Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  •

  After a week T. came to the house to reclaim his pet. He had wanted to do it sooner but he knew she had grown fond of the dog. No doubt he was being considerate.

  “So,” he said, kneeling in the kitchen, his hands in the dog’s fur, rubbing. “When you come back we can start the next project. But no hurry. None at all. Take all the time you need.”

  “A new project?” she asked.

  She’d been doing preliminary research for him on a parcel in Tahoe when he disappeared, something about Whispering Pines.

  “We’re going to disincorporate,” he said.

  He’d said something about that, on the phone from Belize. Back when she thought he was crazy. She’d blocked it out, she guessed.

  She realized she had a headache, thought it might be dehydration, and went to get ice for a glass of water.

  “It can be a complicated process,” he continued. “The lawyer will handle most of the details. I’d like you to stay on with me, though. If you’re interested.”

  “I don’t really get it,” she said dumbly, and turned from the open freezer to stare.

  “I’m going to do something else. You’ll still be needed.”

  “Something else?”

  “A foundation.”

  “Foundation? You mean, for giving away money?”

  “A 501(c)3.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Dead serious. But like I say, no rush. We can talk more when you’re feeling up to it.”

  They were leaving then, he and the dog, with little acknowledgment, the dog’s nails clicking across the kitchen floor. She noticed its bowls were still beside the trash can—one with a few kibbles remaining, the other with water. She and Hal had never had a dog. She thought vaguely that Hal might not have liked them very much, might have preferred cats such as the one he bought for Casey. Though he had always said he liked dogs, this might have been a white lie of sorts, she thought. Why had they never had a dog, if in fact they both liked dogs?

  But it was true what he had told her about T.—her employer was sane, though certainly changed. Apparently it was straightforward: he’d turned liberal Democrat from fiscal Republican. Of course she did not know how he voted. For all she knew he never voted at all. But clearly he had some notion of being a do-gooder. (Why was the term so bitter, so resentful?) Anyway he was newly bent on charity. Such reversals were not uncommon, almost cliché, in fact: it was only the certainty with which he’d proceeded, before, the certainty of his commitment that made it seem absurd. Then again the kid was only in his twenties, barely older than Casey. She’d given him too much credit for being fully formed. He had always had a veneer of maturity.

  She heard his car back out of the driveway and walked with her glass of water into the living room, past a bookshelf where there was a picture of Hal and her. It was before they had Casey, when they were young, and Casey had had it framed and set it up there. They were two young hippies, long-haired and smiling. Well, she was long-haired. Hal had never gone that way. But he did sport a mustache and the obligatory beard, which Casey always found amusing. True to its era the picture was sun-bleached and faded; they stood holding hands in front of a silver Airstream. Susan wore what appeared to be a striped muumuu, Hal a flowery tunic. She had picked out his clothes for him back then.

  An offer came in for the house and she began to sort Hal’s things into boxes to give away, boxes to move with, boxes for Casey. Into Casey’s boxes she put a model horse, toy soldiers, a sailboat with peeling blue paint. That was easy; it was the half-broken objects that were hard, the ones too slight or old to keep—a slingshot made crudely out of twigs and rubber bands, Boy Scout badges, worn baseball cards from the fifties. There were report cards. In second grade Hal had received an A in Deportment; in fifth he’d gotten a B– and the remark, in a slanted, loopy hand, At times, Hal can be boisterous.

  Her own items were the bulk of it. She’d kept more than Hal had and the worst was something she’d thought she’d gotten rid of, a book of lists. It was a bound journal from years ago, from a few months after the accident, when she first started sleeping around. Mainly it was a list of men. She’d been incautious then, maybe half hoping Hal would catch her and she would be confronted, but he had never suspected, as far as she knew, and her desire for exposure had slowly waned. The book was a juvenile collection—the names, physical descriptions, the events of their meetings. She barely remembered all of them now, and looking at it felt ashamed by the childishness. It had always been about knowing and being known, about experience and diversity, but here it was clearly teenage games. Now that she was a murderer, now that she had homicide under her belt, it looked to her like evidence.

  She crammed it down into the kitchen garbage, then cleaned out the refrigerator and rained down old vegetables on it—rubbery carrots, yellowing celery, a torrent of moldy beets.

  She had spent her morning on real estate—showings on the beach, slick modern condos the realtor picked out with wide windows that looked out over the Pacific, balconies that gave a view of the headlands to the north—when the lawyer’s call came. Her great-uncle Albert, who had died a few months back, had named her in his will. She’d barely noticed the death when it happened; she had never known the great-uncle, had met him only once, as a child, when her parents took her over to his house on a weekend. Odd that she remembered it at all; the only reason was his player piano. The piano had stuck with her. He pressed a button and showed her how the white keys moved under the weight of invisible fingers. There was one other fragment too—a thin arm in a plaid shirtsleeve as it bent down and stuck a rusty wire hoop into the grass. That was all she recalled.

  She drove to the lawyer’s office in Century City, a tall shining building with valet parking, and sat across from his desk with her right leg vibrating restlessly. The lawyer talked on the phone while she waited. He was a stubby man with a gleaming nose and ruddy cheeks and she wondered idly what he would say if she told him her husband had been stabbed to death. She considered blurting it out. Behind his head was a Chagall print. The décor in the office matched the colors in the print, down to the blue curtains and the flowers on the desk. Chagall had always irritated her. There was an obnoxiousness to the painting, a repugnantly coy quality, like a grown man talking baby talk to other grown men.

  “There’s no cash to speak of,” said the lawyer when he hung up, cutting right to the chase and handing her a thick file. “The bulk of the estate is the house itself. The house and the contents. Those are yours. You’re the nearest next of kin, or at least the only one he bothered to name. Himself—as I’m sure you’re aware—he died without issue.”

  “A house,” she repeated. The one with the player piano? She would inherit a player piano: a murderer, a black widow, the proud owner of a player piano.

  If she suppressed the murder part, the thought gave her a lift of pleasure.

  “Where is it, again? The Valley?”

  “Pasadena,” he said. “The will, the title, the records he left are in the folder. Review them at your leisure. You may take possession at any time or of course you may also sell. Estate taxes are basically covered for you under the terms of a somewhat complicated trust. All in the file. Feel free to consult your tax preparer.”

  She took a minute to shuffle through the file, the documents that were impervious to her scrutiny.

  “It’s all there,” said the lawyer, apparently impatient. “Feel free to consult your accountant.”

  “It’s such a coincidence,” she said, flustered. “It’s one of those things. Because I’m selling my own home right now.”

  The lawyer nodded and took another call.

  When she left she felt thrilled. She paid the valet and pulled out onto the street, her accordion folder on the passenger seat, then found a side street and parked to rifle through the papers till she found the address. It was unfamiliar—she barely knew Pasadena—so she dug in the glove compartment for her dog-eared Thomas Guide and flip
ped through it.

  There were keys stashed, the lawyer had said.

  •

  She did not let her hopes rise as she drove, expended effort to tamp them down. A derelict bungalow that was two-thirds garage, a trailer with fruit stencils decorating the kitchen walls … thick-walled refrigerators from the fifties strewn across a dry lawn, their rounded edges speckled with rust. With sagging roof and umbrella clotheslines, it would sit hunkered down on cinderblocks on a grim street where the lots were separated by chain-link and pit bulls jumped at you when you passed, backed up to a fast-food chicken joint or a video store or freeway.

  But the nearer she got the smoother the pavement beneath her tires, the deeper and older the covering trees. Their shade moved over her car, dappling the windshield. Soaring limbs, velvet green leaves—even the bark looked soft. There were white flowers, opened up at the throat like trumpets, and then she passed a row of tall gates that reminded her of Bel Air. Hedges enclosed mansions.

  “No fucking way,” she said, leaning forward and clutching the steering wheel. Hal should have been here. He had always been middle-class and had never had, as she did, rich relatives in the hazy distance, perennially blurred figures. And there was the number from her paper, on a wrought-iron gate. At the top of the gate there was something else written—the name of the estate? She squinted to make it out: a rusty script with flourishes, letters missing, obscured by branches and leaves.

  She was out of place here. Even her car, with its fading paint job, seemed like an insult to the street.

  The drive was cobblestone and the gate was locked. She reversed and parked on the street to look for the keys. They were under a rock near the gate, the lawyer had said, so she knelt and pulled back branches until she found it, tipped it up and got her fingers dirty. That part felt right: grubbing in the dirt, squatting. She thought: The murderer squatted. She thought along those lines daily. The murderer poured a cup of coffee. The murderer went to sleep. The murderer disassociated.

  After a while she realized she had the wrong rock. The fake rock was beside it, hollow. Underneath was a set of keys.

  Once she’d pushed one side of the gate open and driven through, the car bumping and shaking over the cobbles, she could peer around at her leisure: a wide lawn with long, leaf-littered grass. There was a fountain off to the left and on her right a pool enclosure. The house, straight ahead, was sprawling and off-white and was surmounted by a green dome, probably oxidized copper. She saw archways over a slate terrace, white metal tables and chairs and parasols with scalloped edges that fluttered. The key stuck at first in the front door, which was intricately carved—some kind of nature scene with odd flat-topped trees—but finally the door opened. No alarm.

  Inside it was dim, streaks of light through a window somewhere, and smelled of mothballs. She slid her hand along the wall, feeling for a light switch. Instead it hit something strange—both smooth and furry, bulbous. She snatched her hand away, heartbeat quickened, and tried another wall as her eyes adjusted. She stood in an entryway painted deep red, deer gathered on the walls. Their antlers protruded, their glass eyes stared.

  The murderer inherited a house full of deer. My deer, my deer. The universe showed off its symbolic perfection; the atoms bragged.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  She moved forward. The next room was spacious, opened up to the dome above. A weak daylight filtered down and she could make out a wide staircase that circled up into a bristling dimness and still more deer heads, mounted on walls, sideboards, above doorways. Maybe not all deer, she thought: some were delicate and unfamiliar, striped or with elaborate curling horns—antelope or gazelle, maybe. There was a huge bull moose.

  The ceilings were high and vaulted. Beneath the dead herds the place was startling in its elegance, though oddly decorated: purple curtains grayed by age and dust, crystal sconces on the walls, thick swoops of gold brocade—a magician’s stage, a goth bordello. She pulled the curtains open as she passed them, turned on lights and moved past the staircase, into a living room with more animals still. Here there were cats. Cheetahs or leopards maybe, she didn’t know the difference—not tigers, anyway. More than just heads, there were whole bodies posed leaping, posed stalking, streamlined with huge, round eyes and fur that seemed less their own than the coats of the rich black ovals on one, black rings with golden centers on another, the trappings of starlets. She looked closely into a face—the golden eyes, the fangs—then turned away.

  The cats were captured forever in the seventies: stone fireplace, sunken lounge area, shag carpet and an L-shaped leather couch. Over the sofa was a lion rampant: its great mane flaring, it reared up, held its front paws in the air as if ready to box. It was either foolish or majestic. She gazed, trying to decide, but her eyes watered as she gazed. The murderer’s eyes watered.

  It was the dust, no doubt. They said dust was composed of human epidermal cells, but in this house it was the dust of Africa, she thought. The dust of the flesh of the veldt, the aged, slowly dispersing brawn of the Serengeti.

  In a cavernous dining room with dark ceilings, wild dogs and foxes lurked. Here some of the animals had labels, ranging from finely etched brass plaques to a kind of dark-red tape with raised white letters on it that she remembered from the seventies. She leaned in close to read them: a timber wolf in a cabinet with sliding glass doors, an American mink on a sideboard. The teeth were sharp. She hadn’t known minks had such sharp teeth. She kept on into the hallway with a shiver, where she found birds at her shoulders. Birds of prey—hawks, owls, eagles. An owl perched on a branch, an eagle spread its wings over a nest of twigs, a nest full of speckled eggs. A hallway led into a smaller room, a guest bedroom possibly or servant’s quarters, with Tiffany floor lamps shedding a green and yellow light. It was still birds, but they were not so fierce.

  She felt slightly relieved: she’d run the gauntlet.

  In the small bedroom there was a pink bird that must be a flamingo, standing with one leg lifted gracefully on a mirrored pool. She leaned down to touch the reeds—reeds of glassy plastic, glorified Easter-basket stuffing. Ducks, geese, pheasants. She barely noticed the furnishings, so abundant was the stuffed game. The specimens were labeled now: a line of small plump birds, a mother followed by three tiny stuffed chicks, bore a shiny plaque beneath that read COMMON QUAIL, OLD WORLD. She leaned in close to it and wondered if the chicks were real. How could you shoot something so small and put it together again?

  Past the bird rooms she came into a large study, ceiling-high bookshelves all around but no ladder in sight. It had the other hallmarks of an old-fashioned library—wainscoting, reading lights with beaded strings to pull, end tables that gleamed with a cherry warmth beneath their patina of dust. An antique brown globe on a stand, crossed sabers over the mantelpiece. She was displeased to see she was back among animals with sharp teeth and claws. Bears protruded from the walls between shelves, fangs bared, black and brown bears of varying sizes. One stood upright and ferocious in the corner, beside a coat stand. Its head was huge and marked on the plaque were the words KODIAK, ALASKA.

  She knew it was irrational but still she felt nervous, alone in the house with the predators. Their glass eyes followed her.

  But that would be easy enough to set right, she thought, looking for the nearest door—she would escape the eyes by stepping outside, get out of the dark wood and fustiness and old fur and take a free, full breath. She would have the stuffed animals cleared out as soon as she could, hire some movers to get rid of them. Not wishing to insult her uncle’s memory, though, she couldn’t throw them in the garbage, she’d have to donate them somewhere—a third-string natural history museum, maybe, or a moth-eaten roadside attraction. She would redecorate the place from top to bottom. It would be an ambitious project, a difficult task—a task so large in scope that it could occupy her for as long as she wished it to.

  Finally she found a door that led outside through a small utility room, in which she blundered around until
she found the lightbulb cord. Daylight shone at the end but there were obstacles crowding in: she made her way around the handles of vacuum cleaners and mops in buckets, toolboxes and stands for sewing machines, piles of yellow ripple-edged phone books on metal shelves, a roll of chicken wire that snagged on her skirt. At last she stood in a shaft of natural light from a frosted window. Beneath it was a rusty bolt, which she struggled with till it slid open, her fingertips sore. When she stepped outside there were cobwebs on her face. A dot-sized red spider skittered up her arm. She brushed it off and blew the strands from her eyes.

  The backyard was nothing like the front. It was overgrown in places, drying in others but still gorgeous, a sumptuous dereliction. There were ponds, filmed over and stagnant, shrubs with flowers, shrubs browning at the base. There were mounds of reedy grass, birdhouses, delicate hummingbird feeders of blown glass. There were trees of all kinds, tall conifers towering, and paths wended back into the undergrowth, half covered by leaves and pine needles. She felt she could barely walk without ruining her shoes but went out anyway, pushed along over the muddy litter on the paths till she was coolly shaded.

  One of the ponds, outlined in smooth, rounded river rocks, was partly covered in lily pads and a scum of green algae so light it was almost luminescent. She thought she saw something move beneath the dark surface and stopped, holding her breath. A slow bubble burst on the water.

  There was a fragrance in the garden, not just the smell of decay but also the pines, or spruce, or whatever they were, in the sun, and flowers—jasmine possibly, she thought, sweet and rich. At her elbow were the leaves of a huge rhododendron. She found a fruitless avocado tree, which she recognized because she’d had one in her backyard as a child. There was an orange tree, a lemon. She wondered how far back the garden went, kept walking even when the paths seemed to trail off through the bushy undergrowth. It look several minutes to reach the very back: a wall taller than she was, a pebbled wall. At the wall she turned back and gazed at where she’d come from. Her path wound through trees, between bushes, beneath limbs. The house was only visible in pieces through the complexities of green, its creamy white ramparts. But it stretched far to the right and the left; it did not seem to end.