“The key,” she said, “is to cover the small action with a bigger one. While doing the pass, I swing my body and arms toward the left to begin dealing to the first player. And like I said, these guys usually don’t complete the cut. But just in case, this works, too.”
I could see it in my mind—Ellen pivoting to her left, doing the move that appeared to be nothing more than a simple squaring up of the deck. Yet something wasn’t sitting right.
“It could work, you mean,” I said.
“I mean, it does. I tried it at a game where the dealer was also the shuffler, so I could crimp the card myself. But in Victor’s game, the person to the right of the cutter shuffles. That means you’ll crimp the card, Victor will cut, and I’ll deal. And you’ll create some kind of distraction at the moment when I swing my body. A cough. A stretch. Whatever. It’s all we’ll need.”
“All right,” I said, but maybe not enthusiastically enough.
“Relax,” she said. “I’ve been practicing it for months. I’ll be ready.”
She’ll be ready? That. That’s what wasn’t sitting right. “You said you already tried it in a game.”
She waved my words away. “At a low-stakes game against a table of idiots.”
I watched her closely. “You did the move before it was ready?”
“It was ready.”
“Sounds to me like it wasn’t.”
She set her deck of cards on the table. “Don’t lecture me, Natalie.”
No one was smiling now. “Maybe you need a lecture.” I took a breath to calm myself. “Listen, Ellen, you don’t do a trick until it’s ready.”
“And I’m telling you it was ready. For them.” She spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “For that particular game, for those particular idiots.”
The Chinese food was feeling heavy in my stomach. “No. Either the move is performance ready or it isn’t. Come on, this is like Magic 101.”
“I’m not a magician.”
No, and maybe that mattered. Maybe I was being unreasonable. Or maybe she was being cavalier. It seemed to me that in her profession, where a heckler wasn’t the biggest threat, it was even more important for a new move to be flawless.
“I want to see it,” I said. “Show me your classic pass.” I held out the deck of cards.
“I’m not gonna audition for you, Natalie.”
“You were pretty excited to show me your spin pass a minute ago,” I said. “So why not this one?”
She glared at me.
“You already know what I think about your false deal,” I told her. “It’s amazing. World-class. But if I’m going to be part of this, I have to know that all the moves you might use are that good. It’s only fair.” I took the deck, crimped the bottom card, cut the deck so the crimped card was buried in the middle, and set the deck on the table. “So let’s see it.”
She watched me a moment longer. Then with a dramatic, teenage sigh she accepted the deck of cards and pivoted her body to the left. During this larger motion with her body and arms, she executed the pass.
It was fine.
Honestly, she did the move better than most magicians I knew. Done as a fast, hidden move during a card trick along with patter and misdirection, the move would have been more than serviceable.
But relative to her spin pass? Not in the same ballpark. And relative to her Greek deal? No. There was no comparing it to her Greek deal.
“You plan to steal a million dollars with that?” I said.
“Give me a break,” she said. “My pass is damn good.”
I took the deck from her, broke it in the middle, turned over the center card—five of hearts—turned it back over, and put the deck back together, burying the card in the center. Then under the guise of squaring up the deck, I did the move: the bottom half of the deck became the top half. If she blinked, she missed it. If she didn’t blink, she missed it anyway. No large action masking a smaller one. No misdirection. Just the classic pass done the way it’s supposed to be done. A move I’d practiced for several thousand hours in my Plainfield bedroom as a teenager while the world spun on around me.
I turned over the top card.
“Huh,” she said, staring at the five of hearts.
After Ellen left, I sat on the loveseat and worked late into the night on controlling the cards. I thought about all the things I used to tell myself about being a magician, things Jack had told me, things I’d read in books. How the magician creates a mystery, an unbridgeable gap between cause and effect. How with enough practice magic could be a balm applied to the tyranny of the everyday.
I actually wrote stuff like that myself in Jack Clarion’s newsletter. I remember believing it. But at some point, or gradually over many points, I had lost the mystery, and a new tyranny had set in. Gig after gig. Rent check to rent check. Good technique, high heels, and a bowler hat, year after year.
I looked down at my hands. I took such care of them, filing the nails, constantly applying lotion I couldn’t afford. People sometimes mistook me for younger than I was because of my face. They should’ve looked at my hands. The hands never lie. The veins were more visible now than they once were, the skin was looser. My hands were no longer the hands of a young woman.
These hands, and what I did with them. They were all I had. When I considered Cardini, Slydini, Dai Vernon, T. Nelson Downs, Harry Houdini—all those legends who made their indelible impact on the art of conjuring—I had to wonder, who the hell was I?
Our time on this earth was so fucking limited. At some point we painted our last brushstroke on the Great Mural, and I had yet to make a single lasting mark.
I wanted to do something beautiful with
