Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “I can send over a couple of burly guys who work for one of our contractors, if you don’t mind paying his fees,” he offered at the front door, consulting a sleek wristwatch. “Some cement guys or roofers or something.”

  “Yes, please send them,” she said. “Or give me the number. Whatever’s quick.”

  “The secretary will call it in to you.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her to sleep with him, she thought, despite his competence and a passing attraction. She wondered at this, and when he was gone she put her feet up on the couch in the library and gazed into the face of a black bear.

  “Vera’s gone,” said Angela.

  Susan had picked up the phone at two in the morning, with Jim asleep beside her.

  “What?”

  “She’s gone. She had to go away.”

  She sat up, discomfort growing.

  “You mean—she’s coming right back, though?”

  “She had to go because someone was sick. But now I’m all alone.”

  She could hear thinness in the voice, a lost quality.

  “She—Vera left in the middle of the night?”

  “She left in the afternoon.”

  “And she didn’t call for a substitute?”

  “No substitute has come.”

  “No one’s with you? No one?”

  “I’m all alone.”

  “I’m in Pasadena, you know. There’s really no one there with you?”

  Silence.

  “Angela. Why don’t you give me the agency’s number and go back to bed, and then I’ll call them for you first thing in the morning?”

  “… I’m all alone,” said Angela again.

  Susan sighed, sat for a minute in inertia and resentment, and then got out of bed.

  “What?” asked Jim, as she flicked on the closet light and stood blinking at the clothes hanging.

  “I have to go make sure she’s OK,” she said.

  “She? Who? Casey?”

  “Angela. Her attendant apparently left her. Unless she’s making it up, for some reason.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Have to drive over there,” she said.

  “There? Where?”

  “Santa Monica.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Why you?”

  “There’s no one else.”

  “But why …”

  “There’s no one else,” she repeated, and reached into the hanging clothes to grasp the folds of anything.

  •

  The drive was faster than usual since the freeways were empty, but it still took almost forty minutes. When she got to the townhouse the lights were all out. After several minutes of her knocking and waiting, increasingly impatient, Angela appeared at the door in a lacy dressing gown and old-school hair curlers.

  “Did you go back to sleep?” asked Susan. “After you called me?”

  Angela shook her head firmly. But there was a waffle pattern printed on the side of her face.

  Irritated that she’d driven across the whole city for what seemed to be nothing, Susan slipped past her and flicked on the overhead. Apparently Angela was fine with shuffling around in pitch black.

  “OK, listen,” she said. “I told your son I would check in on you while he and Casey were gone. So I’ll sleep here tonight, until I can call Vera’s agency in the morning. I’ll just sleep on the couch, right here. And you need to go back to sleep too.”

  “I’m sorry. T. will be back soon,” said Angela, lucid for a moment.

  “Well, good,” said Susan. “I’m glad. And I have to say, I’m surprised at Vera. Even if she had to leave on an emergency, she still should have made sure you had someone.”

  She plumped a pillow on the edge of the couch and slipped off her shoes.

  “Back from the honeymoon,” said Angela, and nodded.

  Susan stared at her.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Back from the honeymoon.”

  “Vera went away on her honeymoon?” asked Susan, and studied Angela’s face, her pale blue eyes and carefully plucked brows. Maybe Vera did the plucking for her. Personally she wouldn’t trust Angela with a sharp pair of tweezers in the eyeball vicinity.

  “Not Vera, T.,” said Angela.

  Not lucid anymore.

  She had to be inventing it—very likely she was. Still, Susan remembered what Angela had said about T., when he was missing in the jungle and she herself was convinced he was dead. Possibly the woman had some kind of savant deal going on.

  “Let’s get you back to bed,” said Susan gently, and took her arm. “Here. I’ll walk with you to the room. Were you going around in the dark before I got here?”

  After she’d left Angela in her room she tossed on the couch for a while beset by images of Casey with vanilla cake smeared around her mouth, Susan not there at all, Susan all alone and separate and completely forgotten. Casey in the middle of sunlight, sunlight and other people who knew her—flowers and dresses, pomp and circumstance, ceremony and dancing, white frills and hideous ruffles.

  •

  In the morning she waited till Vera’s replacement arrived, a pretty young Latina who walked expertly on black stiletto heels. Susan opened the door for her and right away Angela eyed her tight clothes with suspicion.

  “My name is Merced,” said the woman, and smiled. “You must be Angela?”

  “Mrs. Stern,” said Angela coldly.

  “Of course: Mrs. Stern,” said Merced, not missing a beat.

  Angela ignored the outstretched hand but Merced took that in stride too and patted her arm kindly.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Stern,” she said. “We’ll do fine. I’ll take good care of you until Vera comes home again.”

  She put down her purse on the counter.

  “So what happened?” asked Susan, as Angela wandered out of the room.

  “It was an unfortunate situation,” said Merced. “The receptionist was a temp, because the regular girl just went on maternity leave, and then this temp, who I guess, it turns out, is bipolar?—she just all of a sudden walked out on the job. So no one got Vera’s message. And then …”

  “Something could have happened to her,” said Susan.

  “They’re extremely concerned about the error,” said Merced, and nodded earnestly. “Are you the family?”

  Susan was explaining when Angela came back in and began to rearrange items nervously on end tables and shelves.

  “Excuse me, Susan? May I speak to you privately?” she asked after a minute.

  Susan followed her into her bedroom, where she shut the door behind them.

  “I don’t know that woman,” said Angela. “She’s a stranger.”

  “It won’t be for long,” said Susan. “Probably just a few days.”

  “I don’t know her at all. And she doesn’t know me.”

  Angela had flipped open a jewelry box on her dresser and waggled her fingers in its miniature compartments until she found a sparkly rhinestone brooch in the shape of a bow.

  “It’ll be fine. She’s a professional. Just like Vera. When Vera first came you didn’t know her either, but still you got along fine. Remember? This one’s good too. She knows what she’s doing.”

  “But she doesn’t know anything about me,” said Angela.

  “Is there anything you’d like me to discuss with her, before I go?” asked Susan.

  Angela had opened the pin on the back of the brooch and was picking at her cuticles with the sharp point, agitated. They were already torn into ragged hangnails and soon they would be bleeding.

  “I tell you what,” said Susan, reaching out and taking her hand to stop her. She pried the fingers gently off the brooch pin as she spoke. “You try to get along here for the day with just the two of you. All right? Because I have an appointment. I have some men coming to the house to move some heavy furniture for me. So I have to get back to Pasadena now. But if you still don’t feel comfortable with Merced by dinnertime you can call me. And I’ll come
back again. Does that sound fair?”

  Angela said nothing.

  “I want you to relax,” said Susan. “She’ll take good care of you. She really will.”

  “She’s low-class,” said Angela, and put out her bottom lip in a sulk. “She looks like a prostitute.”

  Infantile, scattered, then distant and poised—but after all it must be par for the course. If Hal had lived, if both of them had lived together into their dotage they might have been like this. They might have ended as ancient children, half-gone, fumbling, and rarely if ever themselves.

  “It’s the style,” said Susan. “She’s young. They all dress like that these days.”

  As though she and Angela were already the same—old biddies far past sex and fashion.

  “Prostitute shoes,” said Angela.

  “Look, I like her,” said Susan, thinking that maybe a more personal testimony would help. “She’s nice. Give her a chance. I think she’ll grow on you.”

  After a few more minutes of wheedling she was able to steer Angela back into the kitchen and persuade her to accept a glass of iced tea. Quiet in the background, she slipped out the door while the other two were talking—fled down the walk gratefully in her slept-in clothes, her teeth gritty and unbrushed.

  •

  Construction workers came and moved the large pieces of furniture from the walls marked by the architect. When they had gone, dark, massive old wardrobes stood anchorless in the center of rooms.

  It bothered her. The investigation had to be finished quickly or she would grow restless at the disorder. But when she called his office the architect was busy with real work, he said testily. He pawned her off on a junior associate who could come by in his stead.

  The associate was a young recent graduate named Leigh, her hair pulled back in a tight platinum-blond ponytail, wearing the same trendy horn-rimmed glasses favored by her colleague. Susan admired her self-possession and wondered if all architects had this—a punctilious, almost rigorous and pared-down sense of style, clothing with clean lines and expensive labels. Leigh showed no interest in the mounts, only the house itself—as though the animals were not there, as though she saw right through them.

  Susan could tell she was less expert than the older guy but she seemed to know enough for the purpose. She rapped on walls and moved a small yellow stud finder over their surfaces, Susan watching as its green light flashed on and off again.

  “Nothing there,” she said in the first room.

  “Nope, nothing,” she said in the second.

  “My guess would be crawl space,” she said in the third. “Not enough room for stairs.”

  “Sorry, no,” she said in the last room.

  Susan was disappointed.

  Only then, resigned to a nonevent and walking the architect girl to the door, did she remember the slab.

  “Wait,” she said excitedly, and stopped. “There’s this one place in the yard—it’s not that near the house, actually, it’s in the backyard, way back there in the fir grove—but when I first moved in, we were doing some garden work and we found it. It’s just a piece of concrete sunk into the ground. You don’t really notice it, normally. He said there might have been a root cellar under there once, something like that. I mean, it’s just a slab. Cement or whatever. With grass growing over the edges. But can you quickly take a look?”

  Leigh followed Susan out the service entrance and around to the back, where they picked their way down the flagstone paths toward the copse at the rear of the property. The further they went the more discouraged she felt: it was too far from the house. It was unlikely to be connected.

  A few steps into the fir trees they ducked under some boughs, crunched over a sparse litter of cones and then stood over the slab: overgrown, concrete, about three feet square.

  Almost nothing.

  “Enh,” said the architect girl, and shrugged. She poked at the slab with the smooth toe of her pump. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

  •

  The intercom buzzed a little past midnight. She looked out the window of her new bedroom—it faced the crescent drive instead of the backyard—and saw a taxi waiting at the front gate.

  She was hoping it was Casey, and she took the wide stairs quickly, lightly, two at a time. But when she pressed the button to talk to the driver he said, “I got a Angela here. Angela Stern.”

  She almost said Oh no right then. But instead she sighed, buzzed open the gate and went out front to meet them.

  “Does she know where you are?” she asked Angela, as soon as she stepped from the taxi.

  It could mean Merced’s job, she was thinking.

  “She fell asleep,” Angela said.

  “We have to call. She’ll be worried sick by now.”

  Angela walked slowly, peering down through the dark at her footing as the taxi’s headlights swept back. She was wearing a long winter coat, a coat she’d never have a use for in L.A., over a sheer lacy nightgown.

  “So what went wrong?” asked Susan, a hand on her arm to steer. As they drew near the house again the motion sensors were triggered and the outside lights flicked on.

  “It wasn’t safe. It was unsafe,” said Angela, and shook her head.

  “Unsafe.”

  “What if she stepped on you,” said Angela. “Those shoes—those shoes would be like daggers. They could stab me.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Susan.

  It took her a moment to register the words. And then she found Angela was standing there stricken. Her face looked white.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, exactly as a person might who wasn’t insane at all. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s all right,” said Susan.

  Inside she sat Angela down in the kitchen, gave her a glass of water and called the apartment, where Merced picked up the phone right away.

  “She’ll stay with me,” Susan told her, resigned. “She’ll stay till Vera gets back. So have them call me as soon as that happens. Would you?”

  She looked over at Angela, who was sitting very straight on her kitchen chair under a fish and holding her water glass carefully, with two hands. She put her to bed in North American Birds.

  When the children returned, Angela was still there. They showed up at the big house one evening around dusk, while Susan and Jim and Angela were eating Thai on the patio beside the pool—though Angela was not eating. After the food arrived she’d decided she distrusted food of any “ethnicity” and had requested instead a Tom Collins.

  Casey was brown from the sun and T. wore faded jeans. The three-legged dog loped along beside them.

  “Oh, dears, dears!” called Angela joyfully. “How was the Mexican wedding?”

  Susan rose as they approached the table, rose and put down her napkin.

  “Good,” said T., and rested a hand lightly on Casey’s shoulder. “It was good.”

  7

  She wanted to show she was happy about the wedding news. And for the most part she was, or she would be when she assimilated the information—she felt a kind of rising anticipation on Casey’s behalf—but there was also petty confusion. Her pride was injured as much as her feelings. She would have been grateful for anything—the most nominal warning, the most casual tip of a hat.

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know,” said Casey.

  They’d gone to get a bottle of white wine from the kitchen. Susan didn’t keep champagne in the house, so it would have to serve.

  “But Angela did,” she said, rummaging in a drawer for a corkscrew and trying to contain the seed of resentment. No whining; keep it pure and simple, be remembered well.

  “Oh yeah?” asked Casey. Give her credit: it sounded like real surprise.

  “She told me you were on your honeymoon,” said Susan.

  “Huh. Not exactly,” said Casey. “In the first place, I only went along for the ride. At the last minute. I wasn’t planning to. It was Baja—the Sea of Cortez. A whale stranding.”
>
  “A whale stranding?” asked Susan, looking up from the wine.

  “A mass stranding. There were over twenty of them. Beaked whales, which is a kind that dives deep, I guess? They look like dolphins to me, they have those kind of long noses. Anyway the biologists inspected some of the dead ones and said they had these hemorrhages around the ears. They think navy sonar caused them. You know, the navy does this sonar in the ocean? It’s for detecting diesel submarines, or something. So anyway the whale guys think the sound waves hurt whale brains. They get confused or they’re in pain and it disorients them and then they beach themselves. They lie there baking in the sun and dying. It’s one of the worst things I’ve seen. You wouldn’t believe the smell.”

  “So what did you do?” asked Susan.

  “We helped get some of them back in the water. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Answer: I sat on my crippled ass behind a folding table and handed out bottled water to the volunteers. Tame shit like that.”

  “But it’s good,” said Susan softly. “I’m glad you did.”

  “T.’s idea, he got on some kind of emergency phone tree for marine mammal rescue. He’s on a bunch of lists now. Your basic Good Samaritan shit. Some of it’s just giving out money. Like with the foundation. He just paid a bunch of poachers in Africa to stop shooting rhinos. They sell the horns to make into, like, fake Chinese aphrodisiacs. Now they’re getting a salary for guarding the rhinos instead of killing them. Who knew?”

  “That sounds like a great idea,” said Susan drily.

  “But with the whales I kinda got into it,” said Casey. “It was a life-or-death thing. It had—I don’t know. It wasn’t nothing.”

  “You take the wine, OK? I’ll take the glasses,” said Susan, and handed down the bottle. She put five goblets on a tray and they started out of the kitchen, toward the patio. “So where did, you know, the getting-married part come in?”

  “Spur-of-the-moment,” said Casey behind her. “That was his idea too.”

  “You going to have a reception? At least a big party?”

  “Fuck if I know,” said Casey happily. “Haven’t thought about it. He’s moving in, though. He likes my place better than his.”