The Magician (3 page)

“We could get out here,” Ed said.

“It’ll only be a couple of minutes more,” said his father. “The suitcases are heavy. I’ll help you backstage with them.”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll manage. You can’t leave the car here, it’ll just block traffic.”

He could pull off the road right there and not tie up anything, and he’d have the satisfaction of helping you, you are a shit, Ed Japhet.

When the car stopped, there was some honking, as if it weren’t the star of the show but just some kid getting out. Lila ran for the doorway alone.

Mr. Japhet helped Ed get the suitcases out as fast as possible, the cop yelling at them to hurry-up-you’re-holding-up-traffic, and then Mr. Japhet was back behind the wheel waving good-bye, which Ed didn’t see because he was already lumbering toward the door, one suitcase in each hand, feeling the sweat in his armpits and hoping he wouldn’t look a mess for the show. Where the hell was Lila?

A kid he didn’t know held the door open for him, obviously wondering what the suitcases were all about. Well, he’d know once the show got started.

Around the corner in the hallway Ed put the cases down, looked at his hands as if he expected instant calluses instead of just redness, then dusted the snow bits off his shoulders, like dandruff, except wet.

Lila, suddenly standing close in front of him, gave him a quick kiss on the lips. Nobody noticed.

“Good luck,” she said, showing her crossed fingers to him.

He abandoned her there, telling her to get a good seat not too much on the side, and headed for the back of the gym, one suitcase in each hand, like Willie Loman. He didn’t
feel
like the star of the show, that was for sure.

Backstage, he was greeted by Thin Lips, Mr. Fredericks, the faculty adviser.

“Mr. Fredericks,” he said, trying to make his voice sound like one professional talking to another instead of a student to a teacher, “it’ll help a lot if I can set up in private, I mean, none of the students around, okay?”

“Understood,” said Mr. Fredericks. He showed Ed the two tables he had asked for.

“Just before I’m supposed to go on, this here, the first table, needs to be put out on the left side of the platform, with no jiggling, because there’ll be a pitcher of milk on it, in addition to other things. It wouldn’t be too good for me to do that myself—I mean, carry it on. They shouldn’t see me until I appear.”

Mr. Fredericks smiled that shitty smile of his.

“The second table,” Ed said, “should go toward the back, against the curtains, so I have to turn around with my back to the audience to take anything off it. That’s very important.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Fredericks. “I’ll put them out there myself.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean for you to carry—”

“Quite all right. Pleasure to help.”

Maybe he wasn’t so bad.

Ed had left himself barely enough time to arrange his things from the suitcases onto the two tables. On the first was a quart-size pitcher of milk, a folded tabloid newspaper, a piece of soft clothesline, his mother’s good scissors, and a brown paper bag.

On the back table he carefully arranged the material he needed for his pièce de résistance. Then he took his three-by-five cue card out of his pocket and went over the items one by one. He turned the card over, closed his eyes, and repeated the cues from memory. It wasn’t like doing a magic show for a little kid’s birthday party for five dollars.

Mr. Fredericks came over to say that the lights in the gym were being lowered. He could hear the scraping of the folding chairs, which would be gotten out of the way later for the dance.

“Are you ready?” asked Mr. Fredericks. “Roberta’s number takes three and a half minutes.”

Roberta Cardick was the ice-breaker. She would take the head off the mike, as usual, and sing as if she were making love to it. Roberta, a senior, was good, but she was no Janis Joplin, and the kids had all heard her lots of times. Still, she’d put them in a good mood for him.

“I’m going to introduce her,” said Mr. Fredericks. “All set?”

Ed wanted to say, “Anytime,” casually, but what came out was a dry, barely audible, “Yes.”

He watched Roberta. Sideways, her tits seemed even bigger than from the front. She was singing something new, and they loved it, you could tell.

Never mind. When Roberta came off to wild applause, he held up an approving thumb so she could see. Then Mr. Fredericks carried the tables on carefully.

Ready or not, thought Ed, here I come.

Chapter 3

Lila, her back straight, sat on one of the wooden seats way in the rear of the gym, between strangers, isolating herself. When she shrugged her shoulder-length auburn hair out of her vision’s way, the toss of her head and the movement of her long neck were barely perceptible, the slight sway of her beads just touching the very top of her breasts.

Other students seeing her at that moment might have thought of her as aloof, when in fact she was consciously arranging herself to be alone amidst an audience, to watch as if she were the sole spectator. If asked, she would not deny the pleasure she felt at her escort’s being the star of the evening’s events.

Mr. Fredericks was just then carrying the second table on. The buzz in the audience turned to a breath and then to silence as Ed appeared, looking so different. Was it the distance, or the tuxedo he wore? Or just the way he strode onstage and, with the slightest nod at Mr. Fredericks, touched his hand to his forehead in a salute to the audience that greeted and put them in their places at the same time.

“Ladies…gentlemen…anachronisms…” Ed said, looking directly at the cluster of teachers standing against one wall. A titter, a ripple, and, finally, restrained laughter.

“I want to thank the English teacher who taught me the meaning of ‘anachronism,’” he said, and the laughter continued.

“Fellow students, future dropouts, members of the post-alcoholic generation, what lies in store for you is not rational—just pure and simple magic that we can all understand!”

All that applause, and he hadn’t yet begun his first trick.

“Over here,” he said, “I have a sheet of ordinary newspaper, filled with advertisements, comic strips, help-wanted ads, and half-truths.”

He rolled the newspaper into a simple cornucopia, and, holding it with his left hand, with his right picked up the brimful pitcher of white liquid.

“This, as all you Four-H Club members know, is full of the milk of human kindness.”

Ed tilted the pitcher and let the milk pour slowly into the cornucopia. A few drops trickled out of the bottom of the paper cone, and he set the now half-full pitcher down so that with his right hand he could twist the bottom of the cone and fold the end up tight. Then he resumed pouring. There was a hush in the audience.

Ed looked up. “I learned this trick from my first milkman, Mrs. Terence Japhet.”

Laughter fluttered through the gymnasium as Ed finished pouring the last drops of milk into the cornucopia, set the pitcher down, and carried the cone gingerly over to the edge of the platform.

With a sudden motion he tipped the paper cone toward the girls in the first row, who shrieked, but it was empty, and as he crushed the paper cone the foot-stomping started. He held up a hand for silence and said, “As every student knows, the milk of human kindness has completely disappeared.”

As the laughter and applause became tumultuous, he noticed for the first time that Urek and three members of his gang were sitting next to the girls, up front in the first row.

* * *

COMMENT BY FRANK TENNENT,

ED’S BEST FRIEND

Urek and his gang run this school the way the Mafia runs parts of the United States. I saw a kid go over to the apple machine and let his fifteen cents show one inch before he put the money into the slot and got a whack on the wrist from Urek that’d send the dough flying. It’d be scooped up in seconds by the others. Once I saw this girl, real innocent, pick up one of the coins and try to hand it to the kid who dropped it. One of Urek’s greasers took her wrist and said “Thank you” before he took the coin away.

Student gym lockers used to be free until Urek started renting them out at two bits a month for protection—you know, if you paid up, your locker was protected, and if you didn’t, your combination lock got hacksawed, which cost a buck and a quarter to replace, and anything usable inside was missing. I
told
Ed it just didn’t make economic sense to fool with Urek. Ed paid $5.75 for that tempered-steel lock the guy in the hardware store said couldn’t be hacksawed through. It’s true, it couldn’t, but can you imagine how burned Urek and his friends were every time they passed Ed’s locker? I pay my two bits a month; it’s cheap. I tell you, Ed and I walk home together because we’re on the same block, but if ever the pack came on him on the way home, I’d haul ass out of there.

I’m not his best friend. I’m a senior, and he’s a junior. It’s just that on our block we’re the only teen-agers except for a girl. I play first-string football, and he doesn’t even like sports. When I go off for a game, he says, “Oh, you’re going to be an American”—some crack like that.

Ed can defy Urek all he wants to, just so
he leaves me out of it. I told him, and he said, “Okay, just get to a phone and call the cops.” Now, you know the cops can’t do anything about people like Urek, there’s always a gang like that, whether you’re in school or got a business somewhere, don’t you read the papers?

COMMENT BY MR. CHADWICK,

THE PRINCIPAL

Yes, I know about the locker-room business, and I don’t know how to stop it. If I issued another edict, it would have the same effect as the first: nothing. We never see them taking money from the students. Not one has ever been caught sawing through a padlock, though there are always reports of these things happening. I can’t let the police enter the school premises. What could they do, anyway? They haven’t been able to stop the Mafia’s garbage-collection activities in the area, and that’s much more serious because several gang members have actually been found dead in Westchester, and there’s been no fatality at the school as yet. I mean, we’re a long way past the age when you could encourage boys to masturbate less and eagle-scout more. We believe more than a third of the children in school smoke pot or take amphetamines. How do you stop all that? What would you do in my place? I’ve got less than two years to go to retirement. That’s my solution.

*

For his second trick, Ed Japhet held up a piece of soft clothesline that went from one outstretched hand to the other, perhaps two yards in length.

“What,” he asked his audience, “would be the best way of cutting this length of rope into two equal parts?”

“Cut it in the middle!” yelled a boy from the back.

“What’s the easiest way of finding the middle?” Ed asked the anonymous voice.

“Measure it!” came the voice.

“Well,” said Ed, “I don’t have anything with me to measure it with, and besides, that might take a long time. How about this way?”

He held the two ends together and let the middle drop straight down, then picked up the rope at mid-point, while a titter went through the audience at the obviousness of the solution.

“Now, the student who yelled from the back…at least I hope it was a student…would he please step up to the platform and with these trusty scissors cut the rope exactly in half?”

He recognized the boy when he was halfway down the aisle, a tubby, awkward kid from his gym class who was unable to chin himself up even once. Bigmouth.

The boy took the proffered scissors and cut the rope through at midpoint in one angry snap.

When Ed let the cut ends fall, it was clear that one part of the rope was at least two inches longer than the other. The audience laughed, and tubby wandered back to his seat in disgrace. Ed tied the two cut ends together into a knot, circled the scissors around the knot, then stopped. Carefully, he put the scissors down on the table, took one end of the rope, stood stock-still until there was absolute silence, then suddenly snapped the end of the rope: the knot had disappeared, and the rope was restored to one uncut piece. A beat, and then a stomping of feet and applause as Ed tossed the restored rope out to the audience for examination.

“How’d you do it, Ed?” someone yelled.

Another, standing, said, “Can you fix my broken guitar string the same way?”

Ed held up his hands for silence. “Fellows, girls, teachers,” he said, surveying the tight bundle of faculty members at the side of the room, “I need an adult volunteer.” He looked at the knot of teachers, then at each of their faces in turn, knowing that all of them probably dreaded the prospect of being asked onstage.

Stretch the moment out, he told himself. It’s as important as the trick.

Ed held his hand over his eyes Indian-fashion, as if it were hard for him to see the cluster of teachers he was staring at.

“Any adults here?”

The kids howled.

Still, none of the teachers stirred.

Take it slow, he said to himself.

It was at this moment that Jerry Samuelson shifted his body weight. Jerry, a senior, a journalism major, was not only editor of the school paper but a paid stringer for
The New York Times.
He had intended to file his usual two-paragraph story about the prom, expecting that none of it would be published. In fact, he had begun to feel guilty about the small checks he received from the newspaper because they had actually used only one item from him all semester. When the black students, goaded by the gang, had staged a one-day fracas in the lunchroom, an overzealous policeman called in by the principal had accidentally hurt himself while trying to wrestle an ashcan top away from one of the students. The
Times
had used his story in a roundup of similar incidents in other schools. Even then they had stolen his thunder by sending a by-line reporter up the next day to interview students and faculty and do an in-depth piece on the sociological bases of student unrest in the suburbs.