Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  The final authority of the microscopic.

  She carried the shovel into the back, through the trees, stuck its blade into the ground a few inches from the manhole and then stood on it with one foot. She hopped awkwardly to sink it further, then dismounted, scooped and flung. And again. It was hard, boring work and soon she was dizzy and distracted. As the minutes passed she felt blisters starting on her hands again despite the gloves, felt dirt down the backs of her sneakers and in between her toes, and just as she was thinking how tedious it was the spade hit underground metal.

  “Well of course,” said someone, and she looked up to see the elderly dominatrix, now clad not in the red and gold ensemble of yesteryear or her ruffled nightgown from the breakfast hour but in a voluminous dress of deep and vibrant purple. Around her neck hung a crescent-moon pendant in silver, vaguely redolent of Wicca or perhaps the New Age.

  Were there obese Wiccans?

  “Of course what?” asked Susan, out of breath.

  “You’ve hit the shaft.”

  “I didn’t know there’d be one,” said Susan. She stood resting, catching her breath. What a stupid idea, digging. Of course some Wiccans were obese. Sure—even morbidly so. No different from other Americans, most likely. One of Casey’s best friends in high school had been Wiccan. She worshiped the moon goddess, the feminine principle, and told Casey not to use tampons. She advised Casey only to use sea sponges when she had her period. The use of tampons was a denial of the sacred nature of womanhood. The tampons were the patriarchy. Sponges by contrast came from the ocean, which some viewed as feminine. And also by contrast with the tampons, manufactured by companies that men owned and designed to men’s specifications, the sponges were not shaped like penises or missiles.

  But with sponges you had to wash the blood off in the sink.

  Susan had run interference. She spoke of practical benefits. After the accident Casey lost touch with the Wiccan friend, who went to college and presently joined the Young Republicans.

  Susan squinted at the purple-clad woman and tried to imagine her dancing at midnight before an altar to the horned god.

  “You think it goes deep?” she asked.

  “Too deep to tackle with that thing. Don’t make me laugh. It’s probably solid iron. You could be talking twenty feet deep.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Susan. They’d never been properly introduced. “I’m not sure I even know your name! I’m Susan, Susan Lindley.”

  She stepped forward and stuck out a gloved hand, which the large woman took and pressed lightly. She wasn’t without grace, Susan thought. Around her own mother’s age, if her mother were still alive—older than Angela by almost a generation but clearly far more coherent.

  “Portia,” she said.

  “Porsche?”

  “No, not the sportscar,” said the woman haughtily. “The moon of Uranus, for instance, discovered by Voyager 2. I myself predate the Voyagers by several decades, needless to say. I was, like the moon, named after the heroine of The Merchant of Venice, if you knew your Shakespeare. All of the Uranus moons are named after characters in Shakespeare. And Pope, of course.”

  “I don’t know my Shakespeare or my planetary trivia,” said Susan. “How many Uranus moons are there?”

  “Perhaps you recognize this line: ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath.’ Sound familiar?”

  “It does. The gentle rain part. Definitely.”

  “That line’s Portia’s.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Portia.”

  “About the moon,” went on Portia, lifting the too-large necklace off her chest, “little is known.”

  “I see.”

  “And to answer your question: there are twenty-seven.”

  “Many moons.”

  They were gazing at each other. Susan realized she tended to like the woman, found a kind of reassurance in the woman’s pompous presence.

  “Anyhoo,” said Portia. “What you need here is simple: a backhoe.”

  “I’m not sure I know where to get one,” said Susan. “I did find a guy with a jackhammer. But a backhoe, that’s a whole other level.”

  Hal had ridiculed people who used that turn of phrase. A whole other level. A whole ’nother level. Both, according to Hal, were not only annoying but also ignorant. His least favorite common phrase had been Can I help who’s next? But Susan had stubbornly used the language he looked down upon. She saw his point, certainly, but she couldn’t get behind the snobbery.

  Like Hal, this woman seemed the type to value correct speech.

  “Child’s play,” said the woman. “Leave it to the Yellow Pages and to me. If money is no object?”

  “Well, it is an object,” said Susan, as they started back to the house. She carried the shovel parallel to the ground, trailing clods of earth as they went.

  The day of the court date Casey called. It was hard to hear her—a delay in the connection so that their voices often crossed. Susan talked over Casey without meaning to and only heard half of what she was saying.

  She was hazy on time zones, but it was so many hours different there that it was almost the same time—was it across the international dateline? She did not know. She strained to hear over a kind of swishing windy sound—the sound of space, she wanted to believe, the sound of the stratosphere, of falling interstellar dust … though it was probably none of these, it was probably the sound of wires and circuits, metal and fiberglass. Casey was talking about bamboo—something about the properties of bamboo. Bamboo was good, was the gist of what she was saying. She mentioned the Dayak, who were apparently a tribal people. It rhymed with kayak.

  Susan pictured them in loincloths, although she had no evidence for this. They would look better in loincloths than she did, that much was certain. Smiling, wearing loincloths, the whole ear thing, and now also carrying bamboo. Possibly in spear form, sharpened at one end, or then, in a more modern context, as strips of light-colored flooring. Bamboo floor coverings were increasingly popular.

  Searching for something to prove her own attentiveness, though she could still only half hear, she asked after the other tribal people Casey had written about.

  “But how are your friends, the Penan and the Punan Bah?” she asked loudly, enunciating as best she could, though as usual the names made her want to laugh wildly. No offense to the Penan or Punan Bah, she thought, none meant at all, it was the phonetics.

  “… are the Dayak, Mother,” came Casey’s voice.

  •

  Jim was supposed to meet her outside the court building so she was driving there in her own car. She was nervous, dressed neatly in conservative clothes with pearl earrings and flat, unglamorous heels, and she listened to the radio as she drove—she had always been irritated by NPR, all her adult life, and yet all her adult life she had listened to it faithfully.

  One exit’s worth of freeway driving was all it would be: first surface streets, then a mile on the freeway, then surface streets again. And yet as soon as she merged onto the 110—on NPR a well-known interviewer, Terry Gross, was earnestly complimenting a rap musician on his genius—she knew she would never make it. The traffic was stopped, bumper-to-bumper, as far as she could see, though in the opposite direction it was moving freely. Technically it was spring, but the smog was more like summer smog, heat rippling in the dirty air, and a torpor had descended over the long lines of cars. Up ahead people had gotten out of their vehicles and were walking back and forth, some standing aside by themselves and smoking cigarettes, others in groups, talking and gesticulating. It had to be an accident.

  She wished she had a cigarette, but then she never bought them herself, only bummed them off Jim. She thought of getting out of her car, like the others, and asking one of the other smokers for one, but then that seemed too disgusting. Anyway she had never liked to get out of her car on the freeway, even when the traffic was bumper-to-bumper and at a dead halt. The concrete had a gray desolation
and the air was unbreathable, and she knew a cigarette would seem even viler as soon as she stepped from the car. She waited fifteen minutes with the windows up, cooled by the air-conditioning, glancing frequently at the digital clock on her dashboard, jiggling her foot and occasionally swearing as the minutes ticked away and the hour of the hearing approached. When it was six minutes before the hour she became irritated with Terry Gross, whose earnest tone, it seemed to her, had grown more and more sycophantic. More and more, the intimacy of this trademark Terry Gross tone, as she spoke to the rap star and flattered him several additional times with her eager references to his brilliance and creativity, seemed to suggest that she, Terry Gross, was a longtime proponent and appreciator of rap music and even quite possibly a credentialed expert on the rap-music subject.

  The longer Susan listened, becoming increasingly frustrated and impatient, the more it seemed that the impression being conveyed was that she, the white, middle-aged female Terry Gross—unlike she, the white, middle-aged female Susan—was a proud, savvy collective owner of what she lavishly called the rap-music phenomenon. Susan felt resentful of this pandering self-inclusion, of this proprietary, rap-music-savvy, rap-music-loving Terry Gross.

  At four minutes till her court date she switched off the radio in a fit of pique and rolled down the windows all the way. Let the heat flow in, she thought, let it boil. The fumes from the idling cars almost choked her but stubbornly she refused to roll up her windows again. Not yet, she thought, not yet. In her annoyance and frustration, her incipient rage, she associated the rolled-up windows and air-conditioning directly with Terry Gross: if she closed the windows again and switched the AC back on it would be necessary to turn the radio back on too, and it would have to be NPR because the commercial stations were all men or products screaming at you, which was even more hateful in this situation of car entrapment than the quiet, earnest, middle-class, educated, and maddeningly empathetic tone of Terry Gross, and so the rolled-up windows meant letting Terry Gross and her sycophantic rap-music interview win.

  Three minutes. Two minutes. One. Still no movement. She wished she had a car phone, like T. or probably the rap guy. He certainly had a car phone; most likely he was using said car phone to converse with Terry Gross. Then it was fifteen minutes past, then eighteen, and the tension drained out of her because she had to give up. She had missed it. There was no reason for her to be sitting here anymore, no reason save the obvious fact that she was trapped.

  A bearded man in a baseball cap walked by her car and she rolled the window down briefly to ask him if he knew anything. He told her there was a multicar pileup where the 110 merged with the 5. Cars had crashed and people were hurt, he said. “So count your blessings, lady.”

  She watched him in the rearview mirror as he continued down the line of cars, slouching, moving so slowly it seemed he felt no urgency at all. He walked like a defeated or dazed person, yet he had spoken sharply. Maybe he had seen something, maybe he was grieving.

  When Casey had her accident there were courageous bystanders who went in to help the trapped and wounded victims. One or two of them talked to Hal and Susan later, in the hospital—told how the accident had changed their lives, too, though they had not been physically injured. Some of them never recovered fully, but wrote to Casey and told her how they had cried themselves to sleep at night for months after they came upon the scene.

  And they had not been hurt at all.

  After the man disappeared from her rearview mirror she surrendered to Terry Gross, surrendered completely. She closed her eyes and listened to the empathetic Terry Gross tone and to the rap-loving earnestness as it flowed over her. I love rap music too, she thought, making a generous gesture. She would reach out to Terry Gross, the rap guy and their mutual passion, thus elevating her own mood. I also find it creative and brilliant, she said in her mind to Terry Gross and the rap guy. It is brilliantly creative, it is creatively brilliant. Not only that, but all of it is brilliant, not just the white-friendly, woman-friendly versions favored by college students but also the gangsta version, the version with bitches, hos and gats, the completely misogynistic, racist, homophobic and violent, even nihilistically brutal version.

  I love it, love it, love it. Mmm-hmm. I love it and I love all self-expressions, ironic and otherwise, all of them under the sun. I love pornography, gangsta rap, war video games, all fantasies of violence. These fantasies preoccupy the insane men and keep them from their actual work of angrily murdering. Let us not condemn these proliferating, vibrant simulations, these models of brutality. No, let us praise them as though they were condoms. Maybe that explained Terry Gross and her rap appreciation. Maybe the gangsta rap was viewed, by Terry Gross, less as an incitement to gangsta-type acting out than as an artistic, prophylactic screen against it. Maybe the rap Terry Gross and the Planned Parenthood Terry Gross were actually one and the same.

  I am a nice person, Susan thought steadily. No one will take my house from me. She was a murderer, sure, like the angry men who did not listen to enough rap music—perhaps this was her own problem also, perhaps she needed a larger dose of rap—but not of the angry variety; she was a polite murderer, the white kind, white-skinned and white-collar. Although, come to think of it, she had liked an Ice Cube song Sal forced them all to listen to after the dinner at Casey’s apartment, the night before Hal flew off. Hal had been sleeping then, passed out, and Sal played for them an album titled Death Certificate.

  In fact the song had been hilarious. Her favorite part was a line concerning oral sex, where the slutty daughter ate nuts voraciously, not unlike, said Ice Cube, hummingbirds. It could be ascribed to poetic license, she thought, but let’s face it: Ice Cube lacked a solid education on the subject of bird diets. He was funny anyway, whether because of the curious nut-eating hummingbirds, undiscovered in the annals of nature, or despite them. It was hard to say. The natural history of hummingbirds was not the point. The point was that they rhymed with cummingbird.

  Too late. The probate court judge would either rule without her or not; it was out of her hands now. It always had been, of course. But still she should have left the house earlier, prepared for something like this … up ahead they might be carting a dead person away. Oh, poor, dead people. No more rap music for you. No more of Terry Gross either.

  Hal had liked Terry Gross, but had not liked, as far as she knew, rap music, except for the kind sometimes referred to as old-school, from the seventies or maybe the early eighties, say “White Lines” or “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. He had liked those very much when they first came out and he and Susan were younger, but the nineties brand of rap he’d had less patience with. He might have been surprised at this new Terry Gross version, this new rap-music-loving Terry Gross.

  No ambulances had passed her on the shoulder, she realized—where were they all, the sirens and the lights? Maybe they’d passed this way before she came onto the entrance ramp herself … the man had seemed sure of what he said, sure it was a pileup. She opened the door and got out, stood beside her car and squinted ahead, searching for even the faintest sign of movement. But there was a gradual curve in the road and she couldn’t see past it.

  You didn’t know what was happening out of view; you never did. You lived your life in a small part of the world, with only the faintest inkling of what was everywhere else.

  9

  To celebrate she thought she would sleep in. She would lie in bed and yawn and not get up for a long time. She had won, she had won, she had won.

  When Jim called and told her she was gleeful; then she felt sheepish and somehow frustrated in the effusive moment of rejoicing by herself. Tonight they’d go out, eat at a restaurant for once—maybe have sushi or Korean barbecue, something they didn’t get at home. And then they could stay up late and drive up into the Hollywood Hills and look down at the great sea of lights. She’d always liked it up there, the strange, huge agave plants with their ten-foot-high stalks that grew along the ridgelines and far beneath the
millions of stars that signaled homes, rolling in waves all the way out to the Pacific.

  Later, when they got home in the small hours, they could sleep as long as they wanted to, sleep till the sun rose high enough to fall across her face and she woke up and cast off the too-heavy covers. Then she would feel the light and warmth and think of the long gardens of the mad, dead kings of France.

  It was a thought of luxury but the luxury wasn’t what made her happy. The luxury was an afterthought—embarrassing, ridiculous, and also now familiar. No, it was the safety of what could never be replaced, the house and the collection. It was the fact that the law said, now—on behalf of the house and the animals and the gardens and even on her behalf—the law expressly stated: No one could plunder them.

  Then the doorbell rang and as she hurried down the wide hall to answer it she passed the church ladies, who were sitting in the rec room and playing cards—gin rummy was the usual. The oldest lady, the white-haired trembler named Ellen Humboldt, seemed always to be here these days. She stayed over three nights a week, whenever her son went out of town for work and couldn’t be on call—stayed in Susan’s house as an alternative to a rest home, apparently. The son was a commercial pilot. Angela seemed to have formed an instant attachment to Ellen, and Ellen to her. They walked everywhere together with a painstaking slowness, calling each other “Ellie” and “Angie” and holding each other fast by the arm.

  “Susan!” called Angela from the card table. “We need to talk about elevators.”

  She shook her head in disbelief; yet she was almost giddy enough to say yes. Hell, they should just put beds in the music room or something, make more bedrooms on the ground floor for the benefit of the old people. She’d seen four of them at the rummy table, Angela, Ellen, Portia—as always, regal and in command—and the slight woman in gray like a shade, trying not to be noticed. Susan was always forgetting the gray woman’s name but never forgot the name of her little dog: Macho. The elderly terrier came with her every time and so it was in the house at least three days a week, a curly black thing with bad breath and red bows on its head. It attended the Christian book club meetings, held on Thursdays, and liked to lie in the inside scoop of the three-legged dog’s body—the three-legged dog, which was far younger than the old, small one, curled around it protectively.