Night Magic (13 page)

Michael admired the bouquet and, behind it, Emily’s glowing face. He saw her clearly for the first time since his excited arrival. He was beginning to say, “I think they’re almost as pretty as you are,” but stopped in midsentence as his eyes focused on the button pinched onto the collar of her blouse.

With a joyous whoop, he jumped up, embraced Emily, and swung her off her feet, ignoring both her frantic effort to hold the vase upright and the water that splashed down his back. His reiterated shouts drowned out her laughing protests: “It’s the museum! It’s the Metropolitan! It’s the museum!”

They were both dizzy when he lowered her to the floor, interrupting the celebration for an instant to snatch the tin disc from her collar. She barely had time to set the vase down on the coffee table, where it was relatively free from danger. “Will you please tell me—” she began.

“Museum, darlin’! Button, button, I’ve got the button!” He was speaking loudly, waving the little tab in front of her nose. “He went to the Met that day.”

“Who?”

“The Queer Duck, of course! My magical mystery man. He had a button on his lapel. Different colors for different days, right? He went on the red day. He was at the museum! Here, let me pour us more champagne. This is our lucky day.”

He set up shop at the plaza the following morning. He’d always liked it there and still did, despite its associations with frog-horror. Maybe he’d never get rich working that spot, but at least at the end of the day there was usually an equal number of dollar bills and quarters in the hat. Besides, Samir had temporarily calmed his money worries. He’d paid his landlady, set aside a few hundred dollars he owed Dazz, even insisted on repaying what he owed Emily. She had classes again today, so he was doing a solo bit, his ladder-climbing routine, feet on the ground but moving rung by rung upward into some cloudy infinity, the ladder swaying while he surveyed the terrain like a seasick sailor in the crow’s nest. Tourists were taking snapshots. A black mailman sat on a bench, wolfing down his lunch; next to him a natty-looking banker type in well-creased trousers leaned on the darkly gleaming cane that he held propped under his chin.

Michael’s performance was interrupted briefly by the appearance of one of New York’s too-numerous street crazies, this one an aging hippie alcoholic, a man who’d obviously tippled one too many and had probably ingested more than his share of mind-altering substances in his earlier days. Whatever was left of his mind seemed fixed on being heard and being seen, center stage.

Playing with the drunk in a way that was more fun than mocking, Michael mimicked the man’s unsteady walk and wild gesturing. In the end both of them got applause; Michael even got the man to join him in a bow.

Everyone laughed, the mailman, the woman feeding pigeons, and especially the banker, with his homburg, his yellow gloves, his waxed mustache and horn-rimmed glasses. He even wore spats, over shiny, black patent-leather shoes.

The next day, Michael moved the stakeout to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The weather had cooled somewhat, promising an end to the heat wave that had gripped the area for so long now. After the ninth straight day of ninety-degree-plus temperatures, river breezes had blown some life back into the city; people seemed more normal, relieved, almost winking at one another, as if they shared some private joke.

Michael had put on his whiteface and claimed his spot outside the museum even before the doors opened. He smiled at Emily as she crouched nearby, readying her flute, and then he strode onto center stage, the landing between the first and second tiers of stone stairs. After clapping his hands to gather the passersby, he launched into his act.

From inside the breast of his grenadier’s tunic he slipped out a long-stemmed rose—cloth, faded from use—the only prop he would work with. Around him, up and down the steps, beside the fountains flanking the entrance, the crowd was gathering. He placed the rose at the edge of the top step and returned quickly to center stage, where he lay flat on the cement, closing his eyes as if he were dead. He remained still for a minute; then he began to rise, transformed into the Mechanical Man. This was Michael’s art in full flower. Each of his body movements was precise, robotic, slowly gauged, slightly jerky. He accompanied each operation with ratcheting clicks of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, careful never to use his lips or move his throat muscles. Emily, meanwhile, underscored the proceedings with music of her own devising, quirky and humorous, skillfully incorporating hints of
Coppelia
and
The Tales of Hoffmann.

Michael’s performance as the inanimate toy come to life was masterful, and he was proud of it. With a combination of effortless, rhythmic, slow-motion jerks, he arrived at a sitting position; his apparently sightless eyes looked first right, then left, observing his audience without seeming to. (All the while, of course, he was glancing up and down Fifth Avenue, looking for the bobbing black umbrella.) Clicks and pings, an endless variety of noises reproducing the sounds of invisible interior workings, emphasized each of his movements, as if his body housed, not human organs, but wheels and gears and chains and levers, the internal intricacies of a delicate timepiece or some incomprehensible invention.

Elbows angled, hands flat in front of him, feet straight out, he twisted his torso first one way, then the other, while his head made countermovements. Then, bending one knee and leaning his weight on a single foot, he slowly levered himself up off the cement with the discipline of a Russian dancer.

It wasn’t easy to do it slowly, keeping his balance, his body rigid, the other leg straight out in front of him. He held the position as long as he could without seeming to strain or trembling, then brought the other foot into play, bending so sharply at the waist that the ends of his hair nearly touched the ground and his rear end was sticking perpendicularly up in the air—this phase unfailingly produced a laugh from the audience. Inch by inch he lifted his head and torso from the hinge of his waist until his body formed a ninety-degree angle. He held that pose for some moments, making sounds like gears shifting laboriously, then gradually straightened himself until he was standing naturally. At once he initiated a series of expertly choreographed movements, walking straight-legged to the far side of the landing, bent arms and flattened hands perfectly synchronized with the rest of his body. Clicking, clacking mechanically, he walked, spun, tipped, bowed, straightened, swiveled, bent, straightened again, walked backward, forward, side to side, until he drew near the cloth rose lying at the edge of the top step. He was reaching the peak, the knockout, the “big flash.” The crowd stood motionless, fascinated. He felt strong, loose, confident, yet somewhat disappointed: there was no black umbrella in sight, and he found that he had been expecting it.

With mechanical aspect he registered the discovery of the rose, his penciled brows lifting in circumflex interest, his eyes blinking on as if electrically operated, lips forming a metallic smile. In graduated beats, he mimed joy, savor, passion, ecstasy; while, clanking, cranking, shortening the intervals between his movements—Emily’s flute was picking up the tempo—and putting himself into absolute muscular control, he began to bend toward the flower, hand outstretched, an expression of ineffable joy fixed upon his face. Slowly, movement by infinitesimal movement, the robot fingers closed around the stem until they grasped it, lifted it. It was a difficult task for the Mechanical Man. From behind his closed lips he made a confusion of noises as he tried to stand upright, then repeated one sound like a broken record as Emily cued into a flute passage consisting of a single reiterated phrase. As though suffering mechanical failure, he halted all movement, frozen in this half-bending pose. Thus he remained, while the crowd burst into laughter at his predicament. Finally he managed to administer himself a knock on the back; then some drops of oil from an imaginary can restarted the mechanism. Blissfully he began to move his hand, tiny fraction of an inch by inch, intent on bringing the rose to his nostrils. Bit by bit the rose moved nearer to his face, which was marked by robotlike but boundless ecstasy. Closer, closer came the flower, each movement telling and precise, his nose quivering for the scent, his mechanical eyelids blinking like camera shutters in anticipation of the climactic moment, the flute shimmering, quivering on the brink of satisfied desire, until…

Alas. Distances had been falsely gauged, tangents miscalculated, degrees over- or underestimated, angles misjudged; the arm, the hand, the rose all unfortuitously passed the face, the flower’s scent forever uninhaled, forever unattainable: an heroic effort, a great near miss. The Mechanical Man’s blinking, puzzled expression, a mask of Chaplinesque regret, cried out against the small, sad frustrations of life.

Michael held the last moment, a freeze-frame of amazement and bewilderment, for exactly the proper length of time; then he let his body go limp, the arm holding the rose fell to his side, his head dropped. While the crowd applauded, he looked out through his eyelashes, again searching for the black umbrella. He was surprised not to see it, and surprised at his own surprise. Why was he so sure?

Wondering whether to keep the crowd or let it go, Michael turned at Emily’s call, then looked where she pointed. Out at the curb, a remote television truck was parked, and a cameraman leaning against a fender had a mobile camera pointed at him. He spun around, made a bow, flashed some quick funny stuff that got guffaws from the crowd. While the camera recorded these antics, he glanced down the avenue again; still no sign of the umbrella, or of the man. The camera crew waved him a thank-you. Michael called out, “When will it be on?” The cameraman shrugged; the crew had already begun moving equipment through the front doors of the museum.

“What’s going on in there?” Michael asked in an aside to Emily.

“The big Chinese exhibit’s opening today.”

Michael, who never read the newspapers and seldom saw television news, vaguely remembered Emily’s telling him about this exhibit. It was called “Treasures of Ancient China,” and it included artworks and artifacts never before seen in the West: ritual bronze vessels, bronze horses, ceramics, jade carvings, lacquer-work, tomb figures, even a few paintings, all from pre-Imperial China and the earliest centuries of the Chinese Empire. Every piece in the show was at least fifteen hundred years old, most were much older, and the opening, combining as it did great artistic, cultural, and (especially) political significance, was receiving heavy coverage from the media. At this moment, in the museum lobby, Important People were smiling and shaking hands, brought together by the universal language of art and the presence of the TV cameras.

To keep the crowd from dispersing, Michael resorted to his ladder-climbing routine. Meanwhile, one of the TV crew had come back down the steps with a pad and pencil. “Can you give us your name?” he asked when he caught Michael's eye. “Just in case we use some of that footage?”

Michael disliked interruptions while he was performing, but the thought of some free publicity appealed to his professional instincts. As he was about to make a graceful descent from the ladder and answer the question, he caught sight of the Queer Duck. Michael had been so busy pulling stunts for the camera that he had missed the man’s approach, but there he was, skirting the periphery of the crowd and just beginning to climb the steps, beard and red nose firmly attached, head hunched between the shoulders of his Sunday-black suit, carrying the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag in one hand and the furled umbrella like a walking stick in the other.

Though Michael had spent weeks intensely imagining this moment, anticipating, preparing for it, when it came he could think of nothing to say. “Hey,” he called out lamely, and then “Hey!” again, louder this time.

“Wait, buddy, what’s your name?” The TV man stepped after him as he moved. Michael signaled to Emily, who was passing the hat, and started toward the man, who suddenly looked up and met Michael’s eyes. The man’s gaze froze, his head cocked in perplexity, as if encountering some unexpected situation; then he stepped back, amazed, even (perhaps) alarmed, as though the unexpected had turned to something stranger still. He made a crablike sideways movement along the step, then turned to go back down, hastily popping up the umbrella at the same time, and, thus hiding his head—unreasonably, by calling more attention to it—he tried to lose himself in the crowd.

“Have you got a name?” the TV man insisted, as Michael, oblivious of him and heedless of his inquiries, beckoned again to Emily, nimbly threaded his way through the onlookers, and began following the man.

Their prey sailed down Fifth Avenue, melting into the crowd, the umbrella pitching and dipping as it duplicated his bounding walk. He passed the plaza, reminding Michael again of the Day of the Frog, and continued south to Fifty-third Street, where he turned right, past the Museum of Modern Art, to Sixth Avenue, then Seventh, then Broadway, where he took a left, heading south toward Times Square. His pursuers, younger by far, had to work to keep up with him. Once Michael thought they had lost him, but when they got through the light and up on the curb he saw the black umbrella again, as if the man had slowed his pace on purpose. Then he turned right again, and they hurried to close the gap.

They entered a backwater area with few pedestrians on the sidewalks to block the view. Yes, there he was, up ahead, his shoulders rising and falling, you could see the flash of his white socks as his feet moved. His head was completely obscured by the umbrella, but there was in that dark, striving figure an enticement, as if he were deliberately leading them on—but where? To do—what? Yet the feeling persisted, expanded, and Michael found himself breathlessly excited, like a traveler embarking on a voyage to an unknown destination, beginning a thrilling but nameless adventure. He was holding Emily’s hand, and he could feel the sweat between their entwined fingers and slippery palms, could hear her breathing as he hurried her along, could sense her reluctance and hesitation. Every now and then she made a sound like a stifled giggle, as if this whole pursuit were silly, a charade, not to be taken seriously. Her behavior appeared incongruous and even puzzling to Michael; he hadn’t enough time, nor, perhaps, enough penetration, to see that she was fighting down the dread she felt at the entire undertaking, and at the same time sneering at herself for feeling it.