“I don’t know for sure. But I think so. I only heard this after a while.”
“Ritual magic, then?”
“Probably.”
“Who does it?”
“Lots of people.”
“I mean who did she find? Did you hear that?”
“I think it was Victor Melman.”
He looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know the name.”
“Strange man,” he mused, taking a sip and leaning back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his neck and bringing his elbows forward. He stared off into the lavatory. “I’ve heard it said-by a number of people, some of them fairly reliable-that he really has something going for him, that he has a hold on a piece of something, that he’s known a kind of enlightenment, has been initiated, has a sort of power and is sometimes a great teacher. But he’s got these ego problems, too, that seem to go along with that sort of thing. And there’s a touch of the seamy side there. I’ve even heard it said that that’s not his real name, that he’s got a record, and there’s more of Manson to him than Magus. I don’t know. He’s nominally a painter-actually a pretty good one. His stuff does sell.”
“You’ve met him?”
A pause, then, “Yes.”
“What were your own impressions?”
“I don’t know. Well…I’m prejudiced. I can’t really say.”
I swirled the wine in my glass. “How come?”
“Oh, I wanted to study with him once. He turned me down.”
“So you were into this, too. I thought-“
“I’m not into anything,” he snapped. “I tried everything at some time or other, I mean. Everybody goes through phases. I wanted to develop, expand; advance. Who doesn’t? But I never found it.” He unbent and took another gulp of wine. “Sometimes I felt that I was close, that there was some power, some vision that I could almost touch or see. Almost. Then it was gone. It’s all a lot of crap. You just delude yourself. Sometimes I even thought I had it. Then a few days would go by and I realized that I was lying to myself again.”
“All of this was before you met Julia?” He nodded.
“Right. That might be what held us together for a while. I still like to talk about all this bullshit, even if I don’t believe it anymore. Then she got too serious about it, and I didn’t feel like going that route again.”
“I see.”
He drained his glass and refilled it.
“There’s nothing to any of it,” he said. “’There are an infinite number of ways of lying to yourself, of rationalizing things into something they are not. I guess that I wanted magic, and there is no real magic in the world.”
“That why you threw the Bible at me?” He snorted.
“It could as easily have been the Koran or the Vedas, I suppose. It would have been neat to see you vanish in a flash of fire. But no go.”
I smiled.
“How can I find Melman?”
“I’ve got it here somewhere,” he said, lowering his eyes and opening a drawer. “Here.”
He withdrew a small notebook and flipped through it. He copied out an address on an index card and handed it to me. He took another drink of wine.
“It’s his studio, but he lives there, too,” he added. I nodded and set down my glass.
“I appreciate everything you told me.”
He raised the bottle.
“Have another drink?”
“No, thanks.”
He shrugged and topped off his own.
I rose.
“You know, it’s really sad,” he said.
“What?”
“That there’s no magic, that there never was, there probably never will be.”
“That’s the breaks,” I said.
“The world would be a lot more interesting place.”
“Yeah.”
I turned to go.
“Do me a favor,” he said.
“What?”
“On the way out, set that sign for three o’clock and let the bolt in the door snap shut again.”
“Sure.” I left him there and did those things. The sky had grown a lot darker, the wind a bit more chill. I tried again to reach Luke, from a phone on the corner, but he was still out.
We were happy. It had been a terrific day. The weather was perfect, and everything we did had worked out right. We went to a fan party that evening and afterward had a late dinner at a really good little place we’d stumbled upon by accident. We lingered over drinks, hating for the day to end. We decided then to prolong a winning streak, and we drove to an otherwise deserted beach where we sat around and splashed around and watched the moon and felt the breezes. For a long while. I did something then that I had sort of promised myself I would not. Hadn’t Faust thought a beautiful moment worth a soul?