Magnificence: A Novel Part 17

"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 sn.o.bbery.

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 swis.h.i.+ng windy sound-the sound of s.p.a.ce, 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 fibergla.s.s. 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, b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper, 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 b.u.mmed 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 b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper 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 a.s.sociated 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-cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 b.i.t.c.hes, hos and gats, the completely misogynistic, racist, h.o.m.ophobic 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 p.o.r.nography, 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, pa.s.sed out, and Sal played for them an alb.u.m t.i.tled Death Certificate.

In fact the song had been hilarious. Her favorite part was a line concerning oral s.e.x, where the s.l.u.tty 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 c.u.mmingbird.

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 pa.s.sed her on the shoulder, she realized-where were they all, the sirens and the lights? Maybe they'd pa.s.sed 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 sus.h.i.+ 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-embarra.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sed 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. h.e.l.l, 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.

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 j.a.panese 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 gra.s.ses, 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 absent-mindedness 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 was.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 s.l.u.t 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, some 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-s.e.x 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 unenc.u.mbered. 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 gla.s.s of water at the ready, prying her a.s.sortment 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 s.p.a.cious 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 cus.h.i.+ons. 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 pa.s.s. 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.