attention, and the birthday cake, the act was mainly a reminder of an era he wanted to forget. Shaking fake treasure from his top hat as George caught it in his and Dad stared with simulated envy, Fred would think ahead to how Vartan would remain in the van after getting home, to smoke cigarettes and stare out the windshield; to how up in the kitchen they’d find Mom in one of her homemade housedresses, paused for who knew how long in the midst of folding laundry, gazing out the back window. Fred would look into the spectating kids’ unformed little faces, and feel like he was peddling a lie. About, if nothing else, what his family was, all the magic it didn’t actually have.
George, Fred knew, felt differently. He was hatching ever bigger plans for the act: a theater piece, a TV special. Wearing his little white top hat, he started pitching these ideas to Vartan one night in the living room, dancing around, playing all the parts, and after a couple minutes, Vartan glanced up from his script.
“I’m trying to focus.” He whip-snapped the pages. “Go play somewhere else.”
For a while after that, George tried to cajole Fred into continuing the act on their own. Up on the rooftop, the venue for most of their serious discussions, Fred finally spoke his mind on the subject.
“Magic is bullshit,” he said. “People need to just get real.”
For a moment, though George was nowhere near the roof’s edge, from his expression, it looked as if he were falling, falling away into the distant, sun-drenched rooftops.
Then his face hardened. “Getting real is the bullshit,” he declared. He considered further. “ You’re the bullshit.”
“Any auditions lately?” Fred asked, as a matter of principle.
Vartan fiddled with the volume. War in Lebanon. Sunny and cooler tomorrow. High of eighty-four.
“Nah, it’s hell out there,” he replied, as a matter of form. He made a little flutter of his fingers, signifying the dissipation of his career into thin air. “I should’ve gotten a nose job. Should’ve changed my name when I had the chance.”
It had been a very long time since Fred had heard Vartan bemoan his ethnic-ness (upon which he’d arguably built his early career); he was doing it now, no doubt, merely to elaborate the fiction that he was actively, or even passively, looking for work. In recent years, ethnic and nonethnic being somewhat less distinguishable or relevant in the grayhaired Vartan, he had been getting more parts than ever, playing non-ethnicity-specific cops and judges, lawyers and businessmen, innocent bystanders, relatives of the accused, and assorted well-meaning lunatics and senile people. He’d started rehearsals for a long-dreamed-of project, an off-Broadway production of The Tempest in which he was to play Prospero, when George was diagnosed.
“Changed it to what?” Fred asked, for the hell of it.
“Something American. Martin Brown. That would’ve been good.”
When the three of them were children, their father had often told George that he was named after George Washington, Sam that he was named after Uncle Sam, and Fred that he was named after Fred of the couple Fred and Ethel on I Love Lucy , this having been the single most American person Vartan could think of. Many a night, Fred had lain awake wondering how his life might have turned out had he not been saddled with the name of that dull-witted, bald old man.
A modified pickup truck full of scrap metal cut them off, jammed the brakes, and to salt the wound, sent a cigarette gyring out the window to burst into sparks on the windshield in front of Vartan’s eyes. The Vartan of old would have gone apeshit. The current one’s anger was nowhere, dropped down some deep hole. Barely a sonofabitch and a few disorganized blinks. His thumbs, at the F and U keys, rather than pressing, merely caressed.
“So what’ll you do, now that you’re being let go?” Vartan asked.
Fred didn’t move. Though every cell in his body
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