Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,114

his window. He saw immediately that the place had been ransacked. Everything. Even his clothes. All the money was gone from the pockets of his pants too. He never saw the Japanese woman again: when he looked across the candles were gone. Nobody had ever stolen from him before.

This was the city he had crawled into—he was surprised to find that there were edges beneath his own edge.

Sometimes he would get hired to go to parties. He needed the money. There were so many expenses and his savings had been plundered. The wire itself would cost a thousand dollars. And then there were the winches, the false I.D.’s, the balancing pole, the elaborate ploys to get it all up to the roof. He’d do anything to get the money together, but the parties were awful. He was hired as a magician, but he told the hosts that he couldn’t guarantee that he’d do anything at all. They had to pay him, but still he might just sit there all night. The tension worked. He became a party regular. He bought a tuxedo and a bow tie and a cummerbund.

He’d introduce himself as a Belgian arms dealer, or an appraiser from Sotheby’s, or a jockey who’d ridden in the Kentucky Derby. He felt comfortable in the roles. The only place he was entirely himself, anyway, was high on the wire. He could pull a long string of asparagus from his neighbor’s napkin. He’d find a wine cork behind the ear of a host, or tug an endless unfolding scarf from a man’s breast pocket. In the middle of dessert he might spin a fork in the air and have it land on his nose. Or he’d teeter backward on his chair until he was sitting on only one leg, pretending he was so drunk that he’d hit a nirvana of balance. The partygoers were thrilled. Whispers would go around the tables. Women would approach him in a cleavage lean. Men would slyly touch his knee. He would vanish from the parties out a window, or the back door, or disguised as a caterer, a tray of uneaten hors d’oeuvres above his head.

At a party at 1040 Fifth Avenue he announced, at the beginning of dinner, that he would, by the end of the evening, tell the exact birth dates of every single man in the room. The guests were enthralled. One lady who wore a sparkling tiara leaned right into him. So, why not the women as well? He pulled away from her. Because it’s impolite to tell the age of a lady. He already had half the room charmed. He said nothing more the whole night: not a single word. Come on, the men said, tell us our age. He stared at the guests, switched seats, examined the men carefully, even running his fingers along their hairlines. He frowned and shook his head, as if baffled. When the sorbet came out, he climbed wearily into the middle of the table, pointed at each guest one by one and reeled off the birth dates of all but one in the room. January 29, 1947. November 16, 1898. July 7, 1903. March 15, 1937. September 5, 1940. July 2, 1935.

The women applauded and the men sat, stunned.

The one man who hadn’t been pegged sat back smugly in his chair and said, Yes, but what about me? The tightrope walker whisked his hand through the air: Nobody cares when you were born.

The room erupted in laughter and the walker leaned over the women at the table and, one by one, he removed their husbands’ driver’s licenses, from their handbags, from their dinner napkins, from under their plates, even one from between her breasts. On each license, the exact birth date. The one man who hadn’t been pegged leaned back in his chair and announced to the table that he’d never carried his wallet, never would: he’d never be caught. Silence. The tightrope walker got down from the table, pulled his scarf around his neck, and said to the man as he waved from the dining room door: February 28, 1935.

A flush went to the man’s cheeks as the table applauded, and the man’s wife gave a half-wink to the tightrope walker as he ghosted out the door.

—

THERE WAS AN ARROGANCE in it, he knew, but on the wire the arrogance became survival. It was the only time he could lose himself completely. He thought of himself sometimes as a man who wanted to