Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Yeah. One of my best tricks is with a brown paper bag — the kind you get groceries in. I show them the bag inside and out, and I put it over my head, and when one of them lifts it off, my nose is a penis. Of course you can see that it’s a store-bought rubber penis. But they don’t know where it came from.”

“Would you like to order?” the waitress said.

They ordered. Cynthia looked around the restaurant. Two women, each reading her own paperback copy of Going Too Far , waiting for their food. A man at a table, alone. At the front of the restaurant, where they had come in, was a counter, and a man behind it, cooking. There were giant jars of honey on the counter. In the pastry case was halvah, baklava, some kind of pudding.

“Rickie Lee Jones is invited to this wrap party in Ojai I’m going back to do,” the magician said. “I think I saw her a couple of years ago, before she was famous, playing the piano in the lobby of the Marmont. I was there to do a party in one of the suites. I had a tube with insects in it inside my jacket, and it fell out as I was walking past the desk, and all these flies and moths flew up, right in front of the man behind the desk, and started swirling around. Sometimes really embarrassing things happen. There’s a trick called ‘The Telephone Wizard.’ You have a friend ready on the phone, and you spread out a deck of cards… ”

She stopped listening. This was absolutely ridiculous. Bobby was completely involved with the magician, nodding, fiddling excitedly with his hair, twisting the strands into tighter curls. As she was looking around the restaurant, one of her former professors came in and stood at the counter.

“… so I dialed the number and asked for the Wizard. I had no idea I’d gotten a wrong number. It sounded like my friend Bill. Well — sort of. I thought he’d been drinking. I had had trouble talking him into staying home until ten o’clock that night, because his friend Griffin was in town, and they wanted to go down to the Troubadour. But here’s the far-out thing: Whoever answered the phone knew the trick! It’s not that common a trick. He started counting: ‘Ace, two, three… ’ and—” He stopped talking, said to Cynthia, “Do you know this trick?”

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t think so. I didn’t want to bore you. I could just get to the punch line if you knew it.” The magician wiped his forehead on a napkin. He went on. “So the card she had put her penny on was the three of hearts. The guy on the other end is counting, and when he gets to three I break in and ask if I’m talking to the Wizard. Now, unbeknownst to me, all the time this is happening, Jack, whose house this is, is trying to get his phone to work so everybody can hear. He has those awful speakers that broadcast what the person you’re talking to is saying. I really think those things are offensive. Answering machines are bad enough. Anyway. That was the cue, you see. He knew the card was a three of something. So he started counting again. ‘Clubs, hearts—’ Then I interrupted, her card being the three of hearts, and gave her the telephone. She dated Robert Evans for a while, before he married Ali MacGraw. I don’t know what happened to her. Anyway, she took the phone from me, and I was expecting Bill to say, Three of hearts’ and hang up and go to the Troubadour, but it wasn’t Bill at all. It was some nut. Suddenly he starts talking to her about eating her snatch, and then the goddamn speakers started to work, and she was standing there while he was talking about eating her out. I couldn’t understand what Bill was doing. I mean, at this point, I realized it wasn’t Bill, but I couldn’t believe that I’d dial a wrong number and somebody would not only know the trick, but he’d go along with it! He even told her her card was the three of hearts, then went right on talking about eating her out.”

The waitress, lowering a plate in front of Bobby, caught Cynthia’s eye. She looked curious. Cynthia looked at her lap.

“That’s one for Brautigan,” the magician said. He looked at Cynthia. “Excuse me,” he said. He spread his napkin over his lap. “I’m not like that,” he said. “I was shocked when it happened.” He bit into his sandwich. “It lost me business, too.”

“You said you’re staying here with your mother?” Bobby said. “What does your mother think about your being a magician? Doesn’t seem like a thing many mothers would approve of. What do you think?”

“She doesn’t,” the magician said. “She’d like it if I’d put my rabbits in their cage out on the fire escape and let them sweat to death. She’s not even sympathetic to the rabbits.”

“You know, I’m a college professor,” Bobby said. “You can’t get more respectable than that. My mother would like it better if I was a priest. She thinks I should be a priest or a psychiatrist, because I have such insight into people.”

“People love to think that things can be easy,” the magician said. “My mother likes to think the rabbits can just live on air. She was upset when she saw me chopping their dinner. Bad enough I had to disillusion her about rabbits popping out of top hats. She didn’t want to see me feeding them.”

She sighed. She felt as if she had been pushed onstage during a comedy routine. What was making everything seem even more unreal was that she could not get the real tragedy out of her mind: Only a little while ago Mary Knapp had gotten shot. Their lives must be chaos now. She was sorry for Mary; and, knowing how exasperating Mary could be, she had some sympathy for her brother, who had probably shot her out of the same frustration that had made her want to scream when Mary shrugged and didn’t care about something for the umpteenth time. She drank her tea. The magician was explaining a card trick to Bobby, and Bobby was taking notes on a blue index card.

She had met Spangle by chance. Stayed with him by chance. Not entirely. Not entirely true. She had not been cynical enough. One moment, for her, that seemed genuinely magical, had outweighed so much that was tiresome, pointless — even the things that were mean about him. He had not been kidding when he held her hand and said that he wanted to think that it would be that easy to keep her. He was all around her, like the tiny foam-rubber rabbits that had burst out of the larger rabbit the magician had pressed into her hand. Spangle was always springing up when she didn’t expect him. Jumping out of the closet at her. But also dodging work to be sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, without telling her he was going to do it, to hold her hand for a minute before she went in and faced a root canal. What she had done for him, in return, was to say that there was no fireball when there was.

As they walked out of the restaurant, the magician was griping about too many demands being made on him. “It freaks me out when people think I can cure disease,” he said. “I really clam up when I’m asked anything about that. A friend of mine — the friend from the Santa Monica pier — got in big trouble when he said offhandedly that a woman who was having trouble with her night vision ought to take some Vitamin A. She dosed herself with the stuff until she was as orange as a carrot, and dropped dead. She was married to a lawyer.” He shook his head. “It’s a rotten world,” he said. “No wonder people want answers. No wonder they want to have parties and get distracted. Sometimes something nice happens, though. Like getting to spend time with you guys.” He turned to Cynthia, who had been trying to walk a little ahead of them. “Even if it happened at the last minute, I made two friends. I know we’re going to see each other again. Tell me if I’m not right,” he said. “If I sent you a white orchid in December, with no card, wouldn’t you know it was from me?”