“Oh,” Emily said. “It’s so good to see you. Would you do it again?”
“Sure,” he said. “But I’ve got lots better tricks than that.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said, as the cards leaped out of Michael’s fingers again. “I’ll just bet you do.”
Later, as they sat together eating the breakfast that Emily had prepared with such ease and care, Michael sensed an unstated question lying on the table between them: would they, at the conclusion of this convivial meal, go off to Emily’s bedroom together? Michael toyed with his food, eating slowly as if to postpone that moment when the dishes might be cleared away and they had nothing to do but what they had always done before. Emily chattered about her family, her teachers. It wasn’t long before she asked him about his life at the Little Cairo.
“It’s great,” he said. “But the theater’s a mess. Mostly I work in there.”
And did Max Wurlitzer really know something about magic that Michael didn’t know already?
Michael shifted uneasily in his chair at the mention of his teacher’s name. He didn’t like to hear it spoken in such a cheerful domestic setting, and it struck him that the master was, at least in his own imagination, associated with shadows, with the dust and confusion of the theater, the overfurnished heavy gloom of Lena’s sitting room. He could not say the words that immediately sprang to mind in answer to Emily’s question—he knows things that scare me—because he did not, just yet, maybe never, want to let anyone, even Emily, in on the secret of his fear. In part, he thought, because he expected that fear to go away. Knowledge would cast out fear, it always did. It was clear that the master was not afraid of what he knew, though sometimes he seemed weary of it, of knowing it, whatever it was. Michael swallowed a mouthful of coffee, avoiding Emily’s candid steady gaze, and said weakly, “Oh, yes. He knows a lot.”
“What sorts of things does he know?”
“He knows about the discipline of magic. And how a magician sees the world.”
“And how is that?”
“Differently.”
“Differently from what?”
Michael chewed a forkful of potatoes. He could see where Emily was leading him, what she was getting at, but he found he didn’t really care. “Differently from ordinary people,” he said.
“I see,” Emily said. “Would you say Max is a happy person?”
Michael frowned. “He’s old, he’s tired.”
“Does he have any friends? Does he see anyone else?”
Michael was annoyed. “No, Emily, I don’t think he does. Just his wife, Lena, and me. But I can’t say for sure, because I don’t watch him every minute of the day and night. Sometimes he goes out at night, but I don’t know where he goes, because I don’t think it’s any of my business, frankly.”
“Or mine,” Emily said quietly.
“Right,” Michael agreed. A moody silence fell between them. It occurred to Michael that in all the time they had known each other, they had never had a real argument.
Emily watched her own fork, which she pushed around in her plate disconsolately, without taking anything. “What do you think he wants with you, Michael?” she asked after a lengthy silence.
“He wants me to help him put on a terrific show, his final show.”
“But that’s not all.”
“Why couldn’t that be all?”
“Because if that was all he wanted he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to get you. He wouldn’t have frightened you the way he did with that frog thing, and he wouldn’t have followed you around and created all this mystery about who he was and where he was. He would have just come out and asked you.”
“He’s a magician, a great magician. He doesn’t do anything in a straightforward way.”
“Well, that’s just my point, isn’t it? And also, if he didn’t want something else, something besides this big show, why would he take you completely away from your friends, why would he forbid you to see anyone?”
“I made that choice, Emily. He told me it would be best, as part of my training, to be completely isolated, so I can concentrate all my energy…”
“Does he know you’re here now?” she interrupted.
“No.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
Michael fell silent. He was angry, he knew, too angry to speak. But he was also silent because he didn’t know the answer to the question. He tried to imagine telling the master, in some offhand way, “Well, I had breakfast with Emily this morning,” but he couldn’t really picture it, it would be too awkward.
Emily set her coffee cup so roughly into the saucer that it made a sharp rapping sound that startled Michael and caused him to shudder. Emily was staring at him grimly. “You look a whole lot like a married man to me,” she said. “And I’m starting to feel like the other woman.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied sharply.
“You have to sneak off to see me, can’t say where you’ve been when you go home.” She got up from the table, pushing her chair back, taking up her dishes as she went. “What’s the difference?” she concluded.
“You just have to be a little patient,” Michael protested. “It won’t be forever. I think what I’m doing is important.”
“And when will it end, Michael?” she said, her back to him as she lowered the dishes into the sink. Then she turned again and faced him. “And how will it end, how will you know?”
“I’ll be a great magician,” he said. “That’s how I’ll know. And you’ll know too, when you see me.”
She shook her head. “You’ll be as devious and deceitful as that old man. That’s what I’ll see. That's what you want.”
Michael dropped his head into his hands. “I’m ambitious,” he said. “I have a gift, I want to use it. I’ve found a magnificent teacher who can show me how to use it. How can I not take advantage of that? I’d be crazy not to try. Why can’t you understand that, Emily?”
Emily leaned against the sink, looking down at him; an expression that combined sympathy and irritation furrowed her brow. “If I had a teacher who told me I couldn’t see you, Michael,” she said evenly, “I’d give up music.”
Michael sighed. “It’s not the same, Em,” he said. “It’s just not the same.”
“I think you’d better go,” she said. Michael roused himself. He felt extraordinarily tired, confused and depressed. “I will,” he said. “You’re right. But promise me one thing, would you?”
“What is it?” she said.
“Promise me you’ll come see me at Sami’s party on Halloween. Come and see me and then tell me if you think I’m wasting my time.” He got to his feet slowly—like an old man already, he thought—and followed Emily to the door.
“I promise,” she said. “I’ll be there. But you promise me you’ll think about what I’ve said.”
“I will,” Michael agreed.
“Get some rest,” she said, easing him out the door. She kissed his cheek briefly. She wants to get rid of me, Michael thought. “You look terrible,” she said, and with that she closed the door, and Michael turned his steps toward his new life, the one he knew, more and more, he’d had no choice but to enter.
On his trip back downtown from Emily’s, Michael wrestled with his feelings and finally subdued them into a manageable sense of annoyance accompanied by a mild headache and the reiterated conclusion that Emily simply didn’t, couldn’t understand. Her remark about his resemblance to a married man had stung him, and his thoughts returned to it, as one’s tongue will seek out repeatedly an aching tooth, accepting increased irritation in exchange for the satisfaction of probing. Finally, as he came up out of the subway to the busy, crowded sidewalk, he dismissed the matter entirely. If by married she meant committed, she was right, and why shouldn’t he be? No one got to be the best at anything without putting ordinary life on hold now and then. If Emily were offered a year-long tour of performances, she’d be off like a shot, and he would encourage her to go, though it would
mean a long separation. She was being selfish, and narrow, but in time she would see he was right. As he turned the last corner near the coffee shop, exhilarated by his vision of vindication, he nearly collided with the master, returning at 8:30 A.M. from who knew where.
“It’s a pleasant morning to be out and about,” the master said. “But I think you should begin your working day with a cup of Lena’s coffee. Come with me.” Michael nodded; work was exactly what he wanted. Eagerly he followed the master, across the street and up the narrow stairs.
Michael sat in the living room, waiting for his coffee and idly trying to balance a cup on a saucer in the most preposterous way. Wurlitzer entered the room, stepped briskly to the coffee table, and snatched away Michael’s expensive toys, one with each hand. “Really, young man,” he said in a pathetic voice, sounding to Michael for all the world like one of his vexed aunts. This was certainly a new way of perceiving the master, and he listened with a smile on his lips while Wurlitzer invoked Lena’s love for her china. Again, Michael was struck—he had seldom heard (or seen) his mentor consider Lena’s feelings. An unusually—how should he say it?—approachable mood, he concluded.
“I’m sorry,” Michael apologized. “I was daydreaming. Are you having coffee too?”
“I am,” Wurlitzer said. “Lena will bring it soon.” He took something off the mantelpiece before settling into the wing armchair he favored. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up a pear-shaped earthenware pot, strangely marked, and open at both ends.
“No,” Michael answered, turning the thing around in his hand. “What is it?”
“It’s an aludel, an alchemist’s vessel used in sublimating metals.”
“Right,” Michael said, smirking. “Lead into gold—what dreamers.”
“We do wrong to judge earlier, benighted centuries by our own advanced standards,” Wurlitzer pronounced, making a clucking sound.
Michael shifted to a more receptive position, upright but relaxed. The master was getting ready to deliver a lesson, or at least a lecture.
“The alchemist,” Wurlitzer went on, “is generally derided, either for his ludicrous greed or his ludicrous science—”
“Or both,” Michael interjected.
“Or both,” the old man assented. “But what the best of them were trying to do was not to change base metals into valuable ones but to transmute their own personality, to discover the limits of the possible and then transcend them. They were trying real magic.”
“What is real magic?” Michael asked at once.
Something almost like a smile of indulgence for Michael’s impetuous youth crossed the old man’s face. “First of all,” he said, “it’s a matter of learning to see things differently, as you are doing in the pyramid and our little slide shows. Once you learn that, at certain times it’s possible to enter a world—a fantasy world, if you like—where you can do things ordinary people consider mysterious. To the magician, however, they are only clear and natural, because he brings his imagination to bear on the ordinary and makes his fantasy real. Ah, thank you, Lena,” he said, looking up as she brought in the coffeepot.
“Thanks, Mrs. Wurlitzer,” Michael echoed. Lena smiled at them both and withdrew. The whole family seemed to be in an expansive frame of mind.
In between sips, the old man continued talking. “It is ironic,” he mused, “but the magician can go so far along this path that he, like his audience, has difficulty distinguishing reality from illusion.” He leaned closer to Michael, and his tones took on more gravity. “How do we know that we are sitting here talking in the real world, and not some dream world, some fantasy? Pinch yourself. Go ahead, pinch.”
Michael pinched the back of his hand and looked at the magician.
“Yes, you smile, it is such a natural thing, you feel the irritation of the nerve ends, and by this means you convince yourself that you are alive, that you are here. But what if the next moment you awake as from a dream and discover that all of this was merely illusion? I will tell you a story. A man lives in London, city born and bred, yet all his life he has received intimations of a place he has never visited, a country place, with a river. It is purely imaginary, but he sees it clearly. The river has a particular bend with trees growing at the edge, weeping willows with drooping branches. The trees too seem familiar. At a later period he travels to India, and while walking through the countryside he arrives at a river. He walks some way along it; then he comes to that particular bend with the weeping willows, the scene he has imagined for so long. He seems to fall into a trance beside the river. A light touch awakens him, and he discovers himself to be, not an Englishman at all, but an Indian, and the person who has awakened him is his wife, telling him that an hour ago he had come to the river for water and fallen asleep beside it. Interesting, is it not?” He searched Michael’s reaction.
At first he was speechless; the story was so like his dream of Emily that he had the shattering feeling that Wurlitzer could read not just his thoughts but even his dreams. He forced his voice to sound normal. “Very interesting,” he said—an understatement.
Wurlitzer nodded archly. “You see the possibilities. Perhaps we are all merely dreaming and may awake at any moment to discover that we are not ourselves as we know ourselves to be, but other selves, leading other lives.” He laughed abruptly, harshly. “I offer these facile speculations by way of suggesting to you the power of the imagination, for that is where real magic resides. By allowing the imagination to work, one can work magic. You have surely experienced this already—the imagination of the magician working on the imagination of his audience?” he said, fixing Michael with his single eye.
A vision of himself, squatted down on his haunches like a frog, hopped across Michael's mind. “I think so,” he said.
The eye seemed to see the frog too, and its gaze relaxed as though in empathy. “Quite so,” the old man said. “And therefore you have felt the power of the magic will. Paracelsus defined magic as the working of spiritual power on the externals of nature. I quarrel only with the word spiritual, because, as you must know, magical power is often physical, a matter of energy and force fields and the like. Perhaps this is merely a semantic quibble; but that power, however it may manifest itself, is rooted in imagination, and it gives the true magician his mastery. His audience believes him, they have no choice; he forces them to believe, he bends them to his will.” He pointed to the needlepointed motto under the engraving of Napoleon and the Sphinx. “There is Paracelsus’s motto: Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest: ‘Let him not belong to another who has the power to be his own.’ As you develop that power, you will find yourself capable of greater and greater feats.”
“Like the frog?” Michael whispered.
The master sighed. “You must study patience, my boy, along with all your other disciplines. It is most important. For now, focus on this: real magic—what ordinary people call miracles—is born out of the imagination, out of the mind; but the mind must be trained. Pulling rabbits out of a hat is nothing. But the rabbits of the mind—those are a different matter entirely. Nevertheless, I have hopes of your success. You are young, healthy, intelligent, energetic, independent. You have no immediate family”—he paused significantly—“and no serious love interest.” He paused again, staring at Michael blankly, with no question in his voice or his eye.
Though the effort left him incapable of speech, Michael held the old magician’s gaze. Now, certainly, he could not tell him of his early visit to Emily. Why did he feel so guilty?
“Moreover, you are ambitious,” the funereal voice was droning on, “and you have demonstrated a certain courage. This is necessary, for if you pursue your chosen path, you may glimpse things that will terrify you. If you haven’t already,” he added, arching one mocking, quizzical brow, the one over his glass eye. As Michael remained silent, thinking about the room with the black door, Wurlitzer returned to his discourse.
“We—we magicians, I mean—are explorers of terra incogni
ta, like Columbus, obliged to a quest for what most frightens us. Should you draw back from it, from the possibility of whatever exists beyond the possible, you shall remain…ordinary, safe, untouched, like the people who pass you on the street, who will never be touched because they have no imagination. You will explore no unknown lands, but you will have peace of mind.”
“I don’t want peace of mind,” Michael heard himself saying.
“I know, my poor boy,” the master replied, his voice nearly free from irony. “That is why we are together. You have joined me in a conjuring act, a little hoaxing of the public’s desire to be amused. But you still wish, do you not, to join me in a greater undertaking?”
“You know I do,” Michael stated flatly.
“Good,” the old man said. He pressed his fingertips together and made of them a prop for his chin. “It will be like a trip, a voyage of exploration. And on the way, who knows? We may catch a frog or two.”
Sometimes Wurlitzer reminisced colorfully about other conjurors he had known from what he called the Golden Age of Magic: Horace Goldin, the Great Nicola, Cefalu from Italy, Levante from Australia, Sorcar of India, the ersatz Oriental Fu Manchu, and the Americans, Dante, Thurston, Blackstone. He had known them all, the great stage illusionists, sleight-of-handers, coin manipulators, mentalists, quick-changers, the crystal gazers, the mediums, the Chautauqua magicians.
“Did you know Houdini?” Michael asked one day.
“Certainly. A true daredevil. He started small, with cards, as so many do. But he had a great deal of imagination, along with incredible stamina. He even escaped from the stomach of a dead whale, believe it or not.”
Michael whistled, trying to imagine the logistics of that magical performance. “Escape artists interest me. Did you ever have anything like that in your act?”
“I’ve made a few escapes in my time,” the magician answered wryly.
“But you don’t want to do them anymore?” Michael pressed him.