Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  There were two sweaty-looking men outside the front door, and behind them, through the closed gate, a yellow machine. The pedestrian gate had been left open, she saw.

  “Here about the digging,” said one of them. “Backhoe. A Mrs. Friedrich.”

  “Friedrich?” she asked, blankly.

  “Portia Friedrich,” said Portia, at her elbow. “I am she. The challenge will be getting it in without tearing up the vegetation. I ordered the smallest unit possible, of course, but still: that’s going to be difficult.”

  Susan hung back as one of the men drove his backhoe in the gate, up the driveway, and through the garden, weaving slowly between trees and fishponds. Portia walked backward in front of him directing his steering; she wore a flowing robe with wide-open sleeves that made her look like a pudgy Merlin. When Susan tried to step in she was waved back impatiently, till finally the backhoe stopped, wedged between a rhododendron bush and a weeping willow.

  “Great,” said Susan, shaking her head. “Great.”

  “This was the only way,” said Portia sharply. “Over there you hit the pond with the little cherrywood Japanese bridge. There’s a steep grade on the other side, and the third option is over your lovely bed of angel’s-trumpet. I’m sure you don’t want that.”

  “My what?”

  “Angel’s-trumpet. The white flowers?”

  Susan looked at them—large, drooping conical blooms, languid on their thick tussock of leaves.

  “All things considered, I suggest you sacrifice this.”

  They watched the backhoe rip out half the sprawling rhododendron, dragging a tangle of severed branches behind it. By the time it had reached the area of the manhole it had left a swath of destruction in its wake—torn-up limbs and grasses, red-brown earth exposed beneath the stripped-up turf. She felt a stab of guilt and worry for the plants, for the disturbed symmetry.

  All for a poorly placed manhole, which, for all she knew, covered nothing but an ancient septic tank—she was deluding herself. The aging women, their absentmindedness and dementia: by osmosis she was becoming more and more like them. Or maybe, in her own aging, here at the tail end of her forties, she had drawn these women to her. But more likely they had drawn her to them via some kind of post-menopausal force. When young women lived together, after all, or even stayed for a time in the same area, their periods grew to coincide—the pull of pheromones, legend had it. Possibly this was like that, minus fertility. The other end of the life cycle: contagious senility. Because she was less rational with each day that passed, less grounded. Wasn’t she? More closely tied to the place, but less closely tied to herself … she felt a quick, deep regret.

  Once she had been pragmatic: once, when she was a younger person, she’d passed for normal on a daily basis. She’d been a teacher after all, first grade, second grade. She had personally been a trusted guide for children, had led them up to the new and tried to help them decipher it. She had felt the newness herself now and then—felt for an instant, as she showed them a simple picture of an apple, that she herself had never seen an apple before—never in two dimensions, never so flat. And so perfect.

  In that instant she had a glimpse over the wall of a garden.

  And society had let her do this, had even thanked her for it. Society had deemed her fully responsible, a shepherd of the dear flock. There had been small teaching awards; there had been offers of dull administrative positions as a reward for her years of service. The children had often loved her, the parents had smiled and thanked her profusely and the mothers brought her generic female gifts, soap or scented candles. Now—much of the time alone, far, far away from those glowing children—she roamed a big, dim mansion whose walls were lined with dead animals, herself growing old, surrounded by dust and fur, by remnants of fierceness, remnants of wildness, remnants of what had once been the world.

  The old women weren’t dying quite yet but they were feeble and growing paler all the time, pale speech, pale minds, pale hair, pale skin. As the youth fell away they also shed the pigment, they shed every last vestige of youthful color … maybe that was why old women often wore clothes in garish hues. She forgot what the theories were about aging—cells failing to divide, cells dividing too fast. But however the molecules were getting it done, the women themselves were fading, lost to entropy and washing out. They went gray, grayer, white, toward the day in the future when they attained translucence. And so the reds, the violets, the pinks and emerald greens they wore were a desperate grab at pigment again, a simulation of life.

  She was filled with longing. She knew what it was. She recognized it instantly. She wanted the small children back.

  Yes, it was sentimental—it was pathetic, this yearning. But they were good; they were, almost always, so good. She missed their perfect skin—their beauty, the swiftly given trust. She wanted to see them again. She wanted them all around her. How had she ever let them go? Children! Come back. Come back now, dears, you dear beings. When I left, you know, I was only joking—a foolish joke, wasn’t it. I wouldn’t leave you. I’m here again.

  When had this happened? Not with Hal’s death. Not with his death—long before that. It happened with the accident. She had turned from the children because of a terrible certainty, a certainty of what was coming.

  “Are you all right, Susan?”

  She realized the backhoe driver was staring. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with large underarm stains.

  “Why don’t we let the gentleman begin his excavation,” went on Portia. “I’d like to go inside for a few minutes and check up on the ladies.” She tapped Susan’s arm and they turned back toward the pool and the tennis court. Tie-dye, Susan thought, was limited in its appeal to those who were dropping acid. No one in a sober frame of mind could possibly find it pleasing to the eye—though possibly the old women admired it for its garishness.

  “Go inside,” she echoed, and nodded.

  “You know: Ellen has to take her hypertension pills. I don’t like to leave it to Angela. Angela doesn’t run on a schedule and so she tends to forget.”

  Portia must only be here to manage the others, Susan realized as they picked their way along the flagstones—or to ensure, rather, that Angela did not mismanage them … she must see that as her duty, watching over the frailer ones.

  Herself, she was seeing how all those years had been, falling behind her in ripples, fading. In a rush she heard what Hal had said to her on the telephone from Belize. He was sorry for forgetting her, he said, so taken up with Casey, and he regretted that, regretted leaving her alone. It was true that she had often been alone, but not always; and she had left him too, obviously, for the theater of other men and the straining distraction of vanity. But that wasn’t what gripped her now, that wasn’t a new recognition. She had left the children also, when she turned from teaching to the coldness and orderliness of what she did now, the procedural neutrality of office work. She had decided to be anonymous in her public life and flagrant in privacy—anonymous except to the few people she selected. She chose the sly exhibitionism of her new slut vocation and turned away from the openness that she used to have, once, with children.

  Not their openness but her own. That was what was missing.

  She had left them behind because she was a coward. It was clear. Only a fool could have missed it.

  She had missed it herself and so she must be a fool—or if not a fool, then a person without self-awareness, though she’d always flattered herself otherwise. But there it was: she had looked at her little first graders and seen Casey and seen, after childhood, everything else that would happen to them. Everything that could, and would, and never—not even at the furthest limit of possibility—the single thing that should, that they should remain this way forever, the way of being children, the way of eagerness, sweetness and hope. The hope she used to have for them, the warm hope you had to have for each child once you had a child yourself, was lifted like a thin veil and replaced with cold certainty: they would feel pain and die, som
e of them before they even found out who they were. Others would soldier on and meet defeat in everything they did, the joy of that first thrill of life falling away, disintegrating. She saw them in their futures, pitted and bowed down.

  This was what Hal had known, how she had been captured by dread. He hadn’t known the other part, how she pursued a certain state of being known—sex as a form of fame, wanting to be instilled in other people’s memories. She’d wanted to make herself stay with them, an image in a great hall of figures. She’d thought she would live more that way. But Hal had known she was running, in the end he’d seen: in the fell swoop of the accident she’d been gripped with a fear of children, of them and for them. The sadness of the future had dazzled her. She turned her face away.

  But at least they could have the present, its heat and light. Weightlessness! The lightness of now, the infinity. The children had no past, so all they had was in front of them. Not far in front but right in front, now. You could get a glimpse of it yourself—what it was to be unencumbered. She wanted to be there with them.

  Then she would have the past in her house and the present in her work—she could dispense with the future, she could stop wishing for what she’d never have.

  •

  For some minutes she rested with the old women around her, while outside in the backyard the backhoe ground and creaked and, in reverse, emitted a harsh warning beep that went on and on and penetrated the eardrums. She sat a few feet from their card table on a couch, in a daze until Angela came over and arranged herself on the cushions nearby. It was Oksana’s day off and Susan had said they could do without a sub, knowing the ladies would be there. Now they’d taken Ellen Humboldt aside and were holding a glass of water at the ready, prying her assortment of pills out of a long white-plastic tray whose compartments were marked with the beginning letters of the days of the week.

  “There are small elevators that are quite affordable,” started Angela. “You can order the whole thing, they put it together at the factory. I saw it in a brochure. Or they also have the kind that lift wheelchairs. They put them right on the rail of the staircase.”

  “We don’t need an elevator,” said Susan distractedly.

  “Well, you see,” said Angela, “I’d like Ellie to live with me. And she really wants to. You know, her son has a new girlfriend. Most nights she’s all alone.”

  Susan turned and looked into her face. Angela was smiling uncertainly, as though she knew the request was outlandish.

  “But Angela,” said Susan gently, “you’re not even living here permanently yourself.”

  “My son could pay for it. He’s very generous. And Casey could use it too, when she visits.”

  “You do understand,” said Susan again, “you’re staying here with me just until they get back from Malaysia. Right?”

  Angela gazed at her, wounded. Her eyes shone.

  “As far as I know, that is,” went on Susan, to soften the impression.

  “I like it so much here,” said Angela.

  “Thank you,” and Susan put her hand out to pat the woman’s arm. “But I’m not quite ready to discuss major renovations. Ellie looks to me like she may need real care. More than we can give her. With nurses and doctors. You know, medical help on standby in case of emergencies. Don’t you think?”

  “She doesn’t want that,” said Angela. “She doesn’t want that at all.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we move you down the hall for now. OK? We can put you both in the same room, together. We’ll set up some screens up around your beds, however you want them. The music room, maybe. Then she won’t have to navigate the stairs and you can look after her.”

  And Oksana would look after both of them.

  “The music room,” mused Angela. “Does it have lamps? We like to read our books in the evening. We eat cookies and drink tea and I read to her before we go to sleep. Because she can only read the large print.”

  “It’s a pretty spacious room,” said Susan. “And you’d have that whole wing of the house to yourself at night.”

  “Can we have tents to sleep in?”

  “Tents?”

  “Pink tents make a nice light inside them. We could have lamps under there. And cushions. It’s the Arabian Nights,” said Angela.

  They were girls in a fairy tale—children again, listening to stories. That was how Angela saw herself with Ellen. The novels about angels coming down to earth were only the beginning. Together, as they faded out, they could step onto those sweeping dunes, they could look up at white palaces and minarets, flying carpets, clouds that bore horses with wings. They would move among the genies and camels and the thieves, the women in veils, reflecting pools and curtains of brocade.

  Storytime: to sit and listen and let the years pass. How many years had it been? Five was the school district’s limit, she thought she remembered. It had been longer than that now. But before she could teach again she would have to call the teaching commission, renew her credentials, maybe work for a while at a small private school.

  “Ladies? I’m going to drive Ellen up to the drugstore to refill her Adalat prescription,” said Portia.

  “Wait, wait. Will you come back tonight, Ellie?” asked Angela eagerly, and rose from beside Susan.

  Susan watched as they walked the oldest one slowly down the hall to the door—all five of them, long skirts swaying gently. The dog called Macho trotted at their heels.

  Then she composed a letter to send to Casey and to T. She was resigning from working for him, now that they were family, now that his business had changed, now that he had become a foreign traveler and a philanthropist. She was happy for both of them, she wrote, she loved what they were doing. Or the idea of it, because truthfully, she wrote, she didn’t really understand what it was they were doing, she failed to understand the venture’s actual content. The “non-timber forest products,” the “sustainable community-based harvest models,” frankly it was pretty much Greek to her. In her mind’s eye she only saw brown men with loincloths, looking quite good. She saw women who had never heard of brassieres tapping latex out of big trees.

  Despite her lack of comprehension she liked the gesture, she wrote. She liked the idea of the shower that hung from a branch and was heated by the sun, she liked the all-terrain wheelchair, she even liked the non-timber forest products that stopped you from having to cut down the trees; but there was no room for her in all of that. There was no reason for her to go into the office anymore, to draw a paycheck for sitting at an empty desk and staring at the unruly stacks of his boxes—boxes whose documents were no longer relevant anyway. She was alone in the shell of what had once been his company, and she was turning the light off, locking the door behind her, and leaving.

  She was still his motherin-law, she wrote jokily, so he had better be nice to her. She hoped all was going well in Borneo. She hoped there were no more frightening incidents of violence. Here in the city, she was digging up her yard. She was fending off lawsuits with moderate success. Her house was turning into a retirement home, though it still retained its displays of ferocity. Old people roamed the halls, forgetting everything. The old people forgot their lives, but still they kept on living them.

  •

  None of the others were in the house when the backhoe driver came to get her, beckoning but not saying much, wiping his dripping brow with the back of his forearm and swigging from a large bottle of orange soda. It was the end of the afternoon.

  She followed him out the French doors in the back, through the pool enclosure, down the path to the grove. She saw the yellow of the digger first and then a waist-high mound of dirt piled up beyond. Then she was at the hole, standing a couple of feet back because the edge obviously wasn’t stable—the soft, dug-up earth gave under her foot when she put her weight on it. She couldn’t see in: only a small round of darkness behind the hill of soil.

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s a tunnel. It’s got a ladder going down.”

&n
bsp; She peered over, her stomach turning in a quick thrill.

  “But no—no manhole shaft? No metal tube that goes down? That’s what Portia said there’d be.”

  “No metal tube, no. The cover was just sitting there on some cement.”

  “Huh.”

  “Can’t see how deep it is right now, ” he went on. “Too late in the day. The sun’s low.”

  “Then we should wait till tomorrow to go in?”

  He fished in a baggy pants pocket for what turned out to be a soft pack of Camels, so badly crumpled the cigarettes should be broken.

  “We need to get the dirt back a ways from the opening, make sure it’s not going to fall in and collapse the thing. I can’t vouch for how safe it is even after we do that, though. That shit’s not my deal. You need to get some kind of professional in to reinforce it or test it or whatever before anyone tries to go in there.”

  “But can you at least move the dirt out of the way now? So you don’t have to come back? Or is it already too dark for that?”

  He flicked his lighter and lit up and she asked him for one, leaned in close so he could light it for her. After they both inhaled he shrugged and then nodded and blew out his smoke. “We got another forty-five minutes easy.”

  She watched as he stubbed out his cigarette and climbed back into the digger. He pulled a lever and crunched a gear or two and the yellow arm behind the cab rose off the ground: JCB, read the black letters on the side. It was a claw, though she didn’t know if that was the official name. She went back to the house as he started rolling, got herself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and brought it out to drink while she watched. She looked down at the dirt, at the tracks the backhoe left in the loose piles and in the sparse grass that was flattened beneath the tires; she looked up at the light in the canopy of the trees.