The Spirit Cabinet (39 page)

Within a few days, Miranda had crowded the sleeping quarters at the George Theater with lumps of clay, blocks of wood, easels, canvases and acrylics. And, although it had taken her a few hours, she’d persuaded Preston to sit for a portrait. And, although it had taken her a few additional hours, she had gotten him to pose naked. He now sat on a wooden chair, his hands resting open on his lap, although they twitched restively quite often, eager to cover his crotch. “Why,” he demanded, “am I butt naked?”

“On account of I have a theory,” said Miranda. Her palate was crowded with pigment; to approximate Preston’s skin tone she found it necessary to combine almost all of them, even Royal Purple and Flaming Magnesium. “You see, a real magician wouldn’t wear all those fancy clothes. Fancy clothes—tails or whatever—are just saying,
look, I’m hiding stuff every-frigging-where
. Right? So a real magician—at least, this is my little artistic conceit—would be starkers. Now sit still.”

“I am sitting still.”

“Your eyes. They’re, like, pulsating.”

“Anyway, I’m not a real magician.”

“I see.” Miranda took a step backwards and appraised her painting. It wasn’t too bad. She was determined to capture her lover faithfully, so it would be a long time before she’d rendered every wen and maculation. She dabbed her brush in burnt umber and started in on his belly.

“I’m just a carnival huckster.”

“Okay. Sit still.”

“That’s all I am. A charlatan and a mountebank.”

“You seem to be labouring under the impression that we are debating this point. You are a carnie, I am a carnie. Now, shut up and sit still. I am trying to immortalize you.”

“I just, I just—” Preston took a deep breath, which caused the fat on his belly to roll.

“Shit,” scowled Miranda. “Now look what you’ve done.” The freckles and moles were suddenly realigned, the constellations had changed.

“I just want to make sure you understand that.”

“Right.”

“Because it quite often makes no sense to me.”

“What’s this now?”

“You and me.”

“How so?”

“Because I’m fat and ugly. And you’re flawless.”

“Preston, we’re sitting here in Las Vegas, where dice are getting rolled every second of every day. So I don’t know why you haven’t learned by now that almost
everything
is chance, happenstance, which includes the nature of our physical beings. So I’ve got the Bod and you’ve got, you know—” She gestured both at Preston and at her painted rendition of him. “Anyway, our bodies have been doing what bodies were designed to do. No problem there. At least, very few problems.”

“Huh?”

“Baby, just let me paint. I don’t like talking so much.”

“You always change the subject.”

“What fucking subject?”

“You know.”

“I do not know. I don’t change the subject. I respond. One sentence leads to another. The focus of our conversation shifts.” Miranda’s hand jerked and scraped a gash of clown-cheek red across Preston’s painted belly. She threw down her brush. “Fuck.” She raised the back of her hand and wiped at her face, leaving behind a wide smear of colour where there had been a tear.

Preston remembered a certain morning, long ago. The memory slept like a drunk in an old rooming house, buried beneath the threadbare blankets of memory, snoring and shaking the walls.

This conversation with Miranda jarred it awake—his eighth birthday party. He’d managed to assemble quite a collection of children for the party, a truly impressive number considering he had no friends. His mother fed them hot dogs, chocolate cake and huge goblets of cola. After the feast, before Preston was allowed to tear into the little pile of gaudily wrapped presents, there was entertainment.

Preston the Magnificent appeared suddenly, in full performance gear—a morning suit, puffed cravat, shoes so polished they gleamed and blinded. The children were transfixed by his hair, which was pomaded into an unlikely monolith of curls and locks. “Behold before you,” he said, “a world-traveller, only newly returned to these shores. In my journeys, I have studied fakir miracles, both great and small, in the private chambers of Mohammedan rajahs! I have studied the art of levitation in Tibetan lamaseries! And I, alone in the Occident, am tutored in the secrets of the greatest wizards civilization has thus produced, the fabled Cingalese!!”

“Hi, Dad,” muttered little Preston. This was not the scheduled entertainment. There was supposed to be someone named Sniffles the Clown. What little Preston didn’t know (it would be years before his mother told him) was that his father had confronted Sniffles outside, sending him away with idiosyncratic gestures clearly designed to convey rudeness. Preston the Magnificent also hurled verbal abuse upon Sniffles and his ilk, decrying the craft of clowning as “sheer, mindless bumbletry.” Then he attended to his hair, sharpened the points of his moustache and descended upon his son’s birthday party.

Preston didn’t know why he was dreading this performance—he’d spent months bargaining for it. What good was having a dad who was a magician if the guy wouldn’t even do magic at his own son’s birthday party? But his father had demurred, waving his beautiful, delicate hand in the air. “Nay, nay. I labour upon the proscenium or I labour not at all.”

Preston had begged, but his father was obdurate, indeed, lived his entire life in an advanced state of obduracy. “I shan’t, boy. Beg not. It lacks dignity.”

So Preston settled for Sniffles, resigned himself to the buffoon, and was inexplicably panicky when his father showed up in the clown’s stead.

For a while, things went very well. Preston the Magnificent pranced about the dining room herding balloons, which he then pricked with a long needle. The rubber would explode to reveal some little treat, an ice cream cone, for example, a chocolate bar or a bottle of soda. The children applauded tirelessly. Then, once everyone had received a treat (“Give them something to stick in their orifices,” Preston the Magnificent advised his son years later), he moved on to stagier effects. He produced eight silver rings, banged and clanged them to illustrate their solidity, and then made the rings form links and chains. He blew upon the metal and the rings seemed to melt into and out of each other.
The children didn’t enjoy this illusion so much, mostly because there was no payoff involved, but they did applaud and those who had mastered the art placed dirty fingers in their mouths and whistled.

But then something in Preston the Magnificent’s manner changed. He stiffened, his vertebrae crackling audibly, and peered at his chubby son. “At this point I will require the assistance of an auxiliary,” he said quietly. “And being as it is the natal anniversary of my only begotten offspring, who would be more appropriate?” He extended one of his hands, the nails milky and carved into perfect little shields. Preston eagerly pushed his chair away from the table, sending it toppling over. The edge of the tablecloth was caught in one of the folds of his corduroy trousers, and he hauled down a plate and two empty glasses. His friends laughed cruelly, but then again, they were not his friends, they were by way of being business acquaintances, Preston being far and away the most successful collector of marbles in the area.

“Yes,” Preston the Magnificent intoned, “he is exceedingly graceless. Perhaps he is not the right boy or girl—”

“Please, Pop,” said Preston. “Let me do it.”

He had no idea what he was expected to do, but he desperately wanted to be part of his father’s act.

“Very well.” The Magnificent shook his hand and a small velvet bag appeared. He patted at it, kneading it with his fingers, showing it to be empty. “I hold the satchel of the ancient magi Therebes, who practiced his venerable arcana beside the banks of the mythical White Nile. In those days gone by, many times would the land be a’visited by pestilence and famine. Locusts would raze the crops, the sun would scorch the fields, rendering them barren and devoid of animation. Then would Therebes produce the magic satchel.”

Preston the Magnificent shook the velvet bag and a few children snapped out of their monologue-induced reveries and
applauded madly. The man’s eyes began to smoulder like coals. “Reach into the satchel of Therebes,” he commanded no one in particular, although his son was canny enough to intuit that this was his cue, “and withdraw sustenance!”

Preston shoved his hand into the velvet. His fingertips came to rest on something smooth, hard and vaguely round. He gingerly extracted an egg.

“See before you a continuation of vitality, but for an individual only! But witness again the magical satchel of Therebes! Thrust away, boy.”

Preston bit on his lower lip and reached in again. Once more his fingers came to rest upon the coolness of eggshell. He pulled it out and exhibited the egg eagerly.

“Aw, it’s a trick,” muttered someone. (In his adulthood, Preston decided it was most likely Billy Hirschberg, whose father was a snarling and withered divorce lawyer. The larger question was why Preston as a grown man spent so much time wondering just who had heckled the old man.) “I betcha it’s not even a real egg.”

“Oh, miscreant!” snapped his father viciously. “I counsel only patience. We shall see what we shall see. Note once again that the sack is empty.” Preston the Magnificent tilted the bag and pulled it open roughly, like he was checking the gums of a nag destined for the glue factory. Then he held the bag toward his son. “Go, boy.”

Preston the Younger produced yet another egg.

“Yet again.”

The boy transferred the third egg into his left hand, where it nestled comfortably with the previous two. He reached into the velvet bag and pulled out another egg. “Go, boy.” There was no room for the fourth egg in his left hand, so he folded his forearm across his belly and positioned the eggs along this new ridge. “Go, boy.” The fifth and sixth egg fit there nicely, too, but then
Preston again ran out of room. He spread his left hand and began to form a pile of eggs in the hollow of his palm.

Around about the tenth or eleventh egg, he began to get panicky. He had a sudden inspiration and began to stand them upright on their larger end, so they took up less room and were a little more stable. But this only eased the situation temporarily, and then the boy was completely stymied. The other children began to laugh and hoot, their voices sharpened by barbarity. “And again, boy,” said Preston the Magnificent. “Reach into the miraculous satchel of Therebes.”

“I don’t have any more room for eggs, sir,” whispered Preston. He turned to look at his father pleadingly; his attention was arrested by a rippling of his father’s sleeve, the black material of the morning suit briefly wavy with reflected light. And then an egg popped out and fell into Preston the Magnificent’s fingers, the three digits that were hidden behind the black pouch whilst it was held twixt thumb and forefinger. The three fingers seemed to comprise an independent entity, and they nimbly shifted the egg until it stood upright, hiked it and sent it quietly over the lip of the velvet bag. “Reach away,” commanded Preston the Magnificent.

Preston did nothing.

“Reach in and grab the egg,” whispered his dad, “or I’ll take a brush to your fat backside.”

Had he truly believed that his father was causing eggs to materialize inside the satchel of Therebes? (This was a question that had been posed by many analysts, in those years when Preston felt that analysts might be of some assistance.) Of course not. He had long understood that his father was not a magician in the sense that, say, Merlin was a magician. Preston the Magnificent was involved in Show Business, his son knew that. His son even knew that from time to time his father’s magic didn’t work, that audiences booed and men from newspapers wrote disparaging things.

But he had supposed that his father was up to a more unaccountable order of trickery than merely hiding things up his sleeve.

At any rate, what happened that day was that Preston released the eggs he had stacked and cradled. They exploded upon the floor, a riot of yolk and albumen. The other children hooted and howled and banged ice cream spoons upon the tabletop. Preston the Magnificent pointed at the mess and declared, “Behold! Fakery or deceit? I think not!”

The chubby little boy began to weep. He was embarrassed about the eggs, true, but, really, the little act was designed so that some schmuck kid would drop them all over the floor, that was pretty much the point of the gag. Preston the Magnificent, noting his son’s tears, dealt him a look of stern admonition and then abruptly turned and stormed away.

Preston continued to cry; he alone was aware that what had been broken was not a dozen eggs but a sense of wonder.

It struck him with force that Miranda was packing away her paints with some fury. He hadn’t been speaking aloud, he hadn’t actually related this memory, although part of Preston was very disappointed to realize this.

“Don’t fix what ain’t broke,” Miranda was saying. “I don’t know why you worry about us all the time.”

“I don’t know why, either,” muttered the Adequate.

“What,
exactly
, do you think I’m doing here, then?”