Magnificence: A Novel Part 11

6.

If you lived in a very beautiful house your life became the house, and like the house the life could acquire a quality of completion. It was something about order, she thought, order and its sufficiency. Before now, she had never seen how the mood of her life was defined by the s.p.a.ces where she existed. Other people knew this-on one end of the spectrum architects and interior designers, on the other the guys who lived in appliance boxes in alleys-but it had never been so obvious to her.

When she left the house, three days a week on Mondays through Wednesdays, to drive to the office and do T.'s paperwork, she walked out the side door onto the driveway in a familiar path straight across the gravel. She parked the car in the same position every afternoon and so the path to it was always the same in the morning-behind her, as she emerged from the house, thick English ivy and Virginia creeper climbing the mansion wall, lilac bushes on either side of what had once been a service entrance.

To her left as she went out the door was the pool enclosure: the sounds of the fountain, a bird dipping over the water, a flicker at the edge of her eye. To her right was the driveway as it stretched out toward the wide front gate, the straight line of it with a branch curving off to the right, as you moved to the street, to round the front of the house in a semicircle. From where she stood it was mostly a line between gra.s.sy expanses, a simple gravel line in the gra.s.s. Beyond it rose the hedge that screened her from her neighbors; this was the closest point of contact with the other properties-the towering oleander that guarded them, rising easily eighteen feet, already thick with gaudy pink and red blooms.

Once she pulled through the gate-which was fixed now and glided open before her-and the lush gardens and shady trees were behind her, the gray buzz of the city replaced the oasis. There was the confusion of crowding, sometimes of ugliness: the concrete of overpa.s.ses and buildings, air thick with pollution, black and yellow digital signs with words unfurling constantly, velocity and noise, the haphazardness of garbage, the pall of commerce and everyday filth. There was b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper traffic on the freeway, exhaust fumes, the possibility of bad drivers, hostile pa.s.sersby, sudden accidents, contagious illness, but more overwhelming still than these variables was the slightness and insecurity of her position in s.p.a.ce-she could be anywhere, once she was out of the house.

She understood agoraphobics. As soon as she left the perfection of home her location, if not exactly arbitrary, was constantly and sometimes impulsively changing. Her being was subject to the many conditions of wherever she was, the trivial details of her momentary needs; outside the house the sequence of events was chaotic, could not express a clean design. This situation, she realized, was tolerated by most of the five billion people on earth. But more and more she had no idea how they did it-this normal state of mutability and flux, which she had always presumed and often preferred, was not only displeasing but almost unacceptable.

In her old life she'd gone out looking to make things happen because home was a resting place between these happenings; now home was more like a temple, inviting a routine of poise and deliberation. She could move peacefully between the walls as though she walked a neat path in history, as though her time and place were not the product of chance at all but of an ancient arrangement. She lived in the soft footprint of a ceremony. And the longer she lived there, the rarer were the thoughts of the knife. The winces as she expected the blade, awaiting the invisible cut, receded noticeably whereas out in the city she was anyone again. Anyone, to whom anything could happen; anyone, which she had once embraced.

Not anymore.

With students from the Art Center-art students whose names she'd found on a bulletin board-she began reorganizing the mounts. Before she had them rehung and restaged she had to encode a new system, and for that she went to a reference librarian who helped her order museum floor plans. She studied the organizing schemes.

There was geography, there was taxonomy, and there was the collection itself, the variety of animals she had and the s.p.a.ces she needed to house them. She made her own plan according to those needs.

The main part of the ground floor would be given over to North American mammals, each order with its own section. The deer, the bison, the sheep and goats and p.r.o.nghorns would occupy the great room, as she thought of it now, where previously foxes and wild dogs had slunk along the sideboards. The library would hold the big carnivores-the bears and the cats, the wolves and foxes-while the smaller meat-eaters, the weasels and racc.o.o.ns, would spill over into a drawing room off the front hall. Rodents would live in the music room, rabbits and hares in the ballroom. Bats fit into an alcove once meant for a telephone and a lone armadillo fit into a display case in the hall, where once a forest of antlers had interrupted the air. She made a reptile room out of the old breakfast nook to house tortoises, alligators and snakes; birds of prey now had the rec room to themselves-the rec room where the lion had stood before it was rudely felled by Addison. Owls perched there, hawks, falcons, eagles and a lone vulture.

She knew the second floor should follow the same principle, but she loved the dioramas. Also the foreign collections were small, with the exception of Africa-Africa, land of safaris, was a horn of plenty, and when the African cats migrated from the ground floor, the gazelles and the zebras along with them, it was clear that the horned beasts room could never fit them all. So she took herself out of it and reinstalled the buffalo and the wildebeest. Two of the art students were mural painters so the wide hallway, too, turned into Africa: out the walls of her former bedroom flowed the gra.s.ses and the great lonely flat-topped savannah trees, curling to the right and left as they emerged from the doorway. Long yellow gra.s.ses grew up from the hallway floor as they grew in horned beasts, and then, along the hall, ceded the way to wetter and greener terrain as the plain became a jungle. And on the Rainforest walls the art hangers put up a small colobus monkey, an antelope, a spiny lizard, and a gray parrot.

The birds seemed to demonstrate a lack of interest in her personal business, so she put her bed in Birds of the World, which once had been Russia. She had the squat, dun-colored horse and s.h.a.ggy yak moved, and in the former Soviet Union students painted over Lenin and sketched the lines of treetops in a light sky, arching branches and tree hollows. She watched as the lines were filled in and dimensions came out. On a wooden platform a whooper swan raised its wings; against the wall that faced her bed stood a peac.o.c.k with its s.h.i.+mmering tail open.

But in the other bedrooms the collections stayed where they were, in their quaint geographic compartments. She told herself that even the Natural History Museum in New York, even the British Museum in London, whose floor plans she had photocopied, displayed a less than symmetrical arrangement.

When the project was finished the house had a globe-like aspect in its sectioning off, its variety of scenes, its separation by palette. It was multicolored like a globe, and also like a globe it represented reality only partly, with the failure of all maps but also the same neatness, the same quiet satisfaction. The Himalayas and the Arctic were cold rooms, light-blue and gray-white; the tropics were emerald green, with the bright splashes of toucans and macaws, the savannahs yellow and gold, and in two of the rooms there were sunsets, pink and mauve.

She had loved austere inst.i.tutions, as a child-old churches, universities, art galleries, museums. She'd cherished the high ceilings, the deep walls, the wide doorways. Now she thought she had also liked what she hadn't recognized back then: an air of permanence and contentment, the happy captivity of precious things.

Jim the lawyer had an att.i.tude of indulgence when it came to her interest in preservation. It was the kind of indulgence you would rarely find in a spouse, she thought-the benevolence of a third party with little stake in the matter, someone whose agreement was not required and therefore not contentious.

It wasn't only the taxidermy; there were trees in the garden that were historic, which the state declared it was illegal to cut down. She learned the names of all these trees and tried to find out about them, and then the trees gave her an idea for the house, for how to keep it the way it was. It had never been put up for historic status but it could be, it might well qualify if she pursued that course . . . and she decided she would, in case the cousins won their suit, in case the place pa.s.sed out of her hands. She'd try for state landmark status, Criterion 3: Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region or method of construction or represents the work of a master. She'd need to hire an architect to evaluate the place-she thought it would qualify as an example of California Mediterranean, like Pasadena City Hall-but first she needed the records.

So on a Thursday morning she drove down to the permit center to pull the old building plans. She filled in forms, waited in lines, paid fees for duplication and processing, and at the end of a dreary morning was handed some rolled-up plans. On her way across the parking lot she unrolled one of them: an architect's drawings of additions to the main building made in 1928-outbuildings, a shed near the pool. There was a greenhouse, she saw, which sadly had since vanished. Sitting in her car with the curls of paper spilling off her lap, she found, to her annoyance, that there were no plans of the original construction in all of it. There was a drawing of a garage renovation done in 1950, a 1954 repair of the dome, and an old schematic she didn't pretend to understand. But there was no drawing of the building in its entirety.

There was the name of an architecture firm on the 1928 drawings, though, a firm that had been absorbed by another one and moved from Pasadena to Westwood. She made an appointment to consult with an architect there.

Coming into the office one morning-the new, small office in Culver City to which T. had downsized-she found a message on the answering machine.

They'd gone away for a while, said T.'s calm voice. While they were gone, it would mean a lot if she could look in on Angela every so often.

"You've got to be kidding," she said aloud in the empty, airless room. It was still full of unopened white boxes of files, stacked into crooked towers that stood around awkwardly. The venetian blinds were angled open slightly so that, standing beside the desk, her finger on the rewind b.u.t.ton, she registered the dark ma.s.ses of cars flicking past.

She wished Casey had told her.

The message didn't say where they'd gone or when they planned to come back. T. had left a few jotted instructions about the business on a legal pad, but that was it.

"I can't believe this," she muttered.

The only people she saw for the rest of the day were a FedEx man, a guy selling copiers, and, when she went out to move her car around midday, a woman walking a dog.

Still, a few days later she did as they'd asked. She set it up so that Jim could come with her-made a late reservation for dinner on Abbot Kinney and scheduled the visit to Angela between that reservation and an early date at a bar. The trip would seem less dutiful then; they could stroll over from the bar half-drunk, in the moist sea air of early evening, and be garrulous the way drinks let you be. Angela wouldn't mind. She wouldn't know the difference.

She met them at the door in what appeared to be a kimono, orange and satiny with stylized white birds. They stepped over the threshold shaking hands and smiling. Behind the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, setting crackers onto a tray, Susan saw the live-in helper, formerly of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose name she always forgot.

"Vera," said the woman, without being asked.

"Of course, of course," said Susan to Vera, apologetic. "h.e.l.lo. Susan. And this is Jim. He also works with T."

"A criminal, like my son," said Angela smoothly. She turned to a small wine rack with flourishes of grape leaves and began looking at bottles distractedly.

"I'm sorry?" said Jim.

"It's one of those days," said Vera, rolling her eyes.

Her English had improved, thought Susan, since she first started with Angela.

"Yes, my son is a criminal," said Angela, with a measure of pride. "A criminal mastermind. Would you like white? Or red?"

"Oh, whatever you're having," said Susan quickly, and stole a sidelong glance at Jim. He was gazing at Angela and grinning faintly.

"Look," said Angela, smiling delightedly, and lifted one of the bottles by the neck. "A Zinfandel. A Zinfandel is cheap and stinks like s.h.i.+t."

"Oh!" said Susan. "Yes?"

"I never heard that said," said Jim.

A look of sadness crossed Angela's face and she shrugged regretfully. "I love it very much," she said.

She turned her back, wine in hand. They followed her into the kitchen, where Vera handed them a tray with olives and pickles on it. Jim took a pickle.

"Often they blame it on the parents," went on Angela, as she rummaged in a drawer. They stood back, spearing olives and biding their time. "The worst criminals are often caused by neglect. There was a television show . . ."

"Oh, but not in T.'s case," said Susan.

"I'm sure, not with him," agreed Jim.

"Really?" asked Angela. "But you're a criminal too, aren't you?"

"Some would say," agreed Jim gravely, and inclined his head.

"I've heard of those," mused Angela. "A criminal lawyer."

They stood beside each other and watched as she struggled to open the bottle-"May I?" asked Jim-but Vera was already taking over.

"You would know better than I would," said Angela, and turned from Vera to take a dish towel out of a drawer. It was cheerfully patterned with strawberries; she swabbed it up and down her arms as though cleaning or drying them. "So you tell me. Did they neglect you too? Was that why you did it?"

"I wouldn't say they did," said Jim. "No, I really can't complain. My parents were pretty nice to me."

"The Zinfandel," said Angela, and proffered two gla.s.ses.

They sipped expectantly, waiting for the next remark. But instead she ceased to perform, and for the next half hour was gracious and comprehensible. She made tactful and sympathetic remarks about Hal's death; she knew what T. was working on, discussed the mission statement for his new foundation; she understood that Jim was a lawyer for nonprofits and remembered that he had met T. at an alumni party for their college fraternity.

Frat boys, both of them, realized Susan with vague astonishment. In her youth she would never have gone near one.

They walked away slowly, afterward, in a mild daze.

"I like her," said Jim.

The architect came to the house a week later, a tall, thin man with gla.s.ses and a prominent nose-more or less an architect cliche, as far as Susan could tell. Together they toured the grounds. He studied the building from various angles and then accepted a cup of coffee and went inside with her to examine the interior features. He said he was hopeful the house would be granted state historic status and she felt a surge of confidence: now, even if Steven and Tommy somehow won their suit, she had an ace in the hole. Not that she had the money to pay them off without selling the house anyway, in the event that the decision went against her, but she would cross that bridge . . . she would rather lose all the money she had than sacrifice the house.

When she walked him out to his car he popped the trunk and brought out a long yellowing roll. "The 1924 drawings," he said. "You can keep them. We've made a copy to put back in the archives. Technically we don't need to keep even the copies this long, but since the file's been reactivated . . ."

"Thank you," she said, rolling the thin rubber bands up and down on the tube.

He got in his car, and she stepped back as he started it up. Then he put it into reverse and rolled the window down. "Hey, if I come out again you'll have to show me the bas.e.m.e.nt," he said. "On the plan it has a surprisingly large footprint."

"What bas.e.m.e.nt?" she asked, but he had already backed up out of earshot with a light wave.

At the kitchen table, beneath a blackbelly rosefish, she spread out the drawings. There were several pages and she wasn't good at correlating the lines on them to the real house, but soon she had gla.s.ses weighting the corners and could study the one marked BAs.e.m.e.nT & SUBCELLAR. She wondered if it had been filled in since-was that even possible? She'd never noticed a door to the bas.e.m.e.nt, yet there it was on the plans. As far as she could tell it had been as large as the ground floor, had extended over the same area-maybe nine thousand square feet. The subcellar was smaller and seemed to have been designed for wine storage: there were built-in racks on the plan, if she was reading it right.

She called the architect, who had a phone in his car.

"Could it have been, I don't know, filled in or something? I've never seen a bas.e.m.e.nt here. I mean, I've lived in the house since December."

"Tell you what," he said. "My lunch meeting just canceled. Let's look for it."

He was back in half an hour.

"So you've never seen a door?" he said.

"Never," she said firmly, and shook her head. "They're not where the plan says they should be. See? Here?"

"The plans indicate there-there-two doors, two staircases," and he tapped the flattened paper. "Let's go look."

He lifted the gla.s.ses off the drawings and took the plans with him. She followed him out of the kitchen, along the main hall to the raptor room with the sunken floor.

He looked around for a second and then consulted the drawing.

"Huh," he said, and turned around a few times.

"What?"

"I don't think this room was ever built as the plan stipulated. Either that, or it was gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. See? This should be a supporting wall. Nothing. Instead the support's over there," and he pointed.

"So what does that mean?"

"First we check where the other staircase was supposed to be," he said, shaking his head, and this time she followed him to the music room.

"No," he said, and shook his head again. "Hmm. Surprising."

"Will it affect the application?" she asked abruptly, quickly worried that her curiosity had jeopardized the house's future.

"Oh no. Shouldn't be relevant," he said vaguely, looking around and then back at the drawing.

"Oh good. Good."

"OK. We'll have to walk it. We can start from the east end," he said finally.

"Wait. Are you hungry? I know you're missing your lunch hour right now. Would you like me to make us some sandwiches first?"

"Thanks. Appreciate it."

In a few minutes they were standing with their sandwiches in the parlor off the cavernous front hall-the drawing room, full of racc.o.o.ns and ringtails and coati, weasels and otters and minks. "Procyonids and mustelids," she told the architect, as he nodded and masticated his ham and cheese, casting his eyes to the molding and ceiling beams.

She liked knowing the nomenclature, even took pride in it. They were beautiful words, the terms from Greek and Latin: careful words to be kept and valued, along with the collection.

"All this furniture has been here? Since you took possession?"

"This room is unchanged, pretty much, except for the taxidermy. That's all been moved around. But I don't think it blocks anything."

He walked along the one interior wall, rapping with one hand, sandwich in the other.

"Moving along," he said, when the last bite of sandwich was gone.

He checked the hallway next, the wall behind the grand staircase; he went back and forth between rooms, measuring closet s.p.a.ces and the depths of walls with his eyes. She was impressed by this, how he could know measurements without using a measuring tape. He knew the volume of hidden s.p.a.ces without seeing both sides of them at the same time. But in room after room he shook his head, and finally-by this time she was impatient and the b.a.l.l.s of her feet were hot and sore from standing-they had made it to the west end of the house without new information.

There had been some shelves and cabinets and wardrobes they'd need to get out of the way, he said, if she wanted him to be sure-some walls he couldn't get to without the furniture being moved, pieces that were too heavy for just the two of them to s.h.i.+ft. He wrote down the list of rooms and the walls he needed to check if she wanted a definitive answer.

"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 wrist.w.a.tch. "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 pa.s.sing 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.