“You still gonna have a trick for me by Monday?” he asked.
Shit. I’d totally forgotten.
When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “So no charity work anymore, is that it?”
“Give me a break, Jack.” Fifteen years ago, my mother used to drop me off for lessons with Jack so she could steal an hour with a man who wasn’t my father. Jack knew it, and so did I, and maybe that’s why the two of us had worked so hard on the magic.
I wanted to tell him why my mind was elsewhere. Wished I could explain that money had suddenly become very important. I blinded a man last night, and I’m terrified, I would’ve blurted out if I weren’t a coward, and if Jack weren’t the one magician—the one human being—I didn’t want to disappoint more than I felt I already had.
“No, I understand,” he said, scrunching up the rag in his hands. “Go ahead, make some scumbag with a decent bottom deal look like Houdini and Jesse James and Sigmund Freud all rolled into one.”
“I thought it would be interesting, is all,” I said.
“Pornography is interesting,” he said. “A dead dog in the street is interesting.” He frowned. “You of all people ought to be aiming a little higher.”
“Pardon me?”
“Come on, Natalie. You have the chops of a top magician.” He shook his head. “Or at least you used to. You owe the profession.”
“I owe the—?” My laughter was sucked away by the carpeted floor and the dark velvet curtains behind the display cases.
Magicians with far less technique than mine made DVDs. They did steady corporate gigs for real money. They played Caribbean resorts, not Newark hotels. They landed the prime performances at conventions. They made a living. Not many, but some.
“Just do me a favor—do yourself a favor—and don’t spotlight some cheat,” Jack said.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.
He was already back to wiping down the countertop, so I headed for the door, thinking that he was right about one thing. I was a real magician, and a real magician furthered her craft however she could, learning from anyone and everyone. In that way, I was a purist, too.
I had almost reached the door when Jack couldn’t help himself. “I swear,” he said, “you’re getting to be as bitter as your old man.”
But Jack had never met my father in person and knew him only from my selfish teenage grumblings. And that was near the end, when my father was spiteful and self-defeating. “My father did the best he could,” I said.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night,” he said.
“Really not interested in your pop psychology, Jack.”
“No, you never want to hear anything.” As I opened the door, he added, “I happen to know a cheat or two, but you won’t get their names from me.”
“Don’t need them!” I called out as the door jangled shut behind me.
5
Sitting alone in my car outside the shop, the engine running.
You have the chops of a top magician. Or at least you used to.
Damn you, Jack.
Either I had missed the eight-inch Styrofoam target because my throw wasn’t as sharp as it once was (because I’d been temporarily enraged; because Lou Husk had been tall) or I had hit my target—the lawyer’s smug face—exactly as I had meant to. Either reason proved Jack right. I wasn’t the magician I had once been.
I had tried to sound tough in front of Jack because he’d put me on the defensive, but I didn’t feel tough. I felt the opposite of tough. I felt the irrational and pointless yearning for my parents to swoop in and bail me out.
I tilted the car’s rearview mirror and examined my face. In not too many years, I would be the age my father would always stay. I looked more like my mother—I had her thick hair, thin nose, and sharp jawline—but I had my father’s green eyes and, more and more, the bags under them. Lately, when I saw myself in mirrors, it was my father who looked back.
Get-rich-quick guys who never get rich are a dime a dozen, but my father had been a rarer breed: he actually got rich. But then he got poor again, which was worse than back to zero because loss carries its own burden. He lost $108,000 in a single night—in a single instant—despite never having been a gambler or risk taker before, proving that the risk-taking impulse can lie dormant until a sufficient stake comes along.
Before any of that, he had worked for the Flowers Corporation, putting his accounting training to use. Then, one sunny spring day, he got fired for the crimes of being honest and decent. I was only eight at the time, so it was a number of years before I thought to consider the resentment he must have felt. Yet I don’t remember him ever complaining.
Needing money, he went back to delivering pianos, something he’d done to pay for his college courses. And for the next four years he worked hard and came home each night, and sometimes after dinner he would sit down to play our own piano, a used chestnut upright, courtesy of his employee discount. He lacked finesse, and his hands looked all wrong on the keys with his fat fingers and swollen knuckles, yet his touch was light. He’d play bits of Bach’s “Minuet in G” and the beginning of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and the end part of “Layla.” Sometimes, after a couple of beers, he would sound out something he had heard on the radio, and if he didn’t remember the lyrics he’d make some up.
I tried to remember him that way, mucking around the keys and singing. But we don’t get to choose all our recollections, and mine invariably drifted toward the accident and what came after.
I was with
