Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  Then the loneliness swelled, guilt pulsing at the base. She was a murderer.

  She took a deep breath. Murderer, murderer.

  She had to agree with herself. She had levied the accusation in the first place and now she had no choice but to acquiesce, accept graciously or she would never relax again, would always be defending herself against her own judgment. So yes: she was a murderer. Or worse, had done a negligent homicide. In an assassin at least there was purpose.

  She felt her heart rate slow. Slow and steady. The fresh air cold on her skin. That was all right. She could be cold. She could be frigid. She held her arms out to receive the chill.

  She was alone now. But on the other hand she was also a queen, the private, unseen monarch of a kingdom of dust and faded velvet and the great horns of beasts. She dwelled in a palace. So she had nothing and everything at once, had been struck down and raised up.

  In one respect it was not surprising, because the world’s systems tended to elevate crime. Those systems knew about crime, those systems were forced to reward it. It would be wrong to say the world’s systems liked or encouraged crime; that would be superstition, as the world had no opinions. The world neither liked nor disliked criminal acts; it was amoral, not immoral. It had no agency but it did have structure, and because of its structure it tended to reward criminal acts. As long as the criminal was not too overt and her movements agile, bad actions typically brought profit.

  Inside there might be suffering, but externally, for all to see, profit and gain arrived. It would be incorrect to say society, for it was not society alone that had brought first Hal’s death, then her windfall. Certainly society had created the big house. But other elements had also been required to bring her here—a molecular current was needed, a shifting too microscopic to attribute to people and their social compacts.

  Broadly, the world could not say no to an act of selfishness. Selfishness burned at its core.

  Above the core there was the good soil, the dirt of continents, the water of seas, the winds of the atmosphere. Moon and stars, firmament: the ocean and the sky. This second part of her life was two kinds of freedom and two kinds of blackness. The future yawned over her, the heavens were endless. They were an observatory. Was that what plenty gave you? Everything was offered, nothing was necessary. She was less bound, standing there at the window by night. She had sails, she had wings, she had the lift of low gravity.

  She also had the shudder of regret, a sadness that clung forever. She was the sliver of rot in the wood.

  Airborne, though, maybe she could stand it. Before her the indigo sky of predawn, the black lacework of sheltering trees. She and Hal had never been poor. They’d always had enough income to qualify as middle-class, at least until it came to Casey’s medical bills. But this life was something else by an order of magnitude—a state of exuberance, a lazy abundance that bristled with energy.

  One morning she stood at the bedroom window half-naked while Ramon was working alone in the backyard, and then, when he looked up, she smiled.

  That was all you needed, typically. He was young, shy and deferential, and you had to be obvious with men: she had learned that early. To get what you wanted without undue worry, obvious was the key. Men would take anything that was offered, as a general rule. Most were so surprised they never contemplated refusal. That was the advantage of other women’s submission. In a society of aggressive or even merely confident women, she would be overlooked; but since most of them were passive, and most men were lazy, the field was wide open.

  She led him into the Himalayas on impulse because the bed in there had new sheets—the only sheets in the house that didn’t smell of mold. She had made the bed for herself before she chose horned beasts and not yet bothered to switch the linens, preferring to sleep in dust and oldness every night, half out of apathy. And he was clean, cleaner than average, she felt, and smelled slightly of aftershave or soap—eucalyptus, maybe—which she found she didn’t mind. He gave an impression of instinctive knowledge: something about the fullness of skin, a generosity that made the context fade.

  But then he stayed shy, downcast eyes and an expression of regret or modesty, hard to tell which. She guessed he was ashamed of them, that their behavior nagged at his Catholicism. Maybe the age difference made him awkward, maybe she reminded him of his mother. She would prefer not to. Younger men were a recent event for her, a passing accident. Usually it was competence that attracted her to men more than the way they looked, and older men were more likely to be competent, though they didn’t have a monopoly on it. Baseball had been almost incompetent, which made him less than compelling in the end. Ramon was not; Ramon had competence enough to give solidity to his attractiveness. Also he did not have a girlfriend—she had asked—and so she was unsure where his regret came from, save maybe shame about pleasure.

  She always tried to meet shame gracefully where she found it, felt sympathy for those who believed that pleasure deserved punishment (although she herself even suspected it sometimes, more superstitiously than anything). She felt the sadness of this inheritance, religious, social, even a casual hand-me-down, and tried small tender gestures to soften the exchange. Often she suspected these gestures were only perceptible to her, though—too subtle or subjective to convey.

  They were surrounded by clarity in the Himalayas—the snow-topped mountains in two dimensions, the robin’s-egg skies above. Around the king bed was a menagerie: the goat-like animal labeled BLUE SHEEP, the otter, the cat whose glass irises were a deep-spiraling well of gold. She turned her head to the window. Inside the square were power lines and palm trees and above these a yellow-gray haze of smog. The brief white frame divided those elements from the painted landscape of the peaks—one of which she was almost sure was Mount Everest, another K2, because she knew the shape of them from movies. She wondered if the old man had done this, lain on this very bed when he was young. The animals blindly seemed to watch; in former days, possibly they had watched him. The animals did not watch, of course—dead they were blind—but still they seemed to. You watched but did not seem to; they saw nothing while seeming to fixate on you …

  She shivered. Do not look at the cat, do not think of old fur. Of skinning, of tanning, what happened to the real eyes. Someone had skinned these creatures once, someone had flayed their bodies raw. In Century City the lawyer sat behind his desk and hissed: He died without issue. She closed her eyes for a time, but to look at Ramon she had to risk the sheep in her peripheral vision. Its horns were symmetrical, rounded, rising from the head in graceful arches—but even this was a distraction, even this brief observation was not what she meant to be doing, seemed like a form of disrespect.

  Then the condom came off and Ramon was embarrassed. She slid her hand around it and disposed of it onto the floor, rummaged in the nightstand drawer for a new one. She smiled at him while she reached for the packet, the smile always a key to continuity: she struggled to maintain the grace they’d had, smooth over his humiliation, struggled to do so without the appearance of struggling. Men could be sensitive to interruption.

  She wondered what he made of the house, the moth-eaten mounts everywhere. The new condom went on and they were off and running … the old man’s library contained books on taxidermy. Apparently aficionados called the animals mounted, not stuffed—both about sex, of course—the beasts, the prey, the caught, the shot. Ramon knew the place was new to her, that these were not her oddities but someone else’s, inherited along with the house. That much she hoped, at least, from the fact that he was here working for her in the derelict garden, if not from passing remarks she’d made. If he’d listened.

  Suddenly in her mind she was an old woman in a rambling house full of pelts. Nothing could be less appealing. And yet Ramon did not notice this sour flash of identity. He showed no outward sign. He did what he did. Here he was.

  She pushed the pelts to the back of her mind, closed her eyes again and tried to feel her fingertips, her toes, the long glide of he
r legs over the backs of his. He said something under his breath, a compliment, she thought—it sounded like You’re beautiful—and she appreciated the kindness but doubted that he meant it. It was not true; she knew she was not beautiful but attractive at best, the kind of woman few men noticed unless she wanted them to. She had a symmetrical face and a graceful, smooth body, once you got her clothes off—her body was still better than her face, even in middle age—but overall she had quiet looks.

  She tried to forget the details of herself. She would be no one—Let me be no one at all or all of them. Let me be anyone. That was the privilege of the rich, wasn’t it? They could feel like anyone, where the poor could only feel like themselves, trapped in themselves forever. The rich were infinitely free. Or the suddenly rich, at least. Those born that way were bound and tied, as much as anyone. But the manna from heaven … let us lift off the bed, let our skins absorb the streams of particles, of blood, water, the electricity, the storms—

  She washed the smell of latex off her hands afterward and ran a shower for Ramon in the adjacent bathroom, whose tilework must have dated from the twenties: they were minute one-inch ivory tiles trimmed in black and a powdery pink. A large, rusting showerhead over a clawfoot tub.

  She said to herself, almost aloud: Never again. Next time she slept with a stranger it would be in her own room, where all that watched them was the long, flat grass.

  Ramon clearly felt pressed to get back to work, though the whole episode hadn’t lasted more than twenty minutes and fit into his morning break. He stepped out of the shower and stood beside her, watching from the bathroom window as his supervisor arrived, pulling into the driveway beneath them in his white van with a logo of black leaves.

  “You can say I made you do something for me,” she said, handing him a towel. “I mean, if you want to. You can say I made you carry something heavy.”

  •

  It let her feel regal to stroll through the house out into the back gardens. Laughable—an emperor with no clothes—but still real. The rooms were cleaner now, the gardens tidied and replanted where they had died, trees and bushes pruned, ponds repaired and refilled, irrigation systems patched and put on an expensive timer. She picked out fish from a catalog. She spent her days clearing the house of what she knew she didn’t need—at first only the small debris of the old man’s life, gathered combing through drawers. There were scores of well-used packs of playing cards, held together with rubber bands and bearing an unmistakable old-card smell, the ancient dirt of fingers. There were board games, as though families had come through here frequently despite his having been a bachelor, despite his having died without issue.

  She found Parcheesi, a game she remembered from summer nights in her grandmother’s house. She found ashtrays by the score, glass with seams of bubbles along the edges or in the shape of French poodles, plastic printed with fading beer or tobacco logos, thick clay slabs with crude scallops and the denting prints of children’s thumbs. She found a shelf full of faded badminton birdies and wooden tennis racquets, a worn football, croquet mallets. Somehow these conjured parties for her: elegant guests in evening dress with cigarettes in long holders, spilling out onto the patios and gardens in a gleaming night.

  The furniture was dingy, and there was too much of it: every space was a hodgepodge of styles and colors. She had the ruined and homely pieces removed and watched with satisfaction as the rooms they left behind became airier. She loaded knickknacks into boxes and drove them to Goodwill; she scrounged through cabinets until they contained only items for which she could imagine some future use.

  But when it came to the animals she was undecided. At first she had been determined to rid herself of their carcasses with all possible speed, but curiously the impulse was fading: the longer she lived with them the greater their hold. Some needed repair, were bald in patches with broken horns or ragged tails. At first, as she walked through the great room with its foxes and otters, this had made them ugly or pathetic; but more and more it made her feel protective.

  Their arrangement added to her confusion. She understood the rooms on the second floor—their classification by geography, rough and general though it was. But the ground floor was a jumble. She did not know why the common raccoons of the great room kept company with the foxes, the possums, which were apparently marsupials, or the beavers, classified as semi-aquatic rodents. (She had to look this up.) The old man, she guessed, had not planned at all when he began to collect. At first the assemblages had been thrown together without forethought. A room of BEARS OF THE WORLD, he must have thought, hell yeah. A room of heads with racks. A room of brown mammals, why not.

  As the collection grew he’d moved toward a better scheme—still rudimentary but at least organized—placing each mount in a more logical grouping. He’d been unable to help himself, and the more he acquired, the more he had to impose an order. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, being forced toward it. Because without order there could be no true collecting. Without order there was only acquisition.

  When she’d been living in the house for six weeks Casey finally paid her a visit.

  By then Ramon had moved on to another job—he turned out to be neither an illegal nor a student but the youngest son of a claims adjuster, with ambitions in auto detailing—and she’d started sleeping with Jim the lawyer. Jim was an intelligent and slightly petty man on the surface, but beneath it he was tender. She thought he might be the kind of person who, in the right circumstances, could kill someone. She wondered if this would be a bond between them.

  The combination of circumstances required for Jim the lawyer to kill, she suspected, was so specific that it would likely never occur. That made him a would-be murderer at best, unlike her, and a fairly safe bet. Not that he was vicious or cruel—on the contrary, he was mild and gentle. Still she thought he might have a blind spot of rage, some hair trigger that would unleash a buried anger. Many men did; it was hardly unique.

  Jim impressed her because most of the adulterers she’d known liked to lie naked and panting beside her and offer up a disquisition on their marriage. It was a common impulse. She herself had learned early on not to talk about Hal, that discussing her husband with others was off limits, but some men treated illicit sex as an entry to marital therapy. And surprisingly by her third time with Jim he had still not brought up his wife, other than to acknowledge he had one. She liked this disinclination to confess.

  She was standing over the bathroom sink lazily after he left, gazing at the lines on her face in the mirror, when she heard gravel scrape on the circular drive. Cinching the belt on her bathrobe, she felt around on the floor for her shoes with an outstretched toe, then craned her neck to see out the window. Beyond the branches of an oak—Ramon had told her what each of the trees was in the garden, both the front and the back, and she had faithfully written them down on the landscape map to commit them to memory—she could make out the hood of Casey’s car.

  When she invited Casey to come by anytime she’d been sure she’d have ample warning; her daughter didn’t do drop-bys often. She’d assumed the drive to Pasadena was unfamiliar enough that Casey would have to call for directions. Still, now that Casey was here Susan was excited to show her the place, and as she reached for her jeans she wondered if her daughter had seen the lawyer’s car leaving. It was a light-green BMW—unmistakable since Casey knew it from the office.

  Also the two of them hadn’t talked about Casey’s livelihood since the airport but Susan knew they would have to discuss it sometime—it ached like a bad tooth at the back of her mouth. She would hate to lose her moral high ground, or the carefully guarded illusion of it. On the other hand, with T. around so often it was doubtful that Casey could be spending much of her time on the phone.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Casey, when Susan opened the front door.

  She was sitting out on the edge of the cobbled drive, a few feet from her car, with boughs of oak and laurel dipping over her head like a bower.

&n
bsp; “What?” asked Susan.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” she said. “All this?”

  “I told you,” said Susan.

  “You said a big house,” said Casey. “You didn’t say the Taj Mahal. This is ridiculous!”

  “It’s eccentric,” said Susan.

  Despite herself she felt puffed up by Casey’s admiration, as though the house was her personal creation.

  “Come on, honey. Come see the back. The grounds are almost twenty acres.”

  “No way,” said Casey, and followed her onto the tiles of the patio and past the tennis court.

  Lonely, sometimes, that there were two of them—moments like this, when they were single-file.

  It also struck her that Casey should have a new car, that her car was cramped and dinged and there was plenty of money now.

  “Do you want a car?” she asked impulsively, turning. “We can get you one. With some of the money from the old house. The sale. I mean look, there’s some cash for once. There are taxes on this place, there are repairs I’m paying for, but other than that, with the proceeds from the house sale, maybe your father’s life insurance, eventually, we’re practically rich.”

  Casey stared at her, surprised, and then over her shoulder.

  “Are those—parrots?”

  Susan turned and looked and saw light-green wings flapping and blurring near the tops of the alders.