Magnificence: A Novel Part 2

Briefly she entertained the notion of laughing. But the room was airless and resisted sound.

On the other hand, it might not be Hal at all. Where was Hal? This was a dummy, after all-the real actor was gone. They'd dressed it in a suit and tie, a dark suit she'd never seen before and a discreet tie over a white s.h.i.+rt. T. must have bought it and brought it to them. He had not mentioned this. Maybe, on the other hand, the suit was one of T.'s own. She could check, if she dared to reach for the tags, touch the back of the dead, still neck. She knew T.'s size and she knew that if it was his it would have to be Prada or Armani, since that was all he owned. Or all he used to own before he appeared at LAX in the threadbare garb of a street person, with Hal as his luggage.

She stood there beside the casket. Particles of air were touching both of them, touching Hal's skin and then her own. His skin wasn't living, she knew that all too well, but maybe energy subsisted there. Maybe there was silent movement within, particles sweeping down over the planes of her cheeks, the streams, the rivers of atoms, sweeping down over all of her and sweeping over him. This was the last time they would share a s.p.a.ce, the last time their skins would be close. After this they would always be separate, on and on past the end of time, until the sun burned out and everything dissolved. And yet even if they were apart from now on, there must be others like them, shadows or mimics, unconscious reflections. People were not unique, surely: there were no anomalies in nature, were there? Individuals were permutations of longing, moments, tendencies. They were variations. So other shades of Hal and her, their many versions, crossed each other's paths elsewhere, crossed over and merged, their cells swimming among the billions . . . Except for Casey. In Casey they were together. If Casey were to have children, if Casey could-possible, in theory; at least, no doctor had said otherwise-they would remain together there, the molecules of Hal and her, diminis.h.i.+ng as time went on but never entirely gone.

Impossibly he was putting her to shame-complete, reposing there calmly while she was still amidst the chaos of growth and change, the mess of life, the stew and whirl of microorganisms. Although death too was disorderly, she conceded-simply delayed by chemicals as she stood here. Only the deathless were neat.

She thought of the stone biers of saints, of relics lying in state in ancient churches. They had seen one in Europe, a saint. Oh not the saint, but his image-graven in stone while his bones lay beneath. The church had been built over his dead body. Where was it? France? A church built over the laid-out saint, to house his sanctified remains. After you left that ancient church, in retrospect, you somehow confused the two, you thought the saint was in the stone-the saint was the figure itself, its contours smooth and pristine. A stone man, a stone virgin: people were always less beautiful than the images of them.

Hal was not stone. No one would build a church to him.

But everyone deserved a church, she thought, feeling naive, feeling twelve again: all the tragic heroes that were dead men, once infants-each hobbled soul that wished and was undone. Maybe that was how someone had thought of mausoleums. Personal churches, skyward-pointing buildings. There were whole cemeteries of them. In some places it had to do with flooding, she knew, low cities like New Orleans or Buenos Aires, but here at Forest Lawn the mausoleums appeared ostentatious, the opposite of holy.

It was in the lying-down figure of a man that holiness arrived. If a saint were interred standing up, his stone image vertical like a statue, there would be no grace in that. A man had to be lying down or he was not even an offering.

She had tears on her cheeks, felt the wet streaks cool the skin, but did not feel them in her eyes. She wondered how she had missed her own crying.

Hal had not given himself up, but someone else had offered him. The thieves, she thought at first, but they were only a proximate cause: the root cause was still and always her. The death might technically be a random event, sure, but she couldn't stop there, the shape of her responsibility was too clear. She felt the struggle of trying to make death describe a single point, mean one thing that could be understood, but at the same time she knew she was spinning a tale out of physics, out of atoms. A bus lurching to a stop, a tree branch swaying and bobbing in the moving air, why, that was all that death was-a s.h.i.+fting of microscopic parts through time. The parts s.h.i.+fted and left you alone.

Hal might look good now but he would not stay good for long. From now on he was the property of the dirt and the water beneath the surface, the property of gnarled tree roots, gra.s.ses and microbes, larvae and slugs, rats, beetles, putrefaction, fermentation and dry decay. That was the allure of cremation, of course: when you thought of your body in future time you did not have to see it decomposing. Better to see yourself as ashes, ashes and rising smoke. But she had never liked ovens either. They had it right in India, where they wrapped them in white and lifted them onto pyres.

Hal had been good. Good friend, kind father and kind man.

And yet she had to think of herself. She always went back to her. Not even this dedicated moment could be selfless. d.a.m.n it! You had to see yourself there, where the loved one was, you couldn't help it: because finally you too would be forced out, would have to let it all go. Finally she would be a dummy in someone else's eyes, the living would look upon her from above. She would cease to be and join him, as was said. Join him in the sense of not joining him at all, in the sense of a parallel but utterly separate annihilation; join him in the sense of an eternal nonexistence that contained nothing.

Still they said join, they said join as though there was a throng there waiting, because that was their desperate hope, there was a throng there waiting with arms spread wide to embrace you-there they all were, all the ones you had known, cavorting on the alpine meadows green in stately, s.h.i.+ning ballrooms.

It was unbearable that he should look so perfect, with what was coming to him next. Obscene. She leaned over the coffin and jerked his s.h.i.+rt up from under the pant waist.

The s.h.i.+rt cleared the belt line and she saw his stomach, a shade lighter than his face but still tan. What had he done there, down in the tropics? He must have been on the beach! She saw him walking into the surf, surveying the vast beyond. And there was the wound, the means of this ending. A small line. She reached out with fingers shaking and felt the b.u.mp of its lips against her finger pads. Life was a skin.

She would tell him she was sorry. Or no: too late. The body would not listen. It was a corpse, not him-but then it was him, it was. Wasn't it? The last him she would know-the trace of him, the path he left. The raw materials. Or possibly all there was, all there had ever been. It was not hers to know; no one would let her in. The door of knowledge kept her out, her and legions, the ma.s.ses of the undecided-the living ones, the ones who had been living and were not anymore-try as they might to look through the windows, they could not get in. You knew nothing of death, then you died.

People intended to make you feel better when they said the body was not the person, you or themselves, at least, but those were the ones who believed in the fields of hereafter, those who believed in cherubim. Their words presumed an independent mind, moving, roaming freely. If that were true, who knew how it might be, Hal's mind floating untethered in this sterile room. Only herself for company. His mind and its murderer, her own. Maybe his mind was touching hers, in those infinite molecules of the air.

She willed her hands to rise, her arms to lift up, as though to feel the last of him going.

The cut was small. The cut was hardly there.

She pulled the s.h.i.+rt down after a while. She stood and looked and looked at him, the line of his nose and forehead, the eyebrows. But he would not say anything, and there was only so much looking she could do.

Though technically it was winter it felt like a mild spring day on the cemetery grounds. The service would be held in a steepled chapel called the Little Church of the Flowers, a name both quaint and faintly reminiscent of pederasty. Susan sat waiting in the first pew with Casey beside her at the end.

The venue had to be expensive, she thought-T. was paying, saying the funeral would be his responsibility-because it was an imitation of a church from Europe, an imitation of an English village church slapped down in the sunny, falsely green lake of Los Angeles County. Hal would have shaken his head at the pretension of it, but herself she found it pleasant enough. She didn't mind the fake quaintness. She was not a sn.o.b when it came to authenticity. Whatever works, was the way she saw it. Whereas Hal had a tendency to mock his fellow Americans. He looked down from a high place on his countrymen, as he called them.

In his way Hal was an idealist. Had been. He had lofty ideas, where she only had pragmatism. She wondered if that made him more European. Also he had believed in taxes. Yes: though he'd grown up right here, though he had visited Europe only once, and even then in a bus full of low-budget tourists who yearned for nothing more than to step out of the bus in Paris and find the nearest McDonald's, there were European aspects to Hal.

Sunlight filled the place with an excessive whiteness that made her blink when she looked up. Mourners were filing through the doors in surprising number but she didn't know most of them-her own friends, her friends from college days, were far away and most hadn't even heard the news. These were probably IRS employees, their equally unknown families in tow. Some were large, she noticed. Hal had never said his office was mostly overweight people, yet so it appeared to be. She'd never made a habit of dropping into his office, nor had she attended many office functions. And when she told Casey she would speak she hadn't considered these mourners or their expectations. For their benefit she would have liked to be eloquent, but in the end she would not be. Of that much she was certain.

An arm's length away Casey sat in her chair, head bowed. She did not wish to be spoken to. A few feet past her T. stood by a side door talking to a small man in black, the man who would officiate, Susan suspected-clerical-looking, nodding as T. spoke to him in a low murmur.

He did not say much-either that or Susan forgot to listen-and then Casey had intended to speak but could not, became choked up and had to roll back to her position at the end of the pew. Watching her made Susan wince but she had to get over it, she was up next herself, and she would have noticed her own nervousness if she had not been lost in feeling for Casey and the whine and the buzz. She had heard it from the moment T. told them Hal was dead: her life was full of background noise, a dull and droning clamor behind the voices or a ringing, a dreadful ringing like tinnitus that only diminished when she drank or smoked. Then things quieted and drew into focus.

It was not that she regretted all of it, only that she regretted this specific instance-that Hal had found out, that because of her carelessness he had seen. From that she'd failed to save him. This failure had driven him far away, and from far away came the man with the knife and slit his belly open.

She stood at the lectern with her eyes wide, as though shocked. As though she was stupid. She had an impression of clumps of flowers around her, wreaths and bouquets, white and purple and red, their cloudy colors on the margins, and wondered how she looked as the words flowed out of her, as she gazed down at her paper, which trembled slightly beneath her fingers. She held the paper and read the words, but the words did not say what she meant. She might look aged, widowed, dull, sharp, or blurred by grief. She felt suddenly like a vague being, a form without definition. She smoothed the paper on the lectern and glanced up from it-imprecise words-and out at the crowd, curious for a moment as to whether an ex had come. She hoped none had, of course. Robert, at least, was not here. She had told him it was over and he barely cared, she suspected, though he had seemed slightly annoyed. Inconvenienced, anyway. She cared even less than he did and wondered idly if T. would lay him off. T. had hardly dealt with him, didn't know him at all.

She could barely discern the faces. She saw their pinkness or brownness and their sympathy, an unsmiling sympathy but sympathy all the same. They sympathized because they had no clue that she herself was the murderer. They did not know Hal had been murdered. Or not, at least, by her. They knew of the stabbing but not the real culprit.

Not one of them had the least idea who she was.

Luckily.

Afterward, in their stiff dress clothes, they drank. She did, and so did Casey and even, she thought, T., though he could apparently hold his liquor better than either of them. There was an open bar. People came up to her and she was conscious of feeling better the more she drank-magnanimous even. She would be intimate, she would confide in them. When if not now? She went out in a radius from Casey, made forays into the pa.s.sing crowds from a station at Casey's elbow. T. was drinking whiskey, a lock of his hair fallen over his forehead, his s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned. He was wearing a suit for the first time since he'd come back and had a debonair way about him, Susan thought, like a man from the roaring twenties.

She left them together to join a smokers' circle outside, near an angel statue. It seemed to be office people. A woman with frizzy hair and outsize earrings spoke to her.

"He was a special person," she said.

Susan took the cigarette that was offered and let someone light it for her, surprised at how bad it tasted. The first one always did.

"If there's anything we can do," said a man.

"This is a good beginning," she told him, raising the cigarette, and took a drag.

"Hal talked about you all the time," said another woman. Bookish-looking and gangly.

"He did?" asked Susan.

"He was devoted to you. And Casey."

"Casey, definitely," agreed Susan. She had put her plastic wine cup down near the angel's stone toes; now she reached for it and sipped. "He lived for Casey."

"He had a way with people," said the earrings.

"Really? I used to kid him about not having one."

There was a shocked silence at this.

"One time," went on the big earrings, as though to politely cover the transgression, "there was a crazy, you know, a hostage taker? Did he tell you that story?"

Beyond the woman the hedges were carefully trimmed into long boxes. If they grew wild, she thought, they would be far more lovely. Did people want to be buried beneath topiary?

". . . turned out it wasn't a real gun. It was a water pistol! But there was real, I mean, fear, you know? People were freaking out. And Hal, you know, he totally defused the whole situation."

"Mmm, yeah," said Susan. "The squirt-gun thing."

She did remember, or almost. The anecdote had a punch line, if she recalled correctly: the squirt gun had been green. Hal liked to tell stories, when he was in the right mood-mostly about his coworkers, their foibles and idiosyncrasies.

"The guy was a legend," said a young Hispanic man earnestly. He had a pathetic pencil mustache, a concave chest, and his pants were too long. Or no: they were belted just below the rib cage. "Name's Arlo, by the way."

"Oh," said Susan.

Rodriguez, Hal had called him. The pants were the tip-off.

She shook his hand.

"Pleased to meet you. Again."

Surely she had met him.

"Yeah, Christmas party, right?"

"Right," she agreed. One of the few she'd attended.

"I'm serious. He was a legend. Old-school. Last of the t.i.tans, man."

"Hal Lindley, last of the t.i.tans," she repeated wistfully.

"Man, you know what? I gotta tell someone this," said Rodriguez, and bent forward as though pained. "I totally offered to go with him. I woulda had his back. I told him that. He told me he was going down there. I go, Take me with. Seriously! I hadda gone, you know, maybe this wouldna . . ."

He trailed off. He looked lost.

"You can't think like that," said Susan gently. "He didn't want company. It was his choice, Arlo."

"Yeah, but."

"It was his adventure," she said. As she said it she felt its accuracy: Arlo was comforting her, not the other way round. It was not that she denied her part in it-it was still murder she had done, at least manslaughter. But she remembered Hal's voice on the phone. A tensile strength, an alertness she had missed for a long time before that. How he had looked in the casket: curiously alive.

Her adventure had been without him, his without her. A last freedom.

The bookish woman was crying; the one with large earrings sidled close and put a fleshy arm around her, pulled her in. Susan rested her eyes on the woman's blouse, a pattern of wine-red and dark-blue leaves. Flesh was always a consolation-flesh, not beauty. Beauty was social, flesh was private. These days Susan consoled no one. When Casey was a baby and Susan still had weight from the pregnancy, baby Casey had nestled against her. She had kneaded the flesh and buried her face in it. Later when Casey was a toddler and the weight was gone, Casey had not liked the change or trusted it. She even complained. Susan remembered now: the toddler Casey had said her mother's stomach was no longer beautiful. She bemoaned its absence. To her consolation was beauty; small Casey had not thought of forms or majesty. She wanted body all around.

Susan felt a rush of affection for the earrings woman, as if by putting her arm around the other she had put it around her too. A common mother, a small mothering for all. Susan thought of her own mother. Then how rarely she thought of her. As though her mother had been a mother in another life, a life long past, a faint image or pattern of a mother.

And yet-at least when she was a baby, a small child-her mother must have felt for her, as she herself did for Casey, a deep and wrenching love.

But they hadn't been close; the love had been squandered. Somehow along the way Susan had squandered it.

A terrible remorse threatened.

She would go inside now to see Casey again.

"Let me get some more drinks," she said, for an exit. "Drinks? Anyone?"

A first cousin was in attendance, the only one she still knew. He was a consultant, something to do with computers. He wore a metallic gray jacket and a violet tie and was balding. She hadn't seen him for years; they'd never had much in common. They collided at the buffet table, near a vegetable platter.

"So how've you been," she asked, after condolences. She picked up a piece of celery. It seemed like days since she'd eaten.

"Oh, you know," he said. His hand made a gesture of dismissal.

"I don't," she said. "I don't at all. Tell me."

"Well, Deb left," he said.

The wife, must be.

"Oh. I'm really sorry."

He shrugged.

"Nah, it's for the best."

"And how are the kids?" She thought there were two of them. Both boys.

"College."

"Uh-huh? They liking it?"

"Engineering. That's Tommy. He's gonna be an earner. Gil's doing something useless. Art history."

Now she remembered. The guy was a tool.

"Hardly useless."

"Whatever. No money in it."

"Better than phone s.e.x," said Casey.

There she was, drunk and flushed. Less pale than usual. She reached for a cherry tomato.

"You remember Casey. Casey, your second cousin. Steven."

"I remember Gil. And Tommy. We played with a soccer ball in the street. He did that thing where you head-b.u.t.t it."

It struck her that Steven might not have seen Casey since the accident. He must have known; it could not be new information. But he looked mildly embarra.s.sed.

"Casey, good to see you."

No, he had seen her once in the chair, that was right, a birthday thing for his own kid.

"Thanks for coming," said Casey.

She probably meant it, but there was something in the tone. She'd never liked him, Susan thought. She chewed her tomato and squinted up.

"Kids would have too. But they're busy."