Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “I like it better too.”

  “He does things,” said Casey. “You know. I miss how walking on sand used to feel. I was telling him that, after the whale thing was over. We were on our way out of town, we’d driven down to the shore to look at it one more time. So he picked me up and carried me down to the waterline and put me down and he got down there with me. And then we kind of crab-walked. We walked on our elbows. There were waves, you know, and I can’t go fast on my elbows, I’m not built in the shoulders like Sal or someone. Anyway, I’m not going to say it was some romantic shit, because actually it ended up sucking. I mean after three minutes I was soaking and shivering, I had these scratches on my knees from dragging them, because there were pebbles in the sand too, shit, there were probably syringes, what the hell would I know. And then the finer sand, for like days after that, was killing me. It got way down in my goddamn ears and I couldn’t get it out of there. I was afraid it would do some damage, if you want to know the truth. To the ear drums or whatever. Then I’d be crippled and deaf. So finally I had to go to a Mexican doctor, on our way back up here, in some shitty border town crossing into Arizona where the doctors make most of their salaries selling Ritalin prescriptions to American turistas. For snorting, not for the hyperactive kids. I had to go to one of those guys and get my ear canals irrigated. It was actually disgusting.”

  They passed through the French doors, saw the other three talking and laughing at the poolside table.

  “The guy tried to sell me a scrip for Ritalin just as an extra bonus. After he squirted six gallons of warm water into my ears.”

  “Sounds like T. showed you a really good time,” said Susan.

  “His heart was in the right place, though,” said Casey.

  As they drew near the table Jim glanced up, smiling. T. was smoothing a lock of his mother’s hair behind her ear.

  Family, thought Susan. She was surprised.

  “Don’t look now,” said Jim, a couple of days later. They were on the tennis court, whose clay surface was far too cracked for serious players. Luckily they were not serious. They had two old wooden racquets from a closet in the rec room and a bag of dull gray balls with hardly any bounce.

  “Don’t look where now,” said Susan, walking up to the net.

  “Outside the gate there’s a guy with a camera, taking snapshots of us,” said Jim, and bent down to pocket a ball.

  She turned to look.

  “Well shit. What did I just say,” said Jim, shaking his head. But he didn’t seem upset.

  “Who is it? The cousins?”

  Jim shook his head. “Doubt it. They have no incentive to document us.”

  “But then—who would?”

  “I think maybe my wife,” said Jim. “Apologies.”

  Susan had been reaching down for her water bottle, at the end of the net, but stopped and glanced up.

  “Your wife?”

  “Someone who’s working for her, anyway. They’re gathering ammunition.”

  “Ammunition?”

  “For the divorce.”

  She lifted the bottle to her lips and gazed at him steadily as she drank.

  “I had no idea,” she said, after she wiped drops off her lips.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Can’t she—you mean for alimony, or something?”

  “Ha. No. There was a prenup. She’s wealthy, her family made me sign it. Evidence of infidelity means I won’t get anything.”

  “Oh,” said Susan. They stood opposite each other, wooden racquets in hand, with only the net between them. The top of the net was cracked, like the court, its white hem barely holding together across the top of the sagging green mesh.

  “Sorry for the invasion of privacy,” he said, and gazed down at his shoes. They were Converse; Hal had owned a pair.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “But are you—I mean we could call the cops or something, couldn’t we? That’s actually my property there, where he’s standing. I think he might be trespassing.”

  Jim shook his head and shrugged. “I always knew it would happen. She’s been waiting me out. Waiting for me to do this. For years. So now she’s free to get rid of me. Even before, any settlement would have been minuscule. Fine with me. But she likes to win completely. She didn’t want me to see a penny.”

  “So why did you—I mean, why did you stay? If you weren’t in it for the money …”

  “Why do you think,” said Jim. “Let’s hit the ball, OK?”

  He backed up.

  “You love her,” said Susan, nearly under her breath. “You love her even though she doesn’t love you.”

  He stood and tossed a ball, waiting for her to move into position.

  “I can’t help it,” he said finally, as she walked to the service line.

  The ball came early, while she was still turning toward him to receive. It bounced and hit the fence.

  Vera was not coming back; a sick relative needed her in New Jersey. Angela was upset by the news and sequestered herself in her bedroom.

  “She won’t eat anything but candy,” reported Casey over the telephone. “She refuses to have anyone else come and stay. Except for T. or me, but we can’t go there every night. She drinks water from her bathroom tap, out of the toothbrush cup. She eats these little bags of red licorice. She had them left over from giving out to the kids at Halloween and she took them in there with her and now she won’t eat anything else. If you try to give her real food she lets it sit there and rot.”

  “Maybe,” ventured Susan, “maybe it’s time to consider—?”

  “Not happening. We’re not putting her in an institution. First of all, she would hate it. And T. doesn’t like the idea much either.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Susan. “Taking care of her is kind of a full-time occupation.”

  She was looking out the window at the backyard, where the guys who serviced the koi ponds were dipping tubes into the water to test it.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” said Casey distractedly. “No. It is. Plus T. wants to go to Borneo.”

  “Borneo?”

  “Saving-the-rainforest deal.”

  “Huh. He’s hell-bent for leather on the nature stuff, isn’t he.”

  “What can I say. He’s always been a workaholic.”

  After they hung up Susan wandered out the back door, over to where a technician stood beside a pond with a small bridge arching above it. He was young, freckled and sported a crew cut. Once she might have seen him as a prospect.

  “You don’t happen to know anyone who could tear up a piece of concrete for me, do you?” she asked. “Who has a jackhammer or something?”

  “I could find out for you,” he said. “Sure. How big of a job is it?”

  “It’s pretty small,” she said.

  “So what’s in it for me?”

  She looked at him for a few seconds. He looked at her and smiled slowly.

  “You want a finder’s fee?” she asked finally.

  It wasn’t what he meant, clearly.

  “Nah,” he said. “I was just kidding. I’ll get you a number.”

  But he seemed disappointed, as though he’d expected otherwise. She must be giving off a trace amount of desire, though she was not, in fact, currently a slut.

  •

  The taxidermists were busy. It surprised her: there seemed to be a booming business in animal stuffing in Southern California. West Virginia or Texas she might have expected, but not here. Her repair jobs were often accepted but then put on lengthy waiting lists; sometimes the taxidermists turned her down outright. One came to the house to look at the collection and tell her what maintenance it needed, but he was a hobbyist, not a professional. Lacking experience, she decided to entrust her charges only to the practitioners whose livelihoods depended on their skills.

  On her computer, which was finally unpacked after the move, she kept an electronic log of the mounts she sent out, when and where, with estimated completion dates. Meer
kat, read the spreadsheet. African Taxidermy, (818) 752-9254. Out 2/5/95. ETA 4/15/95. Oryx head, Dan’s Taxidermy & Tanning, (510) 490-9012. Out 2/7/95. ETA 6/1/95. Once, making an entry, she thought of something the aging diplomat had said—something about a record, a log book the old man had kept, a list of which skins were taken, when, where, the hunters’ names. It occurred to her that the names in such a logbook could be helpful—one of the hunters, if any were still alive, might know what the legacy was that Chip had mentioned, might be more lucid than he’d been. It was possible the old man had wanted some of the better-quality mounts to be sent to a museum or something, and the possibility nagged at her so she called Chip’s resting home to ask him about it.

  “Mr. Sumter’s room, please,” she told the receptionist.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” said the woman, after a pause.

  She should have called sooner, should have been more grateful. A small thank-you note after she left.

  She poured herself a cup of tea and cut a slice of lemon. The single apartment with its beige carpet, glass wind chimes catching a cold light. Even a butterfly could be ugly in the form of a wind chime … the chimes would have been his wife’s, likely. Two posters of foreign cities—what had they been? It was already faded. Maybe Venice or Rome. Hanging from the ceiling, a spider plant with brown tips. An opera playing. It was the one with a clown on the front, she had noticed as she left: the opera about clowns. You didn’t have to know anything about opera to recognize it. There was a famous scene from that opera in a gangster movie: the tough Italian mobster was deeply moved by the plight of a clown who was crying inside. Robert De Niro as Al Capone, one moment weeping at the tragic beauty, the next bashing heads in. He stove in a man’s cranium with a baseball bat in that particular movie, if she remembered right—a baseball bat at the dinner table. Not much subtlety there.

  A caterwauling song by the heartbroken clown hero. It rose to a crescendo: Ree-dee, pah-lee-ah-cho … It was a caricature of opera, which was already a caricature of tragedy. Men’s tragic qualities were closely connected to their cluelessness; the tragic men suffered from a lack of self-awareness. Once you painted their faces in tawdry clown makeup and forced them to sing in high registers, at that particular point, frankly, the tragedy turned into chewing gum on your shoe.

  She tried to recall the details of what Chip had said. He had called it a trophy book, she thought—maybe a trophy log or a trophy record, words to that effect. But in the library she would never find such a record book, even if it was stowed somewhere, because as usual she felt overwhelmed as soon as she went in. The books weren’t catalogued and there had to be thousands. She would need to hire someone if she wanted to get them in order—either that or go through them herself and in the process get rid of those she didn’t have a use for: the many shelves on heraldry, for instance. Maybe she could get a library science student to help her. She already had landscapers, art students, architects, taxidermists; she had a small army. Her friends these days were paid for their service.

  Except Jim.

  “So,” he said, the next time he was over. He had the Sunday paper and was reading the real estate classifieds. Rentals section. “The divorce will come through sometime this spring. Not long. There aren’t any disputes.”

  “You’re moving out soon, right?” she asked.

  “Next few weeks.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “Still looking,” he said, and shrugged. “Silver Lake, maybe. Echo Park. Los Feliz. Say, little Craftsman bungalow.”

  “You gonna do the whole running-every-day thing? Getting fit after the breakup? Diet? Sit-ups? Lifting weights and trying to feel young again?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and turned the newspaper page.

  “Maybe I should go jogging with you. We could buy matching tracksuits. A his-and-hers type thing.”

  She couldn’t help but think of the many rooms of her house, without inhabitants. But there was still Hal to consider.

  •

  The jackhammer man showed up only after she’d left several phone messages for him saying to come anytime, she was usually home, etc. She’d finally given up because he never answered the calls himself, and when he did call back he left messages that told her nothing. Then he was at the front door, a yellow unit of some kind pulled up behind his truck and parked in her driveway. She led him into the back and down the stone path into the trees and showed him the small slab.

  “You want me to haul out the pieces?” he asked, cigarette dangling as he took a packet of earplugs out of a pocket.

  “That’d be great,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Not sure I can stretch the cord all the way to the compressor from here, where my truck is parked now. May have to drive onto your grass a bit.”

  “OK. Try not to run over the flowers, though.”

  “OK then.”

  She left him unspooling an orange cord, thick as her wrist. A few minutes later one of her broken mounts was delivered and she forgot about the jackhammer as she stood in the entry hall and opened its crate with a crowbar. She wasn’t handy with tools, had only bought a kit when she realized they always sent the animals back to her in a mass of Styrofoam peanuts, packed deep inside wooden boxes that were solidly built and sturdily nailed. Leaning back and straining, she popped a nail out too suddenly and it hit her on the cheek and stung; then she snagged her shirt on a splintery board-end, tore a rent in the fabric and swore.

  It was one of her favorites among the crocodilians: a small alligator in a swamp setting, dark-brown acrylic mud wrinkling around its clawed feet, a dozen white eggs in a twiggy nest behind it. Its green eyes, gone cloudy over the years as though with cataracts, had been replaced with clear new ones. The squat feet had polished-looking claws instead of the ragged toe ends that had preceded them; discolored patches on the leathery hide had been touched up. She was pleased. The whole assemblage was remarkably light—she could carry it herself.

  So she lifted it, though its bulk was awkward, and walked slowly toward the reptile room, where she put it down on the table while she unlatched its glass case and raised the lid. As she did so she thought of archosaurs, the dinosaur lineage of which only birds and crocodilia remained … that was the problem with organization: it was never perfect. Sometimes she wished she could have laid out the house in evolutionary terms—put the birds and crocodilians together, for instance. But then there would be the strangeness of genetics to contend with, the oddness of the fact that some animals who seemed to be nearly the same had borne almost no relation to each other over the course of history, according to the scientists, and that, conversely, some animals who looked like they had zero business together were actually close relatives.

  Only as she left the reptile room did she register the far-off drone of the jackhammer, still drilling. She wondered if the slab covered an old, capped well—they must have had wells here once, she thought. Pasadena had more of its own water than Los Angeles proper, she’d once been told. Maybe she could have her own well again, in that case, ask them to drill deeper, deeper, down to where cool water flowed beneath the soil, to where it trickled through the rock, the caverns of the earth. Maybe she could make the whole house into a living kingdom then—its flora and fauna, both dead and alive, its circulatory system of ponds and rivers … vegetables growing, the fruit of the trees to eat … but no. That was a pipe dream. It was a terrarium, the house. It should not attempt to simulate nature.

  There were zookeepers, in the order of things, and curators. Previously she had been neither, but now she fell into the curator category. She was not going to keep a menagerie here, she was not going to farm and live off the land, clearly. Living, even the koi were too much work for her alone. But the dead animals were enough. In any case the dead were almost as beautiful as the living, sometimes more so. They had far fewer needs.

  No: this was a museum of killed animals, pure and simple. An amateur museum, yes. It was not professional. But no less beautiful for all
that—maybe more beautiful, even. She welcomed the flocks of suburban parrots as they alit in the trees and she wanted to keep the koi, could even foresee adding to them—bringing in native frogs or toads, maybe, or the cocoons of butterflies, as long as they weren’t a kind that would defoliate her trees. These were mere accents, of course: the center of the house was the skins hung on their plastic bones. The center of it was the crouching, leaping, preening, the frozen poses, the watchful blind eyes; it was a house of ghost prey, ghost predators, innocent killers trapped by the less innocent.

  “Mother,” said Casey.

  She jumped. She’d had no idea she wasn’t alone—had been staring at nothing. Staring at a door lintel.

  But there was Casey, in the hall. Clearly had just entered.

  “Jesus! You scared the hell out of me,” said Susan.

  “Sorry,” said Casey. “You know—I have that clicker in my car now. For the gate. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “No, no,” said Susan. “Course, make yourself at home. You want something to drink?”

  “What is that, construction?” asked Casey, and cocked her head at the jabbering noise of the drill.

  “Some cement in the backyard I’m having ripped up,” said Susan.

  “Ground granulated blast-furnace slag?”

  They smiled at each other. Susan knelt and put her hand on Casey’s arm.

  “How’s married life treating you, honey?”

  “I really like it.”

  “Good. Good,” said Susan. “I’m really happy, then.”

  She thought she might choke up at Casey’s unaccustomed sweetness.

  “Angela came out of her room,” said Casey.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Susan.

  “But here’s the thing,” said Casey.

  Susan’s knees were hurting so she stood up again.

  “Yeah?” she asked. “Follow me to the kitchen, I’m thirsty.”

  “Wait,” said Casey. “Seriously.”

  Susan waited, listening.

  “We’re going away.”