Sabine looked down at her hand and was half surprised to see it taped up. She had forgotten about it until the question was asked. "It's fine," she said. She lifted it, turned it side to side. "It feels much better."
Even under these difficult circumstances, Sabine was glad to show off her city. Los Angeles, she felt, was maligned because it was misunderstood. It was the beautiful girl you resented, the one who was born with straight teeth and good skin. The one with the natural social graces and family money who surprised you by dancing the Argentine tango at a wedding. While Iowa struggled through the bitter knife of winter and New York folded in crime and the South remained backwards and divided, Los Angeles pushed her slender feet into the sand along the Pacific and took in the sun. The rest of the country put out the trash on Wednesday nights and made small, regular payments against a washing machine and waited through the long night for the Land of Milk and Honey to get hers. And, oh, how America loved it when it happened. They called in sick to work and kept their children home from school so they could watch it together on television as a family, the fate of a city too blessed. The fires shot through the canyons, the floods washed the supports out from beneath the houses that lined the hills over the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. There were earthquakes. There were riots. America leaned over: "Dangerous," they whispered to their children. "I always told you that." It was true, in the orderly city the boys packed together and murdered one another and then themselves in brutal festivals. There were places you could no longer go at night and then places you could not go during the day. The city kept its head down. Everyone would say, It is not the same.
But Sabine never thought in terms of having allegiance to her country. She loved Los Angeles. Sabine would always choose to stay. She had lived through every tragedy and shame and they only served to draw her and her city closer together. What would she be without the palm trees, without the Hollywood Hills? She had been born in Israel, but she was shaped by tight squares of regularly watered lawns, by layers of deep purple bougainvillea blooming on top of garages. She heard languages she could not identify and they were music. She smelled the ocean. She loved to drive. After she and Parsifal finished a show, they would almost always drive the long way home, up and over Mulholland, to watch the lights in the canyon. "Try getting that in North Dakota," he would say to her. They lived in the magnificence of a well-watered desert where things that could not possibly exist, thrived. They lived on the edge of a country that would not have cared for them anyway, and they were loved. They were home. Do not speak badly of Los Angeles to Parsifal and Sabine.
Dot and Bertie Fetters, rested, washed, fed, and dressed, were back in Phan's car. They were ready. They gave no hint that they had thought all along that Sabine would come through. They never said she owed them a ride in Los Angeles. On the contrary, they were overwhelmed. They trembled with gratitude that she should give them such a gift.
"Really," Bertie said from the backseat. "This is so nice of you." The top section of her hair, whose curls today appeared more gold than brown, was pulled away from her face in a mock-tortoise barrette. It was a pretty face, though it took some getting used to. The spikes of her eyelashes had left tiny black dots of mascara beneath her eyebrows. Of all the different styles represented in Los Angeles, the Midwestern look was rarely seen.
Mrs. Fetters, either not fully awake or just slightly hung-over, kept touching Sabine's arm as a way of expressing her thanks.
Sabine had not forgotten what had been said the night before. She kept the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility close to her heart. But this morning she felt unable to pin it on the small woman who sat beside her in the car. All that had stayed with her from the conversation was the sadness. The blame, somehow, had gone. "So is there anything in particular you want to see? Any place we should go first? We can go to the studios, the tar pits, the ocean."
"Where did Guy work?" Bertie asked, leaning over the seat. "Is there one main place magicians work or do they go from place to place all the time?"
"He was only a part-time magician," Sabine said. "We never made our living at it." She thought she saw a look of disappointment cross Dot Fetters' face, as if her son were a failed magician. "Nobody makes a living at it, maybe a few dozen people in the country. It's a terrible life, really, you have to travel all the time. Parsifal had two rug stores. That was his job."
"A rug salesman?" Dot Fetters asked.
"He worked in an antique store when I first met him, then he got into fine rugs. The stores are very successful. He had a wonderful eye."
"I thought you had awfully nice rugs in your house," Bertie said, happy to have put something together.
"Then we'll go to the rug store first," Mrs. Fetters said. "And if there's someplace he did magic, then we'd like to go there, too. And back to the cemetery. But we don't have to go every place. I don't want to be taking advantage of you here."
Sabine told them no one was taking advantage.
Sabine hadn't been to the stores in a long time. When Phan was sick and after he died, she went often, ferrying papers that needed signatures and couldn't be faxed. Parsifal would ask her to go and look, at the color and the weave on something that had just come in. Again and again she said she knew nothing about rugs. "You have eyes," he would say. "You have good taste. I want you to tell me if you like them. I want to know if they're pretty."
They were pretty, always pretty, because Parsifal knew his business even when he couldn't go to the store. And in truth, over time, Sabine had picked up some things through constant exposure. She never had Parsifal's talent, but she had been with him on how many buying trips? She had been to Turkey. She had sifted through piles of prayer rugs in Ghiordes and Kula, stood in the sun until her sweat had made mud out of the dust on her legs. Maybe she had missed some subtle values, some rugs that were fine although possibly drab, but the great rugs she could always spot. She could read the patterns, knew at a glance a Melas from a Konya, a Ladik from a Sivas. She loved the Ladik. Parsifal said Sabine was invaluable because she had classic American tastes. Whatever she loved would be the first rug to sell when they got home.
It wasn't just her taste that was helpful. She was strong, though you might not know it to look at her. Sabine could hold up in the heat longer than Parsifal ("Yours are a desert people," he would tell her as he went to sit in the shade) and she could lift the rugs, peel them back, separate the piles. Back in the old days, when there was only one store and the host of healthy young men Parsifal was given to hire had not yet been found, Sabine would climb the ladder and attach the rugs to overhead displays.
Sabine had no plans to keep the stores and run them herself, but she hadn't yet thought of letting them go, either. She drove the way Parsifal liked to go, down Santa Monica Boulevard, past Doheny, and through the abundance of boys. They roamed the street like beautiful moths in tight black jeans and draping trousers, their white T-shirts absorbing light. Blond curls dipped naturally; straight black hair, recently trimmed, swept into eyes. So many white teeth, so many square jaws. Black-brown skin pulled taut over biceps, heavy lashes fell softly on pink cheeks. They walked arm around thin waist, chin nuzzling neck. Bertie put both hands on the windowsill of the car. She started to say something, but then didn't.
"'Parsifal's on Melrose. Fine Rugs,'" Mrs. Fetters said, reading the neat gold letters of his name on the front window. How happy he had been the day the painters came. Sabine had taken his picture that day, standing next to his name. Where was that picture? "Will you look at that."
The fan of bells that Parsifal bought in China bumped against the glass and sang out when they opened the door. Salvio nearly cried when he saw Sabine. He put down his coffee and walked all the way across the store with his arms stretched out towards her, and she stepped into those arms like a woman stepping into a coat held out to her by a man.