Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  Casey was always, always breaking her mother’s heart—Susan had learned to withstand the familiar, crushing pressure. She’d been forced to. This was only the newest and latest erosion of her hopes and dreams. Now she was forced to see a stark outline: her daughter as a phonesex drone. Well, yes. Of course. It was the logical next step. Casey had already done the rest—done the apathy, done the rebellion, done the resentment and the self-loathing. Now, apparently, it was high time for the paraplegic sex work.

  Susan could squint and make out the stereotypes of those outlines—archetypes, stereotypes that shone with depressing implications.

  Gooseflesh crept up her arms.

  “You told your father this?’ she pressed after a minute, shaking her head. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t tell him, actually,” said Casey. “He figured it out. He just knew.”

  “He just knew?” It was embarrassing. She hated to get teary in front of her daughter, who would shoot her a familiar filial look that neatly blended compassion with contempt. “But it’s Hal. He never just knows anything.”

  “Don’t be a bitch.”

  Susan shook her head. Her throat was closing.

  The car was a cage—how did people not always think so? Cages on the assembly line, metal cages with bars and glass, cages along the roads by the billions with their tailpipes shooting out poisons. After the accident she thought of all cars as her enemies, thought viciously that she hated all of them for what they’d done to Casey, hated them like animate creatures, maggots or weevils or scorpions, and she would kill them all if she could. Not KILL YOUR TELEVISION; kill the cars. But of course, she also had one of her own and drove it all the time.

  Cars were the life, here in L.A. Cars were the smallest and most portable of all homes. Even Casey, almost killed by a car, still lived in them without obvious reflection.

  She felt for the vinyl shelf along the side of the door, pressing down with her elbow. There was a narrow well, half lined with lint, on the blue armrest, and she looked into it studiously. The lint blurred. What did they make these oddly shaped holes in the armrests for? What was supposed to fit there? Nothing fit. Or if it did, it was unknown, illusive, and not part of life at all.

  The holes were useless, and these useless holes were irritants, ever-present, inexplicable, angering.

  “He heard something, is all,” said Casey, more kindly. “He overheard me talking to a friend.”

  “You wanted to be a professor,” said Susan. “Remember?”

  She was still shaking her head, minutely. It was almost involuntary. She wiped the corner of one eye quickly with the heel of her right hand and insisted on staring out the window.

  “You wanted to get a Ph.D,” she went on.

  “Now, that was just stupid of me,” said Casey.

  They were on the road into LAX now. Taxis and cars lined up at the curb to their right.

  “You were going to improve your French.”

  “I was i-di-o-tic.”

  “You were going to go to graduate school.”

  “I was eighteen! And now I’m not anymore. And I don’t want to be some boring academic. Even if I could. It’s not the chair, Mother. It’s just me. It’s like, a natural evolution.”

  “So you evolved from a Ph.D. candidate into a phonesex worker?”

  “I evolved from a teenager to a grownup.”

  “But you’re more,” said Susan.

  “Jesus. It’s not the end of the world, OK?” said Casey. “Chill out. Take a deep breath. It’s just a job.”

  She spun the wheel into the parking structure.

  •

  At the baggage claim carousel they waited awkwardly. Susan watched her daughter’s face, the lashes shading the cheekbones. She had not always been so slight and wan. Before the chair she had often been tanned, cheeks flushed, hair lightened by the sun. She had a boyfriend who surfed and then one who was a skateboarder; on weekends they disappeared down the beach in sneakers and ratty, faded shorts and came home with peeling noses and salt tangling their hair.

  Now she was always pale. But she was still beautiful. In her mind’s eye Susan saw baby pictures.

  God damn it. Stay presentable.

  “You actually choose to do this?” she started, over the background murmur punctuated by loudspeaker announcements. “Because if it’s money—”

  “I choose,” said Casey firmly.

  Susan stared past her at a poster of a hotel: a white high-rise with looming palms in the foreground. She stared at the high-rise. She stared at the palms.

  Casey caught sight of him first, coming toward them in ragged pants and shirtsleeves. He was thin and too darkly tanned, like a Florida retiree, but lacking the beard Hal had described. A recent shave had left the sides of his face paler than the rest, the lower cheeks and the chin.

  But what alarmed her was his expression—heavy, anxious. He bent over Casey first, knelt down at the chair and took her face in his hands. Susan saw how she looked at him, noticed it fleetingly, but then already—in the shock of this—the recognition faded as he stood up straight again, still holding Casey’s wrist.

  “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you this over the phone. I have very bad news,” he said.

  In an instant the whole of existence could go from familiar to alien; all it took was one event in your personal life. You might think you were only a mass of particles in the rest of everything, a mass exchanging itself, bit by bit, with other masses, but then you were blindsided and all you knew was the numbness of separation.

  Casey clung to T.’s hand and Susan stood beside her with her own hand on Casey’s other shoulder. She was pinching the shoulder, she realized slowly, quite hard though she did not intend to—out of anxiety, out of tension, pressing the hard ridge of the collarbone between her thumb and forefinger. She made herself relax her hold and the sensation melted into others, unnamed and nonspecific, hazy and suffocating as they stood there in a kind of dumbness. She felt buzzing around her from some unknown source. Was it electric? Was it imagined?

  Casey did not seem to have felt the pinch. Her eyes were forward, fixed on the dark wood.

  “Sorry if it’s not—there weren’t that many choices,” said T.

  The scene was theatrical, three people presiding stiffly at a glass airport wall as coffins were lowered from the belly of the plane and rolled across the tarmac. More than one coffin, she thought, looked like an army of them.

  “There are bodies on most commercial flights,” said T.

  Often, when you flew, bodies flying beneath you, yet the proposition that on this flight one of them had been Hal’s—that Hal’s body had come in on this flight with T.—was absurd. The plane might have begun its descent just as Susan was leaning along the counter with her cleavage showing to ask the tattooed man for a couple of Marlboros—trying to picture, as she always did, whether he would be a strainer and heaver or a graceful thick beast. Whether his tongue would be stubby and awkward or pointed and cunning. Certainly, as a smoker, he would taste bad.

  Hal’s body slim and tall, compared to the big man’s. And now also dead, compared to the big man’s.

  It was almost her own body. Or it was hers without being her own, hers in the way that a home was, those spaces where you spent your time—as much hers as another body could be. By that token she too was almost dead. Wasn’t she? She had been with him forever, through all of it. Since the goddamn sixties. Three decades. He was hers and there were only two years between them; he had been fifty and she was forty-eight. She liked the smell and feel of his skin, she had always liked those things in him: his strangely delicate smell and the way he felt when she touched him. It was the skin that bound you most, the contact of two skins.

  At that moment, because Casey had asked him, T. revealed quietly—trying to hedge at first but then, since there was clearly no way to dull the blow, said it outright—He was killed, killed with a knife in a mugging.

  “Stabbed,” said
Casey, inflectionless. “You’re saying my father was stabbed.”

  When she forced him to it he went on, persevered with the dutiful exposure of facts: Hal had lain alone in a gutter and bled till he died. He had died where he fell. A crowded city and no one found him in time.

  Susan asked when and then computed the hours: it had happened only half an hour after the last time they talked. Stabbed to death for a wallet that might have held nothing but forty dollars total, the rest in traveler’s checks. The cops had found it close by, in the trash.

  Hal, hers. Thoughtful, sad, getting old. But not now. He would never be an old man.

  The thought of him as he walked down the street, and then the sudden impact of the knife—maybe they threw him against the wall, maybe they knocked him down before they did it … she almost cringed as she stood there, thinking of pain, but then again it was nothing like real pain or shock, she recognized, nothing like them at all. The mere idea of a cringe, the projection of it—an anticipation of impact. She tried to feel it and not feel it at once. Pain and suffering, they said, were not the same, but stabbed in the stomach—it happened in war movies: gut-shot, the soldiers shivered and said plaintively, “I can’t feel my legs, man.” She’d seen it more than once. The same scene must occur in dozens of movies. She strained toward an intuition of bleeding, of an opened-up stomach, but failed miserably because the insides of her arms were against her own ribs, feeling her own stomach: regular stomach, enclosed and protected. Regular arms, smooth and unbloody. She moved her hands across the skin.

  Dictators, killers, they had no capacity for empathy or no interest in it … but she, most people—you tried and you failed. Your efforts were inadequate. Pain was beyond simulation. Like sickness, it divided the population into haves and have-nots of pain. At the same time she wanted to be close to him and needed to be far away. Yet only one wish was granted.

  He was utterly distant: here she was, and there was he. Gone.

  The coffins disappeared beneath them, into the terminal basement, but neither she nor Casey moved. Down on the paved surface the blocky carts went on beelining in between planes—baggage carts and catering trucks pulled up for loading and unloading. Between all this bustling activity and the group of them—her, Casey, and T.—was only the filmy and gray-streaked glass. Between them were the membranes. She stood staring forward and not looking at all.

  Once Hal had been beautiful. It was the fading that made him a subject of sorrow, how you could barely see the vestiges of his old beauty. He had never been vain, and because of his lack of vanity he failed to notice what he was losing. In that way a virtue became a liability—he was blind to his own looks vanishing. Only five minutes before she had said something cruel about him—what was it? already forgotten—and Casey had called her a bitch. Richly deserved, no doubt. Casey defended Hal, always. For Hal alone she had a tender love, and in rejecting pity on her own behalf she also rejected it for him. To her his fade was charming.

  The moment was worse for Casey than for her, even. She knelt, holding the arm of the chair. She almost never did that, had learned to steady herself on other things when she knelt—to squat without touching the ground, without needing to. One of the first things she’d learned. Not to infringe.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Casey’s eyes were red but her cheeks were dry, unlike Susan’s. She was in shock, Susan thought.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Casey.

  “They’re taking him to Forest Lawn,” said T. “I’m sorry. It was the only one I could think of. At the time.”

  “Anywhere,” said Casey, shaking her head.

  Susan said nothing, following behind them. T. looked down at Casey often as they made their way to the elevators, put his hand on her shoulder more than once. Susan felt she was floating or being pulled: she barely saw anything but the carpet and the chair, the back of T.’s shirt and his pant legs. They had left Hal behind them; Hal was by himself. Lacking his faculties of perception, he could not know this, of course. He could not know he was alone. The saddest thing: he could not know he was alone.

  Or was it not sad? Not sad at all?

  He did not know where he was. He had become an object. She thought of him among the luggage—was it dark or fluorescent down where he lay? The rest of space lay against him.

  A short time past she had only been thinking of T., but now T., standing beside Casey in the elevator, might as well be invisible. He was commonplace, by contrast with the killed. Stabbed and robbed, robbed and stabbed. Her husband had been killed.

  She blinked rapidly, stood looking down in a daze at Casey as they moved into the elevator, passengers shuffling with their suitcases between their feet, crowding in. Casey hated it when elevators were full, her face forced into people’s asses and groins—usually said something loudly so that they’d give her a wide berth. But at the moment she was saying nothing. Her eyes were on the floor in front of her, her shoulders bent. Susan stood over her in a shroud of self-absorption: she was a pillar of salt, Lot’s wife.

  She would be, from now on, that woman with the robbed and stabbed husband—from now until she died herself, till she herself was personally dead.

  The woman with the stabbed husband: a kind, faded, betrayed man, if they knew him as she did. The one who bled to death in a gutter, bled out by himself, with no one there who loved him or even knew who he was—only a body to them. A body in a slum, a gutter, another country. Her epitaph, since it was her actions that had driven him there, wasn’t it? Without that particular adultery, that passing and mundane instance, he would never have flown out in the first place: without it he would still be here. He would be driving to work, he would be coming home as he always did, regular as clockwork, in the late afternoon.

  She felt sickened—glancing through her was a nauseating unease, a dreadful suspicion. She tried not to feel it, talked to herself instead to cover the noise of her own thoughts, a stream of silent chatter doggedly opposed to both the sickness and the suspicion. It was fully trivial next to death, but her own identity had also been spirited away when the thief took the wallet, which had, it turned out, almost nothing in it. A mistake in judgment, an instantaneous mistake. If only someone had told the thief there were only traveler’s checks in that wallet, if someone had taken him aside … her own identity, a side effect, was sunk and submerged in this new description, the stabbed-husband woman. As Hal lost his life she lost her own, as Hal was a murder victim she was an extension of him. That slut, that slut with the husband who got stabbed to death.

  It made her feel better to think selfishly. She should think steadily of herself, not of Hal. Then she would not feel sickened, there would be less of an ache because she herself was a safe and mundane subject. There was no pain in thinking of herself. Though—maybe it was her, maybe she had done it, made a victim of him in the same way, in a slasher movie, the woman of low morals was doomed from the start, the buxom blonde in tight clothes good for nothing but ogling and murdering, her future blank save for the pending role as punished dead harlot.

  Until this moment, she realized as the doors dinged open, she had been Casey’s mother, but now she was Hal’s killer. That was where her suspicion led.

  She wanted to cry but her eyes were dry.

  OK. Somehow, maintain composure. Her daughter was here, after all. Not to break down, not to. She would have another cigarette if she could, even a pack of them. Get Robert to buy them for her, call him and basically order them. Make him come to the house and be her servant. Or at least her waiter. A glass of wine. A highball.

  She saw that Casey’s eyes were filling as she rolled out of the elevator and she tried to keep close to her daughter, confused, forgetting where to walk, where the car should be parked. Casey’s cheeks were damp and her mouth was clamped tightly closed, likely to keep her chin from trembling. Who could remember where they had left the car? Would they find it again?

  But here it was. The car was beside them.


  She stayed in Casey’s apartment till after T. had left and all of Casey’s friends were gone, into the small hours. Casey shrank inward, huddled under the blankets on her bed, and Susan sat on a chair beside it. After a while she lay down parallel, her arm around the thin shoulders, propping herself up on an elbow now and then to smooth the hair back from her daughter’s wet face. Under normal conditions Casey had a bravado that passed for strength, but she had crumpled like paper. It was impossible for anyone to console her, and yet at first Susan tried, until she gave up and was willing not to try anymore. She had no choice beyond the effort of endurance—it was all you could do, lie with misery till it waned. She made the gesture, she yielded up her resistance to the forward pull of time, but the gesture had no content.

  After Casey fell asleep Susan tucked her in as though her daughter were eight again, the covers up around her small sharp chin, and walked through the quiet rooms with a ringing in her ears. Aimless, she found a place to sit—on the edge of the couch in the living room, still, cupping both hands around the coolness of her beer bottle. She felt herself moving, in the inward hollow, between resentment and desolation. For a while she stared at the chair across from her, at the mantelpiece, a branch in a red vase, a small, enameled wooden box. She closed her eyes. But the eyelids were no help: what could she see from here? A black and burned-out place, an empty lot stretching ahead.

  She realized she’d been convinced, in a deep unconscious presumption, that they were safe now—sure they were off the field, confident lightning would not strike again. The steep hills were supposed to be behind them, the rest a slow coast, the rest a relief. A feeling of security had descended once the worst was over, covering them both, her and Hal, once they recovered from the hit. There had been a plateau, a level of shelter. Now the roof was off, the shelter was gone.

  Still, when she drove away from Casey’s apartment in T.’s company car, she was wide awake. It was dark out, dark for hours now. She saw young couples staggering and falling on each other on the sidewalk, laughing as they righted themselves. It reminded her of sex and drinking. She picked up the car phone and dialed.