Terrible Magician Watches Projectionist
I ripped the cape off my shoulders in one pull, the snaps popping like small bones, and threw it at the empty third row. It caught the back of a seat, hung there a moment on the worn velvet, and slid off into the aisle, one sequined wing folded under itself like a bird that had misjudged the ground, and I left it there because picking it up would have been another trick I could not finish. The interval act had died in front of eleven people and a coughing child. The final coin had bounced, bright and traitorous, into the orchestra pit and kept ringing after the lights came up. Ines, up in the booth, had not laughed. She had not done anything at all. The beam had simply gone on throwing dust at the screen as if nothing below it required commentary.
Rain was doing the rest of the work now, a coastal rain that did not fall so much as occupy, filling the alley behind the fire door and the shallow dish of the marquee until the letters of the last title ran. The house had emptied into it without complaint. Her apartment was upstairs. We closed because there was nothing else to do with the night.
She came down from the booth barefoot, the way she always finished a night in that building, her shoes left at the foot of the booth stairs with the heels together, and moved through the auditorium as if the place were an extension of her wrists. Cable first. She coiled it in even loops against her palm, the old cloth-wrapped kind that still smelled faintly of the decades it had spent warming, and I talked because silence in a room that large felt like an accusation. A future booking, I said. A private dinner. A hotel ballroom in the city, something with better lighting and people who understood misdirection.
“Last bus went at ten past,” she said, not looking up from the cable. “You’re here.”
I said I would walk. The projector hummed its dying mechanical thought through the floorboards. Hot dust. Raincoats steaming on the radiator in the lobby. The particular sweetness of old velvet that has absorbed too many winters.
The marquee letters next. She kept them in a shallow wooden tray with the alphabet painted on the dividers, a tray missing two E’s and an R, and she stood on the second step of the lobby ladder with the long pole and brought the title down a letter at a time while I stood below and caught them, wet, the plastic squeaking in my hands. Thursday’s title went up the same way, one letter at a time, in the order the pole found them, so that for ten minutes the front of the building read like a ransom note, and she did not care, and I told her about the ballroom again. The Excelsior, I said. Forty covers. A corporate anniversary. They had asked for me by name, through an agency. I did not tell her the agency had folded in the spring, or that the asking had gone in the other direction, from me to them, in a message no one had answered. Rain ran off the marquee and down the pole and into her sleeve. She set the pole and the tray aside against the wall, checked the alley fire door because the latch had been sticking, went out into the wet and put her shoulder to the steel from the outside and came back in with rain in her hair and a flat report. “Door’s fine.” The platter upstairs was still dragging on the takeup, she said. It would eat Thursday’s print if she did not get to it. “It doesn’t care about your ballroom.” That was the most she had said to me in a month.
I followed her up the narrow stairs because she did not tell me not to. The booth was smaller than it looked from below, a wooden box of reels and splicers and a single stained mug that had belonged to her father, the brown ring inside it a map of years. She poured tea that had gone too long and did not offer sugar. She kept the mug and drank first, then passed it to me, and I took it, the steam moving the damp hair at her temple before she stepped back and let the moment close. I talked about the jammed platter from Tuesday, the way the film had tried to eat itself, the blown fuse in the stage left trap that still needed looking at. “Fuse won’t look at itself,” she said. Then she listened the way a wall listens. Not unkind. Simply finished with the requirement of being an audience. Fifteen years of other people’s stories finishing without her. I could feel the shape of that in the way she stood, weight on one hip, arms loose, waiting for me to finish the tea.
I drank what was left and set the mug down on the splicer bench, empty, the ring inside it joined now by the ghost of my own use, and we went back down because the fuse was still the fuse. The trap in the stage was a rectangle of darkness that had, during the act, been meant to suggest disappearance. Nothing had disappeared. I had misjudged the lip of it twice already that evening, once in front of the coughing child. She crouched with the flashlight between her teeth, economical, the beam a narrow white fact. I crouched too, too close because the space required it, talking still, about the booking that did not exist, about how the coin had been a timing issue and not a failure of the vanish itself, which was a lie so practiced it had almost become architecture.
Her hand met mine on the stubborn plug.
Not a gesture. Not a correction. Just two sets of fingers arriving at the same badly seated thing in the same second, her palm work-rough and warm, the ridges of her life against the ridges of mine, and the contact lasted one breath longer than the work required because neither of us had planned an exit from it. The fuse box hummed. Rain hit the roof in a sheet. I felt the heat of her skin travel up the inside of my wrist like a wire that had been waiting for a circuit.
I did not let go first.
She did, but slowly, as if the plug had become suddenly interesting, and she took the flashlight out of her teeth into her hand as she stood, and the beam swung across my mouth and stayed there a fraction too long, lighting the place where I had been about to say something practical about amperage. I stood too. I stood because the distance between her standing and my crouching was already more than I could hold, because being lit from above by her was a thing my knees would not permit, and the sentence that came out when I was upright was not about amperage. It was her name, just her name, Ines, said as if I had only just learned it, and the air between us, which had been the air of inventory and wet wool and a dying single screen, thickened into something that had a pulse.
She did not step back.
The distance that had been professional collapsed in increments too small to name. Rain from the alley still darkened the hair at her temple, one strand stuck flat to the skin there, and she did not brush it away. My hands, which had spent the entire evening demanding to be watched, hung at my sides like unused props. The cape lay somewhere behind me in the dark of the aisle. The building ticked and settled. She was looking at me and I could not read it.
I reached.
The magician’s hands, for the first time in their loud and failing life, obeyed a real instruction. They stopped. Midair. Close enough that the heat of her sweater was a weather I could enter. I did not enter. They hung there, open, palms toward her, and I watched them go still in a way they had never once gone still on a stage, the fingers not curling toward anything, the tremor in them not the tremor of a man about to take.
“I don’t want to touch you,” I said, and it was not a line. It came out stripped, almost ugly with how true it was. “I want to watch you touch yourself. I want to stay where I am. I don’t—I don’t want to join.”
The rain filled the silence that followed. Down in the lobby the radiator knocked once and was quiet. She looked at me for a long time, this woman who could thread a stubborn reel in a blackout and smell a lie in a flourish, and she drew a breath she did not finish, held it somewhere under the sweater, let it go with no word in it. The flashlight shifted in her hand. She looked at my hands, still up, still open, and then past my shoulder at the house, the dark rows, the aisle, and I did not know what she was measuring there.
“Down,” she said. She meant the stage. She meant off it. “Stay there.”
I stepped off the lip into the house, the drop taking my knees by surprise, and walked backward up the aisle, past the first row and the second, until my heel found the fallen cape and I knew I had gone far enough, three rows back from her, where the paying people had sat. She crossed to the front row of seats and stood the flashlight upright on a cushion there, angling the beam back toward the stage so that it climbed the lip and threw itself upward across the boards, leaving the deep house and the cape in the dark where they belonged, and then, with the same economy she used on cable, she took off what she chose.
The sweater first, over her head in one motion that left her hair briefly wild and then settling. The thermal underneath, the kind you would wear because a booth was always cold, peeled with a sound like a held breath being released. She was thirty-six and the body she uncovered had not been arranged for anyone. Work in the shoulders. A softness at the stomach that had nothing to perform. She stepped out of the trousers without hurry, folded them once because that was who she was, and left the plain cotton she wore beneath them where it was, and sat on the front lip of the stage in the climbing white of the flashlight, her bare heels finding the vertical facing below the lip and resting there, knees not quite together, looking down the length of the house at me in the aisle.
I did not move.
My unused hands. The ache already starting in the places that wanted to go forward. The strange clean terror of a trick that might finally work because I would not be in it.
She held my eyes.
Her right hand left her thigh.
It traveled, slow, the same patient competence she used on everything stubborn in this building, down the inside of her own skin, two fingers hooking the cotton aside without ceremony, and the world narrowed to the sound of rain and the sound of my own blood and the knowledge that she was about to become the film instead of the operator—
and I still did not move.
Her fingers found the heat of herself without flourish, without looking away from me, and the first sound was not a sound at all but a change in the air, a small wet shift that the rain on the roof tried and failed to cover. Her mouth opened a fraction, as if she were about to say something to the fuse box, something about the bus or the platter, and then did not, because there was nothing left in the building that required words. The auditorium was cold in the way only an emptied theater is cold, the warmth of eleven bodies gone out with them into the rain, and I watched the gooseflesh lift along her forearms and across the tops of her breasts and watched her not care about it, watched her heel knock once against the facing below the lip, bare, a small hollow sound, and settle.
The radiator in the lobby knocked twice. That was how long. The dust hung in the projector’s leftover heat above her and did not come down. I could see the exact moment her breath caught against her teeth, the exact moment her left hand came back to grip the edge of the stage to hold herself there, knuckles whitening once and then releasing, because she was not performing for me, she was simply continuing, and the continuation was the whole of it. The hand between her thighs moved slower than I would have believed a hand could move and still be moving, circling, returning, mapping a thing she already knew the shape of, and heat gathered behind my own teeth, a metallic pressure, the body trying to go forward and being held by the only successful discipline of my life.
Her knees opened the width of a thought. The wet sound became itself, unmistakable now, a private weather happening in the climbing light, and a flush came up out of her chest and into her throat, not pink, darker than that, the color of the velvet on the seat backs where a hundred years of hands had worn it, climbing the work in her shoulders. Her wrist. The small circular patience. I watched her from three rows back, watched the shape of her mouth and the working of her hand and the flush moving up her like weather, and it was enough, it was more than enough, to see it and not need the closer proof of breath or scent to know it was real.
Faster. Not because she hurried. Because there was no slower left in her. Her eyes still on mine. Breath. The wet sound. Her knee. Her heel against the facing again, twice, not hollow now. A sound from her throat that was not my name and not anyone’s name, only the sound of a woman who had spent fifteen years unseen behind a beam of light finally occupying the beam.
I do not. The unused hands. The cape on the floor beside my shoe. Inability to blink. The body lunging in every direction except the one that would have ruined it, held, held, the armor converted entirely into eyes.
She looked at me the way she looked at a reel that had come off the platter wrong, not angry, not amused, simply present for the fact of it, and she came the way the projector finishes a reel, a sudden mechanical certainty after all that patient turning, her whole spine a single long contraction, the hand still moving through it because that was who she was, economical even in collapse, and I felt it happen to me as heat in the teeth and a ringing in the orchestra pit where the coin had gone and the knowledge that I had vanished correctly for the first time by remaining exactly where I stood.
Her breathing slowed.
She did not thank me. I would not sleep. The unused hands hung, the ache of having been perfectly still a clean bright wire from wrist to shoulder, the strange clean feeling of a trick that finally worked because I was not in it. The exit light over the fire door laid its green on the wet of her shoulder, the green of a bottle held up to a window. Rain still hitting the marquee, occupying, filling the shallow dish until Thursday’s letters ran. A joke arrived in my mouth, fully formed, something about the house getting its money’s worth at last, and my mouth stayed shut on it, and it sat on my tongue tasting like the tea had, oversteeped, gone cold, a thing I could hold there without swallowing. She was looking at me now the way she looked at the end of a reel, waiting to see if the house lights should come up. They did not. I stood in the dark of the aisle with the cape at my feet, my hands still raised, palms forward, frozen in the air, and let her look.