Magnificence: A Novel Part 14

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 s.l.u.t.

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 pract.i.tioners 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. Meerkat, 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, gla.s.s wind chimes catching a cold light. Even a b.u.t.terfly 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 bas.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.sifieds. 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 gra.s.s 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 ma.s.s of Styrofoam peanuts, packed deep inside wooden boxes that were solidly built and st.u.r.dily 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.semblage 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 gla.s.s 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 coc.o.o.ns of b.u.t.terflies, 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 h.e.l.l 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 c.o.c.ked 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."

"The rainforest thing?" asked Susan.

"Malaysia. Malaysian Borneo."

"Oh," said Susan.

"And it would be a lifesaver if you could take her again. Her and the dog. Both of them."

"Her and the dog," repeated Susan.

"And T. says we could pay for someone else to live with you here and help her. A new Vera. So you wouldn't have to do much in the way of like, care or whatever. Just let her stay here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we've got her to come out of her own room finally but she's still shaky. And there's nowhere else she'll willingly go."

Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.

"Please," she said. "Please?"

Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.

"You got a manhole in your backyard," he said.

"A manhole?"

"Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing's not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, h.e.l.l if I know. If you want to open the lid you're gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. h.e.l.l. The drill won't do any more for you than it's already done."

"Oh. Well. Thanks, though," said Susan, disappointed.

"Is it like a city manhole?" asked Casey. "It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there's some high-voltage line or s.h.i.+t like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?"

"No letters I could see," said the jackhammer guy.

"I'll call the city anyway," said Susan. "OK. So. Thank you."

"I still gotta load up the truck. I'll come back in when I'm done. Be a hundred fifty," said the guy. "Cash or check."

When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause-Casey's request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There'd been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone s.e.x, of Casey and phone s.e.x and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the a.s.sociation was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut-it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression. In a rut could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.

It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.

"You're not doing that phone-s.e.x job still, are you? Now that you're, you know, married and all that?"

"Nah," said Casey. "It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted."

"So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don't see you living off T.'s money. I don't see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings."

"No," said Casey. "No. Not indefinitely."

"So?"

"Well, s.h.i.+t. I'd like to have an answer for you. I'd like to for myself. But the truth is, I don't know yet. So I'm going to give it some time. I'm going to have this honeymoon period. I'll go anywhere. I'll do anything. I'm free-floating. Say for a year. And then I'll decide."

"I see," said Susan, nodding.

"What the h.e.l.l is that," said Casey, and gestured. "An armadillo or something?"

"A nine-banded armadillo," said Susan, surprised. "Of course. What did you think?"

"It's weird-looking," said Casey. "It's basically a freak."

"I really wouldn't say that," said Susan.

She felt annoyed.

"It's like a giant pill bug with a rat head and a long, ratty tail," went on Casey. "You know, those bugs that roll up into a ball? Or doodlebugs, some of the kids used to call them. It's like one of those, but bigger and uglier."

"If you're trying to get me to do you a favor, you shouldn't insult the collection," said Susan testily.

"Wow," said Casey. "You really like the thing."

"It's not a question of liking," said Susan, but she felt increasingly agitated. "And it's not a thing. Or it wasn't. Anyway. I'm going to the kitchen. You can come with me or not."

Casey followed, past a lone sea turtle in a case with a some fake kelp and a couple of lobsters.

"I dig the tortoise, though," she said, in a clear attempt to curry favor.

"It's not a tortoise at all. It's a green sea turtle," said Susan.

"I was just trying to get your goat," said Casey. "I do that to T. too. I know what a sea turtle is. I watch the nature shows."

"Uh-huh," said Susan.

"But he doesn't love all animals. He's mostly interested in the ones that are about to go extinct," went on Casey.