Magic for Beginners: Stories (20 page)

The next year Paul didn’t come back. Neither did Popsicle.
Someone made a joke about it. Perhaps Paul had eaten Popsicle.

Callahan didn’t know what had happened to Paul or to Popsicle.
Fred, on the other hand, knew what happens to everyone eventually.
He could see the map that Paul and Popsicle had left on Callahan’s
face, just like Callahan’s wife could see it now that she was dead.
The dead can afford to see more than the living. Fred said, “She
says you didn’t really love her. And that she’s better off without
you. She hopes you grow old and die alone.”

Callahan said, “I’m paying you so you can say these things to
me? This is bullshit! And how do I even know if she’s really here?
Why should I believe what some guy says? Why would she talk to you
and not to me?”

Fred said, “Remember you’re talking to a medium. Not a
therapist.” (He tried to sound reasonable; detached rather than
snappish. He knew as he said it that he sounded like Callahan’s
therapist.) “Laura says you have more money than you know how to
spend, and she says she hopes you spend it all on charlatans and
quacks. Don’t get angry at me. I’m just saying this because you
want me to tell you what she’s saying.”

Callahan said, “Laura, if you’re here, talk to me—why are you
talking to him, and not to me?” Like Fred, he was trying his best
to talk reasonably. Soon he’d be throwing furniture around. “Don’t
you know how much I love you?”

She knew. Even Fred knew. But what did how much matter to a dead
woman?

Fred said, “She says you ought to take better care of yourself.
Your refrigerator is empty. She wants you to go out and buy some
groceries. She doesn’t want you to starve to death. She doesn’t
want to see you anytime soon. She’s got her own afterlife to live,
her own things to deal with. This is an important time for her. She
has things to do.”

“So is that it?” Callahan said. “Is that all you can do for
me?”

Fred shrugged. “Do you want me to produce some ectoplasm? A
souvenir of the spirit world? Would you like to talk to somebody
famous? Marilyn Monroe?”

“You are one real son of a bitch,” Callahan said. “So how do you
like the way this asshole talks to me, Laura? You approve?”

Fred said nothing. Laura said nothing, either. She indicated,
however, that she’d like to write something down.

The table where they were sitting was solid oak. Round. No sharp
edges. It was good to have a nice heavy piece of furniture to sit
behind. Both the living and the dead liked to throw stuff around,
as if it proved something. Fred kept a pad of paper and a ballpoint
pen on the table. He picked the pen up so that Laura could write
down exactly what she wanted to say. He didn’t watch as Laura
wrote. It was uncomfortable, watching someone else use your hand.
The fingers always looked too wriggly. Stretched. Laura dragged the
pen across the page as if Fred’s fingers were bags of dirt.

Callahan kept on talking to Laura. He had this feeling that
Laura was hiding somewhere in the room, maybe under the medium’s
floppy toupee, or under the oak table. Laura had never been good at
keeping still. She liked to swim laps until she could barely climb
out of the pool. He couldn’t help it. He said, “Do they have
swimming pools? For dead people? Does Laura still swim every
day?”

Fred tried to keep a straight face. Swimming pools? He couldn’t
wait to tell that one to Sarah. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “They have
swimming pools. Laura’s learning to play bridge. And she’s thinking
about getting a dog. You know, for companionship.”

Callahan thought about that. He could learn how to play bridge,
if that was what Laura wanted. He was sure he could feel Laura
moving around the room, brushing her fingers against the walls,
sliding behind the curtains at the window, touching the backs of
the chair where he sat, but Laura never touched him. What if she
touched him and he couldn’t feel anything? How was all this
supposed to work, if they tried to make it work? They’d been
married for almost thirty years.

Fred read what Laura had written. Terrible handwriting, even for
a dead person. “So she wants you to throw a dinner party. But she
doesn’t want you to invite anyone else. This is the menu she’s
giving me. She says, you want to prove you love her, then prove it.
Make her dinner.”

Callahan said, “I used to make dinner for her all the time.”

Fred said, “You’ll notice I haven’t asked you why she’s so mad
at you. I’m not going to ask you, either. I don’t like to pry.” He
looked down at the list Laura was making, and then back up at
Callahan. “But yeah, she’s pretty pissed. This is one weird-ass
menu. She says ants, a piece of churt—sorry, chalk, her handwriting
is execrable—old milk, vinegar, popsicles, erasers, grass, sawdust,
sand, dirt. She says if you really love her, you’ll show her how
much you love her.”

“So what did he do?” Sarah Parminter said, after a while. “Is he
going to do it?”

“I don’t know,” Fred said. “I just thought it was kind of funny.
He wrote me a check and it bounced. And she said he had lots of
money too, so maybe it wasn’t really his wife, even. Maybe it was
just somebody who wanted to fuck with him. I wouldn’t eat grass
just for a dead girl. Not unless she was paying me.”

“You haven’t mentioned your mother yet,” Sarah Parminter said to
Alan Robley.

“Why?” Alan said. “Is she here? Does she want to talk to
me?”

“She’s over there with the kids,” Sarah said. “They’re teasing a
Goofy.”

“She’s good with the kids,” Alan said. But he didn’t look over
to where a crowd was gathering around the Goofy. He wasn’t going to
tell his kids to leave the Goofy alone. Living parents had a hard
time disciplining dead children. You had to indulge them, even when
their fun got a little vicious. You had to pretend that they didn’t
belong to you. “I mean, even when she was alive, she was good with
them. She was so excited to have grandchildren. She read to them
all the time.”

“She didn’t like Lavvie much,” Sarah said.

“No,” Alan said. “They didn’t get along.”

“Your mother still doesn’t approve,” Sarah said. “She still
thinks Lavvie’s too old for you.”

Lavvie said something.

“Lavvie says your mother is a real, ah, bitch.”

“Fuck Lavvie,” Alan said, but he didn’t really mean it. And now
he was watching the Goofy stumble around, and he was feeling an odd
jealousy. Here he was, all dressed up in red, and the kids still
preferred a guy in a fur suit to their own father. Dead people had
favorite characters at Disneyland. Goofy, for example. The costume
was so baggy. That silly hat. You could poke him in the ass, really
jab him good, and he never moved fast enough. Minnie Mouses were
also popular with dead people. They liked hiding her pocketbook. Or
putting things in it.

The Goofy was shouting obscenities now. Living children were
crying. Dead ones were laughing. Alan said, “She never made any
effort. She always made fun of my mother, the way she put on
lipstick, and why are the dead so obsessed with makeup, anyway? The
way my mother cut up her food real small.”

Lavvie said something else.

“Lavvie wants to know if you ever loved her,” Sarah said. It
delighted her, how the line for Space Mountain never got any
shorter, no matter how long you sat and watched. She’d never
waited, herself. It was enough to watch the tourists shuffle into
line, disappear and come back out again, and wander over to join
the line once again.

“Could I talk to my mom?” Alan said.

Sarah tried waving Alan’s mother over, but Mrs. Robley only gave
her a black, murderous glare. Her lips were pressed together so
tightly that her entire mouth had disappeared. One hand was clamped
around the Goofy’s long ear. The other hand was burrowing into the
Goofy’s costume, as if she were going to disembowel him right
through the fake fur. Lavvie was still sitting weightlessly in
Alan’s lap. The little slut. She gave Mrs. Robley the finger when
the kids weren’t looking.

“She’s, ah, she’s busy,” Sarah said. “And our time’s up, Alan. I
have another appointment at four. But Lavvie has one last thing to
say to you.”

Lavvie didn’t really have anything to say to Alan, but Sarah
knew she wouldn’t mind that Sarah was making something up. The
stranger the better: it would only amuse her. All of it was true,
after all. I love you. I don’t love you. Don’t leave me. Fuck off.
I fuck the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt with a dildo all day long
while you’re at work.

If Alan divorced Lavvie, he’d still need Sarah. There would be
issues of child custody. And there was Mrs. Robley, too. There
would be things Alan needed to ask his mother about his
childhood.

A divorce would mean more trips to amusement parks for the kids
and for Sarah. She could always say the kids wanted to go to Six
Flags next week. There were always good lines for the Psyclone.

Alan was still waiting, his hands in his lap. Let him wait a
minute longer. It was strange, the way his arms just disappeared
right through Lavvie’s body. And it was unkind of Lavvie, Sarah
thought, to sit like that. It was indecent and unkind. Someday she
might write an etiquette book for the dead, although it would be
the living that ended up reading it, no doubt, and one ought to
draw a veil over certain things. Or at least not pull the veil back
too far. Sarah had talked to a historian once—had he been a living
man or had he already been dead? He was certainly dead now—about
the past. The past was, of course, a different country. A different
amusement park and the lines were much longer. The dead didn’t know
the way back any better than the living did.

Sarah’s historian said that one way you went about figuring out
what the past had been like was to read contemporary books of
etiquette. When one of these etiquette books suggested that it was
not well-bred behavior to pick up a human turd from the gutter to
remark upon its color or size, you knew then that people had needed
to be told not to do such things because they’d once done such
things. Sarah hadn’t batted an eye when he’d said that. Better not
to let on about the habits of the dead, she knew. Sarah knew this,
and Lavvie Tyler and the Robley-Tyler children and Mrs. Robley know
this, and me, I know, too. Even as I’ve been telling you this
story, I haven’t described things exactly as they went on. I
haven’t been honest about the dead people in this story, about how
the dead carry on.

There were living people waiting in line at Disneyland, and
there was a dead woman sitting on the park bench with Sarah
Parminter and Alan Robley and there were lots of other dead people,
too, hundreds of them, and what they got up to isn’t any of your
business. It’s just as well that only people like Sarah Parminter
and her cousin Fred ever see what the dead are really like. But the
dead, of course, see everything that you do. Next time you and your
new wife take your kids to Disneyland and you’re waiting in line,
you think about me. You think about that.

There was a lull in the conversation. We were down in the
basement, sitting around the green felt table. We were holding
bottles of warm beer in one hand, and our cards in the other. Our
cards weren’t great. Looking at each others’ faces, we could see
that clearly.

We were tired. It made us more tired to look at each other when
we saw we weren’t getting away with anything at all. We didn’t have
any secrets.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while and it was clear that we
hadn’t changed for the better. We were between jobs, or stuck in
jobs that we hated. We were having affairs and our wives knew and
didn’t care. Some of us were sleeping with each others’ wives.
There were things that had gone wrong, and we weren’t sure who to
blame.

We had been talking about things that went backwards instead of
forwards. Things that managed to do both at the same time. Time
travelers. People who weren’t stuck like us. There was that new
movie that went backwards, and then Jeff put this music on the
stereo where all the lyrics were palindromes. It was something his
kid had picked up. His kid Stan was a lot cooler than we had ever
been. He was always bringing things home, Jeff said, saying, You
have got to listen to this. Here, try this. These guys are
good.

Stan was the kid who got drugs for the other kids when there was
going to be a party. We had tried not to be bothered by this. We
trusted our kids and we hoped that they trusted us, that they
weren’t too embarrassed by us. We weren’t cool. We were willing to
be liked. That would have been enough.

Stan was so very cool that he hadn’t even minded taking care of
some of us, the parents of his friends (the friends of his
parents), although sometimes we just went through our kids’
drawers, looked under the mattresses. It wasn’t that different from
taking Halloween candy out of their Halloween bags, which was
something we had also done, when they were younger and went to bed
before we did.

Stan wasn’t into that stuff now, though. None of the kids were.
They were into music instead.

You couldn’t get this music on CD. That was part of the conceit.
It came only on cassette. You played one side, and then on the
other side the songs all played backwards and the lyrics went
forwards and backwards all over again in one long endless loop. La
allah ha llal. Do, oh, oh, do you, oh do, oh, wanna?

Bones was really digging it. “Do you, do you wanna dance, you
do, you do,” he said, and laughed and tipped his chair back.
“Snakey canes. Hula boolah.”

Someone mentioned the restaurant downtown where you were
supposed to order your dessert and then you got your dinner.

“I fold,” Ed said. He threw his cards down on the table.

Ed liked to make up games. People paid him to make up games.
Back when we had a regular poker night, he was always teaching us a
new game and this game would be based on a TV show or some dream
he’d had.

“Let’s try something new. I’m going to deal out everything, the
whole deck, and then we’ll have to put it all back. We’ll see each
other’s hands as we put them down. We’re going for low. And we’ll
swap. Yeah, that might work. Something else, like a wild card, but
we won’t know what the wild card was, until the very end. We’ll
need to play fast—no stopping to think about it—just do what I tell
you to do.”

“What’ll we call it?” he said, not a question, but as if we’d
asked him, although we hadn’t. He was shuffling the deck, holding
the cards close like we might try to take them away. “DNA Hand. Got
it?”

“That’s a shitty idea,” Jeff said. It was his basement, his
poker table, his beer. So he got to say things like that. You could
tell that he thought Ed looked happier than he ought to. He was
thinking Ed ought to remember his place in the world, or maybe Ed
needed to be reminded what his place was. His new place. Most of us
were relieved to see that Ed looked okay. If he didn’t look okay,
that was okay too. We understood. Bad things had happened to all of
us.

We were contemplating these things and then the tape flips over
and starts again.

It’s catchy stuff. We could listen to it all night.

“Now we chant along and summon the Devil,” Bones says. “Always
wanted to do that.”

Bones has been drunk for a while now. His hair is standing up
and his face is shiny and red. He has a fat stupid smile on his
face. We ignore him, which is what he wants. Bones’s wife is just
the same, loud and useless. The thing that makes the rest of us
sick is that their kids are the nicest, smartest, funniest, best
kids. We can’t figure it out. They don’t deserve kids like
that.

Brenner asks Ed if he’s found a new place to live. He has.

“Off the highway, down by that Texaco, in the orchards. This guy
built a road and built the house right on top of the road. Just,
plop, right in the middle of the road. Kind of like he came walking
up the road with the house on his back, got tired, and just dropped
it.”

“Not very good feng shui,” Pete says.

Pete has read a book. He’s got a theory about picking up women,
which he’s always sharing with us. He goes to Barnes & Noble on
his lunch hour and hangs around in front of displays of books about
houses and decorating, skimming through architecture books. He says
it makes you look smart and just domesticated enough. A man looking
at pictures of houses is sexy to women.

We’ve never asked if it works for him.

Meanwhile, we know, Pete’s wife is always after him to go up on
the roof and gut the drains, reshingle and patch, paint. Pete isn’t
really into this. Imaginary houses are sexy. Real ones are
work.

He did go buy a mirror at Pottery Barn and hang it up, just
inside the front door, because otherwise, he said, evil spirits go
rushing up the staircase and into the bedrooms. Getting them out
again is tricky.

The way the mirror works is that they start to come in, look in
the mirror, and think a devil is already living in the house. So
they take off. Devils can look like anyone—salespeople, Latter-day
Saints, the people who mow your lawns—even members of your own
family. So you have to have a mirror.

Ed says, “Where the house is, is the first weird thing. The
second thing is the house. It’s like this team of architects went
crazy and sawed two different houses in half and then stitched them
back together. Casa Del Guggenstein. The front half is really old—a
hundred years old—the other half is aluminum siding.”

“Must have brought down the asking price,” Jeff says.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “And the other thing is there are all these
doors. One at the front and one at the back and two more on either
side, right smack where the aluminum siding starts, these weird,
tall, skinny doors, like they’re built for basketball players. Or
aliens.”

“Or palm trees,” Bones says.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Sure. Palm trees. And then one last door, this
vestigial door, up in the master bedroom. Not like a door that you
walk through, for a closet, or a bathroom. It opens and there’s
nothing there. No staircase, no balcony, no point to it. It’s a
Tarzan door. Up in the trees. You open it and an owl might fly in.
Or a bat. The previous tenant left that door locked—apparently he
was afraid of sleepwalking.”

“Fantastic,” Brenner says. “Wake up in the middle of the night
and go to the bathroom, you could just pee out the side of your
house.”

He opens up the last beer and shakes some pepper in it. Brenner
has a thing about pepper. He even puts it on ice cream. Pete swears
that one time at a party he wandered into Brenner’s bedroom and
looked in a drawer in a table beside the bed. He says he found a
box of condoms and a pepper mill. When we asked what he was doing
in Brenner’s bedroom, he winked and then put his finger to his
mouth and zipped his lip.

Brenner has a little pointed goatee. It might look silly on some
people, but not on Brenner. The pepper thing sounds silly, maybe,
but not even Jeff teases Brenner about it.

“I remember that house,” Alibi says.

We call him Alibi because his wife is always calling to check up
on him. She’ll say, So was Alec out shooting pool with you the
other night, and we’ll say, Sure he was, Gloria. The problem is
that sometimes Alibi has told her some completely different story
and she’s just testing us. But that’s not our problem and that’s
not our fault. She never holds it against us and neither does
he.

“We used to go up in the orchards at night and have wars. Knock
each other down with rotten apples. There were these peacocks. You
bought the orchard house?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “I need to do something about the orchard. All
the apples are falling off the trees and then they just rot on the
ground. The peacocks eat them and get drunk. There are drunk wasps,
too. If you go down there you can see the wasps hurtling around in
these loopy lines and the peacocks grab them right out of the air.
Little pickled wasp hors d’oeuvres. Everything smells like rotting
apples. All night long, I’m dreaming about eating wormy
apples.”

For a second, we’re afraid Ed might tell us his dreams. Nothing
is worse than someone telling you their dreams.

“So what’s the deal with the peacocks?” Bones says.

“Long story,” Ed says.

So you know how the road to the house is a private road, you
turn off the highway onto it, and it meanders up some until you run
into the house. Some day I’ll drive home and park the car in the
living room.

There’s a big sign that says private. But people still drive up
the turnoff, lost, or maybe looking for a picnic spot, or a place
to pull off the road and fuck. Before you hear the car coming, you
hear the peacocks. Which was the plan because this guy who built it
was a real hermit, a recluse.

People in town said all kinds of stuff about him. Nobody knew.
He didn’t want anybody to know.

The peacocks were so he would know when anyone was coming up to
the house. They start screaming before you ever see a car. So
remember, out the back door, the road goes on down through the
orchards, there’s a gate and then you’re back on the main highway
again. And this guy, the hermit, he kept two cars. Back then,
nobody had two cars. But he kept one car parked in front of the
house and one parked at the back so that whichever way someone was
coming, he could go out the other way real fast and drive off
before his visitor got up to the house.

He had an arrangement with a grocer. The grocer sent a boy up to
the house once every two weeks, and the boy brought the mail too,
but there wasn’t ever any mail.

The hermit had painted in the windows of his cars, black, except
for these little circles that he could see out of. You couldn’t see
in. But apparently he used to drive around at night. People said
they saw him. Or they didn’t see him. That was the point.

The real estate agent said she heard that once this guy had to
go to the doctor. He had a growth or something. He showed up in the
doctor’s office wearing a woman’s hat with a long black veil that
hung down from the crown, so you couldn’t see his face. He took off
his clothes in the doctor’s office and kept the hat on.

One night half of the house fell down. People all over the town
saw lights, like fireworks or lightning, up over the orchard. Some
people swore they saw something big, all lit up, go up into the
sky, like an explosion, but quiet. Just lights. The next day,
people went up to the orchard. The hermit was waiting for them—he
had his veil on. From the front, the house looked fine. But you
could tell something had caught fire. You could smell it, like
ozone.

The hermit said it had been lightning. He rebuilt the house
himself. Had lumber and everything delivered. Apparently kids used
to go sneak up in the trees in the orchard and watch him while he
was working, but he did all the work wearing the hat and the
veil.

He died a long time ago. The grocer’s boy figured out something
was wrong because the peacocks were coming in and out of the
windows of the house and screaming.

So now they’re still down in the orchards and under the porch,
and they still came in the windows and made a mess if Ed forgot and
left the windows open too wide. Last week a fox came in after a
peacock. You wouldn’t think a fox would go after something so big
and mean. Peacocks are mean.

Ed had been downstairs watching TV.

“I heard the bird come in,” he says, “and then I heard a thump
and a slap like a chair going over and when I went to look, there
was a streak of blood going up the floor to the window. A fox was
going out the window and the peacock was in its mouth, all the
feathers dragging across the sill. Like one of Susan’s
paintings.”

Ed’s wife, Susan, took an art class for a while. Her teacher
said she had a lot of talent. Brenner modeled for her, and so did
some of our kids, but most of Susan’s paintings were portraits of
her brother, Andrew. He’d been living with Susan and Ed for about
two years. This was hard on Ed, although he’d never complained
about it. He knew Susan loved her brother. He knew her brother had
problems.

Andrew couldn’t hold down a job. He went in and out of rehab,
and when he was out, he hung out with our kids. Our kids thought
Andrew was cool. The less we liked him, the more time our kids
spent with Andrew. Maybe we were just a little jealous of him.

Jeff’s kid, Stan, he and Andrew were thick as thieves. Stan was
the one who found Andrew and called the hospital. Susan never said
anything, but maybe she blamed Stan. Everybody knew Stan had been
getting stuff for Andrew.

Another thing that nobody said: what happened to Andrew, it was
probably good for the kids in the long run.

Those paintings—Susan’s paintings—were weird. None of the people
in her paintings ever looked very comfortable, and she couldn’t do
hands. And there were always these animals in the paintings,
looking as if they’d been shot, or gutted, or if they didn’t look
dead, they were definitely supposed to be rabid. You worried about
the people.