The Magician's Lie (18 page)

I didn't mind the bodyguards; actually, they were nice boys. They fit in well enough, always watchful but rarely obtrusive. And when several months had passed without further threat—the newspapers continued to growl their same stories about the dangers of a woman taking a man's role onstage, but their tone grew more and more admiring—I offered the big-shouldered one a job as a prop hauler and the long-fingered one a position onstage, and they both accepted.

It was the night after I released the bodyguards that things changed with Clyde. It had been exactly a year since I'd become the Amazing Arden, and I was in New York for just one night, going over our accounts in the office. We'd planned to go to Keen's to celebrate the occasion with mutton chops and red berry bibble, but we got to talking and lost track of the clock. By the time he checked his watch, we decided to content ourselves with sandwiches and keep working.

Truth be told, we hadn't spent every minute talking true business. I'd come to look forward to talking with him on my return visits, sometimes for hours. He confessed his greatest dream was to build a theater of his own, and we fell to talking about it when other business was done, dreaming it grander every time. We changed the name over and over—the Perennial? Garber's Grove? the Modern Taj?—but settled on the Carolina Rose. Each time we talked, we gave it ever more prestigious addresses, furnishing it with chairs and curtains and carpets, down to the last detail. I advocated for a streamlined, elegant scheme of black and white furnishings, but he wanted something more baroque, full of scrollwork and ornament. It was a subject of fun, but also something we shared with each other and no one else.

In a way, it was intimate, a word from which I once would have shrunk where Clyde was concerned. I found I minded that thought less and less. There was still a wall between us—the wall I had put there to guard against being hurt by him again—but it had sunk lower with every passing month, and after all this time, I could see over it. We could laugh together once more. But there was no hint of anything romantic, not until the night he chose to declare himself.

We'd finished the sandwiches, and I'd asked a question about our receipts for June, so he reached into the middle of a stack of papers, and the top of the stack toppled and fell. I leaned over to begin picking them up, but he shooed me back. So I sat in the desk chair and looked down at him while he gathered up the sheets of figures and neatly squared their edges again. When he was done, he handed the papers to me, and I put them back where they belonged, but he didn't get up. Instead, he removed his eyeglasses, folded them slowly, and placed them on the edge of the desk. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose as if it pained him and sat back on his heels.

“Clyde?” I prodded.

He didn't meet my eyes. “Arden, do you know what you want?”

“Sure,” I said. “I want to be famous enough to make front-page headlines just for coming to town. I want to invent an illusion so original I'm forever known as its creator. And I want those marzipan candies they make in that little town outside Binghamton, the ones dipped in chocolate, in the box with the red ribbon.”

I was partly joking, but I watched his reaction, and he was serious. He knelt at my feet and laid his hands on the ground, his fingertips almost but not quite grazing the toes of my shoes. Awkwardly I looked down, waiting.

“I want you to forgive me,” he said. “That's what I want.”

I knew what he meant instantly, of course. My answer took a bit longer to form. “It was a long time ago.”

“But you were right,” Clyde said. “I did you wrong. I never should have let you believe I was going to marry you. It was a trick, and badly done. And I'm sorry.”

I looked at his bent head, and my heart ached. I'd pictured this before, down to the last detail. If I'd been truthful when he asked me what I wanted, I'd have included this: him, on his knees, begging my forgiveness.

“So that's what you want,” I said. “More than that theater of yours? More than the stacks of money you keep in the safe? You want me to forgive you?”

“Yes.”

There was something about the way he looked up at me that turned on a light. I'd been lying to myself. I hadn't been enjoying his company just for conversation. I had wanted something more, something I didn't want to let myself want, but if he was truly repentant? Maybe I could have it after all.

Boldly I said, “Is that all you want from me?”

He lifted one hand to hover over the hem of my dress, stared up into my face, and said, “No. It isn't. But that doesn't matter.”

“Why not?”

“It only matters what you want from me. And you've said I can't even touch you. So I won't, until you give me permission.”

“Done.” I surprised even myself with how quickly, how eagerly, I said it. “Touch me, then.”

He gaped a little bit, taken by surprise. Seeing his shock was almost more gratifying than watching him beg. “I don't know where to start.”

“I do,” I said and leaned down to him, cradling his face in both hands. I could feel the whiskers just under the skin of his cheek. After so long, it was almost too much, and I gave myself over instantly.

His lips on mine were warm and sweet. I parted my lips and felt his tongue slip in, shocking me a moment, and then the sensation took me well beyond warmth into a delicious, undeniable heat. I came down out of my chair, down to my knees, to meet him.

“Are you sure?” he said low in his throat, urgently.

“More,” I said in response and pulled him to me and pressed my hips against his hips as if I could pass my body into his like two magic rings struck together so hard they interlock. His lips were soft but insistent, and I could feel the scruff on his chin scratching me, making my face feel tender, then as he trailed fierce kisses down my neck, the scruff rubbed against the skin there, and my face and neck were aflame as surely as if I were standing in the Navajo Fire itself.

I pressed against him, feeling the delicious, unfamiliar heat of another person's body against mine, chest to chest, waist to waist, thighs to thighs. We knelt facing each other for what seemed like hours. His hands twisted into my hair, his fingers wrapped around my head as he held my face to his, as if to devour me, and I wanted nothing else in the world in that moment but to be devoured.

When kisses were no longer enough, we both knew it. I could feel his need against me, and I lay back so he could have what we both wanted. He pushed at my skirt, sliding it up over my knee, and he was so maddeningly slow about it that I grabbed two fistfuls of skirt myself and hauled the layers of fabric out of the way. He smiled at that, and I kissed the smile off his face, shocked by my own boldness, but so gripped with urgency I couldn't slow down.

I couldn't say which of us unlaced the front of my dress, our fingers were both tangling and lunging, but when the front hung open, I felt a rush of cold air and then a warmer rush as he lowered his mouth. A wave of heat ran down between my legs and up my spine to the back of my head where it exploded, and I gasped out loud.

I had waited a long time without knowing what I was waiting for, and for all the months and years I'd waited, it was worth every minute.

“How beautiful you are,” he said, murmuring the words against my bare breast. The sensation was new and unfamiliar and wonderful, and the heat was everywhere at once. I couldn't feel his hands on me so I reached out for them and found one at the waist of his trousers pulling them aside, and when I brushed something I didn't expect to brush, I heard him groan. He sounded like an animal, but not in a frightening way. I wasn't afraid. I reached out for him and he groaned again, lowering his hips onto mine. His skin was so hot. His face came up to mine, and there was a question in his eyes, and I tipped my hips up to meet his, pressing and pressing, which was all the answer he needed.

“Beautiful,” said Clyde, “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” as he pushed aside the last scrap of fabric separating us and plunged inside, and there was pain and joy in my answering cry, until neither of us were making words, only sounds, though at the end when we lay down next to each other, he ran his hand over my face and cupped my cheek in his palm and said, “Beautiful, beautiful Arden.”

Janesville, 1905

Half past three o'clock

“I'm sorry, Virgil, have I shocked you?”

“Officer Holt,” he says, “or Holt. Or officer.”

“Virgil is a lovely name though. Traditional. And have I shocked you? Made you uncomfortable?”

“No.”

“I don't mean to. But your reaction, just now, it tells a different story.”

“Story,” he scoffs as sharply as he can, given that she's right. He was already uncomfortably warm, but the prickling of his skin now is more than just a rising sweat. The hot, bare room feels as small as a closet. His heart is pounding and that's not all. “You're the storyteller, not me.”

“Stories are often true.”

“Sometimes true,” he says and keeps his distance, still trying to calm himself down. She didn't need to tell that story that way, getting into those details. He should have cut her off. But he didn't want to, and he's sure she knows it. He might as well tell her everything, all his hopes and fears, since it doesn't take much effort for her to figure him out.

Then something interrupts.

At first it sounds like the wind, like a tree branch on a window, except that he knows there are no trees close by. Fast wind over flat land has thrown things against the building before—broken cart wheels, lost shirts, newspapers—but none have sounded quite like this.

The sound keeps coming, something between a whistle and a scratch. He knows he's not imagining it. Partly because it's persistent, but partly because of the magician, who has also turned her attention toward the door, cocking her ear to listen.

“Is that a cat?” she asks. “Do you have a police cat?”

“No.”

Then the sound comes clearly, soft but unmistakable: a knock.

He doesn't move to answer it.

She says softly, almost in a whisper, “Will this be like the telephone? Will you ignore everything for my sake?”

“Nothing for your sake,” he spits in irritation, striding in three long steps straight to the door, unlocking it, throwing it open.

No one is there. No one and nothing. No tree branches or carriage wheels or cats.

They both breathe in the soft summer night, a relief after hours of the tiny police station's stale air. The breeze, with its slight perfume of grass and earth, is a pleasure. He takes deep, sweet, hungry breaths. The sleeping town is framed squarely in the doorway: houses with darkened windows, perfectly straight and silent streets.

“Ah, lovely.” She sighs, which snaps him out of his reverie, and he closes the door on her vision.

“What did you do that for? I was looking at your sweet little town.”

“Well, don't. It's not yours.”

“I didn't say it was. What do you think I could do to it anyway? Terrorize the citizenry? Lead them like the Pied Piper in a merry parade, out of town and into the river?”

The heavy, stale air of the station closes in on him as if the sweet outdoor breeze had never been. He tries to ignore her, but the words keep coming.

“Need I remind you,” she says, “I am still chained to this chair. Terrified. Weak from lack of food and sleep. I would think you wouldn't be so afraid of me. Just for breathing your precious Iowa air.”

He turns the key in the lock, and he doesn't hear the click he should hear, the sound of the bolt sliding into place. But she's chattering at him so loudly that it's hard to hear anything, still talking, still nattering on and on and on. His head is buzzing again. She keeps talking. The later it gets, the harder it is to hold on. It's her fault. If he hadn't found her, if she hadn't been so obvious with her sequins and her fairy eye…

“Be quiet!” he shouts at her.

She falls silent instantly.

He says, “Enough of this. Tell me about the murder. Now. I've been very kind to you, considering.”

“Have you? You hauled me off, nearly knocked me unconscious—”

“And I've listened to your story. But I need the end of it. If you don't get to the end of it, the rest of it doesn't do me any good at all.”

“And I'll get there.”

“When?” He feels like the floor is lurching underneath him, and it's all he can do to plant his feet and stay steady.

“Soon.”

He snaps sarcastically, “Before the end of time?”

“Lord,” she says, “are you all right? You look like you're about to fall over.”

He sits down, setting his weary body down in the chair across from her again, almost sighing with pleasure at getting off his feet. There's no point in arguing with her when she's right.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm just—tired.”

“Me too,” she says, almost in a whisper. “Me too.”

“I suppose it's all taken a toll. The bullet, the bad news from the doctor. Worrying about it all.”

“What was it like? Being shot?”

“It wasn't like anything in particular,” he says. “It was just—it was a fact. I'd been shot. I was going to die. It was a certainty.”

“But then you didn't.”

“I was a fool to think there were ever certainties.”

She smiles.

“It's nothing to be glad about,” he says. “When I woke up under the doctor's care, when I realized I was alive, I was overjoyed. In that moment. But this life, it doesn't even feel like life anymore.”

The smile disappears from her face.

He says, “I told you, I'll get driven out for sure. I'll lose my position, my wife, the only things that give my life meaning. I might as well have died. It'd be faster.”

“Hogwash,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Life is always better than death. Always. No exceptions.”

“You don't understand.” He leans in toward her, speaking more loudly, intently, trying to drive his point home. “I could die right now, sitting across from you in this chair, having this conversation.”

“Well, don't,” she says. “If you do, I'll never get out of here.”

“I'm serious.”

“I'm sorry. I know what you're trying to say. You think your life is so compromised that there's no joy in it anymore.”

“Exactly.”

“Still. Even when life is full of pain, it's better than the alternative.”

“Every minute of every day, I'm aware it could be my last,” he says, still trying to make her understand. “The worst is, when it was happening, and I was lying there bleeding, I thought, all I want is to survive. And I did. But now I'm not sure it's better this way.”

She says, “I don't want to sound rude, but officer, that doesn't make you special. It's the story of modern life. You want something, and you get it…and it's not what you thought it would be.”

“Sure,” he says. “That's what happened to you, with Clyde?”

“With everything,” she answers softly.