Spring 2024: Half Magic.

by Tod Davies.

When it finally happened, I wasn’t sure what went wrong. I knew there were other wives before me. After many years of a marriage that made it through the hard times, now it was going to go belly up on success. I couldn’t be the first woman who, then, hears her husband say, “I’m in love with someone else.”

I suppose it’s like childbirth. Or dying—common enough, but somehow you don’t think it will happen to you the same as it does to everyone else.

Not that I’ve ever had a child. Or died—yet. That first was partially my own vagueness. It just never happened. I was too busy and engaged with other things to worry about it. That, I reflect, combined with his dislike of the idea. I didn’t think about it at the time. But after he broke the news to me that he was in love with someone else, I noticed I felt sad about it. A daughter would have been nice. If we’d had her at the usual time, she could have been a comfort to me.

The woman he said he loved instead of me was about the age our daughter would have been.

Funny, that.

She sounded like a nice enough girl, although I doubted she knew what she was getting into. Actually, to be blunt, I knew she didn’t. If she did, she’d have turned tail and run a hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction. I knew, of course. How many years has it taken me to know? Thirty? Forty?

“She loves me,” he said to me. “I’m the center of her world.”

“I love you, too,” I said back. He waited, with that expectant look on his face, that look it now utterly exhausted me to see, after the thousands—the millions, probably—of times I’d hurried to wipe it off his face. With something admiring. Something comforting. I was good at that, when I was younger. That part of me, though, like a couple of other physical bits I could name—hips, knees, eyes before various forms of surgery—was worn out. I reflected wearily that there were presently no effective surgeries available to restore the ability to unquestioningly admire. Unlike hips, knees, eyes. Those were easy.

Would I have the surgery if there were? I smiled at the image. Surgery on a worn out ability to make my husband the center of my world. No, I didn’t think that I would. Not even if insurance paid for all of it. No deductible.

So I went silent. He was clearly disappointed. He turned away, looking down at his phone, where I assumed a torrid thread of text messaging awaited. I got on with making lunch: lentil soup, toasted cheese sandwiches, carrot sticks. Not bad. Winter carrots are particularly sweet. He used to love them. Maybe he’s bored by this kind of thing now, I thought. Do he and his new love go out for sushi instead?

As I minced the onions and the garlic and rinsed the lentils, I considered this ‘love’ thing. She says she loves him. I say I love him. What does that mean?

Do they mean the same thing?

The night before that ‘center of her world’ comment, three in the morning, actually, after we’d hassled the thing out pretty thoroughly, in my opinion if not his, he said that horrid sentence I think a kazillion women have suffered through before me: “I love you both.”

Yeah, of course you do, I thought, painfully flip. One of us makes a good lentil soup. The other makes you the center of her universe. Hard to give up either of those. If you don’t have to.

I put a glop of cooking olive oil—not the good stuff, which I didn’t feel up to using that day—into the saucepan and added the onions. Heat and stir. And I thought about that love thing. I thought about it hard.

Do I love him, I wondered? After all these years? Do I?

***

It probably started with my insisting on adding the cyber punk stuff to the act. I’m sure that was it. No. Now that I come to think of it, it was the Incident of the Netflix Special. That must have been the final straw.

When we started out, magic acts had gotten kind of tired. So in those early days, we were all for the art, he and I. As for it as you can be. The content of it, not just the form. Magic was political for both of us. Then. We were going to revive the whole scene. We thought. So we were a team. “The old team,” he used to joke after we’d done the circuit for years, after some magician duo showed up on late night television calling themselves “the young team.” There were a bunch of us old teams. Siegfried and Roy in Vegas. David Copperfield and his techs. But they were all form, all dazzle, no content at all. We were content to feel we were holding up the flag.

There was the Amazing Randi, who we both loved, because his magic had content, the way good magic should. But by the time we got going, I mean really going, the Amazing was retired. We were the only ones left holding the political content flag for magic. At least, that was what we told ourselves.

Of course, political content changes. Just like everything else.

There were some cool upstarts. Those started appearing later. The husband didn’t like them much, though he always found a way to dislike them in a way that made sense to me. Then. Sort of. They weren’t really political, was what he usually said.

“She loves me because I’m political,” he said, staring at me in an accusing way. “That’s what she says.”

I gave the lentil soup a stir and taste. Should have added a little curry powder to the onions, I thought. Too late now.

“She doesn’t love you because you’re ‘political’,” I said, putting the word in quotation marks in a way I know will enrage him, and do me no good. But there’s no way around it. At that point, as the young people say, I had to speak my truth. There was just no way around it. There is just no way around it. I’m too old.

I’ve been through too much stuff.

“She ‘loves’ you,” I said again, the enraging quote marks appearing in spite of all my efforts to control them, “because you’re magic.”

Apparently at this point I couldn’t control italics either.

He stared at me, angry and defeated. Only momentarily defeated, but angry for who knows how long, I said to myself with a sigh. I ladled out the soup into the glass soup bowls I’ve carted around for thirty years. Since buying them in an Arizona thrift store, when we were doing the start up magician rounds of small clubs. Rents being what they are, at this late date there aren’t many of those left. The clubs, I mean. The bowls are still here. They’re tough. Back then they cost 75 cents a piece. You remember small triumphs like that.

I remembered that triumph as my husband, his defeat feeding his anger, said he wasn’t hungry, and, pushing his bowl away, went out of the house, slamming the door behind him. A cliché I thought to myself sadly, as I spooned the soup back into a container, and, labeling it, shoved it into the freezer.

It would be better later, I thought.

The reason for my husband’s defeat was a fact with which we were both all too well acquainted. I had always thought, in my vague yet purposeful way, that our mutual acquaintance with it drew us together more firmly than any passel of grandchildren would have.

My mistake, apparently.

The fact was this, is this: the audience wants to believe in magic. It wants to believe that all the supposedly impossible feats my dear husband performed on stage were due to psychic powers, or angelic aid, or even demonic intervention—this last being the most popular. It wanted to believe this, even unto desperation, even though—and let me say this once, here, very loudly—even though they are all tricks. That’s right. You’re laughing at me now, because you’re saying, in a kind of smug way (don’t I know that smug way), “Of course they’re tricks. Everyone knows magic isn’t real.”

Aha. That is where I must disagree with you. Magic is all too very real, yes, it is, Virginia. The realest thing on the face of the earth. At least the real magic you stumble on in life.

But what a magician does in his or her act? That is a chock-full bag o’ tricks. Some good tricks, some shoddy ones. Some professionally done, some strictly amateur land. Some subtle, some blatant. But you get the general idea. Tricks.

The success of tricks of all kinds is down to the need of the audience to believe that magic does actually exist in the world, there, in front of them on stage.

It does exist, of course, oh reader. But not where most people look to find it. It does not exist on stage. On any stage.

All art, in fact, is a bag of tricks meant to mimic the magic that’s all around us. But for some reason, we humans have to take our magic at one artificial remove.

Is it the same, I ask myself, as how we recognize love? Never recognizing it when it’s right in front of us? Having to have some mediated version? Some agreed upon version of what love is?

Is that what we require of magic? Is that the effect on the audience of the magic we pretend to present in our acts?

The bare truth is if there was real magic, demonic or not, on that stage, it wouldn’t show half as well as the kind of tricks we, the magicians, get up to in making a show of it.

My husband knew this as well as I did. He knew, none better, that the less he believed that what he did was magic, the more control he could exert on the stage, the more magic the act would look. It’s always a little depressing for young magicians starting out to realize that the fantasies they clutched to their tiny bosoms as children must be pried out of their hands and released. That before they can gain any mastery over card deck, or hat tricks, or the numerous modern variations thereof.

A magician has to give up believing in magic to make magic. That’s the base theory of it.

The wider theory, that seems to be unattainable by any but the most sophisticated minds, is that a true magician has to gain a wider view of what magic actually means. And part of that meaning is that it never, ever, ever happens on stage.

Is this like true love? I wondered about that. Was the way I loved true? Or was the way he said he needed to be loved the right one?

Which was the illusion? The lentil soup? Or the total rapt attention?

Was one of those love? Or was it something else altogether? Something that happens in private. Off stage. Like real magic.

***

I remember the first tiny club, long gone, alas, where we first met, my husband the magician and I. It was in San Francisco, in the neighborhood where I grew up. It was on a street of restaurants and bookstores and delicatessens and bakeries and bars. And this one tiny club. All dark wood inside, a changing slat board of coming events tacked to the front door. It seated maybe thirty people. Monday was comedy night. The weekends were music.

Wednesday was magic.

In those days, I was all in for magic. I wanted to be a magician myself, though I would never have admitted it to a soul back then. There weren’t many women magicians. Any more than there were, then, many women comics—far fewer, in fact. I didn’t have any role models, and I was a bit of a coward. So instead I became a kind of magician groupie.

There wasn’t much competition for that at the time. Things have changed, of course.

There just wasn’t much sex appeal in magicians back then. The real sex bombs tended to go into guitar playing, or drumming, or singing. The really wild ones got onto the comedy stage.

He wasn’t sexy, not then. Not in the conventional way. To tell the truth, he was downright goofy looking. Too tall, too thin—skeletal really. Ears sticking out in different directions. Snaggle teeth.

I laughed to look at him. Until he started doing his tricks, there on the tiny wooden stage. Simple stuff, I thought critically. I’d studied these sorts of tricks myself, swallowing whole all of the how-to magic books in my local library. I’d even tried out a few in front of my bedroom mirror. Coins disappearing. Scarves pulled from nowhere. Coins reappearing. There was a little ventriloquism too, which I never got very good at, so his showmanship there in particular impressed me greatly.

There was a box he carried out onstage with extreme gentleness, placing it on a tall stool, opening it to reveal…a porcelain doll. A beautiful thing, with big brown eyes and long lashes, long brown hair, and a slight rose blush on a pale brown skin.

Very like I looked, in those days, before my eyes got smaller, and my lashes began looking more like brush bristles, and my hair turned gray, and my skin developed an age spot or two. But then, oh then, I looked like a more human version of that doll. More human? I think so. In any case, I was certainly more human inside.

He made her talk. He talked to her. He even got the illusion of them talking at the same time down pat. My, I thought to myself. Good one.

Was that how it started? I suppose so. There was the illusion that he listened and responded to that doll, and thinking back, I can see there was an illusion that he listened and responded to me. But if that had been so, why is it that now that we’re older, I wondered to myself, it seems much more likely that I have spent many years working hard to keep that illusion alive?

Because, I thought with a hard thump of despair, I don’t think he’s ever really listened or responded to me. And I don’t think I ever wanted know that at all.

***

Does she imagine he listens and responds to her, this young girl who has made my husband the center of her world? I argued with myself: She must, don’t you think? Otherwise, why bother? I wondered if she knew, deep down, that while he loves women the way a child loves his mother, he doesn’t understand the one in front of him anymore than the little boy understands his mom. And he doesn’t think he needs to. After all, if he just screams loudly enough and throws a tantrum, she’ll do whatever is required to adjust reality to his specifications. It’s all a magic act. A sleight of hand. My hands, I thought ruefully spreading the wrinkled, garlic smelling ones in front of me.

I thought: Does she know what she’s in for? Does she know how much work is involved in adjusting reality to another person’s specifications? Well, I decided briskly, she’s young. She’s strong. She’s just setting out. Maybe he’ll be dead before he wears her out. He certainly had a go at wearing me out.

Had he worn me out? About that I was not absolutely sure.

***

It became clear to me that the issue before me was what I wanted. I was startled to think this was actually without any reference to his wants and needs. This, I was sad to discover, was a novelty for me. A new kind of performance. Thinking about what I wanted without reference to the magic act that had been our mutual life. Thinking, as it were, outside the box. My box. Yes, that was me being sawed in half in the box. The joke we used was that I could discuss any book in the English canon with a member of the audience while hubs sawed away, separating my halves. I used to do a particularly good talk on ‘Ulysses’. I would hold forth on the meaning of Leopold Bloom’s love for innards in a way, I’ve been told, that was so fascinating that my husband fondly told me to cut it out. I was being too distracting, and not in the right way either, from the trick. His trick. Well, his tone was sort of fond. There was a bit of an edge there. He never has relished being upstaged.

***

So when he reappeared, and we continued our exhausting discussion, he told me Amanda was an actor—of course her name is Amanda, that places her in the timeline of births rather precisely, I thought sourly—I smelled trouble. For Amanda.

“She’s very beautiful,” he said tentatively. Of course she’s very beautiful. I was very beautiful. “And I think she’s slim enough so we could revive the sawing in half trick.”

Now that was a low blow. I imagine I had that one coming because of my inability to keep the air quotes out of our discussions. He knew it was a low blow. So I’m not as slender as I was as a child bride, so what? I’m a lot better at managing money now than I was then. Than he was and will ever be, as a matter of fact. Though suddenly it occurred to me, of course, that was why he wanted to know all the accounts and all the passwords. I had taken it as a sign of maturation, that he finally was interested in the magic behind the scenes that supported our entire act. But no, it was just a preparation, apparently, for an entirely different one.

A disappearing act.

“I was thinking maybe we could update it. She could discuss modern art with the audience. Much better than that cyber whatever it was stuff we tried out that didn’t work.”

It didn’t work because you hated it, I thought. You never gave anything new a chance. And now you’re going to try the same old stuff all over again. With Amanda.

So she was an art history major before she was an actor. Classic.

Oh dear, Amanda, I thought, you have no idea. You, my dear, are a walking talking cliché, and you’re going to be trapped in a very narrow paradigm with no way out and two shows nightly if you don’t watch your ass.

To my surprise, I found myself sympathizing with Amanda. I found myself wanting to watch her ass for her.

“Speaking of her ass,” I said, even though we hadn’t been. “What are you doing about sex?” Because you know, the guy is pushing seventy, and while we still have a good time together, it’s less and less often. Not that I’m complaining. I always thought we were very well matched that way. I used to joke, “I appreciate that we’re around the same age. Old age sex is the best.” Come to think of it, he used to agree wholeheartedly. But lately he’d taken to just kind of murmuring, “Un huh.”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” he said in that huffy voice he gets when he’s anxious. So now I knew there’d been a lot of romantic talk and very little action. So far. This made me give a little evil-sounding laugh, which resulted in his face taking on that pompous look of being so above everything around him. He refused, his condescending expression made plain, to take notice of my vulgarity.

I laughed even harder. In fact, I spit some of the red wine out that I was drinking, and had to go to the sink for a sponge to mop it off. “Damn,” I said regretfully, “One of the only t-shirts that didn’t have a stain already.”

He stormed out again at that. Like I said, he just kept practicing his very own disappearing act.

***

After he went that time, I drank some more red wine. A lot more red wine, actually.

And after that, I did something supremely uncharacteristic. I snooped. “In a good cause,” I thought to myself, though I was a wee bit wine-addled by then. The ‘good cause’ had not made itself known to me in any clarity.

As I get older, the more I find out, sometimes to my shame and sometimes to my amusement, that I am no different from anyone else In this case, by ascribing ‘good’ motives to myself no matter what they might actually be.

I am no better than I should be, as my mother used to say.

But here is a thing about getting older. Now my own evil, when discovered, just cracks me up.

I discovered it then, as I snooped.

I cracked myself up. I really did.

***

I snooped, as I do most things, with a fierce and concentrated efficiency that brooked no failure.

I gave an evil-sounding cackle as I made my way methodically through the cardboard file cabinet my dear husband fondly thought was the dragon guarding his privacy. As if you have any privacy that your loved one hasn’t granted you after thirty, forty, fifty years of married life.

I’d always granted him his privacy. He’d always granted me mine. Not that I was under the impression this was the result of any particular delicacy of feeling. No, I thought to myself grimly as I zeroed in, unerringly, on the little leather bound book I knew was sure to hold all his passwords. It was because he completely lacked any interest in his wife’s inner life.

How I wished now I had been less interested in his. How I wished it.

That was when I grasped what I was in this for. I mean, as I grasped the book with a sigh of triumph, so I grasped my purpose.

Oh my god. My purpose. It wasn’t what I would have thought at all. It gave me an electric shock. I had to sit down. When I finally dared to look more closely at it, dazed, there it was, my realization, standing sharply out from a fog of otherwise tangled, angry emotion.

Amidst the confusion, there was this strange sense of relief. I considered this. And got another surprise. For the plain fact was my goal was actually for the force of good.

But what good?

Not good for me. Not good for him—though in the end, it was likely to turn out so.

Oh my god. I saw what it was for.

 It was for Amanda. For Amanda’s good.

***

I wonder now if this was for the daughter I had never had. Would I have tried to protect my child from a lifetime of service to a mistaken idea? Maybe it wouldn’t have been necessary. Maybe a daughter I raised would have learned from my mistakes, going on to a free and fearless swim in solitary waters. Probably not, though. I never learned from the obvious errors of my own mother. This may have sprung from another error. In that case, mistaken loyalty. I didn’t want her to think I was any better than she had been. I was protective of her that way.

Strangely enough, I felt protective of Amanda now. Before I’d even met her.

***

That meeting, of course, was predictably easy to arrange. She was as curious to meet me, so she told me later, as I was to meet her. Although ‘curious’ isn’t the word exactly. ‘Desirous’. ‘Yearning’ would not be too strong.

In any event, it was easy enough to find her phone number. I texted her. I knew enough to realize the young don’t go in for voicemail. I texted my name, and a peace sign emoji, followed by one of a bodiless handshake.

I don’t know how it was, but the moment I began searching through my phone’s emojis I felt that she would understand and respond.

So it was. Barely fifteen minutes later, a question mark.

I named a coffee shop. I knew from his address book it was near her apartment. Before I added the link, I checked to make sure. They had chai AND wine. Good. Something for everyone.

She sent back the emoji of a clock set to 9. She must mean p.m. 9 p.m. is when he spends an hour watching anything he can find about young, up-and-coming magicians. On the Internet, which is where they mostly can be found these days. I don’t know why he does this. He hates being online. It just keeps him up. He needs a hot bath and a cup of chamomile tea to come down from it. Even aside from how mad he gets watching the young ones.

It’s inevitable that one or the other steals something from our old acts. I had gently urged that he watch some time other than before sleep, but there was some meaning there for him that I had yet to understand.

I explained all this to Amanda when I saw her the next evening. “It’s only fair that you know what you’re in for,” I told her. “I mean, if you’re under the impression he’s going to go clubbing with you till all hours of the night.”

She smiled at this. She has a nice smile. Very full lipped, the way my mouth used to be. She shook her head. “I don’t club,” she said, and sipped her chai. Just as I thought: made with soymilk. I told her that, and she laughed again, pointing at my glass of Malbec.

“Just what I thought,” she said. And we laughed together.

We liked each other very much. That much was plain from the first moment of our meeting.

***

I was on time, of course, Malbec in a tumbler before me. I knew who she was the moment she blew in.

She looked just like me.

This was a moment of dissonance. Of unreality. For it was quite amazing how much she looked like me. I mean, like the me of forty years before. The same long brown hair parted in the middle. The same furiously serious heavy eyebrows. The same half anxious/half arrogant expression in the eyes, almost-but-not-quite contradicted by a mild, questioning smile.

Then there were her clothes. Had clothes really changed so little in the last half century? My god, I thought. Those bell-bottoms. That poor boy sweater. Those little brown boots. That military style jacket.

I still have that jacket. Somewhere in the back of my closet, unlooked at for years.

***

She recognized me immediately, of course. She ordered her chai, and came to the table shyly. She was uncertain of how to greet me, but I saw she was a nice child, wanting to do right, so I stood and offered a welcoming hug.

We sat. She let me sit first, I noticed ruefully. The respect of the young for the old.

We stared at each other for a moment. Then she spoke first. The weaker party always speaks first. She’ll learn, I thought idly, as a torrent of words poured out of her. And then I thought, “I could teach her.”

I surprised myself at that.

***

“I love him,” she said first off. Not defiantly. Wobbly, you know? Definitely the kind of voice that indicates to an audience that she was not sure of the truth of what she said.

I looked at her sympathetically as she rattled on about his genius, about the first time she saw him, about how tender he was with her. And I felt so so so sorry.

Sorry for her? Sorry for me? Sorry for him?

Maybe sorry for all of us.

“Oh my god,” she said, giving a nervous laugh. “You look like you understand.”

“My dear,” I said, and got up to order another glass of wine, for I was sure I needed one. “I actually do.”

The girl at the counter beamed at me as I paid. “I love watching a mother and daughter get along,” she confided wistfully. “I wish my mom and I were like that.”

“Just wait,” I said, sighing, “it’ll be alright in the end.”

And I went back to Amanda.

***

“What was your mother like?” I asked. Then hoped I wasn’t being rude. I hadn’t actually listened much to the last paragraph or two of her statement. It was all about his wonderful qualities, and of course I know all about those.

At first she looked surprised. She said, in what I think she hoped was an ironic voice, “I thought you’re supposed to ask me about my father.”

I laughed at that. “I’m not actually interested in your father,” I said. She considered this. Then she said something startling.

“She wasn’t like you at all,” she said. “My mother, I mean.”

“Is that good?” I said after a moment. I noted the word ‘wasn’t’. “Bad? Indifferent?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to think about it.”

And we sat there in silence until I finished my second glass and she finished her chai.

***

She got up to clear our glasses onto the bus tray. A nice girl. I approved of her. I stood up, gathering my various bits of scarf and coat. She hesitated, then went to the door and held it open for me.

“Good night, Amanda,” I said as I smiled and passed through.

“Wait,” she said tensely. I turned back.

Somehow I knew what she was going to say.

“Can we do this again?” she asked.

I nodded. Of course I did. Then I reached back and gave her another hug goodnight.

I went out into the darkness to my car. The black of the parking lot seemed strange. I thought: Shouldn’t there be lights on for the customers? Or is this the kind of place that doesn’t have enough money for lights?

This wasn’t a great neighborhood, I realized. Was Amanda poor? Of course she was. All good people are poor at her age. I was poor.

We were poor.

All old people should not be poor.

I made my way home to our lovely little house, with the automatic lights that come on the moment I step into the garden. I saw the warmth inside, and I was glad we were not poor.

Not anymore.

“We are not poor,” I thought resentfully, “because I have made sure we would not be. If it had been left up to him . . .”

That is when I have a moment of inspiration. Of course. He would have wanted to be poor because it would mean he was still young.

How sad, I thought, as I let myself in with my key. How very sad that he can’t just be old with me.

***

He was raging to himself in the bathtub, of course. As I walked in the door, I could hear him muttering. There must have been some particularly egregious malfeasance on the part of a younger magician. “I wonder why he can’t just think of it as a tribute,” I thought as I poured out another glass of wine. A much better wine, might I add, than the one to be had at the coffee house I was just at with Amanda.

I stood there for a moment, my mind a blank. Then I went into the bathroom. Habit, I suppose. I stood there, watching him read a book, as I drank my wine. And I contemplated, once again, the meaning of the word “Love.”

***

He looks vulnerable there, naked and old, I think. His body hasn’t changed that much since we first fell in love, but still . . . it shows wear. It shows fatigue. It shows a surrender to the inevitable.

All of this, I realize as I stand there concentrating hard, is something I find . . . lovable.

“What’s the matter?” he says, taking off his reading glasses and squinting up at me. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I say soothingly. He doesn’t put his glasses back on and return to his book. To my surprise, he just stares at me.

“You’re staring at me,” he says, though again he surprises me. He says this mildly, not accusing. He’s stating a fact.

I like that. He has gotten out of the habit lately of simply stating facts between us. I sit on the toilet next to the bathtub and consider this.

“You’re staring at me, too,” I say. And we both give a simultaneous shamefaced laugh. Embarrassed, he runs more hot bath water into the tub. It looks enticing, actually. So I shrug, put down my now empty glass, take the clothes off my aging body and climb in beside him.

***

We have done this almost every night of our married life. At first in tiny bathtubs. Then, later, with prosperity and home ownership and home renovation, in a bathtub we bought together after trying them all out, fully clothed, at a dealership.

“Do you remember buying this bathtub?” he says abruptly. He surprises me again. I just nod.

“We knew this was the right one the minute we got into it, didn’t we?” he says. Is it wistfully that he says this now? I can’t tell. It might be I’m hearing things, old as I am.

So I nod again. That should answer him.

He starts to say something else. Then he stops.

We’re both quiet for a long time.

I soap myself and rinse. And laboriously get out of the tub, carefully, making sure not to slip and break something. Old bones, I think. Old bones.

He watches me. It must be an unflattering view. But he says, “You look good.” I turn, startled, and have to grab onto the towel rack to regain my balance. “I mean,” he amends, “you look beautiful.”

How strange men are, I think as I dry myself and put on the bathrobe that always hangs there, on the same hook, next to the one where his bathrobe hangs. Just when you think they are completely predictable, they surprise you.

Or is this his way of preparing me for some shock? I shiver at the thought.

But when he comes to bed after me, and we both finish our books and turn out our lights, he reaches out for me and holds me tighter than has been our way of late. I’ve missed it. I’m glad it’s happening now. If it is his way of saying goodbye, at least I can enjoy it while it lasts.

As I fall asleep in his arms, I think drowsily to myself that tomorrow is another day.

***

In the morning he muttered something about having a meeting and disappeared. I heard his car. Resolutely, I pushed all anxious thoughts as far away from me as I could. They insisted on crowding back in, though.

What will I do if he leaves me? What kind of life will I lead?

“Okay,” I think in resignation. “Let me have it, Life. Let me have the worst you can deal me.”

I’m forced once again to confront the Monster.

A habit I’ve had since I was a child. Whenever the Monster appears, I invite it in. Go ahead and try to kill me, I say. I hate living with a monster in the basement. I figure it’s it or me.

If it’s me, I’ve always reasoned, at least I won’t have to live anymore with a monster.

So I stop loading the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes, make myself a cup of tea, and sit down on the chair I bought for myself years ago when I fell in love with it at a thrift store. It’s old, but it’s still beautiful. Still comfortable. Still affectionate. It holds me now and comforts me. The tea does too.

“Okay,” I say to the Monster. “Ready now. Have at it.”

The Monster says, “How will you live?”

I give it an ironic look. At least, my inside face does. “That’s an easy one, dude,” I hear my inner voice say. “We’ve got more than enough money for two houses. I planned it that way. Lucky for him I did, too.”

The Monster is nonplussed by this. Was that really its best shot? It couldn’t have been. So then it says, “What will you do?”

I consider this one. Is the Monster going easy on me? “Why, Monster,” I say, “I’ll do everything the same as always.”

By which I mean my everyday life. Such as it’s been. But the Monster has something more to say about that.

“What?” the Monster says derisively. “What about your so-called ‘KickAss Old Lady Magic Act’?”

Because of course the Monster, being privy to all my secrets, knows that one. The big secret I have kept to myself all these years.

“Why, Monster,” I say, maintaining my calm. “Could you mean that magic act I have been working on and refining these last ten years? Just waiting for the right time to unveil it?” I pray the Monster doesn’t notice the nervousness in my voice.

“And when was that going to be?” the Monster says sarcastically. It noticed the nervousness, I guess.

Then there’s a change. The Monster says, “I mean, I really want to know. When it’s going to be.” Strangely enough, I know the Monster does really want to know.

“It was hard to think about before,” I say. I’m picking my words carefully here. I realize that I didn’t know before why it was hard to think about.

The Monster knows. As usual, the Monster is one step ahead of me.

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?” the Monster says. Its voice is surprisingly gentle.

I contemplate this. I feel a huge wave of sadness that punches me in the stomach, like when you’re walking into the ocean and not paying enough attention to the water heading your way.

Yes, I think. It is indeed because of him.

“Because he’d be angry,” the Monster says.

“Well,” I say. “To be fair. He’d act angry. What he would be is . . . anxious.”

“And you have to protect him from that.”

“I . . . do I? I don’t think I’ve done a good job if that was . . .”

“Don’t mess with me. Of course you both thought that was your job.”

“But if he goes away with Amanda . . .”

“Then it’s Amanda’s job,” the Monster says, in a surprisingly satisfied tone.

“Poor Amanda,” I sigh.

“Hah!” the Monster says. “She can look out for herself.” And then, “But that wasn’t my best shot. I can hit you with something far worse. If you like.”

I feel some trepidation, but I’m committed now. “Okay,” I say, welcoming it in. “Hit me.”

“When you’re gone, what is he going to do?”

That stops me. Stops me cold.

Oh shit, I think. Monster, you’ve got me there. This pain in my chest is not going to stop. Is this all really going to mean I have to rip any care for my dear husband of nearly fifty years right out of my heart?

That would be a disappearing act to end all disappearing acts. And I’m not sure my performance would be up to standard.

***

He was gone all day. My husband, I mean. He texted me that he wouldn’t be there for dinner. It was nice of him to text me. He knew I would worry.

***

I knew there was a pain in my heart, but what caused the pain in my stomach?

The pain in my heart was the easy one to identify. The tearing him out. Or rather, him yanking himself out.

It didn’t need to be that way, I thought sadly. I wasn’t tearing him out myself. But there it was. Nothing to be done. That was up to him.

The pain in my stomach was my own fault. Ah, I thought. Monster, you were right. Even though you didn’t say it, I know you were right.

The pain in my stomach was stage fright.

I scolded myself. How is that possible? Think of all the years of being on stage with him, the Magician. “Ah,” the Monster says. “There you have it. On stage with him.

“What about being onstage just with yourself?”

Oh, Monster, that is it. I feel that. The stomachache is stage fright. From the thought of being on the stage by myself. All alone. There. In front of the crowd. Naked. Old.

Alone.

***

This act the Monster mentioned. I had indeed been working on it for years, in the old garage behind our house, the one where we kept our gardening tools. I told myself it was for my own amusement. For who would ever want to see a magic show given by an old woman? There was no such thing. I wasn’t a pioneer. Was it me who would be the first? Impossible, I told myself.

That didn’t stop me from going on with the tricks. With the magic.

***

At this point, unfortunately for my foot-dragging, the act was about as perfect as I could make it. It was also revelatory. The stomach pain’s obvious cause. For if my husband left me for Amanda, I’d have no more excuse. I’d have to do the act. It was what it was for.

 What exactly was this act? A good magic act, in this the twenty-first century, is one that reaches into the inner world, drags something previously in the shadows into the light and reveals it. Kind of the opposite of a disappearing act. An appearing act, we might call it.

This was a new way of doing magic. It was not spectacle. Or awe-inspiring mystery. It was story telling. Story telling about the performer on stage. Taking their deepest hopes and fears out of the hat.

It was in this that my dear husband’s show had begun to fail, had become old-fashioned. He didn’t see this was the problem, only that there was something that didn’t click for the audience. Not in the same way it had clicked when we were young.

At first this didn’t affect ticket sales. There is always a sort of lag between the time any act passes its sell-by date, and the time when the audience realizes they prefer something a bit more . . . fresh.

My husband was not a fool. He could feel that time coming. I suspected that as being another reason why, when Amanda presented herself, he saw her as a way to revive what he didn’t quite understand needed revision. After all, hadn’t I been a muse for him? Way back when? Why not Amanda, now?

Oh, Amanda, I thought mournfully, and then gave myself a shake. This was no time to worry about Amanda. “Sheer attempt at distraction,” I scolded my inner being. “Get on with it.”

For it was my inner being around which I had planned my act.

***

The idea came to me, treasonously enough, watching that young magician who particularly enraged my husband. I found his act fascinating. It was about his sorrow at having to reveal himself, his compulsion to get out there, and his worry that, after revealing himself, he would be killed. His terror that we, the audience, would realize he was nothing at the bottom.

“What a little whiner,” my husband complained, watching him on his first streamed special. It occurred to me that my husband had yet to perform on a streamed special. He scorned such a venue, saying it was hardly magic, since you could fix special effects in post.

I didn’t think this was the real reason he disliked the show.

I suspected, no, I knew, the real reason was that he could see, even, perhaps, before the audience, that this young magician’s act clicked. I could see it.

Was that why my husband was so angry with me when I suggested timidly that we might want to look into doing a streaming special ourselves? With his act? Because of that young magician and his success?

Probably.

We both read the reviews of the show the next day. My husband read them scornfully, laughing at some particularly good sarcastic turn of phrase in the (older) reviewer’s piece. “Adding ‘woke’ to magic just doesn’t cut it.” And “Displaying one’s neurosis is not showmanship.”

But I knew differently. I could hear the uneasiness in my husband’s voice, so of course I hurried to agree with him. But I knew differently. I knew the world had changed. Magic had changed with it. Magic was not about sleight of hand. Magic was becoming sleight of mind.

And I was here for it.

***

So I did what all magicians do. I revised old tricks to fit a new world.

All tricks, without exception, are based on a concept of distracting perception from where the mechanics of the trick take place. If the audience is directed to look away from that, your sleight of hand is safely invisible.

My act would start by having the stage manager, a nondescript middle-aged, even old woman in headset and glasses, sending out instructions to the ushers from the stage. She’d hurry off to get the backstage set up.

Then I would appear, and introduce myself. I would explain the distraction thing, while shuffling the cards. I would explain how I was distracting the audience by placing cards on the floor in front of me, and then inviting someone up to turn each card over as I went into the rows of chairs and plucked a card from each audience member’s ear in the front row.

The cards would match. I would sigh. “But you see,” I would say. “That was easy. You’re not much impressed. It’s hard for an older woman to impress.” I would sigh, go to the stage, and begin to vacuum it, tossing all the cards every which way.

“Can’t even vacuum correctly. Old lady. Put her in the trash can.”

Then I would sit disconsolately down, putting my hands over my face. Sighs from the audience (started by a plant who was my helper, though I hadn’t worked out who that would be yet). I would get down on my hands and knees—creaky, arthritic—gathering up the cards in a chaotic bundle.

Then, as if in sudden inspiration, I would say, “Oh, look. The Queen of Hearts. My favorite card.” I would take that card off the top of the messy collection and hold it up. I would sigh again. “Women need the support of other women.” And there would be the next card: another queen. And the one after that. Another queen. And the one after that. Another and another, and another, until they were all queens.

Then I would say, as if inspired, “Is there anyone else in the audience who could use some sisterly support?” There would be giggles. But always a few young women, and an older one or two would raise their hands. I would go to them, one by one, for them to choose. Each one of them would draw. All of them would draw the Queen of Hearts. I would fan out the cards and show: a normal deck. Only one queen.

I thought that was very neat. It needed a little work. But it was a nice little trick.

***

There were a few other tricks along the same psychological lines. I particularly liked my finale. This is rather fabulous, if I do say so myself. I would say, “We women have to juggle a lot.”

Then I would pick up a dish scrubber and send it into the air with a child’s toy, adding a checkbook, and a cellphone, and an orange. As I juggled these, one by one as they passed through my hands, they would catch on fire until I was juggling a bunch of fiery balls, faster and faster, audience gasping (I assumed then). I would begin to fade from exhaustion, gasping for breath. One by one, I would drop a ball, breathing hard. All the balls gone, I would give one last tortured gasp, and fall to the ground, dead, a heap of clothes.

The stage manager would reappear, headphones and microphone on her head, looking terrified, calling for me. She would go to the heap on the stage, and pull up the clothes.

Nothing. I would be no longer there.

The stage manager would freak. She would say something like, “Nobody panic. She has to be around here somewhere.” The ushers would reappear, searching the room for me. The audience would stand, look under their seats, look around, laugh uneasily. When the stage manager would pull off her headset, and let her hair down.

And of course, the stage manager is me. I would look at the audience and then I would sigh.

“We women are always multitasking.”

Laughter and applause. I’d take my bow.

That was pretty good, I thought.

I told Amanda about it the next time we got together. I wanted feedback from a young audience, and she was my only young friend.

“Oh,” she said. “I love it. I really do.”

That was nice. I almost forgave her for stealing my husband at that.

***

As my husband’s affair—if it could be called that—with Amanda progressed, I had a lot more time on my hands.

At least, I thought their affair had progressed. I mean, what else was he doing all those times he disappeared—poof!—only to return hours later?

Amanda ducked her head when I inquired casually just what the hell they were doing all that time.

“All what time?” she muttered, and got up to order me another glass of wine.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it. Privacy. Even if he is my own damn husband.” And then I’d thank her for the wine, which she paid for this time. I worried about that. I was pretty sure my husband wasn’t giving her any money. If he was, it was from a source I didn’t know about.

So you know, I worried.

Amanda noticed my look. “It’s okay,” she said. “I work here sometimes. I get drinks for free.” She gave a little toss of her head toward the barista, a reasonably good-looking young man about her own age. He kept his red-haired head down, so mainly all I could see were his white boy dreads. But even in the dimmish light, I could see his white boy skin turn red.

“Ah,” I said. “I see.” And it was clear that I did.

Amanda blushed.

Amanda was beautiful. There would be many more young men like the dreadlocked barista yearning after her. Buying her drinks. Doubtless this didn’t worry my husband. After all, he’d been here before.

I had been beautiful too. There had been many young men yearning after me, buying me drinks. But I chose my husband. It looked like Amanda was following the same path. Poor Amanda.

I contemplated this, my sympathy for Amanda’s path. Then a wicked thought occurred to me. An evil thought. A very very evil thought. I hugged the evil thought to myself.

“Amanda,” I said carefully. “Have you and my hub gotten to where you’re rehearsing as part of his act?”

“I, uh, that’s something we, uh, well, no, actually.” She blushed again. She was very pretty when she blushed. And such a nice child. I really thought she was a very nice girl.

“Do you want to be part of his act?” I said.

She looked a little sad. She nodded her head, and ducked it, embarrassed. “Yeah. But . . .” Her voice trailed off.

What was the problem, I wondered, annoyed now at how slow the husband appeared to be. I thought I knew what caused this. He just didn’t know how to go about it. He knew how to do his own bit. But how to incorporate anyone else—well, when we worked together, we’d been a lot younger. It was always me who managed negotiations with anyone else we needed for the show.

All of this I understood in a flash of evil intuition. So now the first part of my black-hearted scheme was put into motion.

“Amanda,” I said, leaning forward confidentially and putting one of my old hands on one of her young ones. “How would you like to be part of my act?”

She looked at me, and choked back a gasp. “Really?” she said.

“Really,” I said.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “I’d love it.”

***

That was how I stole my husband’s girlfriend to become a part of my debut act.

She was terrific, truthfully. I always say, if you want organizational ability, just look for a young woman without much money.

Of course she knew all the venues in town. Young people always do. And of course she was friends with the woman who ran a good small to midsize place, with all the stage setup requirements we needed for my show.

Another nice young woman. Bianka. Black wiry hair, stout no-nonsense build, skin like coffee, strong handshake. Going places.

She’d done a deal with the venue owner where he got a cut of the gate. Then she put on shows of her friends, for her friends. They didn’t make much money, but, she said, grinning, “He’s a trust fund baby, so he doesn’t care. Also he thinks he’s in love with me.” She and Amanda hooted at that one. I gathered Amanda and Bianka’s relationship had been a lot closer than the trust fund kid was ever going to get anywhere near.

I did briefly wonder if the husband knew about Amanda’s love life. Then I dismissed this. Of course he didn’t. I don’t imagine he thought about her life apart from him for a moment.

That made it all the more perplexing where he was going all those times he disappeared. Because he would be gone even when Amanda and I were rehearsing for the show at Bianka’s place.

“I like this act,” Bianka would say in a satisfying way. “This is gonna go great with my crowd.”

A lot of young women in her crowd. The audience I’d been waiting for. When we started out all those years ago, the ‘young women’ would never come alone. They only ever appeared clinging to the arm of their dates.

This is what we were told: always direct your act at the men. The men won’t come to an act directed toward women. And the women will come to anything, as long as they come with a man.

I mentioned this offhandedly to Bianka and Amanda. They burst out laughing.

“What happens when a woman comes with a woman? Or with a woman and a man?” Bianka said hilariously. Amanda took up the joke. “Or with two men and three women?” The girls giggled. Then laughed uproariously together.

I laughed too. But secretly I began to feel very sorry for my dear husband.

***

Feeling sorry for him didn’t translate into any increase in tenderness, though. Instead it steeled me to even greater feats of betrayal.

What he would have seen as betrayal.

I could hear him say it. “You’ve betrayed me. You’ve betrayed us,” he’d said to me that last argument we’d had about his act. I’d been trying to get a streaming special of it, and when I managed to find a young man producer who was intrigued by the idea, and who had an in with a particularly elite agency, the husband went into a panic. The panic, I assumed, was at the sheer novelty of it. The anxiety it caused. Would he be able to rise to the challenge? In the end it was easier to just shut the young man down, telling him that he was only interested in live performance. And then ranting at me afterwards, as if I’d threatened to drown our only child.

Which I guess our act was, in fact.

That was the end of our collaboration. Not that I minded much. It had been coming for a long time.

No, the betrayal now would consist of my going on without him. Which I did. With a relish I had not suspected in myself.

Bianka briskly moved things forward. “Empty slot, three day show, a great weekend, October, wonderful month for magic.”

“Bianka,” I protested. “It’s not ready. I don’t have the vacuum bit completely clean yet . . . ”

The girls just laughed at me. “It’s as clean as it’s ever going to be,” Amanda said, putting her arms affectionately around my neck and giving me a hug. “Okay, Bianka, we’re on.”

I stood there, frozen.

“Look at her,” Bianka said fondly. “Better stage fright now than later. And now,” she shooed Amanda out ahead of her, “Amanda and I have work to do.”

“What work?” I managed to croak out. My nerves were shot at the thought of all this.

“Marketing,” they chimed simultaneously. And disappeared out the door, leaving me feeling faint. I collapsed on the old sofa in Bianka’s office, holding my heart where it was jumping out of my chest.

Amanda’s head poked back in. “By the way,” she said breezily. “Have we fixed on a stage name for you?”

“Me?” I said.

“Yes, you,” she said, laughing. “We need a name for your act. We can’t use your old stage name. That was when you were the sawee and he was the sawer.”

This was a joke between us. She said she had pushed back when my dear husband suggested her as the lady in the box, and she had suggested they do a turnabout: her as the sawer, him as the sawee. “Think how much cooler that would have been!” she said wistfully. “But he wasn’t having any of it, I bet,” I said. “No,” she said shortly.

I was sort of surprised their relationship had survived that, but on the other hand, Amanda was so very beautiful.

Now she looked sad. I patted her on the hand, and she shook it off, turning back to the business at hand.

“Let’s think,” she said. “Name for the act.”

“Um,” I said. “Any ideas?”

Bianka’s head appeared beside Amanda’s.

“Now that you mention it,” she said, the nonchalance of the tone belied by the gleam in her eyes. “Amanda and I think we have a great one for you.”

“Actually,” Amanda said with pretend casualness, “we think it’s the obvious one.”

I looked at them, half skeptical, half fearful.

“Well?” I said finally.

They looked at each other, and then they looked at me, their faces convulsed with a secret merriment. Then they said in a chorus, “The Magician’s Wife.”

I gaped at that. I stood up in surprise. Then I grasped it. Of course. They were right. It was the only possible name for the act.

I had to sit down again. I thought I was having a heart attack or a stroke. Concerned, they rushed to my side, one on each side.

“Are you okay?” Amanda asked anxiously while Bianka chafed one of my hands with her own.

I opened my eyes wide. “The Magician’s Wife,” I said. “It’s the only name possible.”

They laughed then with relief. And shortly after, I began to laugh with them. We three laughed till we cried.

And then I took us all out for pizza and wine.

It was a wonderful night.

***

In spite of all this, or, more likely, because of it, I found myself thinking about all the things I had done wrong in our marriage—reasons he might have to be wistful himself about roads not taken, affairs not had. I started to think hard about why he might feel the way he did.

I started to notice how sad he looked sometimes. How lost. I began to remember how he had always been the sun in any gathering—the center of everyone’s attention. It began to occur to me how painful it must feel to be pushed out of the sun into the shade.

Of course, being a woman, I had never experienced such a thing. I was always in the shade. That was a woman’s place when I was young: always the one doing the admiring. Never the admired.

Then I wondered. If he was in love with Amanda, and she was in love with him, why did he look so sad?

Eventually it dawned on me. It was Fred. Wasn’t it? It had to be Fred.

But I didn’t get that until later.

***

Fred joined our little team when we needed a tech guy to handle certain backstage issues. “I know someone,” Amanda said. “He can do anything with a machine.” She turned pink. Dimwitted as I was, I didn’t put the blush together with any particular facts.

Not even after Fred arrived. Not even after I recognized him as the white kid with the pale skin and the dreads, from the coffee shop.

That’s how dumb I can be.

***

Fred was welcomed into our little coven with enthusiasm. He could, indeed, do everything tech. I marveled at my luck without noticing anything about his own.

We all were having a marvelous time. There truly is nothing like putting on a show together, solving the problems of it as a team. Especially as a team that works well, enjoys itself, and goes out for drinks afterwards.

Drinks paid for by the mothership, of course. The girls had shyly suggested we go celebrate at the coffeehouse, but I wanted to give them champagne. So my chosen venue was a rather romantic rooftop bar. Sitting ’round the fire pit, view of the city beneath, snacks and drinks. Bianka scarfed up the smoked salmon and gave me a thumbs up. Amanda shyly kissed me on my cheek. Fred just looked stunned, until, I believe, his third glass of bubbly.

I was having a wonderful time. Really, sometimes I felt this was the best time of my life. During the rehearsals, Amanda and Bianka would come up with stage problem solutions impossible for me to imagine on my own. Enthusiastic Fred always found a way to implement them. That changeover of mine from The Magician’s Wife from and to the Stage Manager. It was his rig-out of the Stage Manager’s costume as a one piece with a zipper connected to a string up the back that made the whole thing work. And I was grateful.

I was so grateful that I ordered drinks and snacks all ’round again, and left the children to it.

As I waited for the elevator, I savored a newfound, strange happiness. Then, laughing to myself at Fred’s cleverness with that, and other, more secret, effects, I was seized with an urge to head back in and tell him in great detail what a genius he was.

At that moment, I did not notice that I had never mentioned to Amanda and Bianka what geniuses they were. No need to coddle women, my unconscious said, obviously including myself in the No Coddle Zone. But men. Men are meant to be coddled and praised, and coaxed along. Told they are the center of things. Men are meant to stand in the light.

Not by coincidence, this was the night where I realized that was where I had entirely gone wrong. After what happened next, the blinding light of a new idea struck me full force.

First, humming happily to myself, I turned back to the roof bar to tell Fred how wonderful I thought him. I swooped in, and caught them holding hands. Amanda and Fred, I mean.

Bianka had disappeared. I realized later it was to leave the two lovebirds alone. Tact. That was Bianka all over. Also she was so much smarter than me.

I skidded to a stop and blinked. How stupid can you get? I thought to myself. How blind? I had noticed something like this way back at the coffeehouse. But I hadn’t made much of it. All caught up in my own drama, I thought to myself.

And why not? I thought then in a flash. Why wasn’t I allowed to be caught up in my own drama? Why was it only men who were allowed?

That was when I realized my mistake. My blind spot. That was then, I thought. This is now.

This is an entirely new act. With entirely new roles for the players.

Entirely new spotlights shining on entirely new places on stage.

I giggled. They looked so guilty. Amanda snatched her hand away.

I pretended to look severe. I put my hands on my hips. “Amanda,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re cheating on my husband.”

They both looked at me, mouths open, aghast. I burst out laughing. “Oh, you silly children!” I said. And I sat down again. “I need more champagne,” I said, picking up my glass, which thankfully had not yet been removed. “Unless I’m in the way?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” they said, falling all over themselves to answer. Fred tried to pour me more champagne and just broke his glass instead. He looked at me forlornly.

“Fred,” I said in my most solemn voice. “Men are human too. Even if,” I said taking another deep swig of the wine, “we women have up till now kept that a secret from them. A magic trick of our own, if you know what I mean.”

And I started to laugh. Of course he looked at me openmouthed. He didn’t know what I meant. But Amanda got it. She got it right away.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s been our fault all along.” And she toasted me.

“Yes,” I said. “Our fault.” And I drank some more.

Fred stared at us. “I have no idea what you two are talking about.”

Amanda handed him her glass, and he drank from that.

“But,” he said sheepishly, “I guess I’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” Amanda said.

“Sooner,” I agreed.

Amanda and I looked at each other. Was this what it would have been like with my daughter? That we would understand each other without words?

“That would have been so great,” I murmured. To my complete unsurprising lack of surprise, Amanda understood that, too.

She laid her hand on one of mine.

“Not ‘would have’,” she said. “It is.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”

We looked each other in the eyes, and I thought how happy I was. And it never would have happened, I thought, if my dear husband hadn’t imagined he was in love with someone new.

Fancy that.

***

Fred drove us both home in my car, which was great, since Amanda and I got so tipsy anything else would have been a disaster waiting to happen.

He tried to get out at my house, but I just shooed them both away. “Take the car, take it,” I said. “Bring it back to the stage tomorrow.”

I didn’t wait to see his answer, just zigzagged, singing to myself, as I waltzed up the pathway to our house. The lights turned on one by one. The car drove away behind me, and I heard Amanda call out, “Love you!”

“Love you, too!” I called back without turning. Then the front door opened. There stood my furious husband.

“You love me?” he hissed. “What the hell is this? And where the hell have you been?”

I stopped and thought that one over. I might have been drunk, but several important facts struck me now as undeniably clear.

“Well yes,” I said, and I swooped grandly up the path past him into the house, marveling at my own unexpected physical steadiness. “I do love you. And I do need to tell you where I’ve been. In fact,” I said, kicking my shoes off as I entered the hall and turned into the living room where he had providentially gotten a small fire going, “where I’ve been is one of the most important of the important facts.”

I sat down in his chair. It was the closest one to the fire. I looked at him expectantly, and he sat, without seeming to know what he was doing, in mine.

“By the way,” I said. “Do we have anything to drink?”

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” he said. I just looked at him. He sighed and got up. He came back with two tumblers and a bottle of scotch.

And we got down to it.

***

To this day, I’m unsure what happened. How is it possible I could articulate so much then that I had been mute about for so many years? More than that, how is it possible I can remember, almost word for word, what I said? And yet, it’s so. All I can think is that the words must have been building, experience after experience, tattooing themselves in sequence on my soul. So that all I had to do when I was ready—ready? More than ready!—was hold my soul to the light and read them off.

It was magic.

He started to talk. I held up one minatory finger.

“No,” I said. “You listen. You listen to the end. And then whatever you want to say, you say then.”

To my vague surprise, he sat back, took a swig of his drink, and, for once, shut his mouth when asked.

Another magic trick. One I’d been waiting for our entire life together.

***

“You see, my dear,” I said, smiling benevolently down at him and stretching luxuriously in the warmth of the fire, “it’s quite true that I love you. How could it be otherwise? How else could I have put up with the years of your overvaluation of yourself and your tiny concerns? With the things you said, and the airs you gave yourself? How else could I have seen past these, past the façade you invented for yourself as the Great and Powerful Oz, back to the little boy hiding in the cellar behind him? Love you? Of course I loved you. Of course I love you. You idiot. Not what you’ve done, or who you think you’ve become. Not your body, or your mind, but both of these, most of all because they, as they changed over the years, came out of your spirit. And it’s your spirit I’ve always loved.”

I think I stopped there and brooded. As I said it, I saw it was true. It was his spirit that I loved. It was my spirit that loved his spirit.

It was true love. That was magical, that was. Real magic, not just stage.

He was very still. I saw him turning that one over again and again in his mind.

“But,” I said, holding up a finger. “Love does not mean you always do right by the loved one.”

I saw him begin to protest, and I forestalled him.

“I’m not talking about how you’ve treated me, even though I know you love me too. I’m not talking right now about how you’ve insisted on using, on misusing, my talents and my energy for your own pathetic need to be important. Though you and I both know you’re guilty of that, don’t we? No need to speak. Just a nod will be fine.”

He gave me a look. A tragic look, to be honest. And a gulp. Then a nod.

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad we got that one straight. No, I’m talking about the wrongs I’ve done you.”

A hopeful look on his face. But I wasn’t letting him get away with that one.

“No,” I said. “Alas for your ego. I do not mean all the little times I laughed at you, or said something hurtful, or didn’t do what you wanted, though I know you’re hoping I’ll lean that way. So that you can think you and I are even. Quits. Not gonna happen. So get that one out of your head.”

I still can’t quite believe, as I write this, how it all came flowing out like that. I must have been very drunk.

“I’m not talking about the teeny tiny wrongs of one wife to one husband. I’m talking about a much bigger thing. A century’s old problem. Millennia, for all I know.” I brooded further.

“No,” I said regretfully. And I really felt regret. All the way through. Not just for myself, but for the thousands of years of women who had gone before me, thinking that their sacrifices were made out of love. “I’m talking about how we women have let you men think you knew what you were doing. All this time. Because it would have hurt you so much to think you didn’t. In fact, we were afraid it would have killed you.

“We thought we were doing this out of love. But I think now it was a kind of cowardice. You could be to blame for all the inevitable mistakes we humans would make as we went forward. You could bear the responsibility. We could do the work. We could let you pretend to do the magic. You would strut, and harangue, and let us get on with what was really important: with loving and feeding and making sure we survived.

“The real magic. Not the kind we let you perform. Not the kind we applauded when you did. Letting you think that your act was all that really mattered in the world. That you knew what you were doing.

“That was our error. Because you didn’t know what you were doing. And not knowing what you were doing, you didn’t notice that things changed. As they always do. You kept on as if you were the lords of the universe we let you believe you were. And while we weren’t paying attention, you were out there ruining our world.”

He opened his mouth to speak. “You protest?” I said amiably. “You perhaps would like to argue? You say the fast overheating planet, the wars, the misery, the upcoming endgame for the younger generation, you say none of that is down to you?”

He closed his mouth. “No,” I said. “I didn’t think you would say that.” He shook his head.

“Hah,” I said. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘But you’ve gone global, my dear wife. You’ve flown past our own personal drama onto the world’s, in an attempt to get past your own personal hurt that I’ve fallen in love with a younger woman’.” I peered at him. He looked aghast. “Hah,” I said, satisfied. “I knew that was what you were thinking. And don’t worry, I will now explain how our own little intimate travail is the same as the world’s. Writ large.”

Then I made a teensy tiny mistake, at least as far as this chronicle is concerned. I had one more drink.

What I said after that is a blank. Can’t remember a thing about it. All gone. And then, I assume, I rose with what dignity I could muster, and went to bed.

***

At least I assume that was what happened. Since I woke up the next morning with a giant hangover, naked, alone, in our wide bed, with the morning sun (was it morning?) streaming in from the garden through the window.

Painfully I turned my head on the pillow. Ah, ruffled bedclothes. So I had not slept alone.

I tried to make something of that. But the brain just was not functioning.

Then I had another surprise. My husband appeared by the bed.

And he was holding a cup of tea.

***

Now, theoretically, through the years, our deal had been that whoever got up first made the cup of coffee (his) and the cup of tea (mine). Supposedly we would rotate the roster. This, of course, rarely happened. I usually got up first. And by ‘usually’, I mean ‘just about always except for my birthday when I purposefully lie there pretending to sleep till he wakes up’.

I hadn’t really minded, to tell you the truth. For one thing, he never made my tea just right. Sometimes when we were younger, he didn’t even rinse the cup out enough, so I had to pretend to get up for something else, rinse out the cup, and remake the tea before going back to bed and saying, “Mmm, yum.”

I didn’t mind. But it was a bit of a shock. Was it my birthday? I wondered, bewildered, before I remembered, through my throbbing head, what had happened the night before. Now I was thoroughly confused. Logic had it that after my diatribe he would flee the house.

Of course, he couldn’t have fled to Amanda. I assumed she had spent the night at Fred’s, or if vice versa, she certainly wouldn’t have been home to visitors. I giggled thinking the husband had gotten to Amanda’s and seen my car parked in front. In spite of myself, I clocked a warm feeling of sympathy for the poor sap in front of me.

“Here,” he said. He handed me the cup, gently holding my hands around it so it wouldn’t spill. I was pretty wonky, and the handholding was much appreciated. I took a big gulp and sighed.

“Better,” I said.

He continued to astonish me. Like a magic trick, he disappeared again, reappearing holding a cup of coffee. And then he did the Amazing Husband Reappearing Trick. He climbed back into bed.

“Oh,” I murmured to myself, drinking my tea. “Okay, good.”

We lay there in the morning sunlight, drinking our respective beverages. I had a lot to think about. But not many brain cells functioning with which to achieve this feat.

I finished my cup and set it carefully down on my bedside table. To my astonishment, I heard him set his down on his. He got out of bed. As I watched, he carefully removed his bathrobe and tossed it over a chair.

He climbed back in. He smiled at me.

And then he said, “Do you want to have sex?”

It was so unexpected, I laughed out loud.

I said, cautiously, “You mean old people sex?”

“The very type,” he said, taking me in his arms and looking into my eyes.

That did it for me. The eyes. His were gentle and kind and they looked right at me. That hadn’t happened in a long time.

“Well yes, ” I said. “Thank you. I’d like that very much.”

***

We were very careful with each other the next few days. We didn’t say much to each other. I was scared to say too much. Also, my opening night was coming up, and the thought that he might hear about it took my breath away. I was sure that would be considered a betrayal that would never be forgotten or forgiven.

And yet I knew I had to push forward with it if I wasn’t to die to myself. Much as I was enjoying this break in marital hostilities, and fervently as I wished it to continue, if it was that or me, I had to choose me.

Oddly enough, you know where I got the courage to stake out this position? It was Amanda. Amanda and Bianka. It was even Fred. I just could never, not after all the work they’d done, let them down.

The show must go on.

So I held his hand when it was offered, and held my peace.

“You’re very quiet lately,” he offered in a tentative voice.

“Mmm,” I said, and slipped away to the garage outside for one last practice sleight of hand.

***

Opening night, and all my jitters were that it was going to be the final nail in the coffin of my marriage.

In a way, I should have been grateful. I didn’t have any of my usual stage fright. Amanda hugged me, and pushed a bit of seashell into my hand for luck, while she whispered, “It’s going to be great.” I appreciated it, but I wondered why she looked so concerned.

She was worried I was scared, the darling. And I was. But not about that.

I hardly remember anything from that night except my own obsessive private worries. And yet, apparently I did a pretty good job. It must have been so automatic after all those years of secret practice. The girls were beyond tremendous. Fred, too. He did miss one cue, but, I was told after, I waited patiently, told a joke that wasn’t in the script, and he jerked back to attention when he heard laughter where there wasn’t supposed to be any.

“A joke?” I said, bewildered after, as Amanda and Bianka mobbed me backstage, crying with relief, laughing with triumph. “I told a joke?”

“Get back out there!” Amanda ordered. “You first, we’ll follow.”

Dazed, I turned, and then the onstage transformation took hold. I marched out, bowed again and again to the applause, counted the small but fortunately packed house with one eye as well as I could see into a darkened room, and then made a practiced gesture to the team to come out.

They did, and more applause and more hooting. “Friends of yours?” I said, grinning. The girls grinned back at me. “Friends of YOURS now,” Amanda said. She and Bianka hugged me there. “Like us,” Bianka said. “Forever,” Amanda said.

It was a glorious night.

What I can remember of it anyway.

***

That wasn’t the end of it though.

After the children and I had our celebratory champagne backstage, and made a date to meet at the rooftop bar, and I was back in my (rather drab after all that) street clothes, I shooed them out ahead of me. “I’ll lock up,” I said.

I just wanted a moment to myself. I wanted to be in the theater all alone, looking out at the stage and the little space where we had set up the folding chairs for the audience, and just feel it. Feel myself all alone, about to set out all alone on a wide sea.

I’d miss my husband. But that was okay. He’d be all right.

I felt in my pocket, and there was the seashell Amanda had given me. I clutched it with one hand. With the other I shut down the lights.

And went out into the dark alley, locking the stage door behind me.

***

I know what you’re thinking right now. I mean, if you’re a sane person in the year 2023. Especially if you’re young, and most especially if you’re a young woman. You’re thinking, “Why in the world is she with this guy? Why does she even care? Why not move on?”

I get it. I understand the concern. But let me say this: until you have known someone inside and out for almost fifty years, you have no idea what love is. What life is. More importantly, what your own life is. Even if that person has made it impossible for your life to turn out the way you had dreamed. Maybe even because your life has turned out differently.

And when I say this, I do not just mean that the someone is a husband. They can be a partner of any kind. Or a child. Or a pet, even, though then you have to count it in dog years.

Or a home. Or a neighborhood. Or a country.

Any of these, as long as you stay engaged. As long as you don’t cast them, or it, away, hoping to find something better somewhere, somehow, someone.

As long, I must say, as you don’t mistake stage magic for reality.

That is all I have to say about that.

I think something like that went through my mind that night as I locked up that backstage door. I had not mistaken fake magic for reality, neither on the stage, nor in my home. And both of them had been a pretty good performance as a result.

No matter what happened, I could be proud of that.

***

That was when the real magic happened.

He was waiting for me. He was standing there, sheepish, just out of the light.

He was holding flowers.

We just stood there, staring at each other.

The flowers, I noted automatically, weren’t the usual supermarket ones from Ecuador or Brazil. Those are exotic, but scentless.

These I could smell from where I stood. Roses. Peonies. Jasmine. He must have gone to a florist and asked for them by name.

I hadn’t even known he knew which were my favorites.

The scent shocked me so much I couldn’t speak. Then I got another shock. He spoke first.

“Um,” he said.

My eyes widened.

“These are for you,” he said, ducking his head. You know what he looked like there in the dark? He looked like he had when he was about twenty-three years old. He’d brought me flowers then, after the first time we’d made love. The supermarket kind. It was all he could afford.

“Thank you,” I managed to croak out. We moved toward each other awkwardly, bumping into each other. “Sorry,” we said at the same time.

I took the flowers. We turned in unison and walked down the street. In silence.

We got to the car—my car—and he used his key to open the driver’s side door.

Instead of getting in, he held the door open for me. I slid in and started the car with my own keys. To my surprise again, he got in beside me.

I handed him the flowers. He put them carefully on his lap.

We drove off. Together.

***

“Where are we going?” he said in his humorous voice. I appreciated the bravery that went into that. “Well,” I said as noncommittally as I could manage. “We’re going to celebrate. My success. With my team.”

“With your team,” he said. And he laughed. It wasn’t a bitter laugh. It was a lighthearted one. I considered it. It was as if he put down a burden that had almost been too heavy for him to carry.

Sheer relief.

I drove on.”You know what,” he said tentatively. “You were very good tonight. I mean, on that stage.”

It was a good thing there was so little traffic that late. I swerved the car before I got myself back under control.

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it.

“There was this one moment that you could work on,” he started to say, but I snorted, laughing so hard, that he stopped. “Sorry,” he said.

We sat in silence till I got to the parking lot of the hotel. We went up to the rooftop bar in silence.

In the elevator, he took my hand.

He let me lead. Of course, I was the one who knew where we were going. Still holding hands, we walked to the table out on the roof.

The children were laughing together. Bianka saw us coming first. She gasped and stood up. Amanda and Fred looked our way. I swear Fred blanched. Amanda, though, straightened herself up.

“Hello, Amanda,” my husband said as we got to the table. I raised my eyes to Bianka. We both wondered what would happen next.

“Hello,” Amanda said in a level voice. “This is Fred.” Fred stood up, and he and my husband shook hands.

We all sat down. Bianka, bless her, signaled frantically to the waiter that we needed more champagne.

“Well,” my husband said after we’d sat in silence till it arrived. “I hope you don’t mind if an old magic hand offers you some hearty congratulations. Great show. Really.”

We all sat there, stunned. He poured out the champagne into all our glasses, and then he raised his for a toast.

Automatically, we raised ours in turn.

“I’d like to make a toast,” he said. “To the Magician’s Wife.”

We all toasted. We all laughed. That night we all were one big happy family.

That was magic.

***

Not just that night either. “The Magician’s Wife” did really well. This was mainly due to Bianka. She had found her calling. Marketing, publicity, agenting, whatever you want to call it. Somehow that girl managed to sell the idea of a streaming special, and the special led to a tour. We lost Bianka to her own career after a year, of course. She opened a talent agency for younger magicians in Los Angeles. She’s doing fantastically well. I’m so proud of her.

“You started it,” she said to me the day we all showed up for the open house at her first office. “Feminist magic. It’s the newest thing.”

Fred and Amanda stuck with me, though. And to my surprise, my husband stuck with us too. He pottered around the local show, doing odd jobs. Except when I went on tour, and he stayed home to supervise what we were having done to the little house in our back yard. I could afford a studio now, one in town near the bigger theater where I sometimes appeared. So what we decided together was to turn our old garage into a tiny house. Fred and Amanda were going to move in.

“It’ll be perfect,” Amanda said. “Just big enough but not too big to clean.”

“Yes,” I said, agreeing with her. I didn’t tell her my secret thought. Which was that it wouldn’t be big enough when the children started coming.

But then we could move into it, my husband and I. Fred and Amanda and the children could have the big house.

I kept quiet about this plan. But I noticed when I returned from the tour, that my husband was laying out the tiny house exactly the way he and I would want it. The galley kitchen. The windows letting in the sun and the view from the garden. The tiny sitting room for the two chairs and a table by the small fireplace.

The bigger bedroom. Room for the bigger bed and shelves on either side.

I looked at what he was doing. I looked at him.

He looked back at me. And he grinned.

“What?” he said. “You think after fifty years I don’t know what you’ve got planned?”

I kissed him. “Want to have sex?” I said.

“You mean old people’s sex?” he said.

I linked my arm through his and led him to our bedroom in the big house. “I do indeed.”

“I accept,” he said happily.

“But first,” I said. “Before we begin, I want the answer to one question.”

He waited. Expectant.

“Where,” I asked carefully, “had you disappeared to? You know what I’m talking about. All those days and nights you disappeared when I thought you were with Amanda. You can’t have been with Amanda. Unless, of course, you were having a threesome with Fred.”

He laughed out loud at that. Which just shows you how much he’d changed. Before I wouldn’t have dared the joke. And he pulled at my clothes till I was undressed while he explained.

“Well,” he said. “I was making my own tour.”

He pulled off his clothes, and we both stood there naked.

“All the places,” he said, “where we both started out.” He reached out gently and pulled me to him, both of us toppling onto the bed. “Together,” he added.

“The old club,” he said, kissing my forehead. He pulled the covers up over us, even though we were both warm. “Our first apartment,” he said, kissing my cheek. “The place we went to talk about our future together,” he said, kissing my chin.

“You mean my special spot at the beach?” I said, struggling to get up in my astonishment. “The place you complained was too windy? You actually went there?”

“Ssssh,” he said, pushing me back down gently. He kissed me on the lips. “Sssssh.”

He sat down on the bed beside me. He had a thoughtful expression on his face. The kind you get when you are about to say something of importance. That you have never said before, and probably will never say again.

I looked at him expectantly. He did not disappoint. He had one more surprise. But first the distraction from where the sleight of hand was being prepared.

“Those flyers of yours were all over town. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. I should have known, but it was too scary for me to think about.

Then, sly, he moved seamlessly to the kicker.

Always the showman.

“It dawned on me,” he said, and he looked up at the ceiling as if he was afraid of my reaction. As if the audience would laugh instead of applaud. “That Amanda looked just like you. I mean, when we were young.”

I didn’t laugh.

“Yes,” I said carefully. “I had noticed that.”

He looked at me now and smiled in an embarrassed sort of way. “I thought you might have,” he said. He was quiet then. The kind of dramatic pause he was always so good at in the years of our act together.

“But Amanda isn’t like you. Not at all.”

“A little,” I said.

“She’s like you were,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”

He looked like he was thinking about what to say now. Thinking hard.

Sometimes that’s what you do. Another dramatic pause.

“I’m not like I was,” he said finally.

“No,” I agreed.

“But I didn’t know,” he said.

“No,” I agreed again sympathetically. “That’s true too.”

“I’m like I was in one way. That dawned on me when I was out there, thinking.”

“What way was that?” I said in a pretend casual voice. “If you feel like telling me.”

“Yes,” he said, looking off into space again. “I did really love you.”

“Did?” I said, my voice cracking without my being able to help it. This is where the audience worries the trick is not going to come off.

“Did,” he agreed. “I mean, my young self loved your young self.”

“That’s true,” I said again, and the sadness for what was and could never come again crept into my voice. The sadness for what had disappeared.

That was when he performed his final magic trick. He pulled a scarf out of the hat.

“What dawned on me was this. The person who could have loved Amanda has grown old. He needs someone new.”

“Me,” I said breathless.

“You,” he agreed. We looked at each other. And we smiled.

I think I’ll draw a curtain over what came next. All I can say is, I applauded.

***

Later we had lunch together. It was the lentil soup I had frozen the day he ran out, so angry with me. The day we were so angry at each other.

We weren’t angry that day. We sat there, peacefully eating our soup.

He finished his. I got up to clear the bowls, but he put his hand on mine and said, “Wait a second. I’ve got one more thing to say.”

Obedient, I sat back down to listen.

“When I was young,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “I hated my elbows. Too bony. I thought girls would laugh at them. I always tried to hide them when I did my act.”

I nodded. I remembered that.

“Then one night before I went on, you came up to me and rolled my shirt sleeves up. You said, ‘Don’t hide those elbows. I love those elbows.’ Do you remember that?”

I didn’t remember that.

“I looked at you, and I thought, ‘Don’t fuck this one up.'”

“I like your elbows,” I said.

“I almost fucked this up,” he said.

“I’m very glad,” I said, “that you didn’t.” Then I asked if he wanted seconds.

“Yes, please,” he said. “I’ll get it. You stay where you are.”

He picked up our bowls and served it out for both of us. Brought it back to the table and sat back down.

We smiled at each other.

“This is good,” he said. “Even better than I remember.”

“It’s always better after you freeze it for awhile,” I said.

He looked at me and grinned.

“We are talking about soup,” I said sternly. But I grinned too.

We sat there, eating our second helpings together. It really is true. After you leave it for a while, it just tastes better.