The Magic Circle Read online

  “Hell no,” said Jersey. “I don’t mind waiting if Sam doesn’t!”

  Then she laughed, and I got another waft. Though I couldn’t see the man’s eyes behind those glasses, I noticed that his mouth tightened into a thin line. I stared at him in stony silence.

  The helicopter was coming down across the road, settling on the Crissy Field landing strip beside the bay. Two dark-paned cars had driven out to meet it and collect our distinguished guest.

  “Mrs. Behn,” the shaded one went on sotto voce, as if in a spy movie, “I’m instructed to tell you that the president, acting in behalf of our current administration, has arranged this morning’s agenda. Although your son, as a civilian adviser, was not technically a member of the military, his death took place while he was performing a service for—I should say, rather, operating in an advisory capacity to the military. Our government therefore plans to honor him appropriately. There will be a small ceremony; a military band will play; then the deceased will be given the seventeen-gun salute in farewell. After that, the president plans to present to you the Distinguished Service Medal.”

  “What for?” said Jersey. “I ain’t the one who died, sugar.”

  The ceremony did not go exactly as planned.

  After it was over, Augustus and Grace retired to their suite atop the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill, sending a message that they were “expecting me” to join them for dinner. Since it was just lunchtime, I took Jersey to the Buena Vista to drink her lunch. We found a wooden table at the front windows, overlooking the wharves and the bay.

  “Ariel, honey, I’m really sorry about what happened,” said Jersey, tossing down her first glass of Scotch as if it were milk.

  “Sorry doesn’t help,” I said, repeating a line of hers from my childhood when I’d done something wrong. “I’m having dinner with Augustus and Grace tonight. What the hell am I supposed to say to them?”

  “Fuck them,” said Jersey, looking at me with those famous icy blue eyes, which seemed surprisingly clear, given her recent dietary habits. “Tell them that I was startled by the guns. It’s true. I was startled by those damned guns going off in my ear.”

  “You knew they were going to give a seventeen-gun salute,” I pointed out. “I was there when the security agent told you. You were as drunk as a skunk. That’s why you fell into the grave—good God—in front of all those people!”

  Jersey looked up at me in injured pride, and I glared back.

  But all at once I felt it coming over me, and I just couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. First Jersey’s expression changed to surprise; then she started laughing, too. We laughed until tears were streaming down our faces. We laughed until we could no longer catch our breath. We were choking with laughter and holding our sides at the thought of my mother sprawled, ass up, six feet down in a hole in the ground, before they even had a chance to lower the coffin.

  “Right in front of the Peanut Farmer and everything,” Jersey practically screamed, and this set us off on another peal.

  “Right in front of Augustus and Grace,” I gasped between hysterical sobs.

  It took a long time to run down, but at last we subsided into moans and chuckles. I wiped my tears with my napkin and leaned back with a sigh, holding my stomach, which was raw from laughter.

  “I wish Sam could have seen what you did,” I told Jersey, squeezing her arm. “It was so bizarre—just what tickled his funny bone. He would have died laughing.”

  “He died anyway,” said Jersey. And she ordered another drink.

  At seven o’clock I arrived at the Mark in the limo Augustus sent for me. He hired a car whenever he visited any city so he’d never have to degrade himself flagging down a cab. My father was into appearances. I told the driver to collect me at ten and take me back to the little Victorian inn where I was staying across the bridge. Three hours of Augustus and Grace, as I knew from experience, would be more than adequate.

  Their penthouse suite was large and filled with the lavish flower arrangements Grace required in any surroundings. Augustus opened the door when I knocked and regarded me sternly. My father was always elegant, with his silvery hair and tanned complexion. Now, in a black cashmere blazer and grey trousers, he looked every bit the part of the feudal lord he’d been rehearsing for all his life.

  “You’re late,” he said, glancing at his gold wristwatch. “You were to arrive at six-thirty so we could speak privately before dinner.”

  “This morning was enough of a family reunion for me,” I told him.

  I instantly regretted having alluded to the earlier events of the day.

  “And that’s something else I want to speak with you about: your mother,” said Augustus. “First, what can I fix you to drink?”

  “I had lunch with Jersey,” I said. “I’m not sure I need anything much stronger than water.”

  Wherever Augustus went, he had a well-stocked bar set up, though he drank little himself. Maybe that’s what went wrong when he and my mother were married.

  “I’ll fix you a spritzer; that’s light,” he said, and squirted the soda from a mesh-encased bottle, handing the wineglass to me.

  “Where’s Grace?” I asked, taking a sip as he mixed himself a light Scotch.

  “She’s lying down. She was quite upset by that little debacle your mother pulled this morning—and who can blame her? It was unforgivable.” Augustus always referred to Jersey as “your mother,” as though I were responsible for her very existence, rather than the other way around.

  “Actually,” I told him, “I felt her display provided a well-needed touch of brightness to the entire morbid affair. I mean, I can’t really imagine providing brass bands, shooting off guns, and giving someone a medal all because, in the service of the U.S. government, he got himself blown into pieces like a dismembered patchwork quilt!”

  “Don’t change the subject on me, young lady,” my father reprimanded me in his most authoritarian tone of voice. “Your mother’s behavior was absolutely shocking. Deplorable. We were fortunate that reporters were not permitted.”

  Augustus would never use words like “disgusting” or “humiliating.” They were too subjective, involving personal emotion. He was only interested in the objective, the remote—things like appearance and reputation.

  In that regard, I was a good deal more like him than I cared to admit. But I still couldn’t bear the fact that he was more interested in my mother’s comportment at a social event than in Sam’s brutal death.

  “I wonder if people scream when they die like that?” I asked aloud.

  Augustus turned on his heel so I couldn’t see his face. He went across to the bedroom door. “I’ll wake up Grace,” he informed me over his shoulder, “so she’ll be ready in time for dinner.”

  “I don’t see how we can speak,” said Grace, blotting her eyes, which were swollen with tears, and brushing a wisp of stark blond hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “I don’t see how we can eat. It’s truly incredible to imagine how we can all be sitting here in a restaurant, trying to behave like human beings.”

  Until that moment it had never occurred to me that someone like Grace had ever visualized the concept of attempting to behave like a human being. Things were starting to look up.

  I glanced around at the walls of the restaurant, which were done up with lattices covered in painted vines. They were scattered with a few tiny red painted lizards, which seemed to be basking in invisible sunlight. The table groupings were separated by large plantings of fresh chrysanthemums—flowers that are offered in tribute to the dead in all Italian cemeteries.

  I’d begun and ended the day in a cemetery. Only that afternoon, I’d looked up the word in a bookstore. From the Greek koimeterion, a sleeping chamber; koiman, to put to sleep; or Latin cunae, a cradle. It was nice to think of Sam, wherever he was, as cradled in sleep.

  “He was so young,” Grace was saying between little sobs as she took another bite of steak tartare. She adjusted her diamond bracelet,
adding the telltale words “Wasn’t he?”

  The truth of the matter was, Grace had never met Sam in her life. My mother’s divorce from Augustus had been nearly twenty-five years ago, and he and Grace had been married for little more than fifteen. In between was lots of proverbial water beneath the bridge, including how Sam got to be my brother without actually being the son of my mother or father. My family relations are rather complex.

  But I had no time to think of that, for Grace had moved on to her favorite topic: money. As she switched to it, her tears miraculously dried and her eyes took on a luminous glow.

  “We phoned the lawyers this afternoon from the suite,” she told me, suddenly filled with buoyant enthusiasm. “The reading of the will, as you know, is tomorrow—and I think I should tell you that we got some good news. Though they won’t give out the details, of course, it does appear that you are the principal heir!”

  “Oh, goody,” I said. “Sam hasn’t been dead a week, and already I’ve profited. Did you dig out exactly how rich I’ll be? Can I retire from my labors right now? Or are the tax folks likely to take most of it?”

  “That’s not what Grace meant, and you know it,” said Augustus, who was designing forms in his crème de volaille as I jabbed at the capers on my Scottish salmon. They rolled around the plate and evaded my fork. “Grace and I are only concerned for your own interest,” he went on. “I didn’t know Sam—at least not well—but I’m sure he cared a great deal for you. After all, you practically grew up as brother and sister, didn’t you? And as Earnest’s only heir himself, Sam must have been very—well, comfortable financially?”

  My late uncle Earnest, who’d been in the mining and mineral business, was my father’s older brother, and rich as Midas. On top of that, he died with every cent he’d made, because spending money was of no interest to him. Sam was his only child.

  When my parents, Augustus and Jersey, divorced I was still very tiny. My mother ran around with me for a number of years, visiting all the capitals of the world. She was welcome in such places, since she’d been a famous singer long before marrying my father—which is how she met the Peanut Farmer and nearly everyone else of high social visibility. The Behn men had always liked flamboyant women. But, like my father, they often had trouble actually living with them.

  Jersey had been drinking for years, but everyone expected opera singers to be swilling champagne as if it were water. It wasn’t until Augustus announced his betrothal to Grace—a clone of Jersey at a similar age, but twenty years her junior—that the bottle came out of Jersey’s closet. She fled with me to Idaho, to consult my widowed, hermitlike uncle Earnest about financial matters—my father had invested all her earlier musical income in himself, another Behn male trait—and to everyone’s surprise, Jersey and Earnest fell in love.

  And I, a child who’d grown up like Eloise at the Plaza, eating pâté de foie gras before I could pronounce it, suddenly found myself in the middle of a nowhere that I now, nearly twenty years later, called home.

  So my father’s question, seemingly vague, was really direct and to the point. My mother, married to two consecutive brothers, had actually stopped drinking during Earnest’s lifetime. Knowing her as he did, though, Earnest left all his money to Sam, with a proviso to take care of her and of me “as he deems best.” And now Sam himself was dead. In all likelihood his death made me a multimillionaire.

  Uncle Earnest died seven years ago, when I was off at college, and none of us had seen Sam since. He simply vanished. Jersey and I got our checks every month. She drank hers, and I put mine into an account and left it there. Meanwhile, I did something radical, something the Behn family women had never done. I got a job.

  It was when I started working as a nuclear security officer, my first week on the job, that I heard from Sam. He phoned my office, though God knows how he knew where I was.

  “Hi, hotshot,” Sam said—his favorite name for me ever since we were children. “You’ve broken a family tradition: no high notes or high kicks in the chorus line?”

  “‘Life upon the wicked stage ain’t ever what a girl supposes,’” I quoted from my vast, unsolicited musical repertoire. But was I ever happy to hear his voice. “Where have you been all these years, blood brother? You don’t need gainful employment, I gather, now that you’re the full-time family benefactor. Thanks for all the checks.”

  “In fact,” Sam corrected me, “I’m gainfully employed by a variety of governments that shall remain unnamed. I provide a service no one else can—with the possible exception of those who’ve been hand-trained by me: a group of one. Maybe one day you’ll consider going into a joint venture?”

  And the cryptic hint of a job offer was the last I’d heard of Sam until my phone call from the executor.

  I felt the tires start to suck under the snow. The whole car was sliding, pulling with a riptide force off the road.

  Adrenaline gushed as I snapped to and gripped the steering wheel. Throwing my whole weight behind it, I yanked those massive tons of steel back from the edge of the shoulder. But now I was hurtling in the opposite direction, out of control.

  Bloody hell, I couldn’t run off the road! There was nothing out there but snow and more snow. It was so black, the snowfall so thick, I couldn’t even see what was beyond the road on either side—maybe a sheer drop. I heard my mind, as if inside a well, screaming “Fool! Fool!” while I racked my brain trying to recall when I’d passed the last light in the abyss out there. Fifty miles back? A hundred?

  As these panicky thoughts ran through my mind I was still able, with that dual processing ability we come equipped with, to marshal my muscles and juices to bring the car back under control. I rocked it back and forth like a yo-yo, trying to prevent it from spinning out, trying to feel beneath me—as I would under a pair of skis—the tires hydroplane on the new snow that had now formed a slick, waxy surface atop the deeper, and lethal, layer of diamond-hard black ice.

  It seemed forever until I felt I was winning the wrestling match, and the rhythm of the thousands of pounds of steel started to move toward a center of balance. I was shaking like a leaf as I let it slow to thirty, twenty-five. I took a deep breath and nudged it back up, knowing like every mountain girl that you never stop completely when the snow’s coming down like that, or you may never get momentum again.

  As I moved on into the black and empty night, casting up prayers of gratitude, I slapped my face a few times, hard, and rolled down the car window to let the blizzard come in and swirl around inside. Needles of snow cut my skin. I took a deep breath of icy air and held it in my lungs for a minute. I wiped my stinging eyes with the back of my glove, then yanked off the ski cap I’d been wearing and shook my hair around wildly in the whirling wind that was battering around inside the car, blowing bits of paper in its wake. By the time I rolled the window back up, I had returned to reality, greatly sobered. What the hell was wrong with me?

  Of course, I knew what was wrong. Sam was dead, and I was having trouble visualizing life on this planet without him. It was what a schizophrenic might call being “beside yourself” with grief. Though I hadn’t seen or heard much from Sam these past seven years, he was always there in everything I did. In a way, he was the only really close family I’d ever had. For the first time I realized that in his absence I had conversations with him in my mind. Now I had no one to talk to, even in my head.

  Still I wasn’t about to join Sam in the happy hunting grounds this moment. Certainly not by flunking an intelligence test out here on the midnight road. It was then that I noticed a glow in the distance that I could just make out through the thick lacy curtain of snow. It was large enough to be a town, and there weren’t that many out here in the high desert. It looked like home to me.

  But the adventure was not quite over.

  I pulled up on the road above the house that contained the charming root cellar I called home, and looked down in exhausted frustration. The driveway had disappeared, vanished in the whipped-cream snow that was
drifted above the first-floor windows. It seemed that after miles of grueling combat driving, I now had to face a dig-in to reach the house at all, much less to uncover my fathoms-deep basement apartment. That’s what I deserved for living in a cellar in Idaho—just like a goddamned potato.

  I turned off the ignition and sat looking in gloomy silence down the steep hill where the drive used to be and trying to figure out what to do. Like all mountain folk, in the back of my car I carried emergency supplies in all seasons—sand, salt and water, thermal clothes, waterproof footgear, firemaking supplies, jump-starters, ropes and chains—but I had no shovel. Even if I had, I’d be incapable of moving enough snow myself to get my car down that drive.

  I sat there, mindlessly numb, watching the soft, sifting shroud of falling snow dropping silently around me. Sam would say something funny just now, I thought. Or maybe jump out and start dancing in the snow—a snow dance, as if he were taking credit for the handiwork of the gods.…

  I shook my head and tried to snap out of it. I heard the phone ringing in my apartment below. The lights were off in the main house, suggesting that my eccentric, if adorable, Mormon landlord had gone off to the mountains to catch the fresh powder for tomorrow’s skiing—or perhaps over to the temple to pray for the driveway to clear itself.

  Much as I hated mucking about in deep powder, I understood that the only way to traverse the steep gap between the house and the car was to ski. Luckily, my lightweight cross-country boots and skis were in the back of my hatchback with the other survival gear. Now if I could only manage to follow the line where the drive should be. Our yawning chasm of a front lawn, nearly invisible beneath the drifts by now, might seem as bottomless and lethal as quicksand if I fell in to it. Also I’d have to abandon my car up here on the road for the night, where it would vanish too if the snowplows came through at dawn before I could rescue it.