Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [71]
I got one of the neighbors to buzz me into the building, then Max followed me up to the second floor, to my front door. Using his mystical abilities, he placed his hand on the doorknob, took a slow breath, uttered a few words in another language, and turned the knob.
“There you are, my dear!” He opened the door and gestured for me to go inside.
“Max, I just realized,” I said, “You’ve never been here before.”
“Indeed, I have not.”
“Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”
He protested briefly, considering how exhausted I was. But I spent so much time in his home, I wanted him to at least know what the inside of my home looked like. So I insisted he come inside for a few minutes.
“Ah, very nice!” Max said when I turned on the light.
Actually, it was an old apartment in poor repair, mostly furnished with charity-shop furniture and hand-me-downs. But it was home. “Thank you.”
Max looked around while I poured him a glass of cold water. The kitchen flowed into the living room, the two rooms being partially separated by a counter. A small table for four people was perched halfway between the two spaces, neither of which was large enough to hold the whole thing comfortably. The bathroom door was on one side of the living room. There was another door near it that led onto a very small balcony; it overlooked a claustrophobic space between four close together buildings and offered no privacy, but it was nonetheless a balcony.
I had two bedrooms—a fact that had made Lopez almost green with envy on his first visit here. But the second bedroom would scarcely have passed as a walk-in closet in most other cities. In fact, now that I no longer had roommates, that was precisely what I used it for. I kept a large supply of rehearsal props and costumes in that room, as well as the overflow of my own clothes that didn’t fit in the small closet in my bedroom.
Max beamed at me and said courteously, “I like your home, Esther. It’s very welcoming.”
“It’s rent-controlled,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d probably be living in a phone booth an hour outside of the city.”
Seeing Jeff today reminded me of how things had been back when I was dating him. ”I moved in here with two other girls from Northwestern University after I first came to New York. One girl slept in the back bedroom—which is only big enough to fit a twin bed, nothing else. So she had to keep her clothes in the bigger bedroom, which the other girl and I shared.”
”Where are your former roommates now?” Max asked, taking a seat in the overstuffed chair that we three girls had purchased together at a Goodwill shop five years ago.
I sat on the couch. “One quit acting and applied to law school after we’d been here about a year. The other one left about eighteen months after that. She got married to a doctor and moved to the suburbs. She’s never officially quit the business, but she’s got a baby, she’s teaching part-time, and she hasn’t gone for an audition since before she got engaged.” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’ll want to come back to this life later on.”
“Two out of three? A high attrition rate.”
“Not really. That’s what this life is like. A lot of people who start out acting wind up doing something else. One out of three of us sticking with it is probably a high percentage compared to the field overall.”
“Ah, but you are gifted,” he said. “As well as committed and driven. And these are qualities that cannot be measured by percentages.”
I smiled, liking his description of me.
Max set down his glass and rose to his feet. “You need your rest, my dear. And I must go collect Nelli and prepare for our nocturnal expedition.”
I rose and followed him to the door. “Be careful, Max. There’s danger on the streets at night even apart from baka and zombies.”
“I will be accompanied by a skilled