set. It was like watching an old silent movie, only alive and choreographed to the beat and cadence of the song.
This late-night magic-show-cum-cabaret was being performed at the Abracadabra Club downstairs in our Vegas hotel. Martin and I cuddled in a comfortable alcoholic haze, flush with our night’s wins and too many complimentary cocktails from the Second Chance Casino.
The song and tempo changed. “Luck be a devil tonight . . .”
I laced my fingers through Martin’s and leaned my head back against the padded seating. I felt blissfully buzzy and, yes, beautiful. For almost two weeks I’d spent days by the pool, or at the spa, while Martin had his meetings, and the nights had been ours. Dressing up. Shows. Fabulous food. Trying our luck. I was tanned and so much thinner now than when I’d met him on that blustery January day. I was relaxed and in love, and it showed in my face and body. I really felt as though I’d turned a corner. I’d gone down into the abyss of loss and grief and managed to crawl out. I had overcome.
The Charlie Chaplin magician waved his wand with jerky movements that replicated the choppy, almost comical action in early silent movies. He reached up to remove his hat, as he’d done several times during the show, and pulled out a live rabbit. I gasped.
Martin laughed at me.
“What’s so funny?” I said, punching him playfully. “That was brilliant! There was nothing inside his hat—I saw. He tipped it to the audience several times.”
Martin’s eyes danced in the light of the little candles in jars on the tables. He cupped my face and looked at me with kindness in his eyes.
“My Ellie. I do love you.”
I snuggled against him, and he put his arm around me. But I felt a whisper of unease. He was being patronizing. Or was that just me being sensitive? Like my father always accused me of being. Doug, too, sometimes. A memory washed through me—Doug chiding me for letting Chloe play with a toy that had loose buttons. One of the buttons had come off. She’d put it into her mouth and nearly choked.
“You can be such an idiot sometimes, Ellie . . .”
“Passive-aggressive Ellie.”
Martin didn’t mean it like that, I decided. He wasn’t like that.
“I still didn’t see the trick coming,” I said, unable to let it go. “He’d been wearing that hat on his head the whole time when he wasn’t tipping it to the audience, and when he did, you could see it was empty.”
Martin considered me, something strange, foreign, forming in his eyes. “Like Houdini once said, El, you saw something, but it’s not what you thought you saw.” He reached across the table and plucked an olive from a plate of snacks. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. “That’s the best thing—what I love—about magic, about trickery,” he said as he swallowed the olive and reached for his glass of Scotch. “The trick is to misdirect, to make us all look and think one way while something is slipped past us another way.”
“You’re making me out to be a fool.”
“On the contrary.” He took a sip, set his glass down, and leaned forward. “When we step into a magic show, we arrive actively wanting to be fooled. Magic is . . . It’s a kind of willing con. You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.”
I glanced at the stage. I supposed I had been distracted by the assistant’s choker—she’d drawn attention to it moments before the rabbit trick. The choker had made me think for a moment her white neck had been slashed and the ribbon was blood.
“We crave the deception,” Martin said. “We want to see our world as a tiny bit more fantastical and awesome than it is. That’s why we go to the theater, or movies, read books. The magician is much the same as a storyteller—a trickster who uses misdirection, sleight of hand, to manipulate a person’s beliefs about the world. And we see storytelling everywhere—marketing, politics, religion, over the garden fence.”
I regarded Martin. He had a strange feverish quality in his eyes as he spoke of magic. He’d had too much to drink, I reckoned. The weather had been too hot, the sun too fierce, when he’d sat with me for a while by the pool.
“Another cocktail, ma’am?” I jolted at the sudden intrusion and glanced up to see