester: The Construction of the Diesel Engine. And then there were the girls, the ones he had to dance with at the Harvest Dance and the Spring Dance and after every rodeo to avoid being found out, to avoid being beaten with bottles and fists and flat boards found in a pile behind the gymnasium. He held the girls close and with deadly seriousness. He had to make up one more thing to whisper into their small, shell-like ears and too-delicate necks. He kept his eyes down and free of longing for the ones he longed for, the ones who danced in circles past him without notice, though he suspected some noticed but could not speak. Finally, alone, at home at night in bed, he read movie magazines beneath plaid wool blankets. He looked at the glossy pictures of Hollywood and Vine, tan boys on surfboards, endless summers. Why wouldn’t Los Angeles be the promised land? Eight-lane highways and streetlights that stay on all night, stoplights that don’t give up and begin to flash yellow at ten P.M. Think of what he loved and had never had before, festivals of Italian films from the fifties, Italian sodas in thirty-four flavors, unstructured Italian linen jackets in colors called wheat and indigo, the ocean and restaurant coffee at two A.M. and the L.A. Contemporary and men. Suddenly to have the privilege of wearing your own skin, the headlong rush of love, the loss of the knifepoint of loneliness. That was the true life, the one you would admit to. Why even mention the past? It was not his past. He was a changeling, separated at birth from his own identity.

  Sabine moved the rabbit off her pillow and rolled over. Other nights were different. Other nights he was a liar: Every minute they were together he had thought of what she didn’t know. He had held himself apart from her. He did not notice that she had given up everything for him, that she had put her love for him above logic. He thought she was simple because she fell for the story about the dead New Englanders. It was all he could do to keep from laughing when she took the hook into the soft part of her mouth. Her questions made him impatient. When, exactly, was she planning to let this drop? He fed out enough line to keep her going, a name here, a place, and then, as if the thought pained him too greatly, he closed the story down all together. And she believed him. Lies sprung up like leaks. They were too easy, too inviting. He told her he was going to San Diego when he was going to Baja. No reason, except he knew she’d believe him. He told her the club canceled the date when he didn’t feel like working, told her he wanted to be alone for an evening when he’d brought home some bartender whose name he didn’t remember. He told her the six of clubs was the ace of diamonds. And she believed him. That was her habit, and every time he lied he slipped further away. Sabine woke up twisted in the sheets, the pillow deep inside her mouth. There would have been no reason to lie, not when she loved him the way she did.

  She imagined there would be plenty of answers in the Fetters; probably just seeing them walk off the plane would make it clear that these were people you’d want to cover up. Maybe they made his life hell. Maybe it was worse than that, as her father had suggested. Sabine closed her eyes. What kind of mother would never put her head inside the door to see how you were doing? What kind does not call on birthdays? And sisters! Who were these women who called themselves sisters and didn’t even know their brother was dying? Sabine would have felt the loss of Parsifal anywhere in the world.

  And so she changed her mind, made it up, and changed it back. She made plans to see friends and then canceled. She saw her parents, who thought that no good could come of a woman knocking around alone in such a big house. She would be better off coming home, at least for a while. What would she do if someone broke in?

  She asked them, “Do you think Parsifal scared burglars away?”

  A breeze came in on Saturday and blew what little smog there was out of the valley. From the beach you could see the islands, dreamy silhouettes of someplace to be alone. Sabine had called the pool girl, the yardman, and a service of off-duty firemen that came in teams of six and cleaned the house in under an hour. She went to the garden and cut some orchids that had thrived through the period of utter neglect, and put them on the table in the entry hall. She had Canter’s deliver.

  At some point during the week it had occurred to her that there was a very good chance that the Fetters didn’t know that Parsifal was gay, that they thought they were coming to Los Angeles to meet his wife, as in his partner, the woman he loved. And why shouldn’t they? For an afternoon she would be a daughter-in-law. It came with the territory of being a widow. But it was Phan who should have been the widow. He would have cleaned the house himself, washed the windows with vinegar. He didn’t know the meaning of catering. He would have spent the day at the market buying fresh mussels and rosemary. Phan should have lived to see this through. His gentleness put people at ease. He would not have been angry. He would have had these people in his home out of some genuine warmth, a common bond of loss, not a twisted need to prove who had loved Parsifal best. Sabine took off the dress she was wearing. It looked like she was trying too hard. She put on some black linen pants and a heavy blue shirt. She wore the necklace Parsifal had given her for her fortieth birthday, a tiny enameled portrait of the Virgin Mary to whom, in this particular rendering, she bore an unnerving resemblance.

  At the airport, limousine drivers with dark mustaches and darker glasses held up pieces of paper with names. Sabine wondered if she should have brought a sign that said FETTERS, but she imagined they would be easy to spot. They would look confused. They would look like Parsifal. Sabine blotted off her lipstick on the side of her hand and rubbed it into her skin. People poured off the plane. Some were embraced warmly, some passionately; some strode towards the main terminal with great purpose; some consulted the overhead monitors for connecting flights. There seemed to be no end to the number of people coming down the ramp.

  “My lord,” a woman said to her. “You’re the assistant.”

  She was short, maybe five-foot-two, with a corn-fed roundness. Her gray hair had been recently permed and Sabine could see the shape of the rollers on the top of her head.

  “Mrs. Fetters?”

  The woman took Sabine’s arm and squeezed hard. There were tears puddling behind her glasses. “On the plane I said to Bertie, ‘How are we going to know it’s her?’ But of course it’s you. I’d know you anywhere. Look, Bertie, it’s the assistant.”

  In Bertie Sabine could see the slightest trace of Parsifal, but it had been very nearly scrubbed out of her. She was almost thirty but did not look twenty-five. Her face was pretty but blank. Her hair had also been recently permed and was a tangle of brown curls highlighted in yellow that ca
me halfway down her back. “Nice to meet you,” Bertie said, and shook Sabine’s hand hard.

  Mrs. Fetters put her hand up to Sabine’s face as if to touch it but then pulled it back again. “Oh, you’re so pretty. His life must have turned out okay if he had such a pretty wife.” The tears had dammed at the bottom of her glasses but suddenly found free passage out the sides. “I wish I’d known that you were the one he’d married. Did you meet him on Johnny Carson?”

  “You know me from Johnny Carson?” Sabine said. People were knocking against them in the race down to baggage claim. A family of Indians walked by and Bertie turned to stare at a woman in a gold-flecked sari.

  “Well, sure. I didn’t know you were together, though. We thought maybe they gave people assistants at the show. Everybody we knew said you looked like one of those girls who hand out the Academy Awards.”

  “No,” Sabine said, feeling confused. She was trying to take it all in.... Parsifal’s mother. She had on a green wool coat with a line of wooden toggles up the front. She held a rectangular overnight bag in one hand, the kind of tiny suitcase Sabine had taken to slumber parties as a girl. “I’m surprised that you saw that show, that you remember me.”

  “Saw it?” Mrs. Fetters said.

  “She watches it almost every night,” Bertie said.

  “My daughter Kitty got it for me on video. It took forever to track it down, but they found it for her. All you say is one line at the end, you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Carson.’”

  “Do I? I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t you watch it?” Mrs. Fetters asked. Sabine tried to guide them out of the path of an electric cart coming down the concourse.

  “No, we don’t have a copy,” she said, taking the overnight bag from her mother-in-law’s hand. Of all the urgent things there were to talk about, The Tonight Show didn’t even make the list. “We should go downstairs.”