Magnificence A Novel

2


The complex was manicured and bland, a sprawling suburb for the dead. Susan had taken a backseat and let Casey and T. handle the arrangements, so this was her first visit: for the coffin, the funeral service, the burial, all of it, Hal couldn’t have cared less and she followed his lead.

Once she’d asked him to make a will—she’d read a magazine article in a dentist’s waiting room that ridiculed people for dying intestate—and he had said absentmindedly that he would, but then he never bothered. She’d asked once if he had a preference for his body, in terms of being dead. She asked that mainly because she panicked one night about claustrophobia and beetles and wanted to tell him her own preference (cremation). But he had shrugged and said only yes, his preference would be not to be dead. On the subject of disposal he had no strong opinion; overall he was an agnostic, with a secular, institutional orientation and a general lack of interest in matters of the spirit. So-called matters of the spirit, he would have said, so-called spiritual matters.

T. had already seen his body, long before it was embalmed. He had seen it in Belize City when it lay on the ground, seen it there in the street, seen it right where he fell. When Hal failed to meet him he’d flagged down a rattletrap taxi and told the driver the name of Hal’s hotel. He had described this part to both of them, under duress, after Casey badgered him.

From the half-open window of the taxi, breathing the fumes as it sat idling in stopped traffic, he had noticed rubbernecking crowds gathered curbside. Without a clear motivation he had paid the driver and got out. The crowds had nothing to do with him, for all he knew, but still he found himself walking across the street and peering over the heads of bystanders. People were shorter there, he added.

And then he’d seen Hal on the ground, dying—already dead or maybe still dying, he never found out which. He pushed his way through and fell down on his knees beside him, soaked the kneecaps of his pants in the warm pool of blood, but Hal’s eyes were closed and he lay unmoving. T. felt no pulse, felt no breath. Finally the ambulance came.

When given the opportunity to see the body herself, Casey had shaken her head and said no, she preferred not to remember her father that way. Susan thought she was right, Susan was glad. But herself she had to see him, so she was going alone. They had insisted on laying him out formally in a private room. A young man in a gray suit escorted her to the door of the room and then left.

She went in with a feeling of duty, trying to carry herself well. The walls were a placid beige and there were flower arrangements on a sideboard and the cloying smell of a deodorizer: a bouquet called orange blossom, she suspected, or tangerine breeze or mango blush. Its chemical sweetness conjured industrial parks along the Jersey Turnpike where scents were manufactured for cosmetics, malls, fast food. And here was the coffin, its lid propped up to show a white satiny liner. She approached with her breath held—half-frightened, she realized, her hands shaking. She thought of crime shows on TV, procedurals with all manner of corpses. They used real actors first, then dummies for the grisly autopsy scenes—she recalled a bright crimson, the flaps of chests spread out like butterfly wings. Her parents had died and she had never seen them; Hal’s mother and father had died too, years since, and she had not seen their bodies either.

There he was.

She had expected waxy and limp—that was her expectation—but he was not. Like T. he was tanned, and his graying hair had lightened to blond at the temples. What shocked her was how good he looked—better than the last time she’d seen him alive. He almost looked young again. And it wasn’t makeup but the effect of real sun. With the contrast of light hair against the bronze skin he looked, in fact, healthy.

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 shirt. 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 space, 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, diminishing 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 naïve, 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 shifting of microscopic parts through time. The parts shifted 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, grasses 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. Damn 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, shining 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 shirt up from under the pant waist.

The shirt 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 bump 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 masses 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 shirt 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 snob 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 passing crowds from a station at Casey’s elbow. T. was drinking whiskey, a lock of his hair fallen over his forehead, his shirt unbuttoned. 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 Titans, man.”

“Hal Lindley, last of the Titans,” 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 sex,” 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-butt 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 embarrassed.

“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.”

“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 spaces 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 shifted 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 eggshell blue. She made forays to housewares stores and returned with items that spoke to her of freshness—blue and white linens, cushions, a screen, a wall hanging, a cloudy glass vase full of p-ssy 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-sex 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 glass 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 cliché, 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 glass 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 button 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 shirtsleeve as it bent down and stuck a rusty wire hoop into the grass. That was all she recalled.

She drove to the lawyer’s office in Century City, a tall shining 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 décor 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 title, 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 documents 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, flustered. “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 passenger 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 passed, 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 windshield. Soaring limbs, velvet green leaves—even the bark looked soft. There were white flowers, opened up at the throat like trumpets, and then she passed a row of tall gates that reminded her of Bel Air. Hedges enclosed mansions.

“No f*cking way,” she said, leaning forward and clutching the steering wheel. Hal should have been here. He had always been middle-class 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 disassociated.

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 bumping and shaking over the cobbles, she could peer around at her leisure: a wide lawn with long, leaf-littered grass. 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 mothballs. She slid her hand along the wall, feeling for a light switch. Instead it hit something strange—both smooth and furry, bulbous. She snatched 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 glass 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 spacious, 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 passed 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, shag 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 brass 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 glass 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 shiver, 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 glassy plastic, glorified Easter-basket stuffing. Ducks, geese, pheasants. She barely noticed the furnishings, 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 shiny 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-fashioned 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 glass 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 wishing 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 grass, birdhouses, delicate hummingbird feeders of blown glass. 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 scum 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 shivered when a breeze passed through the branches. She disbelieved it, then she couldn’t help herself. She was filled with elation.