He sighed.
I continued: “That’s why, whenever they can, the queens always—”
“Stop.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Enough.”
“Hey, you asked. That’s how that trick is done. The ladies find each other.” I stood. “Now remember, you’re sworn to secrecy.”
Jack Clarion’s magic shop was on Route 1 in Edison, in a strip mall between a nail salon and an unrented storefront. As I stepped inside, the door closed behind me, sleigh bells jangling. I stood in the entrance a moment while my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
At the other end of the store, Jack barely glanced up. He stood behind the glass countertop demo-ing a trick to a woman and her kid. I walked farther into the narrow store. Instead of watching Jack, the kid was smearing the countertop with his palms. I could tell he’d never paid attention to anything in his life. He’d take whatever trick his mother bought him today and try it once without reading the instructions before shoving it under his bed forever.
I waited off to the side while Jack rang up the lady’s order and she and the kid left and the door jangled shut. Then I restocked a few supplies—borderless playing cards, flash paper, twenty yards of green magician’s rope—screwing up my courage to tell Jack what had happened last night at the Hyatt.
I decided to ease into it. “So remember that magazine editor I met over the summer?”
“You mighta mentioned it two or three hundred times,” Jack said.
After a show, a man had come up to me with his kid and introduced himself as Bruce Steadman, deputy editor for Men’s Quarterly. He’d described himself as “an amateur but very serious magician” and raved about my performance. I was beyond flattered. Then he said, “I also really enjoy your writing in Magician’s Forum,” and I was flattered all over again.
Magician’s Forum was a newsletter Jack had started up eons ago: for years a mailer, now a quarterly email. I was an occasional contributor—I would teach a trick, coins or cards or rope or whatever. Always a household object. Always sleight of hand. Writing for Jack didn’t pay anything, but the deadlines made me keep coming up with new ideas, and I felt I owed Jack for introducing me to magic.
The magazine editor had handed me his business card and said, “If you have any magic-related stories you think could work, feel free to pitch me.”
Guys handing me their cards was nothing new. They like the magic, and I’m five-eleven barefoot, and my dark brown hair is almost down to my ass, and sometimes I feel like a giraffe at a dog show. Usually men’s business cards end up in the nearest trash can but: Deputy editor. Men’s Quarterly. Pitch me. I felt I could do it. But I’d been waiting for the right idea. Or the right motivation. Now I had both.
“I think I finally have a pitch,” I told Jack.
Jack sighed, or maybe wheezed. “What exactly is this idea of yours?” He was seventy-two and looked ten years older. His face was saggy and gray, and probably his opinion shouldn’t have mattered to me anymore, but we went back a long way and I had learned plenty from him. And he had learned from the best: Cardini, Slydini—that whole greatest generation of -inis who’d performed in an age long before camera tricks and CGI, back when our eyes weren’t accustomed to being deceived.
“I want to profile a professional card cheat,” I said. The moment the words left my mouth I realized they would go over about as well as my card-in-the-eye news would. I braced myself and forged ahead. “I was thinking about how card magicians and card cheats have a lot in common, except that a card cheat has more at stake. Because if he gets caught he could end up at the bottom of a lake or something. I want to see what a magician might be able to learn from someone like that.” I watched his eyes, hoping for agreement or understanding. “I think people might be interested in that. Magicians, but also regular readers. It’s interesting, you know?”
“Remind me exactly what part is interesting?”
“You know—the whole thing. What? What’s the matter, Jack?”
But I knew.
“Let me make sure I’m getting this right,” he said. “You have a chance to tell a million readers about the art of conjuring and you’re gonna spotlight a fucking cheat?”
What he meant was, nothing is more honest than a magic trick. It was a point of serious pride for Jack. Over the years I’d heard various iterations of the same lecture: how you know a magician is going to make you see something that isn’t possible, believe something that isn’t true. How the deception is fair because of the pact between magician and audience. How we’re in it together. How done right it’s a game we can both win.
Cheats, though (and here Jack would fake spit), they ruin it for everyone. With a cheat there’s no pact, and there’s only one winner, and it won’t be you.
I didn’t disagree. And yet: we admire the professional cardsharp, don’t we? Even though it’s only a thief thieving. We admire the cheat’s skill because it’s based in refinement. This was nothing I could ever say to Jack, but I wasn’t alone in thinking it. Other magicians felt this way, too, about cardsharps—even the greatest sleight of hand artist who ever lived.
“What about Dai Vernon?” I asked Jack now. “He spent years chasing down the best cheats.”
“You, with all due respect, are no Dai Vernon.” With a rag he started wiping down the glass counter where the kid had greased it up. “And don’t go falling for that center-deal nonsense.”
“He learned it,” I said.
“It’s lore,” he said. “It’s patter.”
“It’s documented. Go online.”
He shook his head. “Dai Vernon was a master, but cheats and con men were his whiskey and hookers. It was a big weakness. Don’t let it become yours.”
And that, right there, was Jack—a purist
