Illusion

“Self Portrait” by Lucie Ware

The Glorious Salvatore had died.

Born Randall Carol Weber, Salvatore had not been someone Ginny and I had known personally. Rather, we’d heard of his prestige in the pages of sleight instructionals and in blurbs on the back of books written by other, less famous, magicians.

Which is why when his publicist called me I’d been so surprised.

“He spoke very highly of you,” she said between drags on a cigarette. “Loved your act, your patter.”

She asked if I was interested in doing a set at Salvatore’s memorial service. Well, not just me.

“I take it you want a package deal?” I asked. “What did Gin say?”

“She’s my next call. I was surprised to hear you two had split up.”

As a performing couple we’d gained a bit of notoriety. Fellow magicians would corner us separately at parties and ask how we made it work. Wasn’t it hard? Didn’t it ever, you know, bleed over, on stage? You two fight sometimes, right? A lover’s quarrel in the wings? And then she’s throwing knives while you’re bound prostrate on the spinning wheel.

There were certainly some who wanted to see us fail, both as performers and partners. They wanted to goad out just a little more drama, it seemed. When it finally happened, our separation making its way through the grapevine, my peers worried not after my well-being as a person, but rather for my career.

Their worries weren’t completely unfounded. Gin and I had only ever worked a duet act, so we both found it hard to succeed on our own. We watched one another from afar, cycling through wide-eyed partners desperate enough to work with someone on the leeward side of popularity. For the most part we stayed out of the other’s way, booking in other parts of town or choosing to go on a performative hiatus if the other was on a hot streak.

I ran into Gin at the Magic Castle one night a few years after we’d split. We were there to see a mutual friend’s show. He was a bit of a hack, but weren’t we all. We hadn’t really been speaking, Gin and I, and so we made the requisite small talk. She asked if I was performing and I said yes, I had gigs. Which wasn’t a total lie, but wasn’t very truthful either. I was playing small change casinos every other weekend. My agent, who barely returned my calls, had booked a recurring show at a farmer’s market in an affluent Burbank neighborhood. I was at sea for a few months, performing for tourist families on a German cruise line. I wasn’t aware I could vomit so much, but there it all was, my breakfast over the rail and into the grey, Nordic ocean.

“You?” I asked, a can of coke sweating in my clammy hand. I was taking another whack at sobriety.

“Not for a year or so. I’m in real estate now, land appraisal.” She tucked a finger of hair—just beginning to shoot through with gray—behind her ear and gave me her business card. She’d gone back to using her maiden name. Then we shared a half-hearted hug before going off in an attempt to mingle. I hadn’t asked if she was there with somebody.

All this in the back of my mind, I told the publicist that if Gin agreed to play the show, I would as well. A day later, when the email came with my booking information enclosed, I drove nonstop from my apartment in Pasadena to The Shell, a newish casino situated just off the Las Vegas Strip in an area of town where every other address was a vacant lot.  

In the lobby there was a marble fountain covered in sculpted cherubs, each holding an urn from which water was supposed to flow. But it wasn’t on, and a collection of paper valet tickets had accumulated in its basin.

“Here are your room keys, Mr. Whittaker.” The woman at the front desk had long, pointed nails, matte red paint like wine. “And I was instructed to give you this as well.” She slid a discreet paper folder across the counter. There was a schedule inside, when I would need to arrive for soundcheck. Gin and I had different call times. There was also a small envelope with five drink vouchers inside, along with a note from Salvatore’s publicist. Thank you again!

“Can you tell me what room Virginia Bankhead is staying in?” I leaned in close to ask, almost whispering. I could barely hear myself over the sound of a raucous table of people shooting craps. It was nearly midnight and the city was just waking up, countless bodies milling around an island of slot machines branded with a popular television show about zombies. The receptionist looked wary to give me the information, but wrote the room number down on a blank piece of receipt paper which I stuffed into my pocket before walking to the elevator.

The mirrored walls of the elevator reflected back a person who hadn’t bathed in a socially unacceptable amount of days, and only once it started moving—an ad for the hotel restaurant playing on a small, scratched screen above the floor buttons—did I check to see which room Gin was in. 417. I examined my own room key, upon which a smiling woman leaning over a roulette wheel was printed. 416.

I lingered outside of my door for a moment, worrying the keycard between my forefinger and thumb. When my close-up skills were better, I could have vanished the card up my shirtsleeve.

From Gin’s room, the one beside my own, the sound of a hair dryer filtered into the hallway. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year. She’d certainly have something to say about my hair, how I was wearing it long again. “It makes me look distinguished,” I’d said in the sunset years of our marriage. “It makes you look homeless,” she replied, applying false eyelashes before we were to go on stage.

The door to the room across the hall opened and a group of young men spilled out, trailing behind them the strong smell of marijuana, and I fumbled the keycard into the door. The walls inside my room were thinner than those in the hallway and Gin’s blow drying echoed in the vacant space. I set my bag on the bed and hung my suit in the closet. My tuxedo, only just barely fitting still, was perhaps the nicest thing I owned. The interior pockets were made from quick felt, silent and seamless to secret something away into. I lay on one of the two queen sizes and felt sweat pool against my back. The mattress reeked of plastic off-gassing, and as I sank into the quilted bedspread I noticed the blow dryer sound had stopped.

“Zach, is that you?”

I followed the familiar voice to a door opposite the closet, adjoining our two rooms. Her voice was clear. She must have been right up against it.

“Can I come in? Are you decent?”

I flung my shoes off towards the bathroom and undid the topmost button of my shirt in an effort to appear nonchalant, like I hadn’t just arrived. I ran a hand through my hair and my fingers came back shiny with grease. “Yeah, c’mon over.”

I turned back the latch and retreated quickly to the bed. When the door opened the air conditioning that had been on in her room escaped into mine like a breath. The skin on my arms raised, flesh like orange peel. Ginny lingered in the doorway as though there were some physical barrier to her entering my room. Her floor-length nightgown swayed as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

“This figures, right?” She gestured to the connected rooms. “Did you just get in?”

“No, a few hours ago,” I lied. “Do you want to sit?” I gestured to the second bed.

“That’s okay.” Her hair, straight just below her shoulders, would naturally curl through the night and in the morning she would go about fussing at it. Or at least that’s what I remembered.

“Did you drive up from Irvine?” I asked.

“This morning.”

“I didn’t think you’d agree to do this.”

“I had some paid time off.”

We stared past one another in silence for a bit. I distracted myself with the overly complicated television remote, removing and replacing the battery cover.

“So, what did you have in mind?” she asked.

“For Sunday? I hadn’t thought about it. I’m not sure what you remember.”

“I’m good with our last show, most of it anyway.” Behind her a cell phone pinged and she craned her neck back to see. In the vee of her neckline a patch of pink skin showed through, a scar of some sort. Its border was dotted with freckles. She’d had something removed.

Our last act had been our best. We’d taken routines to their absolute limit, vanishings and quick changes and levitations. We were in demand as a pair, so much so that when some promoters learned of our divorce they cancelled our bookings. “It’s all the audience will be thinking about,” they told us. We went on for about a month fulfilling obligations while the legal aspect of our separation was finalized. In hotels we would sleep apart, spread out over two beds and making sure not to bump into each other at the bathroom sink. Some nights I would come home on the drunker side of sober and find her likewise, sitting against the headboard and watching television. I would join in and we would stay almost completely silent until both passing out, awaking in the morning to The Price is Right playing at low volume.

Of course she remembered the routine. I’d hear tell of her show in the wake of our parting, how so much of it was what we had created together. I was no better, scrabbling together pieces of a fractured whole. We were doing the same tricks, just with different partners.

A cart rolled by in the hallway. One of its wheels spun in place, rattling, plates and glasses.

“We can talk after the show meeting tomorrow. They only want us to fill five minutes anyway.” She made a show of rubbing the sleep from her eyes and said goodnight, shutting the door behind her and turning the deadbolt which chunked into place. I sat for a while longer on the bed, browsing the web on my phone and waiting to watch the line of light between our shared door go out. When it finally did I stripped down and nestled beneath the duvet. Somehow it was nearly two in the morning. The show meeting, where we would be briefed on the logistics, was in seven hours. Sleep has never come easy to me in hotel rooms, even when Gin and I had shared a bed in luxurious accommodations at the height of our prowess.

Our last ever show together had been in Branson; a medical professionals gala held in the Titanic Museum. We were set to make fifteen-hundred dollars, which we’d split, and then stop performing with one another, seemingly forever. The cleanest break we could think of. In the dressing room before the show I watched as she applied her makeup, put in colored contacts to match her dress. I was doing my dexterity exercises, moving a casino chip over and under my knuckles.  

“Ready?” Gin popped her lips, evening out her lipstick.

I don’t know that I expected the performance to be cinematic, but I certainly didn’t foresee it going as poorly as it did. Truly we were background noise, as the audience—optometrists, if I recall—milled around grabbing finger food from silver trays and exchanging business cards. Every so often a child of one of the attendees would loiter by the stage, staring with bemused interest as I pulled a fan of playing cards from my mouth. During the elaborate finale, in which Gin would run through a flaming trellis, seemingly vanishing as I emerged out the other side, a tornado siren went off and we were all shuffled into a narrow concrete hallway between the kitchen and the laundry room. I could see Gin at that far end of the hallway, her blue sequined dress between tuxedos. The industrial washing machines were running, and the noise masked any severe weather that may or may not have been going on topside. I still had cards in my pocket and I took them out to fidget. One of the doctors saw this and asked if we could pass the time with a game of hearts. I shook my head no and he told me to “fuck off then.” When we were allowed to go back into the ballroom, the trellis was still burning, it’s plastic melted and dripped onto the floor. Gin put it out with a fire extinguisher and then turned to me.

“This tracks. This all tracks.” Her eyeliner was running and her shoes were in one hand. She walked off stage and came back ten minutes later with a wad of cash, half of which she placed in my breast pocket, and then simply left out a side door. The hotel was within walking distance, and when I arrived back, her things were gone and her bed made. She’d left a hundred dollar bill for the chambermaid.    

I suppose it wasn’t one thing that led to our separation. Rather, it was an accumulation of things. It almost always is. We’d begun dating only after we’d been performing together. Our romance happened naturally, and soon it was as though we were living together out of twin suitcases. Our skills were equal, but some promoters didn’t want to book a show where the female assistant had equal billing to her male counterpart. Not that we ever saw ourselves that way, as master and pupil.

“They want me to be your prop,” she said, after we’d been turned away from a show in Syracuse. “The prototypical ‘magician’s assistant.’” When it happened again at a small college in Massachusetts she confronted me about it.

“You wouldn’t stand up for me.” She was peeling an orange on the far side of our hotel room and I found it hard to focus over the citrus oil swimming around my face. We fought and she accused me of consent by silence. In truth, I was more afraid of losing gigs, but I didn’t say that. I viewed Gin as totally equal to myself. In fact, in some ways she was a superior performer. While I had facility with small, lithe tricks, she made me look foolish when it came to the elaborate showpieces. She was fearless. We cycled through a section of our act which included sword swallowing, and Gin commanded a rapt audience. The blade would move down her throat and she would walk deftly around the stage, curtsying to the crowd before pulling it out of her mouth as though it were nothing extraordinary. We were complimentary pieces, like sections of fruit nestled beside one another. 

By the time she had finished the orange we hadn’t solved anything and she left the hotel room with her purse, returning later that evening while I pretended to be asleep. She crawled into bed next to me and I could smell sweet wine on her breath. She wrapped an arm around my midsection and pulled me into her body, the two of us curled together like slivered moons.

In the morning I apologized.

“It’s fine. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

I nodded, but back in some shadowy part of myself I wondered if I’d been acting subconsciously. Maybe I was jealous. Jealous of the attention she received after shows, of her ability, of her ease with the crowd. I would show her a trick I was outlining and she would go in and mold it to a vision of perfection that hadn’t even been at my fingertips. All the reasons I loved her were also the reasons I felt in her shadow. I was cowardly not to tell her this, but I didn’t want to risk baring my insecurity and having her leave as a result. Looking back I suppose it was a forgone conclusion anyway.

So I nodded.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

***

The stage was larger than I expected and it had been some time since I’d been under such powerful lights. Though they seemed alright and I shot a thumbs up to the operator in the booth. We had thirty minutes to block everything out before the show tomorrow night. Later that afternoon the stage had to be cleared for a production of The Music Man that was coming through town. Resting in the wings were racks of costumes, red and white pinstripes and straw boater hats.

“So that’s pretty straight forward, right?” Gin was standing at the opposite side of the stage, a sweater tied around her waist.

“You’re sure you remember everything?”

“Yes. Again, yes.”

We were going to do a few minutes of light vanishing and then end our section of the show with the flaming trellis. My involvement in the trick was minimal, leaving Gin the bulk of the work. Though she assured me, after not having done the trick for nearly four years, that she was comfortable with it.

“Muscle memory,” she said.

We’d told the production team what we needed and they began to construct the trellis, which wouldn’t be ready until showtime. During the blocking we simply used a ladder. The trick itself uses mirrors and a false cover to conceal my hiding in the threshold. Gin runs in and we switch places instantaneously. There is a moment, however brief, where our bodies are pressed tightly together, and as we rehearsed we took caution to not allow ourselves to touch one another for any extended period of time.

“Fine. It will be fine.” She was out of breath, having practiced the run up—a full sprint so that her dress would stream behind her—ten times in total. We’d both gotten old.

But we were getting along surprisingly well. The longer the rehearsal went on, the more we seemed to be smiling at one another. When, after Gin sat on the floor to catch her breath, I offered my hand to help her up. She took it willingly and we lingered for a moment after she stood, holding on to one another.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you hungry?” We were sitting in the amphitheater watching the next performer block his routine. He wasn’t someone we’d ever met before, but his fame preceded him. He was surrounded by assistants responding to every small motion of his body like he was a conductor in the throes of some terrific symphony.

“I could eat.” We made our way to the hotel’s buffet, catching the tail end of breakfast. Our plates piled high, we found a corner booth and ate slowly, watching the stream of tourists file in. Even if you’re not from Las Vegas, being a magician makes you feel like a local. When touring, you’re here so often that you can give directions to hapless bachelor parties listing along the Strip, tell foreign wanderers where the best place to see Elvis impersonators is. So Gin and I felt comfortable playing “yes, and” with the crowd, riffing away while our eggs congealed. Every so often Gin would check her phone, tapping out a quick text before replacing it screen side down on the table.  

“Being here make you nostalgic at all?” I asked. We were walking through the casino, stepping around people piled up beside someone playing blackjack on a tear.

“For what? Performing? I guess a little. I don’t think about it very much anymore.”

“Sometimes it’s all I think about.”

“No plan B for you then, eh?”

“I don’t even know what else I’m good at.”

“You can juggle.”

“I think people lump jugglers and magicians together in the unemployment bucket.”

We passed the front entrance, soaking in the desert heat between bouts of the automatic doors opening. A basketball team was checking in, clad in matching sweats. We ended up by ourselves in the elevator, each keen to get back to our room and shower off the special kind of Vegas sweat that, even inside, paints itself all over your body. In the elevator’s mirrored wall we looked a bit like a couple again. In our street clothes, hair a mess from the heat, we could have been mistaken for just arriving at the end of a family road trip. All that was missing was a spit up stain on Gin’s shirt, a diaper bag looped over my shoulder. It was a comfortable vision and I allowed myself to inhabit it.

We’d talked about quitting when we were together, about not touring anymore and setting up somewhere, maybe in the valley. We’d even begun to look at houses online. During our slow erosion the idea of settling down was a kind of temporary salve. We’d argue about the littlest thing, which slowly uncovered something larger, and then, as we reconciled, we would talk about a certain kind of life, one with PTA meetings and regular lawn mowing. It was all talk, of course, but it was nice talk, talk I am sure the language of which still exists, imprinted on our tongues.

Though I couldn’t stay in memory long. My foregone fantasies were interrupted by the elevator doors dinging open, a family stepping in between Gin and me. Their child had a large helium balloon that I had to keep batting away from my face.     

“You wanna come in? Sit for a minute?” I asked. We were outside our rooms, standing awkwardly in the middle of the hallway. A wheeled cart stacked high with towels was moving towards us.

“I dunno, probably not.”

“Just for a minute? I’ll put the air on.”

She rubbed the back of her neck. She was nursing a sunburn. “Maybe later.”

“Okay. What about tonight? Do you have plans? We could go see a show. Isn’t that what people visiting this place do?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, maybe. I’ll let you know, okay? I might stay in.”

“Are you sure? When are we going to see each other again?” A housekeeper pushed the cart of towels between us and we paused our conversation to let it pass.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Oh, okay.”

“I’m serious. I really don’t think it would be healthy for either of us.”

“Because what, you’re worried about feelings? You act like there’s been some decree that we aren’t allowed to be in one another’s life in a meaningful way anymore.”

“No, you act like that. I don’t want to have this conversation. I’m going to my room and I will see you at call tomorrow.”

And like that she turned on her heel and seamlessly slid her card into the door, disappearing into the darkness of her room, blackout blinds closed tight.

For a moment I stood in the hallway, staring at her closed door and tracing the numbers with my eyes. 417. The numbers themselves seemed definitive, all angles and endpoints. When I finally did go inside I went immediately to sleep, waking up only after the sun had fallen below the horizon and my room was dark. The edges of furniture were illuminated only by the glow from my clock radio. I checked my phone. Nothing. I sat up in bed, rubbed the creases out of my jeans, and fished around on the table for the envelope with the drink tickets. I stuffed them into my pocket and left to grab my jacket off the hook, lingering at the adjoining door. My knuckles hovered over the wood, ready to knock, to incite something. Though before I could complete the action, I was pushing the hallway door open and making my way toward the elevator.

The hotel restaurant was crowded, mainly with young people. A group of women, none older than twenty-five, were crowded around someone wearing a sash that said “Bride To Be,” the “i” dotted with a heart. They were in the process of taking shots, and as they finished, the empty glasses joined a growing pile on the table. In looking at them I felt like a lecherous old man, and situated myself at the bar as not to see them anymore.

I exchanged a ticket for a vodka soda and counted the bright bottles behind the counter. I started nursing the drink slowly, but then, without my knowing, the glass was empty, prompting another exchange for another vodka soda. Then again. An entire half of basketball had passed on the television, whose backwards image I saw in the mirror that spanned the entirety of the back wall.

I hadn’t realized how drunk I was until I stepped off the barstool and the world came rushing up to me. My head floated in a sea of purple light cast by LEDs embedded in the floor and ceiling. I followed the bright path like a trail, stopping for a moment to allow the “Bride To Be” and her friends to pass on their way out towards the front doors. Someone had been sick, leaving a slight man with a mop to clean around their now vacant booth. The motion of the elevator gave me intense nausea and I walked quickly back to my room to lie down. The darkness accepted me openly and I flopped onto the bed, my face mashing itself into the pillow.

I laid like this for nearly half an hour before I heard Gin enter her room. Though there was another voice as well, deeper. A man’s voice. Together they were laughing and I saw the light go on in her room from beneath the connected door. They were speaking, but the voices were low and I couldn’t make anything out, which was especially noticeable since now I was propped up against the door, feeling the inaudible vibrations of their conversation through my back.

I suppose I was still in love with Gin. Or, if not in love with her, in love with the idea. That I could have been so comfortable seemed like something faraway, like a dream that you can only half-remember. During the divorce I had told her that I didn’t want her to leave.

“You’ll find someone else,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to a stage partner or a life partner. Perhaps she meant both.

I passed out with my chin on my chest, waking up a few hours later to the sound of the television in Gin’s room. She was watching local news. I couldn’t tell if she was alone.

I crawled into bed and sloughed my shoes off onto the floor. Turning on the television, I found the same channel and turned up the volume so she could hear. I sat like this, watching in parallel with her, changing channels as she did, until I heard the TV click off in her room. I followed suit and the space was once again dark, allowing me to fall asleep.

***

Waiting. My stomach was rolling. A hangover had settled in my head like a cloud.

I couldn’t even watch the act that was on before us, a playing card illusionist performing their old standbys. Gin and I were seated on opposing painted apple boxes in the wings, the next act to go on. We didn’t have our phones to occupy our hands, so we simply stared around one another as the sound of audience amazement filled the air.

“Is that dress new?”

“It is.”

She picked something off her arm and flicked it into the shadows.          

“We didn’t have sex.” She said this at me, but stared off at the stage where thundering applause chased the performer off into the opposite wing.

“What?”

“I know you were listening, last night.”

“I wasn’t.” I had to yell over the sound of music playing while the stagehands moved our props into position. I watched as they lifted the trellis, painted a dark black and braided through with fake vines, and placed it at the middle of a strong spotlight. The emcee was telling some saccharine story about Salvatore. 

“I could hear you. You were like an elephant banging up against the door,” she said.

“Okay, well, is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not supposed to make you feel anything.”

“I thought we were getting along.”

“What?”

The emcee was revving up, preparing to announce us, and a stagehand motioned that we needed to get into position.

I repeated myself.

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

Please give a big round of applause for Zachary and Virginia Whittaker!

The stage hand gestured for us to walk into a moving spotlight and we did. It was strange to walk on stage with Gin again, not holding hands and bowing together as we had so many times before.

“They used your name,” Gin whispered.

“I didn’t tell them to do that,” I replied, but she was already moving to her mark on the far side of the trellis.

The auditorium was full and the quiet hum of people watching art filled the space. Gin and I had never performed to music. It always seemed so terribly tacky, a product of a bygone age where magicians would sell their secrets via VHS tape.

As we moved through our act, I found myself captivated by Ginny. She always walked with confidence, but now, digging into a certain thread of the past, she seemed especially light and sure. I suppose I didn’t really care if she was with someone last night, or last month, or ever. When we separated, we parted like cells dividing, multiplying away and diluting our presence in the other’s life. These last two days felt like a reclamation of something. I wasn’t over Gin. I probably never would be. I did want happiness though, for both of us. However it would come. I took the image of her making a rose appear from seemingly nowhere and stored it, that I might reflect on it at some other time.

The finale. As Gin pulled focus, I snuck at the last moment into the small hatch built into the trellis’ threshold. There was a slot I could look through to know when to prepare myself, and I watched as Gin lit the flame gel that was slathered over the boards with a torch. Then she extinguished the fire in her mouth, the final button before she would disappear. We never took a beat here, but Gin seemed compelled to stand and look out over the crowd for a moment, savoring the applause and the lights reflecting off the jewels around her neck. 

Then, without waiting another second, she began to run. I counted off the seconds in my mind. It only took three before I would need to throw myself from the hatch and reappear running out the other side. I wondered what kind of person would emerge, how much of my current self he would resemble.

Benjamin Kessler's work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Hobart, DIAGRAM, Jet Fuel Review, Entropy, Storyscape, The Oakland Review, Epigraph, Superstition Review, Aperçus, Boudin, The Gravity of the Thing, What are Birds?, and X-R-A-Y. He writes, teaches, and raises a hedgehog in Portland, Oregon.