Night Magic (6 page)

Emily leaned closer to him, nodding wanly, and he shut his eyes again. And there it was, without warning, the primal image of his life: he was sitting on one of the molded blue plastic seats in the bus station in Toledo, the soles of his shoes hanging a good ten inches above the bright linoleum floor, and his mother was leaning over him, stuffing something into his jacket pocket. “Stay right here, Mikey,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Michael touched bottom with this memory, and the recoil jack-knifed his upper body. Propped unsteadily on his elbows, he looked at Emily, whose eyes expressed about equal proportions of panic and relief. “That was quick,” she said hopefully, pressing the back of her hand against his forehead. “Are you going to be okay?”

Never again,
he thought. “Sure,” he said, more dazed than glib. “At least, I think so.”

“What happened back there?” It was a logical question, and Emily's tone was almost casual, but he could tell she was frightened. “What was going on?”

He grunted, shrugged, and lay down again. “I don't know,” he admitted, feeling foolish.

“You must know. That frog bit—what did you think you were doing?”

How could he say? How to explain? Or even if he could come up with an explanation that would satisfy Emily, how could he explain it to himself? He’d been doing what he always did, having some fun, trotting out the old reliable frog routine. Frog footman from
Alice in Wonderland.
But then there was this man, this Queer Duck, and that moment, that small, single, private, unfathomable moment of darkening illumination when the umbrella lowered over the two of them, and the voice, strangely bland, without rancor or even irony, asking, “Are you then a frog?” with something archaic in the phrasing, or was it merely a European turn of speech, the thinnest trace of an accent? And then, this wild compulsion to play a frog, to hop and hop and not stop hopping, to grimace and pop his eyes, no longer by any volition of his own but because having been bidden to be a frog he was obliged to accept utter and unequivocal—

Subjugation.

Michael knew, though he didn’t say it, couldn’t say it, that that was what it had been. A form of subjugation. It wasn’t that he’d allowed himself to be a frog, not that merely, but that he’d allowed himself to give in to the will of another. The old man had exercised some incredible form of mastery over him. In that moment, he had become enslaved!

He drew up his knees, locked his hands behind them, and bowed his head, like a long-distance runner after a particularly draining race. “We can talk about it later if you want to,” Emily said softly. “Let’s just get out of here. Are you up for that?” On the path by the pond were a man and a woman with a dog, all three of them looking at him. Michael thought about what he must look like still in his mime makeup, wrecked now—smeared whiteface, smeared mouth, smeared eyes. Doesn’t take much to gather a crowd in New York. All you've got to do is paint yourself white, become a frog, and nearly drown in a public fountain.

“Probably,” he drawled, as though calculating the odds. “I’m fine except for my head and my stomach and a few other places.”

She patted his abdominal muscles lightly. “That was an amazing display of virtuoso vomiting, but it was lucky, in a way. Those cops were going to make trouble, but when they saw how sick you were, they just carried you over here.”

The small talk went on, so small that Michael was able to contribute his fair share without engaging more than a fraction of his brain. The rest was free to search for clues to this incomprehensible mystery. How was it possible to do such a thing, to say
Be a frog
and cause it to happen? Not really a frog, of course, that was ridiculous, but to make him continue playing at being a frog, so that he lost control of his being, his self? Leaving him overwhelmed, controlled not by any impulse of his own but by some unknown force outside himself? He searched his memory for the crucial moment, the point of surrender to a power he could not comprehend and would never have believed were it not that he knew without a doubt that it had held him in its sway. He felt hungover, as though from a deadly intoxication, one enormous bender.

“Where’s my kit?”

“Behind you.”

The parasol, the fan were sodden, the silks a disaster. The rubber duck eyed him wetly. He picked it up, then tossed it aside. “What a mess. Jesus, we forgot to pass the hat.” No passing the hat, no dough. A free performance courtesy of the Queer Duck.

The light glimmered through the summer-weary trees, long slashes of a reddish yellow, with ribbony purple shadows, larger ones cast by the apartment fronts at the far side of the park. Higher up, the elegant towers where the rich dwelled rose against the sky in a wash of gold. Out on the muddy surface of the half-drained pond, purple ducks glided by ahead of rippling silver wakes. Quack, quack, queer ducks. He heard a frog—ga-dunk, ga-dunk—a big one, he thought. Aunt Priss used to say they had a catarrh in their throats; he thought she’d said “guitar.” Frogs with guitars in their throats.

But maybe now he was just imagining frogs.

Ga-dunk.
Little frog in a big fountain. He didn’t want to think about it now. He’d think about it tomorrow. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would just bury it, pack it away and never have to worry about it again. He shook his head. Fat chance.

“Wasn’t that Dazz in the limousine?” Emily asked, putting away her flute.

“Mm.” He had a vision of red hair and heard a cool laugh, remembered the conversation like something from the distant past. “Wants us to go to a party with him tonight.”

“Are we going?”

“Mm. Let me see how I feel.” He wasn’t sure he was ready for a party with Dazz’s friends, where he would be expected to interact with intensely chic types who used words like “viable” and “persona” and “mystique.”

“You’ve still got your face on,” Emily reminded him.

“I'll take it off at home.”

“Can I keep the duck?”

“It’s all yours.” He realized that his head had stopped hurting somewhat, though its preoccupation had not diminished in the slightest. He wondered about the man again, tried to make sense of it all, failed totally. What sense was there to be made? Had he been hypnotized? Possibly. And possibly not.

He reached for his grenadier’s tunic, which lay spread out to dry, picked it up, and whirled it in a circle. Jesus, no! He remembered his wallet, money to be deposited—and the banks were closed. Then, with mounting panic, he was feeling the jacket, finding all the pockets empty. He looked around wildly, stopped, and began combing the grass. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t at the fountain, either. It was gone. And with it, thirteen hundred bucks, all his summer’s savings.

He looked back at Emily, standing apart, regarding him with a look of concern and confusion. And affection.

He shook his head. “Well, it looks like we get to start all over,” he said, indicating empty pockets.

He put his arm around Emily as they started their walk back to his apartment. It was, of course, impossible to blank from his mind all that had happened, but fortunately Emily was content to talk, to allow him to be quiet, to listen. And now there was the loss of the money to ponder as well. Gone, in exchange for what? To that question, at least, he had an answer.

In exchange for a taste of what he knew he had always been looking for, though he had no name for it. He would call it real magic. Dark magic. Night magic.

L
ENA SAT AT THE
open window, fanning herself and trying to catch whatever breeze might be stirring. There was none. She looked mournfully at the broken air conditioner and, below it, at the shallow pan of red-brown water where metal chips lay in various stages of oxidation, some of them quite advanced. Air-conditioner maintenance, like creature comforts in general, was not high on Max’s list of priorities. He never noticed things like wilting temperatures or suffocatingly heavy air. Sometimes she imagined that he was hollow inside, like an empty nutshell, dry and shriveled, indifferent to heat or cold or life itself. Yet she needed him, just as he needed her. Their relationship, like the seasons, just seemed to endure.

She could see Max’s big black umbrella at the corner newsstand. As his gaunt figure drew nearer, she tried as usual to read his mood from the way he was carrying the umbrella; having observed several dips, a couple of tilts, and one nearly complete twirl, she looked forward to a relatively pleasant evening.

She heard him as he climbed the stairs slowly, opened the door, and uttered his perfunctory, general greeting, as though addressing all the heterogeneous objects scattered about the large room. Lena looked at the heavy black coat, the beard, the nose, and shook her head. “On such a hot day, why do you wear—”

He made a placating gesture, as though to avoid argument, and left the room. When he returned, he was without the beard and the rubber nose. His long gray hair was wet where he had slicked it back, and his shirt collar was damp. He carried his black coat on one arm, held it against his lap as he sat, and left it draped there as he took up his newspaper, squinting to scan the front page. Lena remained in her chair at the window but contrived a position that allowed her to observe Max without staring at him. He bent his head, turning it slightly to the light, and eased from beside his nose something that he put on the heavy mahogany table: a dull glass eye. It lay on the embroidered linen runner, staring up at the ceiling. After quickly putting on a black patch with an elastic band that he slipped over his head and adjusted, he began rummaging in his jacket pockets, drawing out first one wallet, then another, then a third. These he opened, extracting their contents, laying the cards and photographs in his lap and fingering the money, glancing with his good eye over his shoulder to where Lena sat silent and immobile, as if for a portrait. When he had counted the money, he slipped the cards and wallets into the shopping bag beside him, fanned out the bills, and contemplated them again.

Lena could no longer assist in silence at this spectacle. “Really, Max,” she sighed, “I shall never understand how a man with your abilities can stoop to such things. Why aren’t you embarrassed?”

He fixed her with his good eye, but her guess as to his mood had been accurate; he wasn’t angry, his look was mild, without impact.

“I, on the other hand, shall never understand your fondness for the reiterated reproach,” he said airily. “And you know very well that such pranks never embarrass me. Banal moralizing—now there’s something embarrassing.”

“Who’s moralizing? I simply want you to set your sights higher. Do you get so much pleasure from stealing? And if you must steal, why not steal something large? An air conditioner, for example.”

He chuckled in that eerie, cackling way he had. “My dear Galena, what would be the use of such a thing?” he asked, narrowing his single eye. “Surely you've noticed the chill in the room.
You must be cold.
”

She rose abruptly from her seat and shut the window. Casting a wounded look in his direction, she left the room. Several minutes later she returned, wearing a shawl over her shoulders and carrying two steaming cups of tea on an elaborately worked Persian silver tray. She placed one cup at his elbow, next to the eye on the table, touched his shoulder, and took the seat across from his. Putting on her reading glasses, she began to peruse part of the newspaper as she sipped her tea.

Max had been lost in thought, staring at the shopping bag beside his chair, but now he opened the bag and withdrew the largest of the wallets, the one with the monogram “M.H.” Once again he went through the various cards, slowly this time, absorbing the name, the address, the scraps of information about the young man whose property he had filched, recalling his earnestness, his innocence, his hurt, surprised eyes. He chose one of the cards, a small, plain, white one, and put it into his shirt pocket.

Lena glanced up from the paper. “Where were you today?”

“Uptown.” Sounding casual, as if nothing had happened uptown.

“I see. The beard. That awful nose. You were at the museum. Interesting, about the Rembrandt.”

“Somewhat,” he said offhandedly, but he was not interested in the Rembrandt now, nor in Egyptian antiquities. No, something else had pricked his curiosity. What had that sign read? “Presto the Great.” Absurd, amateurish, but the boy himself was not. Callow, certainly, and untutored, without a doubt, yet somehow compelling, not to be dismissed. Yes, there could be an answer here. The more he thought about the young man, the more it became clear that some further action must be taken in his regard. He would not let this one go.

During their evening meal, Lena hardly spoke. Max was unaccountably, uncharacteristically voluble, though he did not mention the museum or the painted Eye, guarding it in his thoughts as jealously as any curator. He did talk about a young man he had met, who he thought looked interesting despite his immaturity, a young street magician. He seemed likely as a prospect, Max said. Then, after they had finished eating, he made the suggestion—it was too mild to be a request—that he had been contemplating all along.

Taken by surprise, Lena dismissed the notion with a flat refusal. “Tonight? You must be mad. Let me remind you of what happened last time—and the time before that. It only brings trouble. Besides, my head is aching, and my hands hurt.” She illustrated her last point by rubbing her hands. “It’s a bad idea.”

He shrugged his shoulders, the most easygoing of men. It was only a thought. She might try finding out something. The young man in question seemed particularly likely. The final decision would of course be up to her.

“Of course,” she said wearily, rising from her chair and walking over to a small, marble-topped table, on which lay a curiously carved cedar box filled with her pungent French cigarettes. She extracted one, lit it, and turned to face Max, who had remained in his chair with an expectant look on his face. “Why don’t you do it yourself?” she asked, mingling pleading and recrimination. “You’re the one with the power.”