The Sleepwalker(21)
“So, we have a box—an antique box I brought back from Egypt,” Lianna the Enchantress was saying to the dozen girls and boys at the party on Saturday afternoon. I was wearing my purple harem pants, a white dress shirt I had tied into a midriff, and a paisley vest I had found at a vintage clothing store in Burlington. My feet were bare, and I had painted my toenails a shade of lavender to match my pants. The costume was neither inappropriate nor revealing, but never before had I tied my shirt up to expose a part of my abdomen. As I worked, I was aware that some of the moms and dads were watching me as avidly as the children. But mostly I was aware of Gavin Rikert. The detective was leaning against the fireplace mantel of his sister and brother-in-law’s house, wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck. I tried not to think about him, but it was difficult. His gaze was lionesque and he was standing perfectly still. I felt a bit like a gazelle.
“Did you bring it back on a flying carpet, Jasmine?” The question was shouted by a boy on his knees, a chubby kid in camo pants and a John Deere sweatshirt. In addition to interrupting my patter, he was leaning in a lot closer than I liked. But I guessed I had earned the Jasmine joke. I had spotted the boy right away as the child in the audience most likely to drive me crazy, and so I had brought out the Clatter Box earlier in the show than usual so I could involve him right away and win him over early on. Usually I wasn’t a fan of rewarding bad behavior, but the rules were different when I was performing: I did whatever it took to bring the skeptics and hecklers into the fold.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Foster.”
“Well, Foster, I need your help,” I told him, and with the speed of a lemur he bolted to his feet and was standing beside me. The box was about five inches square and decorated with neon-red camels against a banana-yellow desert on three sides and a cocoa-colored pyramid on the fourth. It was made of tin and had a gold tassel at the top. I gave him the box and asked him to hold it by the tassel with his right hand. Then, so he couldn’t use his free hand to examine the box, I gave him a silk to hold in his left.
“As you all can see—as you can see, Foster—the box is empty,” I said, opening the box’s front door, the side with the pyramid. The children and the parents all peered into the blackness. Meanwhile, I babbled about the mysteries of the pyramids and the way treasure hunters disappeared inside them. “The treasure chests were booby-trapped by the ancients to shoot daggers if someone ever opened them,” I added ominously.
I reached onto the card table beside me for a cobalt-blue scarf. I closed the pyramid door. Then I made a tube with my left hand and pressed the scarf into it with my right, reminding everyone how very different Egypt was from Vermont. I encouraged them to imagine how spooky it must be to wander through the dusky corridors and tombs inside a pyramid. When I opened my left hand, spreading my fingers into a starfish and exposing my palm, the scarf was long gone.
“But is it really gone?” I asked the kids, raising an eyebrow. “Does anything really disappear forever?” I glimpsed the detective against the fireplace and briefly our eyes connected.
“No!” the kids shrieked at once, aware that this was most certainly the correct answer, and I regained my focus.
“Indeed,” I said. “Now, my hope is that the scarf is inside this box. I would hate to think I needed a new one. Foster, would you please open the door for me?”
The boy did. And the trick worked like a charm. Foster pulled on the tiny front door handle, the very same one I had used, but this time all four sides and the base of the box exploded out, falling to the floor with a clatter. Only the roof and the tassel remained in the boy’s fingers. And there, dangling from a hook in the ceiling, was the cobalt-blue scarf. The kids squealed and their parents clapped, and Foster would be putty in my hands for the rest of the show. I could now turn my attention to the birthday girl, a child with blond hair and a blue bow and a white party dress—which I did.
But always as I worked, I was aware of Detective Rikert.
“That costume is quite the bold fashion statement for Vermont,” the detective said to me. He had a bottle of soda in his hand and was leaning against the counter beside the dishwasher in the kitchen. His niece was opening her presents with the other kids in the living room, and the two of us were the only adults not watching. His sister had offered me a glass of wine, but I had declined. I hadn’t been twenty-one all that long, and I didn’t believe that Lianna the Enchantress should be drinking in front of children: it would be like the clown removing his makeup. Besides, I usually left the party as soon as I finished. The mom or dad would discreetly slip me a check and I’d be gone. Finally I had accepted a Barbie-pink paper cup of lemonade, but it was only so I would have something to do with my hands.
“It…evolved,” I began. I wasn’t nervous, but I was wary. He was a detective, and I knew I still had much to learn about his relationship with my mother. And yet I was drawn to him: he was handsome and glib, and I felt a little unsteady around him. “There were iterations. When I was a kid—”
“Spoken like someone who is facing midlife with real courage,” he said.
“You know what I mean. When I was in middle school, I actually wore a cape and black pants. I had a top hat. But the whole outfit was, I don’t know, too manly. So I started trying to be more feminine.”