The Truth About Celia (14 page)

“You mean that thing with the dove is part of the act?”

He laughed. “Of course it is. I’m not
that
incompetent.”

By this time Micah was standing in the doorway windmilling his backpack from side to side. “Come
on,
Mom. I’m ready to go. Goodbye, Great Lentini.”

“See you next time, Great Zakrzewski. And thanks for setting me free, Ms. Burch. I’ll try to repay the favor sometime.”

“Likewise,” Stephanie answered, realizing only a moment later that what she had said—what both of them had said—had made no sense.

Before they were halfway home she had to stop in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant. She told Micah he could run inside and order a to-go box for himself, though she herself waited in the car. For some reason she couldn’t stop laughing.

That fall, the night of the first hard frost, a water main ruptured in the movie theater, emptying several thousand gallons of water into the lobby. The pipe that burst was behind the snack bar, at the loose socket of one of the elbow joints, and the force of the evacuating water shattered both the candy case and the popcorn bin. When the pool spread into the VR machines, the discharge short-circuited the building’s electricity, so that the manager had to open the doors manually the next morning. The water poured outside in a single collapsing wall, he told the newspapers, knocking him off his feet. Cardboard packages of Milk Duds and SweeTARTS surfed past him into the parking lot. “It was like in a cartoon,” he said. He closed the theater for remodeling and rewiring and did not reopen it until the new year.

Earlier that same night, a derelict lost half his left arm in an accident at the bowling alley. He had been living in the ball-and-pin retrieval room, it was discovered, sleeping on a blanket behind the machinery and sneaking into the lobby at night to steal hot dogs and pickles from the snack bar. He had been there for weeks, ever since the weather grew cold. Every few days, out of boredom, he would borrow a pin from the belt, drawing a happy face on it with a tube of lipstick before replacing it. No one ever seemed to notice. Late one night, though—a league night—he caught his hand in the rack as the pins shuffled and locked into place. When the apparatus surged forward, it wrenched his arm loose, tearing it off at the elbow. The State Office of Recreational Safety shut the bowling alley down the next day for multiple violations of the occupancy code.

It was three weeks later when a group of college fraternity pledges punched a hole in the ceiling of the Aerospace Museum. They had broken in through the service entrance with a twenty-gallon gas drum, intending to “fly” the Sopwith Camel that was on loan from the Royal Air Force into the gift shop. But they forgot to disconnect the steel cable securing it to the rafters, and when they gunned the engine, the plane made a swinging curve into the ceiling. One of the propeller blades was fractured in the collision, and a strip of canvas was torn from the starboard wing. The boy in the pilot’s chair sprained his ankle, but the other pledges were unhurt by the accident. The college placed the fraternity on extended probation.

Stephanie was in her living room, watching a Web report about the event, when the doorbell rang. It was a bleak Sunday afternoon, sheets of rain falling from a mouse-colored sky, and she was wearing three pairs of socks on her feet and a heavy goosedown jacket. She always seemed to be colder the last few weeks of autumn, before the ice and snow began to threaten, than she was in the depths of winter. It was as if the weather became so humiliating after a while that she no longer even felt it. The doorbell rang again and she shouted, “Hold on,” muting the volume on the monitor before she answered it.

It was Frank Lentini, dripping wet and holding a capsized umbrella, its metal braces locked inside out in a broomlike cone. “I’m sorry to bother you, but can I come in? I won’t take much of your time.”

“Of course,” Stephanie said. When he stepped inside, the light spread across the sheen of water on his face, sharpening the angles and filling in the planes, so that he looked for a moment like one of the movie stars of her childhood—Ewan McGregor, say, or Hugh Jackman. He squeezed the rain from his hair and let it hang down over his eyes in a dark tangle. Stephanie had to shake her head to clear it of the vision. “You know, you should wear your hair like that all the time. It suits you.”

He stared into the middle distance, considering. “I will,” he decided. And then: “Listen, is Micah home? I wanted to talk to you two about something.”

When she called for Micah, he came pounding down the hall from his bedroom. Lentini asked the two of them to sit on the couch, though he himself remained standing, a pool of water threading off his clothes onto the floor. He told them that he had been asked to participate in the state invitational magic exhibition, which was to be held this year at the Shrine Convention Center. “That’s probably why they asked me,” he said. “I’m a local practitioner. Anyway, it’s a real honor, and I want you to come as my assistant, Micah. That is, if you’re up for it. The problem is it’s the first weekend of January, and that doesn’t give us much time. We’d have to start rehearsing three or four times a week instead of just Tuesday and Thursday. I don’t want us—me . . . I don’t want me to botch this one up.”

“Well, what do you think, M.?” Stephanie asked.

He actually looked excited. “Sounds good to me.”

Lentini nodded. “Great, great. So I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon? At four-thirty?” He was still carrying his umbrella, and when he looked at the pierced fabric, hanging off the wires like a bat’s wings, he frowned. He asked Stephanie, “Do you have someplace I can get rid of this before I go?”

“Are you sure? I thought it went with the hands—a matching set.”

He attempted a smile, but it sickened and fell almost immediately. A deep groan rose from somewhere inside him. It sounded like a rockfall echoing through a system of caves.

“I didn’t mean that,” Stephanie said. “Here, I’ll take it,” and after he handed it over to her, he showed himself out the door.

The next day, when Micah had finished school, she dropped him off at the studio, and after that he began to meet with Lentini four afternoons a week. He wouldn’t tell her anything about the act they were preparing, just that it was going to incorporate “each of the five categories of illusion,” and whenever she pressed him, he would say, “You’ll have to come see it for yourself. You’ll be there, won’t you, Mom?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” she’d answer, and he would pinch off an impulsive grin, saying, “I know you won’t. I see all things. I know all things. I am the Great and Powerful Zakrzewski.”

Now and then, half an hour or so before he went to bed, he would show her a simple card trick. He was becoming nimbler and more practiced by the day, and soon, she had no doubt, he would be better than Mr. Lentini. He had taken to rolling a quarter over his knuckles to exercise his fingers, and as she drove him to school in the morning or watched the Web with him at night, she would sometimes catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye, a somersaulting flash of silver, though she could have sworn he was sitting perfectly still. She thought of this diligence, this unexpected skill, as the first feature of his adulthood, rising up in him like a fire climbing a rick of wood, and she found it both fascinating and disturbing. Would she recognize him at all, she wondered, once it had consumed him?

One night, while he was studying for a quiz in long division, his father telephoned for him. Stephanie stood in the kitchen sorting through the expiration dates on the canned goods, trying hard not to listen in as they talked, but she couldn’t help but overhear the occasional
yes sir
and
Saturday
and
why not?
After a few minutes, Micah came out of his bedroom and said, “So guess what? He won’t be able to make it to the magic show.”

“I’m sorry, Micah. Is that why he called?”

“No. I think he called because he’s mad at Jacob. They had a fight or something. Jacob called him a liar, so he sent him to his room. But that’s okay, he says, because I’m his real son. I’ve always been the better one.” He bit his lower lip, and all at once he was crying.

Stephanie towed him onto her lap, closing her arms around him. “Shhh,” she told him. “Shhh.”

“How did we get stuck with him, Mom?”

“Oh, sometimes people aren’t who you think they are. And sometimes people are exactly who you think they are, but then they go and change on you. It will take you the rest of your life to figure it out, honey.”

“But I’m scared of the rest of my life.”

“Why?”

“What if I turn out like him?”

“You won’t, Micah. You know why? Because you’re going to turn out just like me.” She kissed the crown of his head. “Either me or Fatty Arbuckle, I’m not sure who yet,” and though he did not laugh, she felt him sagging contentedly into her body.

“How did
you
think your life was going to turn out when you were little?” he asked, sniffling.

This was something he liked to try every so often—making a sudden hairpin turn midway through a conversation to ask her about her childhood. He thought that if he did it quickly enough, without warning, he could surprise her into remembering. “I wish I could tell you, M.,” she said, and she scratched at the back of his neck, twining her fingers through the wispy commas of short brown hair. “Sorry, kid. Maybe next time.”

A few weeks later, not long before the state magic exhibition, Lentini was waiting outside the bicycle shop for her when she delivered Micah for his lesson. He jogged to the curb, rapping playfully on her window, and asked if he could treat the two of them to dinner that night. “In celebration of our act and its finishing touches,” he said.

“Sounds good,” she told him. “I’ll be back at my usual time. Six o’clock,” she said, “ravenously hungry.”

When she drove to the park, she found it almost deserted. She walked across the cushion of pine needles to the bench by the playground. It was late December, and the wind was blasting so hard that she could hear airborne pieces of gravel pinging against the bars of the jungle gym. The mothers and their children had all gone home for the afternoon, and a small group of teenagers, balancing on the seesaws, was laughing and smoking marijuana cigarettes. She decided to pass the hour in the public library across the street, browsing through the catalogue of books and other printed matter. Then, shortly before six, she collected a dress she had dropped off at the dry cleaner’s. When she carried it over the ventilation grille on the sidewalk, the pliofilm bag fluttered and bellied open like a balloon, and she imagined for just a second what it would be like to rise into the air clinging to its hem.

By the time she returned to the studio she was so hungry she could feel it as a swelling tug at the back of her throat. Lentini was waiting with Micah on the stoop for her, and he drove the two of them to Alouette’s, the only French restaurant in town. As soon as they passed through the door, Stephanie caught the mingled scents of bread and coffee and butter, and she heard her stomach complaining audibly. “Are you sure you don’t want to check your coat?” Lentini asked as the maître d’ showed them to their table.

“No. I’m still freezing.”

He shrugged—“It’s your sauna”—and guided her by the elbow into her chair. The table was lit by a white candle in a curved silver dish, and Micah began making impressions in the pool of wax around the base, peeling the crust from his skin as it cooled and tossing it back into the flame. After the waiter had taken their orders, Stephanie said, “So, you guys are ready for the big show?”

“We are,” Lentini said.

“But you won’t tell me what happens?”

“We won’t,” Micah said. “But—” He turned to Mr. Lentini. “Can I ask her?” and Lentini nodded. “We need a volunteer for the final trick, and we were hoping you would let us pick you.”

She asked Lentini, “I don’t have to eat crumbs out of your mustache, do I?”

He smiled. “No, nothing like that. I promise we’ll take good care of you.”

“Okay,” she said. “It’s settled, then. I’m your volunteer.” As the waiter delivered their salads, she allowed her eyes to wander through the restaurant—the polished wooden walls that held a tapered reflection of their bodies; the smoke-blue tiles of the clay floor; the pale stars of the candle flames, swaying in unison whenever the kitchen door opened. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I ate in a restaurant like this,” she said. And she couldn’t. She had been on few dates since her divorce—none at all in the past two years—and they had always ended early in the evening, shortly before her son’s bedtime, after a few hours of conversation at a coffeehouse or bar. She subjected each of the men she went out with to a single question,
Could this person be a father to Micah?,
and they were transformed before her eyes, every one of them, into walking repositories of damage.

“That’s a shame,” Lentini said. His hair was hanging in a tattered line across his forehead, and it looked something like the whisk of oscillating brushes at the automatic carwash. She couldn’t help but find the effect comic (as she found everything he did—though why was that?), but she was touched that he had taken her advice. “I try to go someplace nice at least once a month. But, you know, a magician’s pay. I can’t always manage it.”

“Lentini,”
she said. “That’s Italian, isn’t it?”

“Sicilian.” He drank a sip of water. “I’m named after my great-great-grandfather, Francesco Lentini. He immigrated to the United States when he was just a boy. He was a circus performer—a three-legged man, actually—fairly well known in his day.”

Micah looked up from the candle. “No way. You never told me that.” He was shaping the soft wax of the brim into crenellations.

“You never asked.”

“What did he do when he needed to buy shoes?”

“Well, believe it or not, I know the answer to that. He always bought an extra pair. He would give the fourth shoe, the one he didn’t need, to a one-legged friend of his.”