by Lydia Millet
In Bali, said Chip, and Peru, and Japan, and Indochina under the French.
“He moved in our circles, you see,” said Chip warmly, and sipped his tea.
She remembered the phrase he had written. Much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.
“I found an old letter you wrote him,” she said, and fumbled to pull it from her purse and pass it across.
“Ah,” said Chip. He reached for his glasses, thick black-framed bifocals perched on an end table on top of a large-print book. He put them on and reached for the letter shakily.
“And I was wondering,” she said, “if you knew where he got so many trophies. I mean all the—I’m his heir, and the house is full of these—”
“The club,” said Chip. “Oh yes. Old Buddy ran the club.”
“He did?”
“He loved the hunt,” and Chip nodded. “He did. He loved the hunt. He liked the ponies, too.”
Then he was saying something about a horse race and a particular horse—the Belmont Stakes, he said, when it was won by the son of Man O’ War—did she know Man O’ War? Did she know Secretariat? The hats worn by the women, in times long past, he mused. The lack of hats in horse-racing nowadays—sometimes he went to Santa Anita, he said, or Del Mar or Hollywood Park to wager on the horse races and he was dismayed by the casual dress. In former times the ladies had worn hats.
“What club?” she asked.
“He started the club in that house, you see,” he said. “It moved, later—into the desert somewhere … published his own record books, even back then. The members’ books … trophy records, you know.”
“I haven’t seen those,” she said.
“All the big-game trophies. The trophies, owners’ names, the year they were taken … skin length.”
“There are so many,” she said. “There are hundreds.”
“Now, Teddy Roosevelt,” said Chip dreamily, “took down twelve thousand on his African safari. Of course some of those specimens were insects. Not all big game, you see. Big game alone, I think there were only five hundred. Had your rhinos, your elephants … my father knew Roosevelt. Called him T.R.”
“He knew him personally?”
The old man nodded absently.
“Buddy started the competitions. Started them and ran them, ran them for years. Who could have the most kills, you know. One of every kind of deer. Every bear. You won them all, you’d have to take maybe three hundred all by yourself … used to give them to the Smithsonian. Like T.R. Needed their help later to bring in the rare ones. After they passed the laws … back when I used to go over there, wasn’t any of that. At the beginning, the soirees were nothing much. No girls, you see. The ladies weren’t much interested in that. But later they came. Yes they did. The wives, the girlfriends. When he gave out the awards, and so forth. He would throw these …”
He started to cough and shook his head.
“Here you go,” said the nurse, and handed him water and pills.
“I went for the parties, mostly,” he said, after he’d swallowed the pills and taken a sip. “A bachelor back then, you see. I didn’t go so often after I married.”
“My uncle was always single. Wasn’t he?”
“Never found the right special lady.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any old pictures? Pictures of him? My family, we weren’t close. And I haven’t been able to find anything in the house.”
He got up with difficulty, leaning hard on her arm, and made his way slowly to a bookshelf. She gazed around the room: shelves with framed pictures on them, a philodendron, tourist posters of Greece and Hong Kong, an old map. Finally he pulled out a thick ochre-colored album but it seemed too heavy for him, balancing on the edge of the shelf, half out and half in, as he stood helplessly with a feeble hand on the spine. She rose quickly before he could drop it.
“Oh here, let me … thanks, thank you so much,” she said, and sat down with it.
“Might be one of Buddy near the beginning. Long time ago, you know. My wife marked everything.”
The photographs were elaborately annotated in a spidery, awkward hand, words standing on the gluey ridges of the paper. She sat with the scrapbook open on her knees as he puttered over to a cabinet in the corner, which had an old turntable on top, likely of seventies vintage: fake wood-grain on the sides of the platform. It took him some time to remove a record from its sleeve, so long that she considered offering to help but then reconsidered in case it might give offense. Instead she paged through the heavy leaves looking for her uncle’s name. They were all black-and-white at the beginning, then sepia-toned; there were color Polaroids throughout the 1960s.
It seemed the wife had even gone back and archived Chip’s photos from before they met, since one caption, under a black-and-white of Chip and a young blonde in evening dress, read Chip and his girlfriend Lettie “Lulabelle” Mae, May 1953.
Finally she hit paydirt with a caption that read Chip with, l–r, Arnie Sayles, Lou Redmond, Frank Davis-Mendez and Albert “Bud” Halveston. Spring Banquet, 1959. It was a row of middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Her uncle, at the end, was thin and angular with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a wave of shining hair standing up over his forehead.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember him like that. She had been thirteen years old; she would have known him then.
Still nothing but the croquet and the player piano.
Chip’s record was opera—a mournful aria. When he sat down again he was less lucid, rambling about the ancient festivities as she paged through his album. Once there had been famous people, he said. Bud was well known for lavish cocktail parties, catered dinners, fancy-dress balls … he remembered women with tall feather headdresses, feathers and sparkling beads, the fund-raising events for charity, the hunting expos and sportsmen’s banquets. The Reagans were there once, and Henry Kissinger. Zsa Zsa Gabor one time when she was between husbands. Ice statues in the swimming pool.
“Charity,” said Susan, clutching at straws. “So what were his charities?”
“Oh the club, freedom to hunt, like that,” and he flapped a hand wearily. A moment ago he had been eager but suddenly he was tired. She wondered if she should call the nurse.
The opera played behind them, suddenly more subdued.
“I’m trying to figure out what he would have wanted,” she went on. “What his wishes would have been, for the house and the collection. My instructions, more or less. I don’t know who he was, is my problem.”
“Of course his pet project was the legacy,” said Chip, nodding.
“The legacy?”
He bent forward, coughing, and the nurse was back beside them with another glass of water.
“So what was the legacy?” asked Susan, when he had calmed down again.
“The legacy,” he said.
She saw the letter, on the coffee table in front of him, was half soaked in water. It was no good anymore, she thought, and felt a curious sadness.
The old letter was gone.
“I’m sorry, the—?”
“That actress, what was her name, she had—oh, who was it—I heard that Buddy showed it to her …”
“Time for your doctor visit,” interrupted the nurse. “We have a checkup downstairs.” She was pushing a wheelchair.
“May I walk with you, then?” asked Susan.
The nurse held one of his elbows as he rose, steering him to the chair. His other hand pointed waveringly at the record player, so Susan went over and lifted the needle, trying for delicacy. In the silence after the ffft she could hear the whine of a car alarm cycling outside but the apartment itself seemed airless and sealed.
“You were saying,” she urged gently, walking beside the nurse over the carpet. The wheelchair squeaked slightly under Chip’s weight.
“Saying?” he asked.
“What was the legacy?”
“Wasn’t allowed to go in. Not in the i
nner circle anymore. Bitsy was very softhearted, you see, she didn’t like the hunting and so forth … that was where all his fortune went …”
“Where, though?”
No use.
The apartment door closed behind them and they were on the catwalk now, the car alarm shrieking louder and nearer. She had to squeeze in beside them due to the narrow passage. He looked up at her and smiled broadly and she thought, with a lift of hope, that he would say something oracular. He pointed past her and she turned and looked: a small plane passing over the ocean, pulling a yellow aerial banner. But there was nothing on it, or if there was the words were facing out to sea.
Later she half wished she’d asked for the picture of her uncle or even slipped it surreptitiously out of the scrapbook—what were the chances Chip would ever have noticed it missing? Instead of a constant reference point she had a new ghost image of her great-uncle Buddy that moved along beside her: a thin man in a white dinner jacket with Brylcreem stiffening his hair.
It was better than nothing.
To resolve the guilt she tried to be frank with herself. She was a murderer when she got up, a murderer when she walked, a murderer whenever she was moving. It was only during the quiet times that she tried not to think of the new title. With momentum behind her she could embrace her status: a murderer without a prison sentence, without a trial or a defense attorney, a secret and sure-footed murderer ranging beyond the confines of the penal colony. But when she was trying to get to sleep it was more difficult to reconcile. Doubts intruded. At first, before she knew she was a murderer, they had been doubts about her innocence. Now that those doubts were answered with the certainty of her guilt she thought she should be sure of everything. She should be past equivocation and bargains, now that she had embraced the murdering. Yet tensions still arose. It wasn’t enough, in the dark, to know your own sin. It wasn’t enough to admit it. There was still the silence that followed the admission.
When she felt restless in the night she got up from her bed, pulled on a fleece sweater and went down the hall, touching a switch to bring on the dim lights of the sconces. She went to the carnivore rooms usually; she found their open mouths in the dim light, their dark maws studded with the white teeth, and rubbed the points of canines with a finger. She slung her arms around the musty fur of their necks. There was something she should be learning from them, but she didn’t know what. The hawk was no more to blame than the rabbit, right? She’d done her own killing in the passage of daily life, not because she wished to inflict pain. The cats and the wolves only did it for food: they looked cruel but they weren’t, she told herself. By contrast she looked innocuous and that was equally deceptive. She’d been greedy, she’d been selfish: maybe greed was her sin, or the variant of it that was lust. She was irreligious but sin was a neat description: lust, gluttony, avarice and pride. In the end all of the sins seemed the same to her, softer and harder forms of the same murder.
Once she accepted her own judgment, there was also the question of whether more sinning would make for still more murder. If she kept being a slut, would someone die again? It was foolish to think so, but after all, she thought, she was a fool. If any sin was murder, she might have to start behaving.
They did their best to ignore Christmas. Casey went to a movie in a mall somewhere, maybe the Westside Pavilion—with a guy, Susan assumed, though it was left unsaid. Jim the lawyer had gone to Tahoe to be with his wife’s relatives and everyone else she knew was occupied celebrating, so Susan rented a couple of videos and picked up Indian food.
On New Year’s she made a resolution to be different, though she was still unsure. She had murdered once, so she would always be guilty. But that didn’t mean she had to be a serial killer.
She decided to tell Jim.
“So listen,” she said, in bed.
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, we’re not breaking up.”
She propped herself up on an elbow, curious.
He’d grown on her. At first she’d thought he was average, and then, slipping sideways somehow, the fact arrived that she almost loved him. At any rate she liked him far too much. She saw him only once every few days, but she’d come to depend on it—the pleasant welcome of his face. She wondered in passing if it was all about his skin and its sweet smell: his skin that reminded her of Hal’s, smooth and flawless.
He lay on his back now, eyes closed. Curiously at ease. There was a crescent scar near one eyebrow, a shallow nick.
“And how is that your call, Jim?”
He shrugged lightly, his shoulders barely moving.
“We’re not, is all.”
Despite herself she was impressed.
“What if I said I don’t like you?”
“But you do.”
“What if I said it was—I mean, better late than never—the fact that you’re married?”
“I’d say that fact was none of your business.”
She turned and lay on her back beside him, gazing at the rings of light on the ceiling. One, two, three, the yellow circles intersecting with their invisible overlaps like a Venn diagram, the lamps on the nightstands, the floor lamp in the corner. They were on the ground floor for a change, in the small guest bedroom with the green Tiffany lamps. There were waterfowl around them. The waterfowl were an exception to her usual rule against sex with stuffed animals watching. The ducks, the geese, the pink flamingo on its single leg bothered no one. They had beady little eyes but clearly no interest in looking.
“Of course it’s my business. Motherfucker.”
“Come on, sweetie,” said Jim, and touched her briefly on the side of her leg with fingertips, not moving his arm. She liked how he expended no energy unless forced to. Male lions were like that, according to her uncle’s old encyclopedia. They slept all day in the sun and let the females do the hunting. “Let’s not argue.”
“I want to be better,” she said after a while.
“You’re good enough for me,” said Jim, and turned his head slightly to rest his face against her shoulder.
“Obviously you set the bar low.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said quietly.
“There’s a third party,” she said. “My new plan is not to be selfish.”
“That part is my life. Let me worry.”
A car passed somewhere outside, light glancing. Of course it was his life, but if she let herself off this easy her resolution was meaningless.
“I don’t want those boundaries,” she said abruptly, and sat up. Her robe was puddled on the floor beside the bed—she was still damp from the shower beforehand, she realized—and she leaned down to get it. “You don’t want to tell me, fine. It’s your business, I agree. But then I get to say if you stay or go.”
She stood and threw the robe over her shoulders. She felt glad of its lightness, its shine in the lamplight. She could make a smooth exit.
But also her slippers were somewhere lost in the dark of the floor. In the big house she almost never went barefoot. Sharp things were lodged in the elaborate tilework of the hallways, old, permanent dirt blackened the soles of her feet even after the women came to clean. She widened her eyes, tried to look harder. There, on the mirror lake with the long yellow reeds like Easter-basket stuffing, a flip-flop lay between a duck’s feet, the other tumbled beside it.
He mumbled something. She couldn’t quite hear and turned back to him as she pulled the robe’s belt tight.
“Sorry?”
“No love,” he said.
“No love?”
“She doesn’t love me.”
His eyes were still closed. She saw his chest in the light, hairless and lightly muscled. She’d even come to like his stomach, even its small roll. In the quiet she thought of asking him if he was sure, if he was just saying that, if he was rationalizing. But something in the tone of his voice stopped her.
“No love at all. Not for years. Really, I promise you. She doesn’t give a shit.”
“Susan,” he said slowly, almost growling, and this pleased her. She remembered Fantasy Baseball and the way he’d said Susie, and how she had disliked him for it. She almost shivered. “Let’s not.”
She considered for a few moments and lay down.
•
In the morning she woke up and found he was still there, for once. He seemed unworried by the novelty of the infraction. He got up and shuffled around the kitchen in a T-shirt, boxers and his unlaced dress shoes without socks.
“Those shoes look ridiculous,” she said fondly.
“Next time I’ll bring the slippers and pipe,” he said, but didn’t glance up at her. He was breaking eggs for an omelet.
They shared it on a single plate, sitting on either side of a wrought-iron table at the end of the pool. Above them were the branches of a weeping willow. Then they smoked two of his cigarettes and drank their black coffee. Their faces were in the willow’s shade, and she shivered and felt good.
He was consulting his watch—it was a weekday morning and he had to go to work—when T. came around the corner from the front of the house, followed by Casey.
Jim looked sidelong at Susan, squinting and crossing his legs. She had only the robe on, the robe and her flips, though her hair was brushed and she was clean. He was less so, half-dressed, his hair mussed, the boxers a dead giveaway. The situation was clear.
She watched Casey’s face as it neared.
“How awkward,” she said.
Best to be brutally frank. Her daughter was.
“Chill out,” said Casey mildly.
“Sorry for the intrusion,” put in T. “I wanted to see the place.”
She looked from Casey’s face to T.’s as they came toward her alongside the pool. They were relaxed.