Magic for Beginners: Stories (5 page)

He jumped up and down in the parking lot, trying to keep warm.
The woman, when she came out of the store, gave him a funny look.
He couldn’t see Batu behind the counter. Maybe he’d fallen asleep
again, or maybe he was sending off more faxes. But Eric didn’t go
back inside the store. He was afraid of Batu’s pajamas.

He was afraid of Batu.

He stayed outside, waiting for Charley.

But a few hours later, when Charley drove by—he was standing on
the curb, keeping an eye out for her, she wasn’t going to just slip
away, he was determined to see her, not to miss her, to make sure
that she saw him, to make her take him with her, wherever she was
going—there was a Labrador in the passenger seat. The backseat of
her car was full of dogs, real dogs and ghost dogs, and all of the
dogs poking their doggy noses out of the windows at him. There
wouldn’t have been room for him, even if he’d been able to make her
stop. But he ran out in the road anyway, like a damn dog, chasing
after her car for as long as he could.

He tickled her with his funis ignarii.

Q: And who will be fired out of the cannon?

A: My brother will be fired out of the cannon.

Q: And what is the name of the cannon?

A: Mons Meg. Dulle Greite. Malik-i-Mydan, Tzar Pooska, Dhool
Dhanee, Zufr Bukh. Her nickname is Inevitable. She is also called
Sweet Mouth and The Up, Up, And Away. She is known as The Widow for
her coloring and because she has had congress with many men. She is
also called The Mermaid by her husbands—the men who oil her parts
and polish the O of her mouth, and harness her and pull her along
from town to town—they say we should release her into the harbor,
to see if she swims away. It is their little joke. She is called
The Conversation, because she will speak courteously if you address
her with a match. She is called The Only Answer, because she only
ever gives the same answer, no matter your question.

Q: And what is your brother’s name?

A: I have already forgotten it.

Q: How far will he travel?

A: He will travel so far, he will never come home again. His
feet will never touch the ground, not for the rest of his life. He
will never see his family again. He will never see the cannon
again, but for the rest of his life, he will dream of her round,
fixed, roaring black mouth.

Q: Who are these women?

A: They are his wives. After my brother is fired from the
cannon, his two youngest wives will take his place in the cannon.
They are wearing his luggage on their backs, filled with his
belongings, his books, his golf clubs, his correspondences, his
record collection, his toiletries, his identification. His wives
will climb into the cannon and leave the cannon in much the same
way that my brother will leave it, but they won’t go to the same
place he is going. Men and women don’t travel to the same
place.

Q: Why not?

A: No one knows why.

Q: Will he never come home again?

A: He will never come home again.

Q: Why must the cannon be fired?

A: The cannon must be fired because that is the reason for
cannons. Ordnance must be placed in the cannon. Ordnance must be
fired out of the cannon. The cannon serves no other purpose. A man
may accidentally fall asleep in a cannon, or take shelter from a
rainstorm, or hide from his enemies inside a cannon, but in the
end, the cannon must be fired.

I once fornicated with a married woman inside the Sweet Mouth.
She was agoraphobic. I said I was agnostic.

I said, “Yes, like that, don’t wriggle so much,” and she said,
“How do you like this?” and “Watch your head,” and while we were
fucking, her husband came up and lit a match, and then we were
flying. We sailed out like grappling shot. My lover yelled back at
her husband, “Cock her up a bit, master gunner!” and we watched him
get smaller and smaller.

I held on to her hips and the tails of her hair and fucked her
as we passed over the countryside, and she wrapped her legs around
my waist and fucked me back. When we were finished, we flew along
side by side, and she remarked that she was grateful to me and the
cannon and her husband. The affair had cured her of her
agoraphobia. We fucked some more, to celebrate, and then we came to
a town and I grabbed on to the steeple of an Episcopal church. She
kept on going along. She wasn’t ready to go back down again. I had
a long walk home. I haven’t seen her since.

Q: Did your brother have a happy childhood?

A: Why don’t you ask him? He used to sit on my head. Once he set
off firecrackers in my closet. He substituted
toothpaste-and-cucumber sandwiches for my lunch. He ripped out the
last pages of his comics before he gave them to me to read. He
saved up his allowance and paid Josepha Howley and her four sisters
to chase me around the neighborhood. When they caught me, they took
off my shorts and tied them to a tree branch.

Q. Did the cannon have a happy childhood?

A. A long time ago, before all the wars were over and done with,
when large artillery still had other uses, there was a master
gunner who loved the cannon. Wherever he traveled he took her with
him. She was his mascot, his victory, his confidante, his clock.
For love of the master gunner she took Odruik. She took Prague,
Famagusta, Seringapatam, Bajadoz. She took Cairo, she took dancing
lessons, she took Beethoven’s hearing and Napoléon’s arm. She took
and took and the master gunner gave and gave. He tickled her with
his
funis ignarii
and his wands and his wormers, he wooed
her with Valturio’s patented incendiary shells, with fireworks and
grapeshot, lead, granite, and bronze; he anointed her with costly
scents—saltpetre, serpentine, sulfur, charcoal, antimony. When the
master gunner was old and rich and tired of going to war, he
retired to the Riviera and built a castle. He married the cannon
and he tied up her muzzle in a bonnet of white silk so that she
would look like a lady. On Sundays the master gunner harnessed his
wife to four ex-cavalry horses and rode her down the road to the
chapel.

His wife was too stout to fit through the doors, though, and
when the priest turned down the master gunner’s offer to pay for a
new set of doors, the gunner left her tied up next door in the
cemetery. The horses cropped the grass and the gunner paid a small
boy to watch and make sure that no one took his wife to melt down
for scrap. After services, the younger members of the congregation
used to go pick through the cemetery for rocks and small bits of
masonry, for the master gunner to fire off.

Inside his castle the master gunner built a ramp so that when he
went up to bed, the cannon went with him, and when he came down in
the mornings for his breakfast, the cannon went too. To their great
sorrow, they never had children and when at last the master gunner
died, the undertakers dressed him in his traveling clothes and
placed him inside his wife, the cannon. This was consummation. But
the charge was inadequate, and when the master gunner left his wife
at last, he got only as far as the next town over. They found his
boots in an irrigation ditch, his johnnie in a lemon tree, his body
tumbled over a sheep wall, his head in the shepherd girl’s lap.

His heirs sold his widow to a circus impresario.

Q: Is there such a thing as a happy marriage?

A: Let me answer that question. My name is Venus Shebby. When I
was a young girl, they fired me from the cannon one day and when I
came down, I was in a different place. A beautiful place, full of
beautiful people! The people who live in that beautiful place are
hairy in winter and in spring they shed their hair and go
naked.

In winter, they catch fish by setting fires on the frozen lakes,
but in summer they don’t eat fish. In summer they eat fruit and
grains which they ferment in bladders, and those people stay drunk
the whole summer long. Summer is the time of ghosts. In winter,
ghosts are easy to spot. There are stories about winter ghosts
found tangled like lice in their lovers’ hair. Dead people have no
hair themselves, which is how they can be recognized in winter. But
in summer, the living and dead may pass each other on the street,
and no one knows the difference. There are epic comedies, famous
tragedies about the misunderstandings that ensue.

Those beautiful people collect their hair as they shed it, and
keep it in pouches which they wear around their waists. The people
wash the hair and perfume it and card it and comb it. In summer,
the living wear woven hair belts and their pouches of hair around
their waist, to show they are living people. But there are always
fashionable people, who pretend to be dead, and there are cunning
dead people, who steal hair from living people. For this reason, it
is a deadly insult to pick off a strand of someone else’s hair and
put it in your own pouch, unless you have been invited to do
so.

The people form societies to weave enormous carpets from their
shed hair, and these carpets are soft and warm and heavy. The
people sleep under these carpets in winter, once they are married,
and they marry as many wives and husbands as can sleep together
comfortably under one carpet. There is one word, which means all
three of these things:
marriage
,
carpet
,
society
. There is no word for
war
or for
travel
. The people do not have a word for
cannon
.
There are no cannons. All of the people’s artifacts are made of
hair and bone and skin. (Can you imagine a cannon made out of
hair?) Even their histories are told on tapestries woven out of
hair. But there is nothing as beautiful as the marriage
carpets.

I have a collection of photographs of married people, lying
together, all piled together beneath their marriage carpets, red
and brown and black and amber and gray, looking as if particularly
thick and hairy circus tents have collapsed. Heads and feet poke
out at the edges, and some of the people are sneaking looks out of
the embroidered, unfastened holes which are for breathing. The
fastening buttons are carved of bone. If you have money, I’ll show
you these photographs. Industrious people sometimes weave carpets
so large that they can marry several hundred other people all at
once.

Other carpets the beautiful people keep in houses which are only
for this kind of carpet, and not for living in. The carpets kept in
these houses are the carpets in which the people are buried.

In summer, I might have been born in that place. The first
winter, I was a novelty. I had my pick of husbands and wives. At
the end of the second winter, when the ice was thawing, they sent
me away. They said it was like sleeping with a dead person. I gave
them bad dreams, and finally they couldn’t sleep at all if I was
near them. They use the same word for
dead
and for
summer
and for
hairless
, and after a while that
word became my name. I left when they divorced me. They have no
word for
divorce.

I built a cannon out of ice, and wrapped myself in the funeral
carpet which my husbands and wives had woven for me out of their
own hair, and one of my wives was my gunner. I came back here,
after many adventures, and once, when I’d been drinking, donated
the funeral carpet to the national museum. When I was sober again,
I asked for it back, but they claimed not to know what I was
talking about. I live by myself and this old, bald, shabby thing I
wear is a horsehair throw I found in a thrift store.

When I wake up, sometimes, before I open my eyes, I imagine that
I am still lying under a marriage carpet with my husbands and
wives. My hands are full of their sweet, perfumed hair. My name is
Venus Shebby and once I was very beautiful, as beautiful as a
cannon carved out of ice.

Q: Who was that woman?

A: Venus Shebby.

Q: How is a cannon like a marriage?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Who was the first person to be fired from a cannon? Was it a
man or a woman?

A: The first person to be fired from a cannon was a young man
dressed as a woman. His name was Lulu. Sometimes, when someone is
fired from a cannon, they say they are demonstrating “the Lulu
leap.”

Q: Do you love your brother?

A: I love my brother like a brother.

Q: Do you think I’m beautiful?

A: You are beautiful, but not as beautiful as Venus Shebby was,
when she was young. You’re not as beautiful as the cannon.

Q: Thank you for being honest. Why does your brother have so
many wives, when you have no wives at all?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Will you say yes when I ask you to marry me?

A: I don’t know.

Q: What noise will the cannon make? Why can’t you love me, just
for a little while? Why must the cannon be fired? How long will
your brother be gone? Why won’t your brother come back? Will he
never come back? What are you putting in your ears? Is it time for
the cannon to be fired? May I ask the cannon these questions? What
will she say?

A: A noise as loud as God, but only my brother and his wives
will hear it. Everyone else is putting beeswax in their ears. I
don’t know. I don’t know. A long time. He won’t come back again.
No. Beeswax and cotton. Soon. I don’t know. No. Not now. Be
patient. Listen. Listen.

Henry asked a question. He was joking.

“As a matter of fact,” the real estate agent snapped, “it
is.”

It was not a question she had expected to be asked. She gave
Henry a goofy, appeasing smile and yanked at the hem of the skirt
of her pink linen suit, which seemed as if it might, at any moment,
go rolling up her knees like a window shade. She was younger than
Henry, and sold houses that she couldn’t afford to buy.

“It’s reflected in the asking price, of course,” she said. “Like
you said.”

Henry stared at her. She blushed.

“I’ve never seen anything,” she said. “But there are stories.
Not stories that I know. I just know there are stories. If you
believe that sort of thing.”

“I don’t,” Henry said. When he looked over to see if Catherine
had heard, she had her head up the tiled fireplace, as if she were
trying it on, to see whether it fit. Catherine was six months
pregnant. Nothing fit her except for Henry’s baseball caps, his
sweatpants, his T-shirts. But she liked the fireplace.

Carleton was running up and down the staircase, slapping his
heels down hard, keeping his head down and his hands folded around
the banister. Carleton was serious about how he played. Tilly sat
on the landing, reading a book, legs poking out through the
railings. Whenever Carleton ran past, he thumped her on the head,
but Tilly never said a word. Carleton would be sorry later, and
never even know why.

Catherine took her head out of the fireplace. “Guys,” she said.
“Carleton, Tilly. Slow down a minute and tell me what you think.
Think King Spanky will be okay out here?”

“King Spanky is a cat, Mom,” Tilly said. “Maybe we should get a
dog, you know, to help protect us.” She could tell by looking at
her mother that they were going to move. She didn’t know how she
felt about this, except she had plans for the yard. A yard like
that needed a dog.

“I don’t like big dogs,” said Carleton, six years old and small
for his age. “I don’t like this staircase. It’s too big.”

“Carleton,” Henry said. “Come here. I need a hug.”

Carleton came down the stairs. He lay down on his stomach on the
floor and rolled, noisily, floppily, slowly, over to where Henry
stood with the real estate agent. He curled like a dead snake
around Henry’s ankles. “I don’t like those dogs outside,” he
said.

“I know it looks like we’re out in the middle of nothing, but if
you go down through the backyard, cut through that stand of trees,
there’s this little path. It takes you straight down to the train
station. Ten-minute bike ride,” the agent said. Nobody ever
remembered her name, which was why she had to wear too-tight
skirts. She was, as it happened, writing a romance novel, and she
spent a lot of time making up pseudonyms, just in case she ever
finished it. Ophelia Pink. Matilde Hightower. LaLa Treeble. Or
maybe she’d write gothics. Ghost stories. But not about people like
these. “Another ten minutes on that path and you’re in town.”

“What dogs, Carleton?” Henry said.

“I think they’re lions, Carleton,” said Catherine. “You mean the
stone ones beside the door? Just like the lions at the library. You
love those lions, Carleton. Patience and Fortitude?”

“I’ve always thought they were rabbits,” the real estate agent
said. “You know, because of the ears. They have big ears.” She
flopped her hands and then tugged at her skirt, which would not
stay down. “I think they’re pretty valuable. The guy who built the
house had a gallery in New York. He knew a lot of sculptors.”

Henry was struck by that. He didn’t think he knew a single
sculptor.

“I don’t like the rabbits,” Carleton said. “I don’t like the
staircase. I don’t like this room. It’s too big. I don’t like
her
.”

“Carleton,” Henry said. He smiled at the real estate agent.

“I don’t like the house,” Carleton said, clinging to Henry’s
ankles. “I don’t like houses. I don’t want to live in a house.”

“Then we’ll build you a teepee out on the lawn,” Catherine said.
She sat on the stairs beside Tilly, who shifted her weight, almost
imperceptibly, towards Catherine. Catherine sat as still as
possible. Tilly was in fourth grade and difficult in a way that
girls weren’t supposed to be. Mostly she refused to be cuddled or
babied. But she sat there, leaning on Catherine’s arm, emanating
saintly fragrances: peacefulness, placidness, goodness.
I want
this house
, Catherine said, moving her lips like a silent
movie heroine, to Henry, so that neither Carleton nor the agent,
who had bent over to inspect a piece of dust on the floor, could
see. “You can live in your teepee, and we’ll invite you to come
over for lunch. You like lunch, don’t you? Peanut butter
sandwiches?”

“I don’t,” Carleton said, and sobbed once.

But they bought the house anyway. The real estate agent got her
commission. Tilly rubbed the waxy, stone ears of the rabbits on the
way out, pretending that they already belonged to her. They were as
tall as she was, but that wouldn’t always be true. Carleton had a
peanut butter sandwich.

The rabbits sat on either side of the front door. Two stone
animals sitting on cracked, mossy haunches. They were shapeless,
lumpish, patient in a way that seemed not worn down, but perhaps
never really finished in the first place. There was something about
them that reminded Henry of Stonehenge. Catherine thought of
topiary shapes;
The Velveteen Rabbit
; soldiers who stand
guard in front of palaces and never even twitch their noses. Maybe
they could be donated to a museum. Or broken up with jackhammers.
They didn’t suit the house at all.

“So what’s the house like?” said Henry’s boss. She was carefully
stretching rubber bands around her rubber band ball. By now the
rubber band ball was so big, she had to get special extra-large
rubber bands from the art department. She claimed it helped her
think. She had tried knitting for a while, but it turned out that
knitting was too utilitarian, too feminine. Making an enormous ball
out of rubber bands struck the right note. It was something a man
might do.

It took up half of her desk. Under the fluorescent office lights
it had a peeled red liveliness. You almost expected it to shoot
forward and out the door. The larger it got, the more it looked
like some kind of eyeless, hairless, legless animal. Maybe a dog. A
Carleton-sized dog, Henry thought, although not a Carleton-sized
rubber band ball.

Catherine joked sometimes about using the carleton as a measure
of unit.

“Big,” Henry said. “Haunted.”

“Really?” his boss said. “So’s this rubber band.” She aimed a
rubber band at Henry and shot him in the elbow. This was meant to
suggest that she and Henry were good friends, and just goofing
around, the way good friends did. But what it really meant was that
she was angry at him. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

“I’m only two hours away.” Henry put up his hand to ward off
rubber bands. “Quit it. We talk on the phone, we use email. I come
back to town when you need me in the office.”

“You’re sure this is a good idea?” his boss said. She fixed her
reptilian, watery gaze on him. She had problematical tear ducts.
Though she could have had a minor surgical procedure to fix this,
she’d chosen not to. It was a tactical advantage, the way it
spooked people.

It didn’t really matter that Henry remained immune to rubber
bands and crocodile tears. She had backup strategies. She thought
about which would be most effective while Henry pitched his stupid
idea all over again.

Henry had the movers’ phone number in his pocket, like a
talisman. He wanted to take it out, wave it at The Crocodile, say,
Look at this! Instead he said, “For nine years, we’ve lived in an
apartment next door to a building that smells like urine. Like
someone built an entire building out of bricks made of compressed
red pee. Someone spit on Catherine in the street last week. This
old Russian lady in a fur coat. A kid rang our doorbell the other
day and tried to sell us gas masks. Door-to-door gas-mask salesmen.
Catherine bought one. When she told me about it, she burst into
tears. She said she couldn’t figure out if she was feeling guilty
because she’d bought a gas mask, or if it was because she hadn’t
bought enough for everyone.”

“Good Chinese food,” his boss said. “Good movies. Good
bookstores. Good dry cleaners. Good conversation.”

“Treehouses,” Henry said. “I had a treehouse when I was a
kid.”

“You were never a kid,” his boss said.

“Three bathrooms. Crown moldings. We can’t even see our nearest
neighbor’s house. I get up in the morning, have coffee, put
Carleton and Tilly on the bus, and go to work in my pajamas.”

“What about Catherine?” The Crocodile put her head down on her
rubber band ball. Possibly this was a gesture of defeat.

“There was that thing. Catherine’s whole department is leaving.
Like rats deserting a sinking ship. Anyway, Catherine needs a
change. And so do I,” Henry said. “We’ve got another kid on the
way. We’re going to garden. Catherine’ll teach ESOL, find a book
group, write her book. Teach the kids how to play bridge. You’ve
got to start them early.”

He picked a rubber band off the floor and offered it to his
boss. “You should come out and visit some weekend.”

“I never go upstate,” The Crocodile said. She held on to her
rubber band ball. “Too many ghosts.”

“Are you going to miss this? Living here?” Catherine said. She
couldn’t stand the way her stomach poked out. She couldn’t see past
it. She held up her left foot to make sure it was still there, and
pulled the sheet off Henry.

“I love the house,” Henry said.

“Me too,” Catherine said. She was biting her fingernails. Henry
could hear her teeth going
click, click.
Now she had both
feet up in the air. She wiggled them around. Hello, feet.

“What are you doing?”

She put them down again. On the street outside, cars came and
went, pushing smears of light along the ceiling, slow and fast at
the same time. The baby was wriggling around inside her, kicking
out with both feet like it was swimming across the English Channel,
the Pacific. Kicking all the way to China. “Did you buy that story
about the former owners moving to France?”

“I don’t believe in France,” Henry said. “
Je ne crois pas en
France
.”

“Neither do I,” Catherine said. “Henry?”

“What?”

“Do you love the house?”

“I love the house.”

“I love it more than you do,” Catherine said, although Henry
hated it when she said things like that. “What do you love
best?”

“That room in the front,” Henry said. “With the windows. Our
bedroom. Those weird rabbit statues.”

“Me too,” Catherine said, although she didn’t. “I love those
rabbits.”

Then she said, “Do you ever worry about Carleton and Tilly?”

“What do you mean?” Henry said. He looked at the alarm clock: it
was 4 a.m. “Why are we awake right now?”

“Sometimes I worry that I love one of them better,” Catherine
said. “Like I might love Tilly better. Because she used to wet the
bed. Because she’s always so angry. Or Carleton, because he was so
sick when he was little.”

“I love them both the same,” Henry said.

He didn’t even know he was lying. Catherine knew, though. She
knew he was lying, and she knew he didn’t even know it. Most of the
time she thought that it was okay. As long as he thought he loved
them both the same, and acted as if he did, that was good
enough.

“Well, do you ever worry that you love them more than me?” she
said. “Or that I love them more than I love you?”

“Do you?” Henry said.

“Of course,” Catherine said. “I have to. It’s my job.”

She found the gas mask in a box of wineglasses, and also six
recent issues of
The New Yorker
, which she still might get
a chance to read someday. She put the gas mask under the sink and
The New Yorker
s in the sink. Why not? It was her sink. She
could put anything she wanted into it. She took the magazines out
again and put them into the refrigerator, just for fun.

Henry came into the kitchen, holding silver candlesticks and a
stuffed armadillo, which someone had made into a purse. It had a
shoulder strap made out of its own skin. You opened its mouth and
put things inside it, lipstick and subway tokens. It had pink
gimlet eyes and smelled strongly of vinegar. It belonged to Tilly,
although how it had come into her possession was unclear. Tilly
claimed she’d won it at school in a contest involving donuts.
Catherine thought it more likely Tilly had either stolen it or
(slightly preferable) found it in someone’s trash. Now Tilly kept
her most valuable belongings inside the purse, to keep them safe
from Carleton, who was covetous of the precious things—because they
were small, and because they belonged to Tilly—but afraid of the
armadillo.

“I’ve already told her she can’t take it to school for at least
the first two weeks. Then we’ll see.” She took the purse from Henry
and put it with the gas mask under the sink.

“What are they doing?” Henry said. Framed in the kitchen window,
Carleton and Tilly hunched over the lawn. They had a pair of
scissors and a notebook and a stapler.

“They’re collecting grass,” Catherine took dishes out of a box,
put the Bubble Wrap aside for Tilly to stomp, and stowed the dishes
in a cabinet. The baby kicked like it knew all about Bubble Wrap.
“Woah, Fireplace,” she said. “We don’t have a dancing license in
there.”

Henry put out his hand, rapped on Catherine’s stomach.
Knock, knock
. It was Tilly’s joke. Catherine would say,
“Who’s there?” and Tilly would say, Candlestick’s here. Fat Man’s
here. Box. Hammer. Milkshake. Clarinet. Mousetrap. Fiddlestick.
Tilly had a whole list of names for the baby. The real estate agent
would have approved.