Magnificence A Novel

Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet


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The author thanks Maria Massie, Tom Mayer, Jess Purcell, Ryan Harrington, Denise Scarfi, Amy Robbins, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Tara Powers, Louise Mattarelliano, Steve Colca, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Dan Christiaens, and David Goldberg for all that they have done.





1


It was a stricken love, but still love. It was the kind of love that gazed up at you from the bare white flood of your headlights—a wide-eyed love with the meekness of grass-eaters. Soft fur, pink tongue, and if you got too close a whiff of mulch on the breath. This was the love she cherished for her husband.

The love had other moments. Of course it did. But its everyday form was vegetarian.

She suspected it was the love of most wives for their husbands, after some time had passed. Not for the newlyweds—that was the nature of the condition—but for the seasoned, the ones who had seniority. When she thought of conjugal love she saw a field of husbands stretched out in front of her—a broad, wide field. Possibly a rice paddy. They were bent over, hoeing. Did you hoe rice? Well, whatever. The way she saw them, the husbands had a Chinese thing going on. They toiled like billions of peasants.

Technically, historically, and at this very moment in most of the world it was the wives who toiled. The wives toiled for their livelihoods, for the husbands and the little children. Sure; those were the facts. It was the wives, historically and factually—in that limited historical, factual sense—that were the beasts of burden. Even in the richer places, it was the women who shortened their life expectancy by marrying, whereas the husbands lived longer than their freewheeling bachelor counterparts.

Still, there was something about the essence of husbands that made them seem like sturdy toilers. Husband, housebound. It might be the wives who were bound to the houses, materially speaking, but the husbands were bound to them. This was because of the narrow focus of most men, how they tended to have few intimates, in emotional terms. They left the social bonding to the wives, so they were bound to them.

And she was ready to tell him all the details, if that was what he wanted. She was prepared to come clean. But a toiler could so easily be hurt. A toiler was chronically exhausted from his long days of labor. What labor, you might ask? The labor of being a man, of course. It was hard to be a man. The men were all insane, basically, due to testosterone. You could see it in them, roiling under the surface. The few exceptions proved the rule, and the smart men were big enough to admit it. For instance, steroids made you more of a man, chemically, and also—not a coincidence—made you insane. She’d read that autism was thought by scientists to be an exaggerated form of maleness. So there was that. The latent madness and retardation of men was compounded by the fact that most of them didn’t get to kill their own prey anymore, stalk living things and slay them in a savage bloodletting.

The men, even when they didn’t know it, were frustrated by this. They were unfit to live in civilized society.

Of course, women were also subject to hormonal madness—famously so. The estrogen or whatever, so-called premenstrual syndrome: the chemicals that, in excess, made them into caricatures of women. Hysteria, for instance, as Freud had called it. Neurosis. That time of the month. Of course Freud had been largely discredited. He had been a philosopher more than a scientist and Americans did not trust philosophers. Far from it. Also he did cocaine.

Still: no question, the fairer sex was more changeable than the unfair one. In practice this meant that the women’s madness sometimes receded. But with the men it was constant. When it came to insanity, women were indecisive while men never let up. Oddly the chronic insanity of men was often referred to as stability; the men, being permanent sociopaths, got credit for consistency. Whereas the women, being mere part-time neurotics, were typecast as flighty. Essentially, the female bouts of sanity were used as weapons against them. Sociopaths v. neurotics. It was a nontrivial distinction since many men took the thing a bit too far, frankly, becoming serial killers, wife beaters, dirty cops, or boy soldiers in roving gangs; war criminals, tyrants, and demagogues.

Not so much the women.

In one sense, though, she didn’t blame the men. That would be blaming the victim. They were hobbled by their repressed rage and Asperger syndrome, variations on which were lavishly spread throughout the male population, but so what? Far from blaming them she had always loved them, loved them for their sad flaws. The men were tragic heroes. To be a tragic hero, all that was needed was manhood.

She loved them. Yes she did.

Casey was driving her to the airport, down La Cienega at rush hour. There was a comfortable silence between them. Susan gazed out the window at traffic. The traffic was full of men, most of whom were tragic. The tragic men sat in their cars, driving. Some played with radio dials, others picked their noses while staring glassily at nothing. In many cases, completely unaware of their tragic identity. Women were also driving, of course—her own daughter, for one; Casey enjoyed driving and drove with speed and a certain measure of abandon—and yet these women, including Casey who was in a wheelchair, were less tragic per se than the men. The women might be unfortunate—take Casey, for instance—but few of them were Ophelia. No, when it came to tragedy the men had slyly cornered the market.

Driving gave Casey a feeling of mastery she didn’t have in the chair, since she was higher up when she drove. In the driver’s seat she was on the same plane with everyone else: the playing field was level. She was excited now, drumming her fingers on the wheel. Susan felt exhilarated herself. Her husband and her employer, both returning from the tropics. It was a homecoming, a heroes’ welcome. Though come to think of it, the hero role, like tragedy, was unfairly, readily available to men. When she herself stepped off an airplane, no one would ever shriek in joy, jump up and down and hurl themselves into her arms.

Neither she nor Casey usually smoked but impulsively they had bummed Marlboro Reds off a burly biker at a bar, a guy covered in colorful tattoos with eagles feathering his biceps. The only reason they hadn’t progressed to hard liquor, in a further festive gesture, was that the hour wasn’t advanced. If Susan drank before sunset she tended to nod off. Her middle age began to show.

They would wait, Casey had said, and have their drinks with Hal and T. They would meet the two men at the airport and take them out to celebrate.

“Maybe move into the right lane?” she asked Casey.

“Oh yeah? Huh. Who’s driving?”

“You are.”

“Exactly.”

“It’d be smoother sailing, though. Look!”

“Mother?”

“OK, OK.”

“Relax. It’s not so bad. We could be on the 405.”

Anyway: she would tell him whatever he wanted to know, he had the right to such knowledge, but all in all it would be far better for him if he never asked.

Of course she would never describe the exact dimensions of her affection to him. Those microscopic inclinations were a best-kept secret—out of protectiveness for the other, more than anything—a secret she kept to herself, as everyone guarded their shameful, shrugged-in shadings of instinct. No one told the smallest increments of their feelings to their dearly beloveds. No one revealed the minute singularities—the slack of an ass, say, how it could cause disgust. The response was involuntary.

There might be those, on second thought, who did reveal such things in times of anger, but mostly those people were not women. She would keep the hurting elements to herself, those subtle insults to a man’s self-worth. In certain moments, for instance, his sex could seem a forlorn, pugnacious servant, a servant that bowed its head and had a humble, comic quality. Anyway you could pity something, pity it as a brute and still want to use it: a brute part of a half-child, half-ape. Their handle, their use, their eagerness a panting hound. The metaphor was mixed, she knew that. Her love for husbands was like a love of deer, but then the men themselves were other animals, half-apes, and finally their sexes were doglike. Quite the menagerie, all told.

She condescended to the sexes of men, but it wasn’t personal. Clearly they also condescended to hers. They had their own opinions about the sex of a woman, and those opinions were not all positive. That much was obvious—from, say, pornography, which almost every man loved, from the purest young boy to the jaded defiler. In other words small secrets were also held against her, and she did not need to know them.

Pornography, she thought. Degradation and debasement. A man liked to degrade a woman, in pornography. It made perfect sense. If she were male, she’d like it too. Because a man might not know he was tragic, but he often suspected it. On a subconscious level, a man suspected himself of pathos. A man walked around bearing that half-aware, weary load; it was more stressful to suspect than to know for certain. Women were oppressed from the outside, via the patriarchy—girls raped in various African cultures, for instance, then put to death for their trouble. But men were oppressed from inside their own skin. She saw it this way: the testosterone was a constant barrage, not unlike an artillery shelling. They had doubtless needed it, in, say, prehistory, to run around spearing meat, build up muscles that impressed the breeding-age females, etc., much as baboons made their loud wahoo calls or sported shocking pink anuses.

But now that the men were deprived of the endorphins of the chase and the butchering, the hormones were a call with no response, a ceaseless, useless siege upon the male psyche. Naturally the men, held hostage in bunkers of flesh, sought refuge in pornography and violence. It was just self-expression.

At the airport she would see T., who had disappeared in the jungle and then, a miracle, been found again. She had thought he was gone and then he rose up like Lazarus—her employer, a real estate developer who fetishized his Mercedes and wore no suits retailing at less than 5K, had been discovered a few weeks ago living on a tropical island with poor hygiene, ribs showing, and a hut made of twigs. Despite these choices her husband, who had found him, somehow claimed he was in robust mental health.

Admittedly it had been generous of Hal to fly down to Central America to search for T., a man he barely knew. Admittedly she was grateful. Even if the trip had been an excuse to get away from her, even if it was his answer to an unpleasant discovery, namely her having sex with a coworker on the floor of her office. (She was still mystified as to exactly how he’d been a witness to that encounter: the front door to the office had been locked, the blinds, she was almost sure, closed tight?) Anyway a hard conversation was pending between them re: infidelity.

And his evaluation of the situation with T. could not be taken at face value. He had no history with the man. According to Hal her employer had reevaluated his life while he was wandering, starved and exhausted, in the rainforest, and this no doubt careful and rational appraisal had resulted in a decision to reside, for a time, as a hermit on a remote island with no indoor plumbing. Which Hal had tried to justify, over the phone, as a moment of growth, a sort of premature midlife crisis that headed in the monklike/whole grains/meditation direction instead of the more popular red sportscar/divorce/trophy wife. He harked back to his sixties roots: in his view T. had been seeking enlightenment.

But T. had lost a girlfriend recently, lost her to sudden death. And Hal was not perceptive, when it came to human interactions. Susan’s husband was not what, in job interviews, you called a people person. Herself she thought T.’s condition resembled a schizoaffective disorder. She was no shrink, but she’d done some reading in the DSM-IV. She liked the Case Studies.

Casey’s excitement was simple. T. was her friend and to her all that mattered was that he was rescued. If he was unfit for business that meant nothing to her. And it should mean nothing to Susan either; she should be thinking first of his long-term welfare. After all she and T. were also friends, beyond the work arrangement, and no matter what there was no risk for her: he would cover her salary.

But stress had worn her down, making financial decisions without him. She had never intended to sign up for a job that required actual thought. She’d become a secretary, after decades of thankless teaching in the L.A. Unified School District, in a half-relaxed and half-perverse gesture—purely for the anonymity it offered and the straightness. She had put her energy into other pursuits until recently, with a sleek and methodical urgency. T.’s disappearance had obstructed that. She needed relief. She needed him to come in and issue directions. “Do this. Do that.” She longed to be absolved of agency. For all she knew she’d made bad decisions already, decisions that were draining his coffers.

But if he was insane he could not effect her rescue. He would lack the power to reassure.

“So hey, when Daddy settles in? He’s probably going to want to talk to you about something,” said Casey.

Susan hadn’t talked to Hal for two nights now. It was T. who had called and left their flight number on her machine—sounding even farther away than he was, over their staticky connection, farther away than the tropics. Likely exhausted by his mania.

T., who had always seemed the most solid of young men. It went to show you. The madness lurked in all of them. Smack a man down in nature and he returned to his Cro-Magnon roots.

Casey was looking at her sidelong, waiting.

“What something?”

Could she know what Hal knew, could Hal have told her? He wouldn’t. He would not.

“My job.”

Relief.

“The telemarketing thing?”

“Yeah. The deal is, it’s phone sex.”

Susan’s head jerked to the left. Her neck hurt, it was so sudden. Past Casey’s profile the side of a moving truck read STARVING STUDENTS.

“Case, please. You almost gave me whiplash. Can people get, like, sideways whiplash?”

“I’m serious, it’s a 900 number.”

The set of her lips was the confirmation: the lips and the chin, its slight lift. Even as a toddler she had lifted her chin like that when she was being stubborn.

“You actually mean it.”

“Sleazy, yeah. That’s what I like about it. I wanted to give you a heads-up, is all.”

“Tell me you just connect the calls, or something.”

“Come on. That wouldn’t be any fun.”

She found her eyes were watering annoyingly—couldn’t she even take a joke? Damn it. Big deal. Laugh it off.

She turned away and looked out her window.

“And your father already knows this?” she asked, her gaze still steadily averted. Another truck; they were boxed in. This one was yellow and read PURITAN.

She looked to her left again, then back to the right: STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. And here they were, between the two. It was a clear rebuke. A rebuke from the world, which knew them both and knew everything. Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed—significance, but not purpose. The great collective knowingness of the world was a library of the hidden, a vast repository. But it was not meaning. It was the sum of an infinitude of parts, was all. There was the paint on the sides of trucks, the trucks themselves, which commerce and roads had brought beside her like this . . . in Casey’s car, the car between the trucks, they were neither starving students nor puritans. They were sluts.

She was a bad mother and a slut; her daughter was a bad daughter and a slut. Two sluts.

The traffic started to move again.

Of course, personally she wanted to be a slut. She rejoiced in it. It was the sole creative gesture of her life.

“Shit,” said Casey, and swerved around a pothole.

It was the private room in her house, it was Bluebeard’s locked closet—the only space, since the accident, where she was not only a dutiful mother or wife. Say what you liked about husbands: mother, now there was a role that typecast you for the rest of your days . . . being a slut was a survival tactic. No more, no less—that sly, indulgent freedom, that liberty in its rotten deceit, the sweetness in the rot. It had saved her from despair more than once.

When she was young she’d been pedantic on the subject: monogamy was authoritarian, a form of property law. On occasion she’d even tried to convince Hal, who had a more conventional mindset. There had been long earnest nights of conversation, now blurred in retrospect—one ego struggling to free itself from the encumbrance of another. Since then she’d dropped all that as a series of rationalizations. Arguments could be made, but at its base sleeping with many men who were not her husband was a pure satisfaction, an expression of greed and vanity, a glorification of herself. She could freely admit it; she did. In those spans of time, sleeping with other men, she emerged from obscurity into the light. She was the subject of the biopic: the camera followed her face, thus slowing time, and a score accompanied her movements. She liked to see herself with others; she wanted to be known.

And Casey, in the wheelchair, how could she make that gesture? It was the wrong kind of freedom for Casey, it was a category error. Yet here was Casey, willful as always, stubbornly ignoring the fact that her gesture was compromised. Yes, yes, this was the manner of her revolt—it was parallel—Susan saw that now. The two of them were the same in this, though Casey had no idea.

But Casey could not walk. She could not walk and had no legs that moved.

Poor darling, poor sweetie.

Possibly this 1-900 thing was a way of keeping her leglessness private. Callers would never know that she was in a chair, so Casey could be pure voice—could gratify them in the warm and electronic darkness, the dark that bristled with mystery. Their private and dirty handmaiden.

Casey was always, always breaking her mother’s heart—Susan had learned to withstand the familiar, crushing pressure. She’d been forced to. This was only the newest and latest erosion of her hopes and dreams. Now she was forced to see a stark outline: her daughter as a phone-sex drone. Well, yes. Of course. It was the logical next step. Casey had already done the rest—done the apathy, done the rebellion, done the resentment and the self-loathing. Now, apparently, it was high time for the paraplegic sex work.

Susan could squint and make out the stereotypes of those outlines—archetypes, stereotypes that shone with depressing implications.

Gooseflesh crept up her arms.

“You told your father this?’ she pressed after a minute, shaking her head. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t tell him, actually,” said Casey. “He figured it out. He just knew.”

“He just knew?” It was embarrassing. She hated to get teary in front of her daughter, who would shoot her a familiar filial look that neatly blended compassion with contempt. “But it’s Hal. He never just knows anything.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

Susan shook her head. Her throat was closing.

The car was a cage—how did people not always think so? Cages on the assembly line, metal cages with bars and glass, cages along the roads by the billions with their tailpipes shooting out poisons. After the accident she thought of all cars as her enemies, thought viciously that she hated all of them for what they’d done to Casey, hated them like animate creatures, maggots or weevils or scorpions, and she would kill them all if she could. Not KILL YOUR TELEVISION; kill the cars. But of course, she also had one of her own and drove it all the time.

Cars were the life, here in L.A. Cars were the smallest and most portable of all homes. Even Casey, almost killed by a car, still lived in them without obvious reflection.

She felt for the vinyl shelf along the side of the door, pressing down with her elbow. There was a narrow well, half lined with lint, on the blue armrest, and she looked into it studiously. The lint blurred. What did they make these oddly shaped holes in the armrests for? What was supposed to fit there? Nothing fit. Or if it did, it was unknown, illusive, and not part of life at all.

The holes were useless, and these useless holes were irritants, ever-present, inexplicable, angering.

“He heard something, is all,” said Casey, more kindly. “He overheard me talking to a friend.”

“You wanted to be a professor,” said Susan. “Remember?”

She was still shaking her head, minutely. It was almost involuntary. She wiped the corner of one eye quickly with the heel of her right hand and insisted on staring out the window.

“You wanted to get a Ph.D,” she went on.

“Now, that was just stupid of me,” said Casey.

They were on the road into LAX now. Taxis and cars lined up at the curb to their right.

“You were going to improve your French.”

“I was i-di-o-tic.”

“You were going to go to graduate school.”

“I was eighteen! And now I’m not anymore. And I don’t want to be some boring academic. Even if I could. It’s not the chair, Mother. It’s just me. It’s like, a natural evolution.”

“So you evolved from a Ph.D. candidate into a phone-sex worker?”

“I evolved from a teenager to a grownup.”

“But you’re more,” said Susan.

“Jesus. It’s not the end of the world, OK?” said Casey. “Chill out. Take a deep breath. It’s just a job.”

She spun the wheel into the parking structure.

•

At the baggage claim carousel they waited awkwardly. Susan watched her daughter’s face, the lashes shading the cheekbones. She had not always been so slight and wan. Before the chair she had often been tanned, cheeks flushed, hair lightened by the sun. She had a boyfriend who surfed and then one who was a skateboarder; on weekends they disappeared down the beach in sneakers and ratty, faded shorts and came home with peeling noses and salt tangling their hair.

Now she was always pale. But she was still beautiful. In her mind’s eye Susan saw baby pictures.

God damn it. Stay presentable.

“You actually choose to do this?” she started, over the background murmur punctuated by loudspeaker announcements. “Because if it’s money—”

“I choose,” said Casey firmly.

Susan stared past her at a poster of a hotel: a white high-rise with looming palms in the foreground. She stared at the high-rise. She stared at the palms.

Casey caught sight of him first, coming toward them in ragged pants and shirtsleeves. He was thin and too darkly tanned, like a Florida retiree, but lacking the beard Hal had described. A recent shave had left the sides of his face paler than the rest, the lower cheeks and the chin.

But what alarmed her was his expression—heavy, anxious. He bent over Casey first, knelt down at the chair and took her face in his hands. Susan saw how she looked at him, noticed it fleetingly, but then already—in the shock of this—the recognition faded as he stood up straight again, still holding Casey’s wrist.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you this over the phone. I have very bad news,” he said.




In an instant the whole of existence could go from familiar to alien; all it took was one event in your personal life. You might think you were only a mass of particles in the rest of everything, a mass exchanging itself, bit by bit, with other masses, but then you were blindsided and all you knew was the numbness of separation.

Casey clung to T.’s hand and Susan stood beside her with her own hand on Casey’s other shoulder. She was pinching the shoulder, she realized slowly, quite hard though she did not intend to—out of anxiety, out of tension, pressing the hard ridge of the collarbone between her thumb and forefinger. She made herself relax her hold and the sensation melted into others, unnamed and nonspecific, hazy and suffocating as they stood there in a kind of dumbness. She felt buzzing around her from some unknown source. Was it electric? Was it imagined?

Casey did not seem to have felt the pinch. Her eyes were forward, fixed on the dark wood.

“Sorry if it’s not—there weren’t that many choices,” said T.

The scene was theatrical, three people presiding stiffly at a glass airport wall as coffins were lowered from the belly of the plane and rolled across the tarmac. More than one coffin, she thought, looked like an army of them.

“There are bodies on most commercial flights,” said T.

Often, when you flew, bodies flying beneath you, yet the proposition that on this flight one of them had been Hal’s—that Hal’s body had come in on this flight with T.—was absurd. The plane might have begun its descent just as Susan was leaning along the counter with her cleavage showing to ask the tattooed man for a couple of Marlboros—trying to picture, as she always did, whether he would be a strainer and heaver or a graceful thick beast. Whether his tongue would be stubby and awkward or pointed and cunning. Certainly, as a smoker, he would taste bad.

Hal’s body slim and tall, compared to the big man’s. And now also dead, compared to the big man’s.

It was almost her own body. Or it was hers without being her own, hers in the way that a home was, those spaces where you spent your time—as much hers as another body could be. By that token she too was almost dead. Wasn’t she? She had been with him forever, through all of it. Since the goddamn sixties. Three decades. He was hers and there were only two years between them; he had been fifty and she was forty-eight. She liked the smell and feel of his skin, she had always liked those things in him: his strangely delicate smell and the way he felt when she touched him. It was the skin that bound you most, the contact of two skins.

At that moment, because Casey had asked him, T. revealed quietly—trying to hedge at first but then, since there was clearly no way to dull the blow, said it outright—He was killed, killed with a knife in a mugging.

“Stabbed,” said Casey, inflectionless. “You’re saying my father was stabbed.”

When she forced him to it he went on, persevered with the dutiful exposure of facts: Hal had lain alone in a gutter and bled till he died. He had died where he fell. A crowded city and no one found him in time.

Susan asked when and then computed the hours: it had happened only half an hour after the last time they talked. Stabbed to death for a wallet that might have held nothing but forty dollars total, the rest in traveler’s checks. The cops had found it close by, in the trash.

Hal, hers. Thoughtful, sad, getting old. But not now. He would never be an old man.

The thought of him as he walked down the street, and then the sudden impact of the knife—maybe they threw him against the wall, maybe they knocked him down before they did it . . . she almost cringed as she stood there, thinking of pain, but then again it was nothing like real pain or shock, she recognized, nothing like them at all. The mere idea of a cringe, the projection of it—an anticipation of impact. She tried to feel it and not feel it at once. Pain and suffering, they said, were not the same, but stabbed in the stomach—it happened in war movies: gut-shot, the soldiers shivered and said plaintively, “I can’t feel my legs, man.” She’d seen it more than once. The same scene must occur in dozens of movies. She strained toward an intuition of bleeding, of an opened-up stomach, but failed miserably because the insides of her arms were against her own ribs, feeling her own stomach: regular stomach, enclosed and protected. Regular arms, smooth and unbloody. She moved her hands across the skin.

Dictators, killers, they had no capacity for empathy or no interest in it . . . but she, most people—you tried and you failed. Your efforts were inadequate. Pain was beyond simulation. Like sickness, it divided the population into haves and have-nots of pain. At the same time she wanted to be close to him and needed to be far away. Yet only one wish was granted.

He was utterly distant: here she was, and there was he. Gone.

The coffins disappeared beneath them, into the terminal basement, but neither she nor Casey moved. Down on the paved surface the blocky carts went on beelining in between planes—baggage carts and catering trucks pulled up for loading and unloading. Between all this bustling activity and the group of them—her, Casey, and T.—was only the filmy and gray-streaked glass. Between them were the membranes. She stood staring forward and not looking at all.

Once Hal had been beautiful. It was the fading that made him a subject of sorrow, how you could barely see the vestiges of his old beauty. He had never been vain, and because of his lack of vanity he failed to notice what he was losing. In that way a virtue became a liability—he was blind to his own looks vanishing. Only five minutes before she had said something cruel about him—what was it? already forgotten—and Casey had called her a bitch. Richly deserved, no doubt. Casey defended Hal, always. For Hal alone she had a tender love, and in rejecting pity on her own behalf she also rejected it for him. To her his fade was charming.

The moment was worse for Casey than for her, even. She knelt, holding the arm of the chair. She almost never did that, had learned to steady herself on other things when she knelt—to squat without touching the ground, without needing to. One of the first things she’d learned. Not to infringe.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Casey’s eyes were red but her cheeks were dry, unlike Susan’s. She was in shock, Susan thought.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Casey.

“They’re taking him to Forest Lawn,” said T. “I’m sorry. It was the only one I could think of. At the time.”

“Anywhere,” said Casey, shaking her head.

Susan said nothing, following behind them. T. looked down at Casey often as they made their way to the elevators, put his hand on her shoulder more than once. Susan felt she was floating or being pulled: she barely saw anything but the carpet and the chair, the back of T.’s shirt and his pant legs. They had left Hal behind them; Hal was by himself. Lacking his faculties of perception, he could not know this, of course. He could not know he was alone. The saddest thing: he could not know he was alone.

Or was it not sad? Not sad at all?

He did not know where he was. He had become an object. She thought of him among the luggage—was it dark or fluorescent down where he lay? The rest of space lay against him.

A short time past she had only been thinking of T., but now T., standing beside Casey in the elevator, might as well be invisible. He was commonplace, by contrast with the killed. Stabbed and robbed, robbed and stabbed. Her husband had been killed.

She blinked rapidly, stood looking down in a daze at Casey as they moved into the elevator, passengers shuffling with their suitcases between their feet, crowding in. Casey hated it when elevators were full, her face forced into people’s asses and groins—usually said something loudly so that they’d give her a wide berth. But at the moment she was saying nothing. Her eyes were on the floor in front of her, her shoulders bent. Susan stood over her in a shroud of self-absorption: she was a pillar of salt, Lot’s wife.

She would be, from now on, that woman with the robbed and stabbed husband—from now until she died herself, till she herself was personally dead.

The woman with the stabbed husband: a kind, faded, betrayed man, if they knew him as she did. The one who bled to death in a gutter, bled out by himself, with no one there who loved him or even knew who he was—only a body to them. A body in a slum, a gutter, another country. Her epitaph, since it was her actions that had driven him there, wasn’t it? Without that particular adultery, that passing and mundane instance, he would never have flown out in the first place: without it he would still be here. He would be driving to work, he would be coming home as he always did, regular as clockwork, in the late afternoon.

She felt sickened—glancing through her was a nauseating unease, a dreadful suspicion. She tried not to feel it, talked to herself instead to cover the noise of her own thoughts, a stream of silent chatter doggedly opposed to both the sickness and the suspicion. It was fully trivial next to death, but her own identity had also been spirited away when the thief took the wallet, which had, it turned out, almost nothing in it. A mistake in judgment, an instantaneous mistake. If only someone had told the thief there were only traveler’s checks in that wallet, if someone had taken him aside . . . her own identity, a side effect, was sunk and submerged in this new description, the stabbed-husband woman. As Hal lost his life she lost her own, as Hal was a murder victim she was an extension of him. That slut, that slut with the husband who got stabbed to death.

It made her feel better to think selfishly. She should think steadily of herself, not of Hal. Then she would not feel sickened, there would be less of an ache because she herself was a safe and mundane subject. There was no pain in thinking of herself. Though—maybe it was her, maybe she had done it, made a victim of him in the same way, in a slasher movie, the woman of low morals was doomed from the start, the buxom blonde in tight clothes good for nothing but ogling and murdering, her future blank save for the pending role as punished dead harlot.

Until this moment, she realized as the doors dinged open, she had been Casey’s mother, but now she was Hal’s killer. That was where her suspicion led.

She wanted to cry but her eyes were dry.

OK. Somehow, maintain composure. Her daughter was here, after all. Not to break down, not to. She would have another cigarette if she could, even a pack of them. Get Robert to buy them for her, call him and basically order them. Make him come to the house and be her servant. Or at least her waiter. A glass of wine. A highball.

She saw that Casey’s eyes were filling as she rolled out of the elevator and she tried to keep close to her daughter, confused, forgetting where to walk, where the car should be parked. Casey’s cheeks were damp and her mouth was clamped tightly closed, likely to keep her chin from trembling. Who could remember where they had left the car? Would they find it again?

But here it was. The car was beside them.




She stayed in Casey’s apartment till after T. had left and all of Casey’s friends were gone, into the small hours. Casey shrank inward, huddled under the blankets on her bed, and Susan sat on a chair beside it. After a while she lay down parallel, her arm around the thin shoulders, propping herself up on an elbow now and then to smooth the hair back from her daughter’s wet face. Under normal conditions Casey had a bravado that passed for strength, but she had crumpled like paper. It was impossible for anyone to console her, and yet at first Susan tried, until she gave up and was willing not to try anymore. She had no choice beyond the effort of endurance—it was all you could do, lie with misery till it waned. She made the gesture, she yielded up her resistance to the forward pull of time, but the gesture had no content.

After Casey fell asleep Susan tucked her in as though her daughter were eight again, the covers up around her small sharp chin, and walked through the quiet rooms with a ringing in her ears. Aimless, she found a place to sit—on the edge of the couch in the living room, still, cupping both hands around the coolness of her beer bottle. She felt herself moving, in the inward hollow, between resentment and desolation. For a while she stared at the chair across from her, at the mantelpiece, a branch in a red vase, a small, enameled wooden box. She closed her eyes. But the eyelids were no help: what could she see from here? A black and burned-out place, an empty lot stretching ahead.

She realized she’d been convinced, in a deep unconscious presumption, that they were safe now—sure they were off the field, confident lightning would not strike again. The steep hills were supposed to be behind them, the rest a slow coast, the rest a relief. A feeling of security had descended once the worst was over, covering them both, her and Hal, once they recovered from the hit. There had been a plateau, a level of shelter. Now the roof was off, the shelter was gone.

Still, when she drove away from Casey’s apartment in T.’s company car, she was wide awake. It was dark out, dark for hours now. She saw young couples staggering and falling on each other on the sidewalk, laughing as they righted themselves. It reminded her of sex and drinking. She picked up the car phone and dialed.

Robert answered, groggy.

“Come to my place,” she said. “OK? And bring me Camel Lights and something strong to drink.”

“But you don’t smoke, Susie.”

“I do at times like this.”

“Like what?”

Susie was not her name. No one had ever called her that; no one had been invited to, though Hal had fondly called her Suze, on occasion. She had been planning to stop seeing Robert since even before Hal found out, kept meaning to—the breakup was like an item on a grocery list, something to cross out, but then she kept forgetting it and pushing it back the way you’d forget to buy something and tell yourself: big deal, no cereal this week. But now she needed someone neutral, someone unimportant. She needed someone who had no ties to Hal, whose feelings were irrelevant. It was insulting to Hal that the very least of her encounters, the most purely trivial of them all, was the one that killed him. Because Robert was a lightweight, a person almost completely devoid of substance. The guy played fantasy baseball, and worse, lacked the discernment to kid about the subject.

Play fantasy baseball: fine. But at least have the wit to make a joke out of it.

His selling points were a taut, muscular stomach and well-built shoulders. Also he was submissive in a way that was almost dutiful, as though he was honoring an obligation—civic or military. There was something twisted in his simplicity.

“Times of mourning,” she said.

•

When she told him, in the entryway of the house, he was mildly surprised. Not floored even. At this lackluster response a part of her was incredulous. And then, as the moment expanded quietly between them, infuriated. Apparently he was too insensitive to be shocked even by sudden death. A human block of wood. On the other hand, he was easy to shock with sex. The news of Hal’s death barely moved him, but when she indicated that they could proceed from that sound bite to having sex he was uncomfortable. She relished his discomfort. She led the dog into the backyard and closed the door behind it.

A dog was not sexy. Also it was T.’s dog, which she and Hal had been taking care of after T. disappeared—practically a proxy for T. and thus also for Hal, for both of them conflated.

Then, in the dining room, she made Robert remove his clothes while she took a cigarette from the pack he’d brought in, lit it and poured herself a drink. He wore a half-wary expression and she knew exactly why: he was disgusted by the smoking, being a tan, buff, fantasy-baseball type. But not disgusted enough by the smoking to say no to the sex. He was neither shocked nor disgusted enough to say no to the cigarette-tainted sex. Rather he said yes. In fact he said yes speedily.

Most men were like that, when it came to sex. Their own desires came first, before whatever scruples, even revulsion they professed. Most women also. That was the definition of a scruple: something you consciously ignored to do whatever you wanted. Hell, what did he care. For him, no one had died.

And for herself, on this specific point—the timing of the sex—she did not feel guilt. She knew she should, likely. She felt anger, but it had no target beyond herself. As far as she went, she had ended Hal already. That black deed was done. Hal was over. Nothing could bring him back, nothing she did—no virgin purity, no nuns. Everything she did now was irrelevant, irrelevant to Hal, and though she would always be unredeemed Hal was not here to see. Hal did not care and Hal would never care again.

She closed her eyes, swaying with the drinking she’d done, and felt, uncalled-for, the edge of things, the brittle, slicing edge—the yellowing edge of old bone . . . she pushed it away by bringing Robert down. They were a warm mass against the woolen throw rug, which she and Hal had bought long ago at Ikea. Blocks of warm red, brown and beige. At the time they had thought the rug was a temporary measure, but then the rug from Ikea had stayed. As it turned out, she thought while Robert went down on her, the cheap rug from Ikea had stayed with them forever.

Robert was not particularly skilled despite the pointers she’d given him over time—had a robotic technique, in fact. In any case her mind wandered. What made her pull him off her after a couple of minutes and ask him to finish was a decision that arrived inappropriately: she had to see Hal’s body. His body was in her mind, suddenly.

She had never seen a body, she didn’t come from an open-casket culture. Her family had been more or less Protestant, uptight anyway and not given to sordid spectacles, and as a result to this day she had never been to a funeral where you saw the deceased. But she needed to see Hal. She needed to touch the seam.

“Sorry, not in the mood,” she said, when Robert asked why she had stopped him.

“No kidding,” he said, and got up, sticky and dangling, to get Kleenex for her stomach. He had slight rug burns on his knees.

Most other men she’d been with wouldn’t have asked, would have realized the effort was futile from the start. A failed comfort. It was where she went, but of course it was a dismal failure. So what.

Lying on her back, she looked up at the chandelier, whose dimmer had been turned down so that the filaments of the bulbs glowed a deep, warm orange. That was, in a sense, the benefit of Robert, whose critical capacity was low. He did not examine past a point, and was therefore unobtrusive. Almost streamlined, in fact. He was not hindered by complexity. Whereas Stellan, for instance, from about four months ago, had been overly given to psychoanalysis. Sex with Stellan, who hailed from some cerebral northern land like Finland or Sweden, was an extended therapy session. Nothing could be more annoying. Still, for a while she had relished her annoyance. Stellan, whose habit it was to sit naked afterward, smoking pot and discussing the quote-unquote relationship, was like a persistent itch—aggravating, but satisfying to scratch.

Was she relieved, slut that she was? Was there something in her that was relieved by any of this? If anyone could admit to such a thing, she should be able to. She was not only a slut but a killer.

But no. She was not relieved: she was robbed and it had left her empty. Hal had been robbed and she was robbed too, robbed of him, and now she was missing something and she always would be. That was all she had now: the freedom of nothing.

Nothing.

She realized she wanted Robert to stay, wanted it with a rare desperation despite the bad-sex episode and the fantasy-baseball element. She would smoke the cigarettes he had brought and drink his booze and talk to him: she would use Robert as a sounding board. That was what she would do, talk, smoke and drink, pretend she had velocity. Robert would be her shield against slowness and the loneliness that came from it, the morbid tranquillity. She would keep him here until morning, until the sun came up and the birds were in the trees and she could take him out to breakfast. Scrambled eggs did not remind you of death. (Did they? Yellow eggs on a blue plate. A warm feeling, farms or home, the morning sun, a nook with folded cotton napkins. Unless you thought instead about the beginning of eggs and then you went from beginning to end—eggs found in an autopsy—eggs themselves in their sensuousness or sterility—once, when she was pregnant with Casey, she had found a red fleck in an egg and thrown up.)

Whatever, she didn’t have to have eggs.

Toast maybe. A waffle. A waffle could not remind you of death.

Could it?

What she didn’t want above all, she knew—watching him as he knelt down beside her with a tissue bunched in his hand to wipe the cleft of her belly button—was to lie there in the half-empty bed waiting to fall asleep. She was afraid of the certainty of those minutes, the cold night shining through the window onto the threads of her white cotton sheets.