Magnificence: A Novel Part 3

"Studying art history."

"Gil's back East. Tommy's at USC."

"Mmm. Good for him," said Casey.

"I'm really sorry about your dad," said Steven.

Casey nodded. There was silence.

"Freak thing," said Steven. "You get a lot of freak . . ."

He trailed off, his gaze lingering on her chair.

"Huh," said Casey, and popped another tomato into her mouth. "Better quit while you're ahead."

She spun and wheeled off.

". . . accidents in your family," he finished, lamely.

"Uh, yeah," said Susan.

"Hoo," he said after a moment, with awkward jocularity, and shook his head. "Sensitive."

"Well. Her father was just stabbed to death," said Susan.

She left him groping a zucchini flower.

She called a real estate agent and put the house up for sale. Casey issued a grudging invitation to stay at her apartment but Susan was afraid of grating on her. Meanwhile T. was forcing her to stay home from work for a while. She was ambivalent about this: the office was somewhere to go, a location in which to exist. But he insisted she take a leave of absence, and she had no strength left to argue.

She established a simple pattern of avoiding the s.p.a.ces where she and Hal had spent most of their time, moving out of the master bedroom into a smaller room that had once been Casey's.

But even trying to sleep in that room-a room she'd thought might be safe because it held almost no specific memory of Hal-she was preyed upon as soon as she lay motionless. Apprehension crept over her, a fringe of blackness she could almost see rising slowly from the foot of the bed, covering her feet, her legs, her chest, her shoulders, coming to smother her chin and her mouth like earth. Hal's death and her own were gathered wretchedly in the shadows, hunched down with teeth showing, sharp teeth and the talons of bony fingers. A heaviness made her heart beat hard with fear-a leaden certainty that her selfishness had killed him. There was no buoyancy at all, no river to drift on.

She s.h.i.+fted onto the living room couch for several nights and during the daytime moved the bedroom's furniture around, trying to find a configuration that would ease the weight. If it were different enough, she thought, it wouldn't cause pain like this, so she removed the shades from the windows and hastily painted the walls an eggsh.e.l.l blue. She made forays to housewares stores and returned with items that spoke to her of freshness-blue and white linens, cus.h.i.+ons, a screen, a wall hanging, a cloudy gla.s.s vase full of p.u.s.s.y willows. She wanted it to feel like a replacement room, a surprise. But the change was so slight, after all that, as to be unnoticeable.

So she considered, every night after twilight, whether to go to a hotel. She thought of lobbies, their carpeting and warm lights and the people milling. But in the end she did not go to a hotel. In the end she stayed home. She went out for as long as she could, to bars or the promenade or the Santa Monica Pier, sitting and smoking and drinking and idly watching the movement of crowds. But then she came home to sleep, or to lie there trying. Maybe it was apathy or maybe it was penance. She couldn't decide.

Daytime was better. She went out with first light and walked T.'s dog around the neighborhood; she got coffee in the morning and took her lunches in restaurants or diners. Sometimes she drove around in a daze. Other times she asked friends over, made sure there were people in the house to lift its grimness. When she had to be there by herself she kept to the sunporch and Casey's room, venturing into the kitchen only when she had to. The two of them had spent years in the kitchen.

His car was still in the shop, having bodywork done after a fender bender, so she asked the man there to sell it for her. He said no at first, but when she told him why he relented and said yes. Then she began looking for a new place to live. It took her out of the house, it distracted her, it pushed her forward . . . she thought maybe a small one-room condo near the beach. That was the benefit of being alone: she needed little square footage, could buy for location, could afford, possibly, a clear view of the ocean. She tried to picture a new life and when she did so-putting it neatly into a frame as though the future was visible through a porthole-she saw the blue ocean.

She visited Casey as often as she could, sought her out for meals or trips to the grocery store and did not press her about the phone-s.e.x job. She would not dream of asking. The job was irrelevant now, its triviality complete. One afternoon they sat for hours at the end of the Santa Monica Pier, where Casey also liked to go, barely speaking. They listened to the screeching gulls and watched the pier's small population of anglers, a few stubborn old curmudgeons who didn't mind pollution in their fish.

After a week T. came to the house to reclaim his pet. He had wanted to do it sooner but he knew she had grown fond of the dog. No doubt he was being considerate.

"So," he said, kneeling in the kitchen, his hands in the dog's fur, rubbing. "When you come back we can start the next project. But no hurry. None at all. Take all the time you need."

"A new project?" she asked.

She'd been doing preliminary research for him on a parcel in Tahoe when he disappeared, something about Whispering Pines.

"We're going to disincorporate," he said.

He'd said something about that, on the phone from Belize. Back when she thought he was crazy. She'd blocked it out, she guessed.

She realized she had a headache, thought it might be dehydration, and went to get ice for a gla.s.s of water.

"It can be a complicated process," he continued. "The lawyer will handle most of the details. I'd like you to stay on with me, though. If you're interested."

"I don't really get it," she said dumbly, and turned from the open freezer to stare.

"I'm going to do something else. You'll still be needed."

"Something else?"

"A foundation."

"Foundation? You mean, for giving away money?"

"A 501(c)3."

"Are you kidding?"

"Dead serious. But like I say, no rush. We can talk more when you're feeling up to it."

They were leaving then, he and the dog, with little acknowledgment, the dog's nails clicking across the kitchen floor. She noticed its bowls were still beside the trash can-one with a few kibbles remaining, the other with water. She and Hal had never had a dog. She thought vaguely that Hal might not have liked them very much, might have preferred cats such as the one he bought for Casey. Though he had always said he liked dogs, this might have been a white lie of sorts, she thought. Why had they never had a dog, if in fact they both liked dogs?

But it was true what he had told her about T.-her employer was sane, though certainly changed. Apparently it was straightforward: he'd turned liberal Democrat from fiscal Republican. Of course she did not know how he voted. For all she knew he never voted at all. But clearly he had some notion of being a do-gooder. (Why was the term so bitter, so resentful?) Anyway he was newly bent on charity. Such reversals were not uncommon, almost cliche, in fact: it was only the certainty with which he'd proceeded, before, the certainty of his commitment that made it seem absurd. Then again the kid was only in his twenties, barely older than Casey. She'd given him too much credit for being fully formed. He had always had a veneer of maturity.

She heard his car back out of the driveway and walked with her gla.s.s of water into the living room, past a bookshelf where there was a picture of Hal and her. It was before they had Casey, when they were young, and Casey had had it framed and set it up there. They were two young hippies, long-haired and smiling. Well, she was long-haired. Hal had never gone that way. But he did sport a mustache and the obligatory beard, which Casey always found amusing. True to its era the picture was sun-bleached and faded; they stood holding hands in front of a silver Airstream. Susan wore what appeared to be a striped muumuu, Hal a flowery tunic. She had picked out his clothes for him back then.

An offer came in for the house and she began to sort Hal's things into boxes to give away, boxes to move with, boxes for Casey. Into Casey's boxes she put a model horse, toy soldiers, a sailboat with peeling blue paint. That was easy; it was the half-broken objects that were hard, the ones too slight or old to keep-a slingshot made crudely out of twigs and rubber bands, Boy Scout badges, worn baseball cards from the fifties. There were report cards. In second grade Hal had received an A in Deportment; in fifth he'd gotten a B and the remark, in a slanted, loopy hand, At times, Hal can be boisterous.

Her own items were the bulk of it. She'd kept more than Hal had and the worst was something she'd thought she'd gotten rid of, a book of lists. It was a bound journal from years ago, from a few months after the accident, when she first started sleeping around. Mainly it was a list of men. She'd been incautious then, maybe half hoping Hal would catch her and she would be confronted, but he had never suspected, as far as she knew, and her desire for exposure had slowly waned. The book was a juvenile collection-the names, physical descriptions, the events of their meetings. She barely remembered all of them now, and looking at it felt ashamed by the childishness. It had always been about knowing and being known, about experience and diversity, but here it was clearly teenage games. Now that she was a murderer, now that she had homicide under her belt, it looked to her like evidence.

She crammed it down into the kitchen garbage, then cleaned out the refrigerator and rained down old vegetables on it-rubbery carrots, yellowing celery, a torrent of moldy beets.

She had spent her morning on real estate-showings on the beach, slick modern condos the realtor picked out with wide windows that looked out over the Pacific, balconies that gave a view of the headlands to the north-when the lawyer's call came. Her great-uncle Albert, who had died a few months back, had named her in his will. She'd barely noticed the death when it happened; she had never known the great-uncle, had met him only once, as a child, when her parents took her over to his house on a weekend. Odd that she remembered it at all; the only reason was his player piano. The piano had stuck with her. He pressed a b.u.t.ton and showed her how the white keys moved under the weight of invisible fingers. There was one other fragment too-a thin arm in a plaid s.h.i.+rtsleeve as it bent down and stuck a rusty wire hoop into the gra.s.s. That was all she recalled.

She drove to the lawyer's office in Century City, a tall s.h.i.+ning building with valet parking, and sat across from his desk with her right leg vibrating restlessly. The lawyer talked on the phone while she waited. He was a stubby man with a gleaming nose and ruddy cheeks and she wondered idly what he would say if she told him her husband had been stabbed to death. She considered blurting it out. Behind his head was a Chagall print. The decor in the office matched the colors in the print, down to the blue curtains and the flowers on the desk. Chagall had always irritated her. There was an obnoxiousness to the painting, a repugnantly coy quality, like a grown man talking baby talk to other grown men.

"There's no cash to speak of," said the lawyer when he hung up, cutting right to the chase and handing her a thick file. "The bulk of the estate is the house itself. The house and the contents. Those are yours. You're the nearest next of kin, or at least the only one he bothered to name. Himself-as I'm sure you're aware-he died without issue."

"A house," she repeated. The one with the player piano? She would inherit a player piano: a murderer, a black widow, the proud owner of a player piano.

If she suppressed the murder part, the thought gave her a lift of pleasure.

"Where is it, again? The Valley?"

"Pasadena," he said. "The will, the t.i.tle, the records he left are in the folder. Review them at your leisure. You may take possession at any time or of course you may also sell. Estate taxes are basically covered for you under the terms of a somewhat complicated trust. All in the file. Feel free to consult your tax preparer."

She took a minute to shuffle through the file, the doc.u.ments that were impervious to her scrutiny.

"It's all there," said the lawyer, apparently impatient. "Feel free to consult your accountant."

"It's such a coincidence," she said, fl.u.s.tered. "It's one of those things. Because I'm selling my own home right now."

The lawyer nodded and took another call.

When she left she felt thrilled. She paid the valet and pulled out onto the street, her accordion folder on the pa.s.senger seat, then found a side street and parked to rifle through the papers till she found the address. It was unfamiliar-she barely knew Pasadena-so she dug in the glove compartment for her dog-eared Thomas Guide and flipped through it.

There were keys stashed, the lawyer had said.

She did not let her hopes rise as she drove, expended effort to tamp them down. A derelict bungalow that was two-thirds garage, a trailer with fruit stencils decorating the kitchen walls . . . thick-walled refrigerators from the fifties strewn across a dry lawn, their rounded edges speckled with rust. With sagging roof and umbrella clotheslines, it would sit hunkered down on cinderblocks on a grim street where the lots were separated by chain-link and pit bulls jumped at you when you pa.s.sed, backed up to a fast-food chicken joint or a video store or freeway.

But the nearer she got the smoother the pavement beneath her tires, the deeper and older the covering trees. Their shade moved over her car, dappling the winds.h.i.+eld. Soaring limbs, velvet green leaves-even the bark looked soft. There were white flowers, opened up at the throat like trumpets, and then she pa.s.sed a row of tall gates that reminded her of Bel Air. Hedges enclosed mansions.

"No f.u.c.king way," she said, leaning forward and clutching the steering wheel. Hal should have been here. He had always been middle-cla.s.s and had never had, as she did, rich relatives in the hazy distance, perennially blurred figures. And there was the number from her paper, on a wrought-iron gate. At the top of the gate there was something else written-the name of the estate? She squinted to make it out: a rusty script with flourishes, letters missing, obscured by branches and leaves.

She was out of place here. Even her car, with its fading paint job, seemed like an insult to the street.

The drive was cobblestone and the gate was locked. She reversed and parked on the street to look for the keys. They were under a rock near the gate, the lawyer had said, so she knelt and pulled back branches until she found it, tipped it up and got her fingers dirty. That part felt right: grubbing in the dirt, squatting. She thought: The murderer squatted. She thought along those lines daily. The murderer poured a cup of coffee. The murderer went to sleep. The murderer disa.s.sociated.

After a while she realized she had the wrong rock. The fake rock was beside it, hollow. Underneath was a set of keys.

Once she'd pushed one side of the gate open and driven through, the car b.u.mping and shaking over the cobbles, she could peer around at her leisure: a wide lawn with long, leaf-littered gra.s.s. There was a fountain off to the left and on her right a pool enclosure. The house, straight ahead, was sprawling and off-white and was surmounted by a green dome, probably oxidized copper. She saw archways over a slate terrace, white metal tables and chairs and parasols with scalloped edges that fluttered. The key stuck at first in the front door, which was intricately carved-some kind of nature scene with odd flat-topped trees-but finally the door opened. No alarm.

Inside it was dim, streaks of light through a window somewhere, and smelled of mothb.a.l.l.s. She slid her hand along the wall, feeling for a light switch. Instead it hit something strange-both smooth and furry, bulbous. She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away, heartbeat quickened, and tried another wall as her eyes adjusted. She stood in an entryway painted deep red, deer gathered on the walls. Their antlers protruded, their gla.s.s eyes stared.

The murderer inherited a house full of deer. My deer, my deer. The universe showed off its symbolic perfection; the atoms bragged.

"Jesus," she said.

She moved forward. The next room was s.p.a.cious, opened up to the dome above. A weak daylight filtered down and she could make out a wide staircase that circled up into a bristling dimness and still more deer heads, mounted on walls, sideboards, above doorways. Maybe not all deer, she thought: some were delicate and unfamiliar, striped or with elaborate curling horns-antelope or gazelle, maybe. There was a huge bull moose.

The ceilings were high and vaulted. Beneath the dead herds the place was startling in its elegance, though oddly decorated: purple curtains grayed by age and dust, crystal sconces on the walls, thick swoops of gold brocade-a magician's stage, a goth bordello. She pulled the curtains open as she pa.s.sed them, turned on lights and moved past the staircase, into a living room with more animals still. Here there were cats. Cheetahs or leopards maybe, she didn't know the difference-not tigers, anyway. More than just heads, there were whole bodies posed leaping, posed stalking, streamlined with huge, round eyes and fur that seemed less their own than the coats of the rich black ovals on one, black rings with golden centers on another, the trappings of starlets. She looked closely into a face-the golden eyes, the fangs-then turned away.

The cats were captured forever in the seventies: stone fireplace, sunken lounge area, s.h.a.g carpet and an L-shaped leather couch. Over the sofa was a lion rampant: its great mane flaring, it reared up, held its front paws in the air as if ready to box. It was either foolish or majestic. She gazed, trying to decide, but her eyes watered as she gazed. The murderer's eyes watered.

It was the dust, no doubt. They said dust was composed of human epidermal cells, but in this house it was the dust of Africa, she thought. The dust of the flesh of the veldt, the aged, slowly dispersing brawn of the Serengeti.

In a cavernous dining room with dark ceilings, wild dogs and foxes lurked. Here some of the animals had labels, ranging from finely etched bra.s.s plaques to a kind of dark-red tape with raised white letters on it that she remembered from the seventies. She leaned in close to read them: a timber wolf in a cabinet with sliding gla.s.s doors, an American mink on a sideboard. The teeth were sharp. She hadn't known minks had such sharp teeth. She kept on into the hallway with a s.h.i.+ver, where she found birds at her shoulders. Birds of prey-hawks, owls, eagles. An owl perched on a branch, an eagle spread its wings over a nest of twigs, a nest full of speckled eggs. A hallway led into a smaller room, a guest bedroom possibly or servant's quarters, with Tiffany floor lamps shedding a green and yellow light. It was still birds, but they were not so fierce.

She felt slightly relieved: she'd run the gauntlet.

In the small bedroom there was a pink bird that must be a flamingo, standing with one leg lifted gracefully on a mirrored pool. She leaned down to touch the reeds-reeds of gla.s.sy plastic, glorified Easter-basket stuffing. Ducks, geese, pheasants. She barely noticed the furnis.h.i.+ngs, so abundant was the stuffed game. The specimens were labeled now: a line of small plump birds, a mother followed by three tiny stuffed chicks, bore a s.h.i.+ny plaque beneath that read COMMON QUAIL, OLD WORLD. She leaned in close to it and wondered if the chicks were real. How could you shoot something so small and put it together again?

Past the bird rooms she came into a large study, ceiling-high bookshelves all around but no ladder in sight. It had the other hallmarks of an old-fas.h.i.+oned library-wainscoting, reading lights with beaded strings to pull, end tables that gleamed with a cherry warmth beneath their patina of dust. An antique brown globe on a stand, crossed sabers over the mantelpiece. She was displeased to see she was back among animals with sharp teeth and claws. Bears protruded from the walls between shelves, fangs bared, black and brown bears of varying sizes. One stood upright and ferocious in the corner, beside a coat stand. Its head was huge and marked on the plaque were the words KODIAK, ALASKA.

She knew it was irrational but still she felt nervous, alone in the house with the predators. Their gla.s.s eyes followed her.

But that would be easy enough to set right, she thought, looking for the nearest door-she would escape the eyes by stepping outside, get out of the dark wood and fustiness and old fur and take a free, full breath. She would have the stuffed animals cleared out as soon as she could, hire some movers to get rid of them. Not wis.h.i.+ng to insult her uncle's memory, though, she couldn't throw them in the garbage, she'd have to donate them somewhere-a third-string natural history museum, maybe, or a moth-eaten roadside attraction. She would redecorate the place from top to bottom. It would be an ambitious project, a difficult task-a task so large in scope that it could occupy her for as long as she wished it to.

Finally she found a door that led outside through a small utility room, in which she blundered around until she found the lightbulb cord. Daylight shone at the end but there were obstacles crowding in: she made her way around the handles of vacuum cleaners and mops in buckets, toolboxes and stands for sewing machines, piles of yellow ripple-edged phone books on metal shelves, a roll of chicken wire that snagged on her skirt. At last she stood in a shaft of natural light from a frosted window. Beneath it was a rusty bolt, which she struggled with till it slid open, her fingertips sore. When she stepped outside there were cobwebs on her face. A dot-sized red spider skittered up her arm. She brushed it off and blew the strands from her eyes.

The backyard was nothing like the front. It was overgrown in places, drying in others but still gorgeous, a sumptuous dereliction. There were ponds, filmed over and stagnant, shrubs with flowers, shrubs browning at the base. There were mounds of reedy gra.s.s, birdhouses, delicate hummingbird feeders of blown gla.s.s. There were trees of all kinds, tall conifers towering, and paths wended back into the undergrowth, half covered by leaves and pine needles. She felt she could barely walk without ruining her shoes but went out anyway, pushed along over the muddy litter on the paths till she was coolly shaded.

One of the ponds, outlined in smooth, rounded river rocks, was partly covered in lily pads and a sc.u.m of green algae so light it was almost luminescent. She thought she saw something move beneath the dark surface and stopped, holding her breath. A slow bubble burst on the water.

There was a fragrance in the garden, not just the smell of decay but also the pines, or spruce, or whatever they were, in the sun, and flowers-jasmine possibly, she thought, sweet and rich. At her elbow were the leaves of a huge rhododendron. She found a fruitless avocado tree, which she recognized because she'd had one in her backyard as a child. There was an orange tree, a lemon. She wondered how far back the garden went, kept walking even when the paths seemed to trail off through the bushy undergrowth. It look several minutes to reach the very back: a wall taller than she was, a pebbled wall. At the wall she turned back and gazed at where she'd come from. Her path wound through trees, between bushes, beneath limbs. The house was only visible in pieces through the complexities of green, its creamy white ramparts. But it stretched far to the right and the left; it did not seem to end.

True, it was not the ocean. She had planned for the ocean, when she considered a new home. The ocean was what she had foreseen. She had always been drawn to the sea, to the symbol of it more than what you could see-she thought of the untold depths, the deep blue mystery. But then, from the beach itself, the ocean could be flat and unknowable. The beach itself was mundane, compared to this-the beaches of L.A., at least, with the throwback hippies of Venice, the crowds of sweating tourists, bimbos rollerblading in headphones and bikinis.

Here it was lush, there was a hidden splendor. To the ones that had it, anyway: minutes ago she had been on the other side of the line, now she was here. A minute ago she might have hated who she was now. This sumptuous luxury.

The real selfishness, she thought, the only real selfishness was wealth like this. The commandeering of places, their fencing in, the building of palaces there-arches, gardens. No other selfishness mattered. All other selfishness was petty, as tiny as blown dust.

Her heart was beating fast, her cheeks were hot though she s.h.i.+vered when a breeze pa.s.sed through the branches. She disbelieved it, then she couldn't help herself. She was filled with elation.

3.

Susan invited Casey to the big house and Casey nodded and mumbled a.s.sent but didn't show up. Her grief seemed to be s.h.i.+fting to melancholy-lighter and less oppressive, though still she was p.r.o.ne to sudden retreat: she would be talking or doing routine tasks and then fall silent. Many days she continued much as before, at least on the surface.

Often when Susan got to her apartment T. was there, cleaning or fixing things or putting away groceries. He carried Hal's boxes in, arranged them neatly in a closet; he ferried Casey back and forth to his mother's place. Apparently Casey was curiously fond of Mrs. Stern, who remembered almost nothing from one day to the next. Susan felt a pang that her daughter chose to spend so much time with another mother, as though the two of them were in compet.i.tion for her affections-she and a woman with no memory, a faded blond dowager from Connecticut who showed every sign of presenile dementia. Who, by the way, was blissfully competing with no one, while Susan had to work to pin down her daughter for dinner despite the fact that they were both bereft. Still it was good for Casey to spend her time with someone worse off than herself, Susan thought-she had to be grateful for any straws Casey could cling to. She tried to suppress her jealousy.

Before the closing with the buyers she and Casey and T. drove over to the old house. Opening the familiar front door, she thought how shabby this place was compared to the big house in Pasadena, this place where they'd spent all those years-a humble bungalow with no pretensions. With the furnis.h.i.+ngs gone it was a stack of boxes with hardwood floors and creamy walls, the wood pocked and scarred but still giving a tawny glow. T. pushed Casey's chair through the empty rooms as she looked around, Susan lagging behind.

Without their belongings it could be any house, any house where once a family had lived. Was there even a trace of them here? Only the appliances. Their appliances had been left behind. But it was hard to get teary about an appliance. Although she did remember shopping for them-the was.h.i.+ng machine and dryer at Sears, the dishwasher later, when they had more money. For most of her life she'd washed dishes by hand. They'd bought the dishwasher in the evening of a day in which, bored and listless, she'd met a man named Najeem in a motel room that had indoor-outdoor carpeting (she remembered it still, a muddy brown flecked with yellow) and he turned out to be gay. She and Hal had been slaphappy that day, both of them, hysterical with laughter for their own unknown reasons. She would never be sure whether Hal had caught her hysteria or had his own wellspring. It could be ambient; hysteria caught like a yawn, that was clear, hysterics and yawns had their contagion in common.

Outside the mall, in the parking lot, they had run hard, chasing each other, and laughed even harder when she fell, surprising themselves. To this day she had a line of black dirt embedded in the skin of one knee.

This was where they'd been living earlier too, when the accident happened. Susan had got the call here, standing in the kitchen, and this was the s.p.a.ce they'd adapted to accommodate the wheelchair, before Casey told them she wanted to move out. It had worn wooden ramps on the ground floor, to the elevated section that held Casey's bedroom.

Susan left her daughter and T. staring out the bare window at the next-door backyard, where a kid was creaking slowly back and forth on a yellow swing set. She made her way upstairs and stood silently in the empty master bedroom.

She and Hal had slept here together for years. Once, only once, had she let someone else in. Fantasy Baseball. The memory made her wince.

She stood still, wondering how sharply she would feel the rising tide of shame. She had never expected Hal to die young. She had a.s.sumed they would be old together, absentminded, dreamy and tottering. She had hardly ever thought of it, but when she did she saw them-a bit sadly, a bit nostalgic beforehand for the youth they had lost-nodding while quiet music played from dimly lit alcoves, drinking strong c.o.c.ktails every night or watching the sunset, say, from the verandah of a restaurant-the games of children long forgotten by then. The selfishness of their youth left behind with their looks. That was how it would be, she used to think, when one of them finally left.