Now the long-legged woman was helping the pretty magician into a big red box. Now she was turning it around and around. It was on wheels! Everything in the act had to be on wheels, so it could be turned around. It was a rule of magic that all boxes must be turned around and around, to prove there were no strings, that no one was hiding just behind. But if something wasn’t turned around would the audience revolt? Did they ever ask, Excuse me, why hasn’t someone turned the box around? Turn the box around! My God, turn that box around!

Now the sparkly assistant opened the box. The pretty man was not in the box! Josie whooped again, clapping over her head. Where had he gone? The suspense was fantastic.

And now he was next to them! Suddenly a spotlight was on their table, or near it, because the pretty man was next to them. “Holy shit,” Josie said, loud enough that the pretty man, whose hands were outstretched, again asking for applause, heard her. He smiled. Josie clapped louder, but again the rest of the audience didn’t seem to care. He was up there, she wanted to yell to them, now he’s here! You fuckers.

Up close, she saw that the magician was wearing a tremendous amount of makeup. Eyeliner, blush, maybe even lipstick, all seemingly applied by a child. Then the spotlight went dark, and he stayed for a moment next to their table, hands up, while a second magician appeared onstage. Josie wanted to say something to the pretty man, to his heaving silken silhouette a few feet away, but by the time she arrived at the right words—“We loved you”—he was gone.

She turned to the stage. The new magician was less pretty.

“This is the one from Luxembourg,” Charlie whispered.

“Hello everyone!” the new magician roared, and explained he was from Michigan.

“Oh,” Charlie said, sighing.

The Michigan magician, in a white shirt and stretchy black pants, was soon in a straitjacket, hanging upside down twenty feet above the stage. With his breath labored and his arms crossed like a chrysalis, he told the audience that if he did not escape from the straitjacket in a certain amount of time something unfortunate would happen to him. Josie, trying to get the attention of the waitress, had not caught exactly what that consequence was. She ordered a third Pinot, and soon some part of the contraption holding the magician was on fire. Was that intentional? It seemed intentional. Then he was struggling in an inelegant way, ramming his shoulders against the canvas jacket, and then, aha, he was free, and was standing on the ground. An explosion flowered above him, but he was safe and not on fire.

Josie thought this trick pretty good, and clapped heartily, but again the crowd was not impressed. What were they waiting for? she wondered. Bastards! Then she knew: they were waiting for the magician from Luxembourg. They did not want domestic magic. They wanted magic from abroad.

The man from Michigan stood at the edge of the stage, bowing again and again as the applause dissipated until he was bowing in silence. Josie thought of his poor mother, and hoped she was not on this cruise. But she knew there was a very good chance that the Michigan magician’s mother was on this cruise. Like the pretty magician’s mother, she was proud, she was retired, she travelled the world clapping for her son. How could she not be on this cruise?

Now a new magician appeared. He had a high head of gleaming yellow hair and his pants were somehow tighter than the pants of his predecessors. Josie had not thought this possible.

“I hope this guy’s from Luxembourg,” Charlie said, too loudly.

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“Hallo,” the magician said, and Josie was fairly sure he was from somewhere else. Perhaps Luxembourg? The magician explained that he spoke six languages and had been everywhere. He asked if anyone in the audience had been to Luxembourg, and a smattering of applause surprised him. Josie decided to clap, too, and did so loudly. “Yes!” she yelled. “I’ve been there!” Her children were horrified. “Yes!” she yelled again. “And it was great!”

“Lots of visitors to Luxembourg, I am pleased,” the magician said, though he didn’t seem to believe those who had applauded, least of all Josie. But by now, her spirit dancing in the glorious light of her third glass of wine, Josie believed she had been to Luxembourg. In her youth, she’d backpacked through Europe for three months, and wasn’t Luxembourg right there in the middle of the continent? Surely she’d been there. Did that one train, the main train, go to Luxembourg? Of course it did. She pictured a beer garden. In a castle. On a hill. By the sea. What sea? Some sea.

The magician from Luxembourg did his tricks, which seemed more sophisticated than those of his predecessors. Maybe because they involved roses? Before him there had been merely carnations. The roses, this was a step up. Women holding roses appeared in boxes, boxes on wheels, and the man from Luxembourg turned these boxes around and around. Then he opened the boxes, and the women were not there; they were somewhere else. Behind screens! In the audience!

Josie clapped and hollered. He was wonderful. The wine was wonderful. What a good world this was, with magic like this on ships like this. What an impressive species they were, humans, who could build a ship like this, who could do magic like this, who could clap listlessly even for the magician from Luxembourg. These fucking assholes, Josie thought, trying to single-handedly make up for their sickening lack of enthusiasm. Why come to a magic show if you don’t want to be entertained? Clap, you criminals! Even Charlie wasn’t clapping enough. She leaned over to him. “Not good enough for you?” she snarled, but he didn’t hear.

Now Luxembourg was gone and another man was making his way onto the stage. He was rumpled, his hair reaching upward in seven different directions, and he was easily twenty years older than the others. Another man. Where were the women? Were women not capable of magic? Josie tried to remember having seen or heard of any female magician and couldn’t. My God, she thought! How can that be? What about Lady Magic? Why do we accept all these men, all these silken heavy-breathing men? And now this one, this crumpled one—he made no effort at all to be pretty like the others. He had no lovely assistant, and, it soon became clear, he didn’t intend to do any magic. She looked for the waitress. Where was the waitress?

There was only the rumpled man standing at the edge of the stage. He was telling the audience that he’d worked for some time at a post office, and had memorized most Zip Codes.

He’ll get murdered, Josie thought. What kind of world is this, when a man from the post office follows Luxembourgian magic, and why were they, she and her kids, on this ship in the first place? With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity she’d made precisely the wrong choice. She had been a dentist for a decade but for most of that time had not wanted to be a dentist. What could she do now?