NO ONE IS ORDINARY

The old woman I was interviewing was reluctant to talk, but I was an exotic animal veterinarian, so I knew to be patient and not try to control things. She was talking about a famous magician she had known.

“I was well and truly seduced,” she said. “It was partly that he was so skillful and charismatic that everyone loved him, but I met him when he was in real trouble over the death of one of his assistants. It turned out he had bribed her to play dead to kick up some publicity, but it worked almost too well. In fact, the public split between those who believed she was still dead and those who denied that she had ever existed. She just went off, got married, and had kids.” The police had gone off laughing.

The note of contempt in the old woman’s voice betrayed what she thought of the young woman assistant. She had compromised by going off cheerfully to get married. Should she have actually died?

The old woman had never been a great beauty. She was known as a poet but the magician had asked her to write stories about him as a matter of stirring up interest at the same time as defending him. She had been rather successful at steering him into a higher class of people. But now he might be dead himself.

“We never ever had a physical relationship. He moved all around the country as his act required to keep making money, but I was always right here. We wrote and I simply answered his letters with what he requested.”

She had saved all the letters — his and copies of her own — keeping them in a suitcase barely big enough to hold them all. Both sides were hand-written, quite personal, though his were on an assortment of hotel stationary and hers were on the same standard typing paper, no heading at the top and not typed. She was remarkably able to keep her even writing horizontal, not slanting up or down. His was full of drawn figures, diagrams, exclamations and question marks. The sizes varied and there were arrows to other sentences or marginal notes.

Clearly she was hooked on the guy, maybe because he was the exotic animal and she was the domestic cat on the windowsill, watching without risk. But she had not escaped the risk. He keyed into her soft spot, which was bad boys, the exotics of the human species. At least she recognized and respected the damage they could do, usually in defense of themselves, real or fancied.

For his part, he hardly knew any women. He operated on memories of his mother and grandmother who fought intimate warfare, which was terrifying for a small boy, but kept contemporaries at a distance by paying them. Unless he could seduce them into working for nothing — merely the glory of it all. But women who did cleaning or laundry or even editing, were often willing to accept a low wage for a kind of work that had to be done over and over. After all, they were doing it for a famous man who might praise them.

When she was doing adjunct teaching, esp. when she got into classes about exotic species, she had students, mostly boys who had been abused as children and a few girls who interpreted everything in terms of love, even attacks. Since she was protected by the admission standards of the university from the most psychotic of them, still a few managed to get in, but they hated her right away and soon left. Some committed suicide.

She knew her soft spot was due to a need to help the troubled, maybe as she hoped to be helped herself, but she had a healthy respect for danger ever since seeing a Clyde Beatty-type show go out of control so the trainer was mauled by his lion.

The magician, for his side, was realistically worried that such a woman as this one being interviewed might want to horn in on his act, learn his secrets and reveal them to the world. Or she might learn everything and take it all to rivals. She protested that she would be discrete and protective, but he never believed her.

The general public was unaware of all this. They never knew the inside stories of show people and they didn’t want to, because it interfered with the magic of the illusions. The magician did workshops for wannabes but never revealed the real tricks — just taught simple things one could find in library books. Anyway, it took obsession, whole life commitment, and few had the persistence for the practice and risk involved.

The exotic veterinarian watched the old woman closely to see how she held her tea mug, where she set it down in front of her, and how she shifted in her chair. This was the way she watched all kinds of animals. On the one hand the old woman seemed ordinary, but no one is ordinary. The vet began to be curious about the magician himself and just how extraordinary he managed to be or was driven to be.

“In the end I figured out almost everything,” said the old woman. “I was reading a lot of books about those psych experiments they do where they set up a situation that revealed how people thought. The early experiments with people whose brains had been split in half were remarkable, unexpected, and revealing.

“When they prevented one half from seeing something, the other half had entirely different insights. One side was verbal and conventional, the other was just did free-associations. Brains make their own reality. That’s the key to the magic.”

Not an unexpected point of view for a cat to have. But what about the magician? What sort of animal was he? Or was he a shapeshifter, his own best illusion? I asked, “What finally happened to him?”

The old woman had been tracing on the tablecloth with one pointed old woman’s nail. Now she picked up her empty mug, set it down in the same place, and dropped her hands out of sight. Her shoulders slumped, her head drooped. If she had had the right kind of ears, they would have signaled sadness.

“He got old. He couldn’t quite make the tricks work. He was killed.”

I sat very still but made sympathetic noises. This was not a woman who teased, who flirted, or even who used others.

She said, “I promised I wouldn’t write about him. I haven’t. Now I can’t.”