The Immortalists(44)
They land two gigs at a casino in Santa Rosa, four at a resort in Lake Tahoe. The audiences smile at Raj – showman and family man – and at Ruby, large-eyed beneath a child-sized top hat, which Raj uses to collect tips after each show. He keeps the cash in a locked box beneath the driver’s seat. In Tahoe, he buys a car phone to use for bookings. Klara wants to call family, but Raj swats her away. ‘Bill’s enough as it is,’ he says.
When winter comes, they go south. LA is lousy with competition, but they do okay in the college towns and better at the desert casinos. But Klara hates the casinos. The managers always mistake her for Raj’s assistant. People amble over from card tables and slot machines because they want to see a young woman spin in a tight dress or because they’re too drunk to go home. They like Raj’s Indian Needle Trick, but they boo during the Vanishing Birdcage. ‘It’s up her sleeve!’ someone bellows, as if the failure of the trick is a personal offense. Klara begins to look back at the small shows in San Francisco with nostalgia, remembering the dark battered stages but forgetting the hecklers, forgetting that nobody, there or here, has ever really wanted what she’s selling.
During the day, while Raj is at pitch meetings, she reads to Ruby in the trailer. She admires the look of the desert, the blue mountains and sorbet sky, but she doesn’t like the feel of it, both languid and restless, or the heat that presses down on her like hands. She keeps miniature bottles of vodka in her makeup case, which she prefers for their clarity and smarting punch, for the way they tear her throat. In the morning, when Raj leaves, she pours two fingers into her instant coffee. Sometimes she walks Ruby to a nearby convenience store and gets a bottle of Coke, which does a better job of disguising the smell. Raj knows she stopped drinking during her pregnancy, but he also thinks she never started back up. It’s different now, though. The blackouts and retching have been replaced by something steadier, harder to detect: a low-grade but constant remove from the facts of her life. Before Raj comes home, she throws the bottles away. Back in the RV, she brushes her teeth and spits out the window.
‘This,’ Raj says, counting checks. ‘This is the stuff.’
‘We can’t stay here much longer,’ says Klara. They’re parked illegally behind a boarded-up Burger King because Raj doesn’t want to pay rent in an RV park.
‘Nobody knows we’re here, baby,’ he says. ‘We’re invisible.’
The seasons are all wrong. When she calls home during Hanukkah, huddled over the car phone while Raj is at Stop ’n Save, it’s snowing in New York and eighty-six degrees in the RV.
‘How are you doing?’ Daniel asks, and it shocks her how much she misses him. When he visited San Francisco, she watched him play peekaboo with Ruby and imagined him for the first time as a father.
‘I’m good,’ she says, faking sparkle, faking shine. ‘I’m fine.’
Klara has kept two things from her siblings: the knocks, and the fact that Simon’s death aligned with his prophecy. Simon never shared his date with Varya and Daniel, and they haven’t discussed the woman on Hester Street since Saul’s shiva. But the knowledge festers inside Klara. After shows, taking off her makeup while Raj collects tips, she calculates how long she’ll live if the woman was right about her, too.
I’m not going to die, she told Simon. I refuse to.
It was easier for her to adopt that swagger until the woman’s first prediction came true. When Simon died, Klara careened back to the age of nine, back to the doorstep of the apartment on Hester Street. In truth, she hadn’t wanted to know her date of death, not really. She’d only wanted to meet the woman.
She had never heard of a female magician. (‘Why are there so few of us?’ she asked Ilya once. ‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?’) When Klara entered the apartment, the woman was standing against the window. She wore her hair in two long, brown braids, which made her face look symmetrical and complete. Years later, Klara cut class to wander through the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There she saw a statue representing the head of Janus, on loan from the Vatican Museum, and thought of the fortune teller. The statue’s faces stared in different directions, representing the past and the present, but this didn’t make the figure look disjointed; instead, it had a circular coherence. Klara only resented that the statue portrayed Janus – god of beginnings as well as transitions and time – as a man.
‘Wow.’ Klara gazed at the charts and calendars, the I Ching and fortune sticks, in the woman’s apartment. ‘You know how to use all these things?’
To Klara’s surprise, the woman shook her head.
‘That stuff’s for show,’ she said. ‘The people who come here? They like to think I know things for a reason. So I got props.’
When she walked toward Klara, her body had the power and electricity of a moving vehicle. Klara nearly stepped aside, but no: she steeled herself, held her ground.
‘The props make everybody feel better,’ said the woman. ‘But I don’t need nothing like that.’
‘You just know,’ Klara whispered.
The gap between their bodies was as charged as the space between two magnets. Klara felt faint, as though she’d float into the woman’s arms if she let herself relax.