Late Return

My name is Sammie and I'm thirty-eight years old, and I have worked the front desk at the Maplewood Curling Club for eleven years. My husband Bruno is forty-one and he does magic. Not birthday-party magic, or not only that, but actual shows at actual bars, and most months the shows pay less than the gas to get there. We've been married thirteen years. He proposed at twenty-seven during a pumpkin-carving contest at a pumpkin patch off Route 9, down on one knee with orange pulp all over his sleeve, and I said yes before he finished the sentence because I'd known for two years I would.

So the annual contest means something to us. That's the background you need.

It was a Friday in October and I opened the club at four. The league players come in at six, the contest people come in at seven, and in between there's this dead hour where the building just hums and nobody wants anything from me. I used that hour to go through the lost and found, which I do maybe twice a year and should do more often, because it had gotten to the point where the bin under the desk was more bin than found.

Most of it was junk. Four single gloves. A water bottle with a sticker half peeled off. A knitted hat so sad looking I almost felt bad throwing it in the keep pile. And then, near the bottom, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag like somebody was hiding it, there was a book.

It was a library book. That part was clear right away, because the plastic cover had the Maplewood Public Library sticker on the spine, and there was a date stamp card glued inside the front cover, the old kind, in the little paper pocket. The last stamp was dated thirty-nine years ago. Somebody had checked this book out in 1985 and just never brought it back.

The title was printed on the spine in faded gold letters: The Conjurer's Art of Amusement. I figured it was some old magic book, which made me think of Bruno, which made me smile, and I sat down on the desk chair to look at it before I put it in the return bin.

Bruno collects old magic books. He has a shelf in the garage that he organizes by era and complains about constantly because the humidity warps the covers. He'd want to see this one. That was my first thought, just a small warm thought, the kind you have about your husband when something reminds you of him.

Then I opened the book and my face got hot.

It was a guide to magic tricks, all right, but a good chunk of the tricks were what the author, writing in 1912, apparently considered amusements for married couples. There were line drawings. There were line drawings of a woman in a floor length gown being sawed in half by a man in a tuxedo, except the drawing made it very clear she wasn't wearing very much under the gown. There were chapters on production tricks, things appearing and disappearing, and the things appearing and disappearing were not doves. There was a page about a trick called the Vanishing Handkerchief where the handkerchief in the illustration was clearly a stand-in for something else, and the author's caption said, in that stiff old-timey prose, that the gentleman must practice diligently before performing for the lady.

I sat there in the empty club with my coffee going cold and read forty pages. The hour where nobody wants anything from me turned out to be the hour I wanted quite a lot of something, and my husband wasn't even in the building yet.

Here's the honest part, or as honest as I get on a page like this. Bruno and I have been in a dry spell. Not a fight, not a cold war, just a dry spell, the kind that creeps up on you over a couple of years until you realize it's been a while and neither of you knows how to bring it up anymore. We still like each other. We still laugh at the same dumb stuff. But the bed has been mostly for sleeping, and at thirty-eight I am not ready for the bed to be mostly for sleeping. So when I read a chapter about a card trick where the lady's card keeps reappearing in places the illustrations suggested were progressively more interesting, I closed the book and made a decision that felt reckless and small at the same time.

I was going to tease my husband with a forty-year-overdue library book, and see what happened.

* * *

Bruno came in at six with his arms full of pumpkins and his coat open like he'd jogged from the car. He's a big man, Bruno, broad through the shoulders from hauling his own equipment to gigs for twenty years, and he still gets excited about things the way some men get excited about playoff games. Pumpkins were one of those things.

"I got the good ones," he said, setting them down on the bar top one at a time like he was dealing cards. "The guy at the patch saved me the big tall one. Sammie, look at this thing, it's practically a column."

"It's a nice column," I said. The book was sitting on the desk behind me, face down, which I never do to library books, and I could feel it there like a hand on my shoulder.

He came around the bar to kiss me hello, which he does, every time, thirteen years, and I let it be a longer kiss than the usual hello kiss. He noticed. I felt him notice, a little pause before he pulled back.

"Okay," he said. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. Yet." I picked up the book and held it against my chest with the spine toward me, like a dealer holding cards. "Question. If somebody found a vintage magic book, circa 1912, in our lost and found, would you want to see it?"

His whole face changed. That's the thing about Bruno, he has never once learned to hide an emotion, whatever the magicians' code says about keeping a blank face. "Vintage? How vintage? Is there a dust jacket?"

"More vintage than your shelf. Different subject than your shelf, though." I turned it around and handed it to him open, right to the page with the sawed-in-half lady.

I watched him read it. First the drawing, then the caption, then the drawing again. His eyebrows went up and stayed up. "Sammie."

"That's not even the good page."

"There's a better page?"

"There's a whole better chapter." I flipped it to the Vanishing Handkerchief and set it on the bar between the pumpkins. He read that one slower. I watched his ears go pink, which happens to him, always has, and I have not seen those ears go pink in a long time and I had forgotten how much I liked it.

"This is a library book," he said, like that was the important part.

"Checked out in 1985. It's thirty-nine years overdue. Whoever had it decided they'd rather pay than give it back, and then didn't pay either, and then left it in a plastic bag under our desk."

"Doesn't a front desk professional have feelings about overdue books?" He was still looking at the illustration while he said it, which undercut his point some.

"Deb can have it back Monday. Tonight it's contest equipment." I took the book back before he could argue and carried it to the back room, where the contest tables were already set up in a row. Six stations, six pumpkins, carving kits and newspaper spread everywhere. The prize is a year of free ice time and the rivalry between the Tuesday league and the Thursday league over it is genuinely ugly for a suburban club where the worst crime on record is somebody moving somebody's broom.

Bruno followed me back with his pumpkins and set up at our usual station at the end. He kept glancing at the book, which I had placed on the corner of our table like a centerpiece. "You're going to leave it there all night? People are going to look at it."

"People are going to be busy carving. And you're going to be busy not looking at page forty-seven."

"Which one is forty-seven." He reached for it and I pulled it back.

"Later. Tonight, at home." I spread newspaper over our table and handed him the little saw knife that never cuts anything. "The book isn't a prize. It's just not contest equipment."

"You can't withhold a historical document, that's, that's basically a magic clause violation." He was grinning while he said it though, and he cut the lid off his pumpkin with more attention than the job needed, and every couple minutes his eyes came back to the corner of the table where the book sat.

The room filled up around seven. Neighbors, league people, a few kids from the junior program dragging parents in, all of it the usual noise. Bruno traced his design on the pumpkin with a washable marker, some profile he'd been planning for a week, and leaned close to me while the room got loud.

"Page forty-seven," he said, quiet, near my ear like he was telling me a secret about a trick. "When we get home. You'll show me."

"That was my plan, yes."

"Good." He went back to his pumpkin. His ears were still pink.

The contest judge is Gil Prater, who has judged the carving contest for as long as I've been working here, which is eleven years, and probably longer than that. He's sixty-two and he takes it seriously in a way that other people reserve for tax audits. At about quarter past eight he walked the row of tables with his clipboard, looked at six pumpkins, said "hmm" at each one, and then went back to the bar and told everybody there'd be a ten minute break before final scoring. That's his ritual. Ten minutes, exactly, while he drinks one ginger ale and pretends to tally.

I used the ten minutes to check the front desk, because that's my job even on contest night, and there was nothing there but a stack of napkins and a single mitten somebody had left during leagues. Not a glove, a mitten. I noticed that because of what happened next.

When I came back to the tables Bruno had stopped carving. His pumpkin had the profile half done, the nose cut clean, one eye hollowed out, and he was standing there with his hands in his pockets as a man would wait for a bus.

"You stalled," I said.

"I'm letting the marker dry."

"It's been dry for an hour. You cut around it."

"Then I'm pacing myself." He leaned an elbow on the table. "Actually I've been thinking. About the book."

"Page forty-seven?"

"Before that. The chapter before it. The Amusements of the Hand, it's called. Sleights and small illusions. There was a vanish in there I've never seen written down anywhere else. Old style, pre-raven. I want to try it."

"On the audience?"

"On you." He said it easy enough but his ears had gone pink again, and he picked up his knife and put it back down. "If that's all right. It's nothing much. I'd need one of your gloves."

"We came here for a date night at a pumpkin contest and you're asking to borrow my glove."

"Yes. That's what I'm asking."

So I took off my left glove, the black knit one I'd worn because the walk from the car is cold, and held it out, and he took it like it was something valuable, which I thought was sweet and also a little ridiculous. Gil was over at the bar with his ginger ale. Nobody was watching our station. Everybody was watching the Marshes' pumpkin, which was apparently going to be a lighthouse, and there was drama about it.

"Stand there," Bruno said, and pointed at a spot about three feet from him, under the light. I stood there. He held the glove flat between both hands, showed me the front of it, showed me the back, which is the first thing you do in any vanish, you show the audience there's nothing to hide. Then he did a motion with his wrists, crossed them, uncrossed them, and the glove was gone.

I looked at his hands. Both of them, open, palms out, empty. I looked at the table. I looked at his sleeves.

"Where is it."

"Magician's secret."

"Bruno."

"Performer's privilege."

"I'm your wife and you have exactly one glove of mine and I will turn out every pocket in that jacket."

He grinned at me, an actual wink with the one eye, and reached over and tapped my shoulder, and when I shrugged my coat half off there was the glove, tucked up under my own collar like it had been there the whole time. Which I suppose it had, at some point in the wrist business, though I never felt a thing.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, that was good."

"Page sixty-something of the book. I read it twice while you were checking the desk. There's a version with a silk in it that I think I could build." He handed me the glove back and his fingers stayed on it a beat longer than they needed to. "The vanish is the first half of the trick. The book says the real effect is the return. The object comes back where the audience isn't looking for it."

"Is that a line from the book or a line from you?"

"Book. Mostly." He went back to his pumpkin, but he was smiling down into it like an idiot and his ears were fully red now, and I stood there holding my glove and feeling warmer than a curling club in October has any right to make a person feel.

* * *

Gil called everybody back to their stations and we carved for another half hour. Bruno finished the profile. It was good, actually, a woman's face with hollow cheeks, a little sinister, done with the small knife he brought from his own kit because he doesn't trust the club ones. I did my usual thing, which is a cat, every year a cat, because I have no artistic ambition and a cat with triangle eyes reads fine from across a rink.

Gil stood in front of our table last, on purpose, he always saves ours for last because we're the hosts. He looked at Bruno's pumpkin for a while. He looked at mine.

"Solid work this year," he said, and made a mark on his clipboard. From Gil that's a standing ovation.

Then he said the thing that changed the evening. "I need twenty minutes with the scorecards. Everybody take a break. Bar's open. There'll be a drawing at nine."

The room moved toward the bar in the usual slow herd, coats and mittens and arguing about the lighthouse. I collected the newspaper off our table, rolling it up with the pumpkin guts the way I do, because if I don't do it nobody does it. Bruno took the roll out of my arms and set it down.

"Come with me," he said. "Storage closet. There's a crate I need help with."

"That's the worst invitation I've ever heard."

"It's a heavy crate." He was already walking, not looking back at me, and I looked at the clock, and I looked at Gil with his scorecards, and I followed him.