by Lisa Knopp
You’re sitting in a Pret de Manger in east London trying to get caught up on the assignments from couple of independent studies you’re directing. But you’re distracted. To your right sit three construction workers in chartreuse vests. They’re probably working in the gutted building next to the coffee shop. You might find them attractive in a hunky sort of way if they were talking about something other than video games. To your left on the other side of an empty table sit two men. They strike you as an odd couple. The older man has buzzed blond hair, blue eyes, and crow’s feet that suggest he’s at least 35. He wears a dark, fitted suit jacket, a white button up shirt open at the neck, and jeans. The younger man, probably 20 or so, with dark, tousled hair and glasses with heavy, black frames, wears jeans and a charcoal and white tee-shirt. He’s literally sitting on the edge of his chair as he listens to the older man. Because you hear the word “job,” and because the older man studies a sheet of paper that the younger man has handed him, you surmise that this is a job interview. The younger man seems earnest. No, he seems earnest and gullible. It’s just a hunch you have, but the job that the older man is hiring for may be a little shady, like selling door-to-door what nobody wants — electric brooms, stationery, crates of grapefruits, or magazines.
You try to settle in to your work. But the younger man is tossing coins from hand to hand. He opens his right hand with a flourish and they’re gone! He opens that hand again and there they are. Just as the older man begins to speak, one of the construction workers shouts, “Yeh, man!”, and they all laugh. You wish they’d leave so you could hear what the odd couple is saying. You recognize the eager look on the younger man’s face, since you’ve seen it on the faces of some of your students. You probably looked that way, too, long ago in the presence of a published writer who was willing to teach you what you hadn’t been able to figure out on your own about crafting essays. The younger man is the hungry novitiate, the magician in training. The older man is his mentor.
Each man spreads a rectangular piece of dark blue velvet cloth on the table and sets out big bottle caps. The teacher appears to be giving directions to his student, but with the talking and laughing at the table to your right, you can’t hear what he’s saying.
You Google “magic” on your laptop. The Wikipedia entry on “Magic (illusion)” lists the effects that illusionists perform: productions, penetrations, transformations, restorations, transpositions, transportations. That such extraordinary acts as changing a red scarf into a blue one or a smashed watch into a whole and workable one would bear such everyday names as “transformation” or “restoration” is rather disorienting. When you search what one must do to become a magician, you learn that since magicians don’t like to reveal their tricks, most aspirants join a magic club or pick up the art on their own. You Google “magic lessons.” Over 5,460,000 hits. Apparently, someone is sharing secrets.
You’ve never liked magic acts. You’re bothered by the deceitfulness of concealment, and you’d feel foolish if a magician pulled a silver dollar from behind your ear. Yet, you’re grateful for real magic – like wishing for coins to plug a parking meter when you have no change and then finding a quarter right there on the ground near the meter, which gives you enough time to run into a shop and get change. But is that luck or coincidence rather than magic? Real magic is when you, with the aide of supernatural forces, cause something outside of yourself to conform to your will. Turning pennies turn into quarters. Or traveling from Nebraska to London and back with the click of your heels rather than in a stuffy, germy, crowded, over-priced, airborne aluminum tube. But that type of magic is beyond the scope of your powers.
You have experienced “magical” moments. “Magical” as in a captivating, charming, enchanting. Among your most precious memories are these: an August evening when you were eleven and you and your family stood in reverent silence on a pier jutting into Lake Michigan, gazing at the lights from a distant city and their twinkling reflections on the water, while lulled by the sound of the waves; a jaunt on a Mississippi cruise boat when you and your mother stood together on the upper deck, savoring the moment together on the river on whose banks you’d both grown up near but now, both lived so far from; the Mother’s Day fishing trip on a farm pond in southeastern Nebraska where, as your son and his partner quietly and efficiently pulled in one bluegill after another, you laid back in the drifting boat and watched the sky through willow and cottonwood leaves; sitting on a bench with your daughter above the English Channel near Dover on a June day when you were both so stunned by the perfection of the white cliffs, the blue, blue sky and water, the synchronized movements of the lorries and ferries at the terminal below, and low, white, distant Calais that you couldn’t move or speak. Apparently, your magical moments involve family and water. Or is what you find so magical a sense of oneness or communion that obliterates the distinctions you usually insist upon between inside and outside, between you and not you?
“Time, mates!” one of the construction workers calls as he checks his phone. Your wish has come true. The mates drain their cups, clean up their food wrappers, and vanish. Now you can hear the magician and magician in training. But they’re picking up their bottle caps and folding up their velvet clothes. Perhaps one of them also said, “Time, mate.”
“Oh,” the mentor says, as if he just remembered. “Let me see your jacket.”
The student pulls from his backpack a wrinkled orange, linen jacket. It’s not the lurid orange of a plastic drug store jack-o-lantern but the subdued orange of a real pumpkin. The young man stands up and slips it on. It looks odd with his tee shirt and messy hair. It’s short, as jackets go, and rather feminine. If it were your size, you’d wear it on occasion with a slim, silky scarf. What would better complement that orange – a turquoise? a bright green?
The jacket is boxy and doesn’t nicely hug the younger man’s shoulders. But the lapels are slim, which is good given his slight frame, and the venting in the back will allow him to move freely as he saws a woman in half. He twitches his shoulders and tugs at the front flaps.
“The jacket is bad,” the older man says flatly.
The younger man’s shoulders sag. He drops into his seat.
You’re taken aback by the mentor’s bluntness. Aren’t the Brits supposed to be more polite and reserved than you Yanks? You want to argue with the mentor. His student is low on funds, especially now that he’s paying for private magic lessons, and this jacket from the bargain rack at TK Maxx is all that he can afford. He chose this pumpkin orange jacket over the tan one because he thought it would be a real attention-getter at children’s birthday parties or when he sets up a table on a corner near the farmer’s market and does card tricks for tips. The student wanted a frank assessment of his choice, but this was too blunt and negative. You’re tender with your students and always tell them what you appreciate about their writing before telling them what they need to work on. If you were the magic teacher, you would have said to your protégé, “What a fetching color you’ve chosen. I like it. But …”
“It’s the sleeves,” the mentor says.
The sleeves? They end at the hinge of wrist bone as they should – or at least, that’s the way you like yours. They’re fine.
“The fabric is too stiff,” the teacher says. “You want stretchability in case you have to pull a bouquet or a dove out of your sleeve.” The mentor smiles. His judgment about the jacket is based not on color or style, but on fit and functionality.
The student looks surprised, as if he’d never considered this.
Over lunch, you tell your daughter a story about two magicians and a pumpkin orange jacket. She likes the turn in the story about your misjudgment as to why the teacher didn’t like his student’s jacket. “I wish that you could have seen him in that jacket,” you say. You both agree that most of the time, it’s better to withhold judgment, especially when you’re out of your element.
As you’re walking toward the Tube station on a street that’s so crowded, you’re afraid that you and your daughter will be separated in this city of 8.8 million people where you barely know anyone and don’t know your way around. You see a familiar face in the crowd, a face that touches you. It’s the magician-in-training hurrying past, his backpack slung over a shoulder. “That’s him!” you say to your daughter. “It’s the guy in my story! Can you believe it?” But before you can call out to him and tell him that you sat near him in the coffee shop, that you like his jacket, that you wish him well with his career, he disappears into the crowd.
Lisa Knopp’s essays have appeared in numerous journals including Brevity, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and Creative Nonfiction. Seven of her essays have been listed as “notable essays” in the Best American Essays series.