“If you want a beer, no one’s stopping you. If there’s something you want from me, then tell me what it is. I’m very busy.”
Aware that I might have only this one shot, I launched into my fastest explanation of the Men’s Quarterly article, and why I’d been with Ace the previous night in Atlantic City, what I’d hoped to learn from him, and how he’d been a disaster, but how excited I had been to witness her, Ellen, at the card table.
“A magazine article,” she said when I stopped talking. I waited while she looked out at the brown fields, the empty playground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She clicked her key and the car door unlocked. “It was nice seeing you again.”
“Wait!” I said, louder than I meant to. Her door was open. “Please, just … forget the article for a minute, will you?” I had so many questions, but the one forced itself to my lips. “Was it a center deal? It wasn’t, was it?”
When she didn’t answer right away, I knew she was deliberating: keep playing dumb, or drop the act. But I wasn’t being fooled by the act, and I was her only audience. She must have come to the same conclusion, because she said, “My god, why are all magicians so obsessed with the Kennedy deal? It isn’t even useful.”
“I just want to know—”
“So you can write your article. Yes, you’ve explained all this already.”
“I said forget the article. I want to be able to do it.”
“In your little magic show, you mean.”
I let it slide. “You might not call yourself a magician,” I said, “but I saw you perform last night. No way did you pick up everything on your own. You had teachers. People showed you what they do because you needed to know. Please. Ellen. I need to know.”
A cold breeze whipped across the schoolyard. Ellen unzipped her shoulder bag, felt around, and withdrew a pack of playing cards. “Here.” She tossed me the pack. “Show me something. Show me if you’re any good.”
2
The raw air of the school parking lot was lousy for card manipulation, but I’d performed in worse settings: poolside with a wet deck; frat parties in rooms too dark to see and for audiences too drunk to care; hotel suites where the air was choked with smoke and sweaty bodies.
After a few cuts and flourishes to warm my hands and give Ellen a glimpse of my card handling, I did an abridged version of a card change/disappearance/reappearance I’d been doing for years. I kept the patter to a minimum, because my patter mattered to her as much as my shoe size. It was my hands she was interested in, a fast showcase of what they could do. And they could do a lot, and they did it well, and they didn’t shake at all despite the cold. My hands, my fingers, they were mine again. When I returned the deck to her, she said nothing but walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for me.
While we drove, I gave her the silence she seemed to want while she decided the parameters of our conversation. After a short journey she stopped in front of a place called Sixty-Two, which was the street number.
Whatever setting I might have imagined for the clandestine shoptalk between magician and cardsharp, this wasn’t it. The venue was either a café that sold beer or a bar that sold coffee drinks, ice cream, and, inexplicably, glass vases. The floor was cement, the ceiling drop panel, the walls brick. The music was ’80s pop, the kind no one ever seeks out but everyone knows. This time in the afternoon, a lone bartender/barista stood behind the counter looking at his phone. Two guys in their twenties were shooting pool near the back.
I paid for a bottle of beer. Ellen ordered some triple espresso, high-octane drink that would have kept me awake for a month. To the guy behind the bar she said, “Sorry, I keep forgetting your name.”
“David.”
“Right. David. Got it.” She paid for her drink, stuffed a dollar into the tip jar, and led me to a high-backed booth near the rest-rooms. We sat opposite each other. “I want you to understand something,” she said. “I don’t do this—explain myself. It’s no one’s business what I do.” Her voice had a lower, richer tone to it than the night before. At the poker game she had a thin, nasally voice. “You’re a magician and a woman,” she was saying, “and maybe you think that means I can trust you—”
“You can trust me.”
“Maybe. Maybe I can. Or maybe you only need to know I’m a kindergarten teacher.”
“Why a kindergarten teacher?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw what you can do. Why are you a kindergarten teacher?”
“Because I’m certified to be one.”
“But what’s the angle?”
“Angle? The angle is I like being a productive member of society,” she said, and sipped her drink. “Also, there’s this thing called the IRS, and it has a real bias against citizens who are able to live in homes and pay bills with no reported income.”
“Still, how do you work it with your poker schedule? What if you have to travel to a game?”
Ellen chewed her lip. I felt her reading me as if there were cards in my hand. “You said forget the article. I’m holding you to that. I don’t tell you a damn thing if it’s for an article.”
Why had I
