by Lydia Millet
“So who have we here? Introduce me to your cute friends, Susan.”
“My cousin Steven,” she said. “His son, Tommy.”
“Hey, Tommy,” said Casey. “Last time I saw you we hadn’t even hit puberty.”
“Hey, Casey,” said Tommy stiffly, but made no move in her direction.
“You were into Star Trek,” said Casey.
“I don’t remember that.”
“Denial is common. But I remember all too well. You always tried to give me a Vulcan nerve pinch.”
Tommy lifted his vodka and drank, projecting an aura of distrust.
“That was his geek period,” said Steven, and elbowed his son in the ribs.
“All in the distant past now,” said Casey, and grinned.
“He’s got a job in Portland cement!” said Susan.
“Ground granulated blast-furnace slag,” corrected Tommy.
“So, Tommy,” said Casey brightly. “Let’s catch up then, shall we? Come tell me all about that slag.”
She inclined her head toward a nearby table, and Tommy shuffled off after her with some reluctance.
“Hey, name’s Jim,” said Jim, and held out his hand to Steven.
“Sorry, how rude of me,” said Susan, and finished the round of introductions.
When Susan paid attention next Steven was saying to Dewanne, “So what are you, one of her teacher friends?”
“Just a neighbor,” said Dewanne. “From the old neighborhood. And what do you do, honey?”
“I run my own business. In programming.”
“Oh my,” said Dewanne.
She would leave the two of them alone, thought Susan, and Dewanne might win him over. Dewanne graciously liked everyone, even sleazebags.
But really, for the cousins, forget the guest list and the food selection; she should have cut straight to the chase and ordered up some working girls.
“You ready for a refill?” asked Jim.
“I’ll come with you.”
Better this way—better to leave her relatives with people who could stand them.
She and Jim slipped away for ten minutes, snuck into the room with the ducks and locked the door behind them. But then, in the yellow-green glow from the stained-glass lamps, in the drowsy aftermath of the pot, she drifted. She woke up later in the quiet and realized it, alarmed. She had fallen asleep. She sat up with a jolt. Damn it, she’d missed her own party.
The house was still beyond the door, the clock on the wall read 2:48. She had not meant to vanish. How inconsiderate, how wrong. Also, she’d screwed up the cousin thing. She felt panicky.
She got up and pulled her clothes on in a rush, the dress, the heels. The music was turned off, she thought, or she’d be hearing it. Her guests must all have left, gone to their homes. Some must have asked where she was, some must have felt ignored or irritated—but anyway she had to know, if there were any still here she had to go out there, play the hostess, take care of them.
She left Jim sleeping on his side, mouth agape on the pillow, opened the door and stepped out into the silent hall. A few lights were still on, here and there, but overall it was dim and on the edges of her vision she had an impression of orange and black shades in the rooms, great caves looming off to the sides, beer bottles on the tables, wineglasses on the windowsills. Ashtrays, empty food bowls on surfaces—how many guests had there been, after all? Thirty, she thought, thirty guests at the most, but now it looked like more, it looked like forty or fifty.
She passed the ballroom and saw the doors. They all stood open still and the drapes rushed out in rills when the breeze came up. It was a chill breeze now, in the small hours. She would close the doors, she thought, and went into the room. In the dimness she stepped across a trail of crackers, crumbling to powder underfoot, and walked toward the pool, visible through the line of doors with its wavering aqua light. She started to shut the doors and then thought she saw something outside, a movement in the back garden beyond the corner of the pool enclosure. For no good reason she thought of burglars, then chided herself for paranoia.
But someone was still here, she thought. Someone remained.
She went through the doors, planning what to say if it was Steve or Tommy—how to appear gracious and pretend she hadn’t retreated into a back room to get laid and then, stoned as a twelve-year-old on his first high, abandoned them. As though, somehow, she was controlled and prim. This was how she wished to appear in their eyes: someone who was responsible, grateful, and unduly burdened. Someone straight as a pin and fully deserving of their charity.
Give it up, she told herself, moving onto the patio.
Alternatively she could confess her guilt, make a clean breast of her character flaws and throw herself on their mercy. She went around the pool and opened the gate on the far side, heard it creak behind her and stepped out onto the path that led between the koi ponds and the willows. There were footlights along the pathways and she was glad of them. She stopped on the flagstones and listened. She thought she heard a whisper; she didn’t want to interrupt anything. But then—she stopped again, holding her breath—maybe it wasn’t intimate, maybe it was just talk.
Further along the path the bushes were closer beside her, there was less room to move, and the sound of her heels on the uneven stones seemed louder. She peered through the dark. There was a bench in the trees, back there, with footlights around it—a small paved area, one of the round wrought-iron tables, and she went toward it cautiously. There were shapes under the trees, near the bench—a wheelchair, facing her, more or less, and sitting in it a girl with long hair, her face down. For a second she thought it was Casey, before she knew it wasn’t.
It must be the college girl, she thought—still shocked, in the background of her recognition, that her own daughter was not a college girl, apparently would never be. It wasn’t Nancy, because Nancy’s hair was shorter. It had to be the younger girl, the one who had multiple sclerosis.
She was about to say something to her, was wracking her brain for the name, but then she blinked, her eyes nearly aching from the strain. She could make out another figure, on its knees, its head in the young woman’s lap. A man, must be. Because of the footlights she could see lower but not higher up—see the man’s bent legs, the vertical planes of the soles of his shoes, even their patterning, with the orange light from the sodium lamp shining onto the grooved rubber surface. She moved around to try to make him out, so the wheelchair was more in profile. But his head was down and she could not see his face. Indistinct sounds of choking. Was it sex? No: the man was crying, or sniveling at least, and the girl was speaking in low, consoling tones. They were drunk, or at least the man was drunk—the man was well on his way to wasted. The girl might not be drunk at all, as Susan recalled, she probably didn’t drink—her way of speaking had stutters and pauses, had slushy consonants—it was common with her disease, Casey had said. But the man slurred when he spoke, slurred and mumbled, and with him it was all drunkenness.
On a spying impulse she crept closer, screened from them by trees.
“It’ll be OK,” said the girl, and stroked the man’s head, comforting. Who was he? Not enough light. She couldn’t tell.
“One night you pet one,” he slurred, “and the next night you come in and you have to kill it.”
“You could change jobs,” said the girl, in her soft, halting way. “If it’s too hard.”
“There’s no one else to take it,” said the man, and raised his head. He was sobering up now, or had stopped sniveling, anyway. There was a branch in front of him and she couldn’t see his features. “Someone has to do it.”
“I’m sure they do …”
“There’s weeks when, though, I feel it’s all on me, like the whole thing is on me. You know?”
Susan hit her anklebone on something hard, winced and looked down. It was a round river rock at the edge of a pool—mounds of rocks, dry reeds white in the nighttime, the black water. The still, black pools: she felt such an affini
ty for them. Who knew what he was talking about, some kind of mass euthanasia of unwanted pets? And yet the information was being dispensed as though he was a hero: he was a noble caretaker, he was a suffering martyr in his euthanizing. Repulsive.
Beneath her the pool was peaceful, black and smooth. So tranquil was the pool: look at the pools, pretend the pool alone was real, its dark relief, simplicity. She would creep backward, if she could do it silently and without tripping—back away from the conversation. After all, if these two were still here, there could be other guests lingering. She might still be able to redeem herself, as a hostess. She should sweep the rooms and make sure. She started her retreat.
Quiet.
“You’re so pretty,” said the man more loudly, in a different tone. His words still ran together, but now he was projecting.
“Shh,” said the girl.
“Come on. Lemme—”
“No.”
“Your eyes are nice.”
“We’ll get you some water,” said the girl.
He was trying to force himself on her, pushing his face up to hers. Jesus, she thought, a guy who used dead dogs as foreplay.
It was a new one on her.
There was the sound of it, the flesh sound of arms or chests, of soft fronts blundering.
“Stand up,” said the girl firmly. “It’s alcohol. That’s all.”
A long moment and then the man stood up droopily.
“We’ll go inside,” said the girl. “We’ll get you some water.”
She reached for her handrims and Susan stepped back into a nook, back behind a bush—the rhododendron, thick and waxy. In a minute they went past her, the girl ahead in the chair, the man slowly following. She recognized him from behind: Addison.
Where was Nancy? Asleep, maybe. Sleeping girlfriend in a wheelchair, dying dogs. That was the strategy. He was golden.
When they had disappeared she stepped up to the pool again and stared down into it.
•
There were others, she discovered, but they were fast asleep. Casey was lying on one length of the L-shaped couch in the cat room, a blanket pulled over her up to the chin, and Nancy was asleep on the other length. Sal was there too, asleep nearby but still in his chair—snoring, his head back to expose the jut of his Adam’s apple. An annoying tinny beat issued forth from his Walkman earphones. She didn’t see Addison or the girl.
She walked across to Sal and stood there looming over him for a second, deliberating. After a moment she reached for the dull silver cassette player lying on his lap. She lifted it delicately, turned it sideways to study the row of buttons, and gently pushed the one marked STOP.
Sal’s head jerked up. He blinked at her blearily.
“Sorry,” she said. “I thought you were …”
“I gotta have the music,” he said.
“When you’re—?”
“To sleep, man.”
“Oh?”
“Can’t sleep without music,” and he took the Walkman back and placed it on his thigh again.
“I apologize, then,” she said.
He grunted, pressed PLAY and crossed his arms, leaning back.
Down on the couch, Casey moved her head restlessly.
“Good night,” whispered Susan in Sal’s direction. She was turning to leave when she saw the two from the garden approaching—the girl ahead, Addison stumbling behind.
“He needs to crash,” whispered the girl, and then: “I would—go home, but all of them …”
“You came together,” whispered Susan.
The girl nodded. “In a van.”
“It’s always hardest for the sober ones,” said Susan, as though she knew.
Behind the girl—possibly headed for the corner recliner—Addison tripped abruptly and fell sideways onto the platform that held the rearing lion. He turned and grabbed at it as he fell and the hind paws came up off the platform, ripping off their bolts, so that he and the lion fell together, in a clinch.
“Oh my God,” said the girl.
“Oh no,” said Susan.
Sal’s head jerked up again.
“What the fuck,” he said.
Addison lay on the shag rug loosely holding the beast, whose front paws stretched above his head.
“Passed out,” said the girl, after a second.
“I think you’re right,” said Susan.
“No shit,” said Sal, and shook his head.
“I’m sorry about the lion,” said the girl.
“Me too,” said Susan, and gazed down at the lion’s ripped feet. She bent to look closer: the four gray pads of the toes, a yellow-white fur around them, another soft pad further back. It was torn open now with a bolt sticking out to reveal part of the white-plastic mold inside. Their pose, she thought, was like two animals on a shield or flag in one of the old man’s heraldry books. Some flags pictured lions and unicorns facing each other, standing on their hind legs, or griffins and dragons. Two animals poised to pummel each other. Lying inert, Addison pummeled a lion.
“Why don’t you come with me,” she said to the girl. Sal was already nodding off. “There’s another room on this floor you can sleep in. More comfortable than here.”
They left Addison where he had fallen, tangled with the great cat, a high-pitched beat leaking out of Sal’s headphones.
“They’re going to claim he had delusions,” said Casey in the morning.
She was in the bathroom with Susan, who stood up from the sink, her face dripping, and reached for the hand towel, her eyes squeezed shut.
“What?”
“Yeah. They’ve got a lawyer. They’re going to say the will isn’t valid.”
“You’re kidding.”
“But Jim says that they’re full of it.”
“Jim knows?”
“Yeah, he was standing there when they told me.”
Susan dried her face and walked out, looking for him. He was in bed still. She pulled the curtains open and flooded them both with whiteness, bleaching the flamingo.
“You didn’t think I’d want to know?”
He groaned and rolled onto his back, feet splayed under the sheet, arms wide.
“Listen. I don’t think you really need to worry.”
“Don’t need to worry? They’re trying to take this all away from me!”
“The standard for legal capacity is low,” he said, and raised himself onto his elbows, rubbing his eyes wearily.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Jim. What are you telling me?”
“They’d have to prove that he was delusional under 6100, and there’s no evidence of that. Or under Section 811, they’d have to have evidence he couldn’t reason logically. Or recognize familiar objects or people. Or have any memory. They’re not objecting to the trust. The trust is irrelevant to them. And that’s a benefit to you, because with trusts the legal capacity standard is higher. There’s no presumption of undue influence here, either. So chances are slim they’ll prevail.”
“Slim?”
“Very slim, Susan.”
She was silent for a second, biding her time. Then she realized the legalese was oddly erotic. His competence. His knowledge of the probate code. She wanted to get back into bed.
The door was open, though, and outside in the corridor was Casey, sitting impatiently in her chair beneath a woody canopy of fallow-deer antlers.
“You’re not just saying that?” she asked him finally.
“I’m telling you. It’s a long shot at best. It’s frivolous, in my view.”
“Do I have to—then should I do anything?”
“Try to relax.”
Now that the cousins’ decision was made, she saw, it was possible. The lawsuit was actually a relief; she could behave exactly as she wished. No more need to try to impress them, no need to fail so miserably.
She was smiling at the lawyer from the white-lit dust. Motes were adrift in the beam, and floated horizontally.
6
If you lived in a very b
eautiful house your life became the house, and like the house the life could acquire a quality of completion. It was something about order, she thought, order and its sufficiency. Before now, she had never seen how the mood of her life was defined by the spaces where she existed. Other people knew this—on one end of the spectrum architects and interior designers, on the other the guys who lived in appliance boxes in alleys—but it had never been so obvious to her.
When she left the house, three days a week on Mondays through Wednesdays, to drive to the office and do T.’s paperwork, she walked out the side door onto the driveway in a familiar path straight across the gravel. She parked the car in the same position every afternoon and so the path to it was always the same in the morning—behind her, as she emerged from the house, thick English ivy and Virginia creeper climbing the mansion wall, lilac bushes on either side of what had once been a service entrance.
To her left as she went out the door was the pool enclosure: the sounds of the fountain, a bird dipping over the water, a flicker at the edge of her eye. To her right was the driveway as it stretched out toward the wide front gate, the straight line of it with a branch curving off to the right, as you moved to the street, to round the front of the house in a semicircle. From where she stood it was mostly a line between grassy expanses, a simple gravel line in the grass. Beyond it rose the hedge that screened her from her neighbors; this was the closest point of contact with the other properties—the towering oleander that guarded them, rising easily eighteen feet, already thick with gaudy pink and red blooms.
Once she pulled through the gate—which was fixed now and glided open before her—and the lush gardens and shady trees were behind her, the gray buzz of the city replaced the oasis. There was the confusion of crowding, sometimes of ugliness: the concrete of overpasses and buildings, air thick with pollution, black and yellow digital signs with words unfurling constantly, velocity and noise, the haphazardness of garbage, the pall of commerce and everyday filth. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, exhaust fumes, the possibility of bad drivers, hostile passersby, sudden accidents, contagious illness, but more overwhelming still than these variables was the slightness and insecurity of her position in space—she could be anywhere, once she was out of the house.