Magnificence A Novel

3


Susan invited Casey to the big house and Casey nodded and mumbled assent but didn’t show up. Her grief seemed to be shifting to melancholy—lighter and less oppressive, though still she was prone to sudden retreat: she would be talking or doing routine tasks and then fall silent. Many days she continued much as before, at least on the surface.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While he was alive she’d never felt squalid. Alive he had given a resilience to the fabric of things, his dry humor had warmed the rooms. But this was his death, its painful sanctity. Its coldness.

God damn. Death made everything serious.

This gray severity was the hard part—the punishment for her lifestyle, her callous practice of adultery, as a friend had put it once. Only three of her friends had known, and one had moved long since to New Zealand from where, every two or three years, she sent a postcard of craggy mountains and wild meadows, green ridges towering over a blue sea. The other two were more gone than that—one had succumbed to cancer in her forties, the last to manic depression and a group home in Northern California, not far from the ancient redwoods . . . faces blended and faded, their features more and more obscure.

That was the abstract cost of this, the cost beyond Hal’s death: his memory was compromised. What should be a full and vivid remembrance of him was fractured by her separate life and blame—her separate life infringing on the life they had, the history he deserved to own.

The queen-size bed that had stood here might well have been the origin of his dying. She closed her eyes and saw the bed again, its sheets and blankets in disarray. She’d been careless here once, just once, with Fantasy Baseball. She had no way of knowing, of course, that Hal would have a minor car accident and appear at the house in the middle of the day, when she was still washing off in the shower. She had brazened it out, pretended there was nothing to acknowledge, and Hal had seemed to go along—but then soon after that he’d known, too soon for pure coincidence.

She should have erred on the safe side and never brought Baseball here. It had not been her practice to bring men home. Pure laziness: Baseball’s apartment, where they usually went, was at Fairfax and Wilshire and she’d wanted to avoid the lunch-hour traffic. And she was not in the mood for the apartment’s frat-boy furnishings, free weights on a vinyl bench, neon Budweiser sign and running shoes tumbled in a pile near the door with dirty socks crumpled into them.

That it was Baseball, with his stolid lack of foreplay and solid grasp of box scores, kept multiplying the offense, but the fact remained that she was sorry for symptoms, sorry for side effects most of all. Not for all of it, only what slid off the rails. It could not be her fault and all of it was her fault. She was a murderer and a victim, she felt the strain of trying to find her footing on uneven ground. Then also she was changeable, prepared to be someone else. She had fluidity.

She said goodbye to Hal again. She had left him once in the casket, once at the funeral and now in the bedroom. She would leave him again, she suspected, hundreds of times in near-invisible gestures, like the blur of a moving limb in a photograph.

Downstairs she passed Casey’s doorway and saw T. stand up quickly from the level of the chair; he caught her eye and smiled. She wondered what was between those two these days. Before he went away there had been a close friendship that had ended; Casey had pushed him away, run from him even. Susan had suspected then that she had a crush on him. Casey liked to beat men to the punch, since the accident, reject them preemptively before she could be rejected. Understandable. Typically, though, she chose losers to take up with, insulating herself. That part wasn’t so good.

But now—the look on his face as he rose—when it came to Casey Susan was unsure of her own instincts.

He had better not be leading her daughter on, she thought, with an edge of anger. T. dated women who resembled models—not that they actually were models, only that the prerequisites for seeing him seemed to be poise and classical looks. The girlfriend who had died, whom Susan had met only a handful of times, had been a slim, light-skinned black woman with a surprising movie-star charisma, who turned heads wherever she went but was also self-effacing and modest. The combination was rare. And then this rare, humble beauty had suddenly died: her heart had stopped with no warning and she was gone, as though to prove the unfeasibility of her goodness.

Casey was a rumpled child by comparison, a tomboy, a brat and a squeaky wheel. Not to mention the paraplegia, an attribute unlikely to be on his wish list.

She was defenseless, more so than ever. Susan would speak to him if she had to.

They dropped Casey at her apartment and headed to the office, where Susan would be introduced to the work of dismantling the business. T. had hired some kind of lawyer who specialized in charities. He was waiting for them.

“James,” said T., and she and the lawyer shook hands. “He’ll be helping with the transition.”

“Call me Jim,” he said easily, and held her fingers a little too long as his hand fell away. A good-looking man with a bit of a spare tire. She noticed the wedding ring.




Everything she owned was in the big house now, where she slept in an upstairs room. It featured the “horned beasts” of Africa; this theme was painted on a rippling scroll over the door. The horned animals were a water buffalo and a wildebeest, whose heads she’d taken off the brackets and piled beneath the sweeping curved staircase. Only the backdrop remained. The walls of the bedroom were painted diorama-style, long grasses growing up from the wooden trim along the floor and then, rising above them, the same flat-topped trees that were carved on the mansion’s front door.

The heads themselves, alone in her room at night, had been too much company. But she liked the murals. In the distance, beyond the trees and the grasses, flat giraffes grazed and a herd of rhinos hunkered down, waiting patiently to be taken as trophies.

There were eight bedrooms on her floor, each with a geographic theme lettered above the door. One was titled THE RAINFOREST, with stuffed snakes and parrots and a sloth. Another was labeled THE ARCTIC, with caribou and a white Arctic fox. Icebergs were painted on the walls of the Arctic, expanses of blue water and a pale sunset. A third sign read THE HIMALAYAS, where there were snow-capped mountains, a stuffed white and black cat, an otter, and something labeled HIMALAYAN BLUE SHEEP, which to her looked neither blue nor sheeplike.

She’d chosen her own room, HORNED BEASTS, for its large bay windows that overlooked the back garden, the glittering oblongs of ponds. She could see the thin flagstone walkways weaving between the ponds, the feathery sweep of willows. In the mornings she liked to stretch in front of the window, leaving behind her dusty canopied bed whose linens smelled of mothballs. While she stretched out her limbs the sun rose and filtered through the dirty panes in strips. Her boxes lingered unpacked, save for the clothes and the toiletries: organization was a goal she kept ahead of her, fixed at a safe distance. In the meantime she liked her old life fine inside cardboard.

When the landscapers came the first morning to start work on reclaiming the garden she noticed one of the crew, Ramon: he had a pretty, unlined young face and ropy muscles and worked in a plaid shirt that hung open over a tank top and silver crucifix. She wondered if he was illegal. She would welcome that for she was illegal herself, far more criminal than Ramon would ever be.

•

Increasingly she wanted to know about the old man, as she was coming to think of her great-uncle. In the big house he was a ghost that walked alongside. But the ghost had the vague outline of a croquet mallet, the player piano. She wished it would take human form. She wanted to picture him. And she wanted to find out about his mania for collecting, if he had hunted or merely gone shopping. It seemed necessary to know.

She tried to ferret out his personal belongings but it was not even clear to her which bedroom had been his; the house was sprawling and uncentered. She found only piecemeal evidence that it had ever had a live-in tenant—a few old dress shirts marked ARROW and VAN HEUSEN hanging on the dirt-caked banister of the attic staircase, their faded pinstripes in mustard yellow and orange; a cast-iron bootjack in the shape of a Texas longhorn.

In daytime the house had the character of a dusty labyrinth whose caretakers had vanished, but by night the dust receded and she felt the solidity of the walls. At night the house was more like a honeycomb, a thick-built hive with hundreds of compartments. She could nest there cushioned and unseen.

After a few days of looking she found a desk in the library that might once have been a minor center of operations. It was less than it should be in that role; all it held was yellowing bills and checkbook registers, bundles of letters and postcards paper-clipped together. But it was as close as she’d come, so that night she took the bundles to the kitchen and sat down at the table beneath a wall of fish.

The kitchen was mainly fish. She’d read in one of the old man’s books that most fish trophies were replicas, so she thought these were probably also fakes. They shone with an unnatural flare and their colors had the high-contrast brightness of plastic. There were the usual suspects, a trout, a bass, a marlin, but there were also odd-looking specimens with peeling labels beneath them that read like poetry—a deep pink fish with large eyes labeled BLACKBELLY ROSEFISH, an evil-looking dark creature with white eyes labeled GOLDEN POMFRET, a tiger grouper and a bowfin. She read beneath them with a bottle of wine at her elbow. The more she drank, the more dazzled she was whenever she looked up. The wallpaper was red and white and the fish on the walls were gray and blue and a lurid peach; their lines of contrast vibrated . . . in spidery writing on the back of a cruise-ship postcard from 1948 she read the words Lil and I are having a swell time. On a card from the Lincoln Memorial, The hotest place Ive ever been.

Now and then she had to get up, pacing with a letter in one hand and her wineglass in the other. The letters were impenetrable somehow; they gave her almost no information about the old man. But one of them she wanted to keep for herself anyway. It was written on delicate yellowing stationery and was from a diplomat in Indochina, marked Hanoi October 29 1945. The diplomat described a cocktail party for Ho Chi Minh.

Ho is a seasoned old professional revolutionary, has done time for agitation in French, Chinese and even Hongkong jails. He is amazingly pleasant and gives the impression of being a Chinese scholar type . . .

Further down the letter writer described a person called the Emperor of Annam, who had also attended the party. The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. He is said to be interested mainly in sports, chiefly hunting. There is wonderful shooting a couple of hundred miles from here. A hint, she thought, a clue, a piece, but then it went nowhere, for there was no further mention of hunting. She forgot what she was looking for, in the wine and on her empty stomach, and only wished that she was in that time, long gone, when there were those habits of politeness and a person might reasonably write much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.

Then she was finished with the bundle of letters and there was nothing left but money. In a water-damaged register she found electricity and gas bills, even milk bills from the days when you could have it delivered, but most of the entries were illegible. There were a few invoices from travel agencies, which might have led somewhere if there had been enough of them, but in the end they yielded nothing of interest and she threw them away. The old man must have had photo albums, at least a box of curling old snapshots, she thought next, and started to search the library. But the task was too daunting.

Still she was stubborn and for a while at least she had nothing better to do, so she drained the wine bottle and combed the dusty shelves, pulling out one oversized book after another, flipping them open, then sliding them back into place. She lost track of time. There were volumes on coats of arms, on the children’s crusades and the history of war, biographies of Napoleon and Douglas MacArthur. In a corner there was a small, primitive television and a pile of old movies: Lion of the Desert, Little Big Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

She would hire a cleaning woman, she decided, trudging upstairs at three in the morning with the dim old wall sconces lighting her way. People with big houses had cleaning women. Those people were not her, which she never forgot: rich people were not her. She looked at the sconces as she passed. Full of moths, hundreds of off-white moth bodies piled in the yellowing basins like pencil shavings. Were they a fire hazard? A cleaning woman could search the library. Or maybe a student could do it. With money, you could pay.

At the landing was an open window, its gauzy curtains blowing inward in the mild night breeze. Standing at windows had become a pastime. If she could, she would stand in the frame of an open window forever—the perfection of it. The peace. There you were, enclosed by the assurance of walls yet turned to the air. Stretching before you was the land, as though you were beginning it; the rest of being floated ahead, a movie in a darkened hall. Its possibilities touched the planes of your face, not too close, not too far, a scene of earth and sky that asked for nothing and forced nothing on you. There at the border and the rim, the real was also a mirage. The evening air cooled her cheeks and she felt exhilarated—her windfall house, a new life. The life of someone else.

Then the loneliness swelled, guilt pulsing at the base. She was a murderer.

She took a deep breath. Murderer, murderer.

She had to agree with herself. She had levied the accusation in the first place and now she had no choice but to acquiesce, accept graciously or she would never relax again, would always be defending herself against her own judgment. So yes: she was a murderer. Or worse, had done a negligent homicide. In an assassin at least there was purpose.

She felt her heart rate slow. Slow and steady. The fresh air cold on her skin. That was all right. She could be cold. She could be frigid. She held her arms out to receive the chill.

She was alone now. But on the other hand she was also a queen, the private, unseen monarch of a kingdom of dust and faded velvet and the great horns of beasts. She dwelled in a palace. So she had nothing and everything at once, had been struck down and raised up.

In one respect it was not surprising, because the world’s systems tended to elevate crime. Those systems knew about crime, those systems were forced to reward it. It would be wrong to say the world’s systems liked or encouraged crime; that would be superstition, as the world had no opinions. The world neither liked nor disliked criminal acts; it was amoral, not immoral. It had no agency but it did have structure, and because of its structure it tended to reward criminal acts. As long as the criminal was not too overt and her movements agile, bad actions typically brought profit.

Inside there might be suffering, but externally, for all to see, profit and gain arrived. It would be incorrect to say society, for it was not society alone that had brought first Hal’s death, then her windfall. Certainly society had created the big house. But other elements had also been required to bring her here—a molecular current was needed, a shifting too microscopic to attribute to people and their social compacts.

Broadly, the world could not say no to an act of selfishness. Selfishness burned at its core.

Above the core there was the good soil, the dirt of continents, the water of seas, the winds of the atmosphere. Moon and stars, firmament: the ocean and the sky. This second part of her life was two kinds of freedom and two kinds of blackness. The future yawned over her, the heavens were endless. They were an observatory. Was that what plenty gave you? Everything was offered, nothing was necessary. She was less bound, standing there at the window by night. She had sails, she had wings, she had the lift of low gravity.

She also had the shudder of regret, a sadness that clung forever. She was the sliver of rot in the wood.

Airborne, though, maybe she could stand it. Before her the indigo sky of predawn, the black lacework of sheltering trees. She and Hal had never been poor. They’d always had enough income to qualify as middle-class, at least until it came to Casey’s medical bills. But this life was something else by an order of magnitude—a state of exuberance, a lazy abundance that bristled with energy.




One morning she stood at the bedroom window half-naked while Ramon was working alone in the backyard, and then, when he looked up, she smiled.

That was all you needed, typically. He was young, shy and deferential, and you had to be obvious with men: she had learned that early. To get what you wanted without undue worry, obvious was the key. Men would take anything that was offered, as a general rule. Most were so surprised they never contemplated refusal. That was the advantage of other women’s submission. In a society of aggressive or even merely confident women, she would be overlooked; but since most of them were passive, and most men were lazy, the field was wide open.

She led him into the Himalayas on impulse because the bed in there had new sheets—the only sheets in the house that didn’t smell of mold. She had made the bed for herself before she chose horned beasts and not yet bothered to switch the linens, preferring to sleep in dust and oldness every night, half out of apathy. And he was clean, cleaner than average, she felt, and smelled slightly of aftershave or soap—eucalyptus, maybe—which she found she didn’t mind. He gave an impression of instinctive knowledge: something about the fullness of skin, a generosity that made the context fade.

But then he stayed shy, downcast eyes and an expression of regret or modesty, hard to tell which. She guessed he was ashamed of them, that their behavior nagged at his Catholicism. Maybe the age difference made him awkward, maybe she reminded him of his mother. She would prefer not to. Younger men were a recent event for her, a passing accident. Usually it was competence that attracted her to men more than the way they looked, and older men were more likely to be competent, though they didn’t have a monopoly on it. Baseball had been almost incompetent, which made him less than compelling in the end. Ramon was not; Ramon had competence enough to give solidity to his attractiveness. Also he did not have a girlfriend—she had asked—and so she was unsure where his regret came from, save maybe shame about pleasure.

She always tried to meet shame gracefully where she found it, felt sympathy for those who believed that pleasure deserved punishment (although she herself even suspected it sometimes, more superstitiously than anything). She felt the sadness of this inheritance, religious, social, even a casual hand-me-down, and tried small tender gestures to soften the exchange. Often she suspected these gestures were only perceptible to her, though—too subtle or subjective to convey.

They were surrounded by clarity in the Himalayas—the snow-topped mountains in two dimensions, the robin’s-egg skies above. Around the king bed was a menagerie: the goat-like animal labeled BLUE SHEEP, the otter, the cat whose glass irises were a deep-spiraling well of gold. She turned her head to the window. Inside the square were power lines and palm trees and above these a yellow-gray haze of smog. The brief white frame divided those elements from the painted landscape of the peaks—one of which she was almost sure was Mount Everest, another K2, because she knew the shape of them from movies. She wondered if the old man had done this, lain on this very bed when he was young. The animals blindly seemed to watch; in former days, possibly they had watched him. The animals did not watch, of course—dead they were blind—but still they seemed to. You watched but did not seem to; they saw nothing while seeming to fixate on you . . .

She shivered. Do not look at the cat, do not think of old fur. Of skinning, of tanning, what happened to the real eyes. Someone had skinned these creatures once, someone had flayed their bodies raw. In Century City the lawyer sat behind his desk and hissed: He died without issue. She closed her eyes for a time, but to look at Ramon she had to risk the sheep in her peripheral vision. Its horns were symmetrical, rounded, rising from the head in graceful arches—but even this was a distraction, even this brief observation was not what she meant to be doing, seemed like a form of disrespect.

Then the condom came off and Ramon was embarrassed. She slid her hand around it and disposed of it onto the floor, rummaged in the nightstand drawer for a new one. She smiled at him while she reached for the packet, the smile always a key to continuity: she struggled to maintain the grace they’d had, smooth over his humiliation, struggled to do so without the appearance of struggling. Men could be sensitive to interruption.

She wondered what he made of the house, the moth-eaten mounts everywhere. The new condom went on and they were off and running . . . the old man’s library contained books on taxidermy. Apparently aficionados called the animals mounted, not stuffed—both about sex, of course—the beasts, the prey, the caught, the shot. Ramon knew the place was new to her, that these were not her oddities but someone else’s, inherited along with the house. That much she hoped, at least, from the fact that he was here working for her in the derelict garden, if not from passing remarks she’d made. If he’d listened.

Suddenly in her mind she was an old woman in a rambling house full of pelts. Nothing could be less appealing. And yet Ramon did not notice this sour flash of identity. He showed no outward sign. He did what he did. Here he was.

She pushed the pelts to the back of her mind, closed her eyes again and tried to feel her fingertips, her toes, the long glide of her legs over the backs of his. He said something under his breath, a compliment, she thought—it sounded like You’re beautiful—and she appreciated the kindness but doubted that he meant it. It was not true; she knew she was not beautiful but attractive at best, the kind of woman few men noticed unless she wanted them to. She had a symmetrical face and a graceful, smooth body, once you got her clothes off—her body was still better than her face, even in middle age—but overall she had quiet looks.

She tried to forget the details of herself. She would be no one—Let me be no one at all or all of them. Let me be anyone. That was the privilege of the rich, wasn’t it? They could feel like anyone, where the poor could only feel like themselves, trapped in themselves forever. The rich were infinitely free. Or the suddenly rich, at least. Those born that way were bound and tied, as much as anyone. But the manna from heaven . . . let us lift off the bed, let our skins absorb the streams of particles, of blood, water, the electricity, the storms—

She washed the smell of latex off her hands afterward and ran a shower for Ramon in the adjacent bathroom, whose tilework must have dated from the twenties: they were minute one-inch ivory tiles trimmed in black and a powdery pink. A large, rusting showerhead over a clawfoot tub.

She said to herself, almost aloud: Never again. Next time she slept with a stranger it would be in her own room, where all that watched them was the long, flat grass.

Ramon clearly felt pressed to get back to work, though the whole episode hadn’t lasted more than twenty minutes and fit into his morning break. He stepped out of the shower and stood beside her, watching from the bathroom window as his supervisor arrived, pulling into the driveway beneath them in his white van with a logo of black leaves.

“You can say I made you do something for me,” she said, handing him a towel. “I mean, if you want to. You can say I made you carry something heavy.”

•

It let her feel regal to stroll through the house out into the back gardens. Laughable—an emperor with no clothes—but still real. The rooms were cleaner now, the gardens tidied and replanted where they had died, trees and bushes pruned, ponds repaired and refilled, irrigation systems patched and put on an expensive timer. She picked out fish from a catalog. She spent her days clearing the house of what she knew she didn’t need—at first only the small debris of the old man’s life, gathered combing through drawers. There were scores of well-used packs of playing cards, held together with rubber bands and bearing an unmistakable old-card smell, the ancient dirt of fingers. There were board games, as though families had come through here frequently despite his having been a bachelor, despite his having died without issue.

She found Parcheesi, a game she remembered from summer nights in her grandmother’s house. She found ashtrays by the score, glass with seams of bubbles along the edges or in the shape of French poodles, plastic printed with fading beer or tobacco logos, thick clay slabs with crude scallops and the denting prints of children’s thumbs. She found a shelf full of faded badminton birdies and wooden tennis racquets, a worn football, croquet mallets. Somehow these conjured parties for her: elegant guests in evening dress with cigarettes in long holders, spilling out onto the patios and gardens in a gleaming night.

The furniture was dingy, and there was too much of it: every space was a hodgepodge of styles and colors. She had the ruined and homely pieces removed and watched with satisfaction as the rooms they left behind became airier. She loaded knickknacks into boxes and drove them to Goodwill; she scrounged through cabinets until they contained only items for which she could imagine some future use.

But when it came to the animals she was undecided. At first she had been determined to rid herself of their carcasses with all possible speed, but curiously the impulse was fading: the longer she lived with them the greater their hold. Some needed repair, were bald in patches with broken horns or ragged tails. At first, as she walked through the great room with its foxes and otters, this had made them ugly or pathetic; but more and more it made her feel protective.

Their arrangement added to her confusion. She understood the rooms on the second floor—their classification by geography, rough and general though it was. But the ground floor was a jumble. She did not know why the common raccoons of the great room kept company with the foxes, the possums, which were apparently marsupials, or the beavers, classified as semi-aquatic rodents. (She had to look this up.) The old man, she guessed, had not planned at all when he began to collect. At first the assemblages had been thrown together without forethought. A room of BEARS OF THE WORLD, he must have thought, hell yeah. A room of heads with racks. A room of brown mammals, why not.

As the collection grew he’d moved toward a better scheme—still rudimentary but at least organized—placing each mount in a more logical grouping. He’d been unable to help himself, and the more he acquired, the more he had to impose an order. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, being forced toward it. Because without order there could be no true collecting. Without order there was only acquisition.




When she’d been living in the house for six weeks Casey finally paid her a visit.

By then Ramon had moved on to another job—he turned out to be neither an illegal nor a student but the youngest son of a claims adjuster, with ambitions in auto detailing—and she’d started sleeping with Jim the lawyer. Jim was an intelligent and slightly petty man on the surface, but beneath it he was tender. She thought he might be the kind of person who, in the right circumstances, could kill someone. She wondered if this would be a bond between them.

The combination of circumstances required for Jim the lawyer to kill, she suspected, was so specific that it would likely never occur. That made him a would-be murderer at best, unlike her, and a fairly safe bet. Not that he was vicious or cruel—on the contrary, he was mild and gentle. Still she thought he might have a blind spot of rage, some hair trigger that would unleash a buried anger. Many men did; it was hardly unique.

Jim impressed her because most of the adulterers she’d known liked to lie naked and panting beside her and offer up a disquisition on their marriage. It was a common impulse. She herself had learned early on not to talk about Hal, that discussing her husband with others was off limits, but some men treated illicit sex as an entry to marital therapy. And surprisingly by her third time with Jim he had still not brought up his wife, other than to acknowledge he had one. She liked this disinclination to confess.

She was standing over the bathroom sink lazily after he left, gazing at the lines on her face in the mirror, when she heard gravel scrape on the circular drive. Cinching the belt on her bathrobe, she felt around on the floor for her shoes with an outstretched toe, then craned her neck to see out the window. Beyond the branches of an oak—Ramon had told her what each of the trees was in the garden, both the front and the back, and she had faithfully written them down on the landscape map to commit them to memory—she could make out the hood of Casey’s car.

When she invited Casey to come by anytime she’d been sure she’d have ample warning; her daughter didn’t do drop-bys often. She’d assumed the drive to Pasadena was unfamiliar enough that Casey would have to call for directions. Still, now that Casey was here Susan was excited to show her the place, and as she reached for her jeans she wondered if her daughter had seen the lawyer’s car leaving. It was a light-green BMW—unmistakable since Casey knew it from the office.

Also the two of them hadn’t talked about Casey’s livelihood since the airport but Susan knew they would have to discuss it sometime—it ached like a bad tooth at the back of her mouth. She would hate to lose her moral high ground, or the carefully guarded illusion of it. On the other hand, with T. around so often it was doubtful that Casey could be spending much of her time on the phone.

“You’re kidding me,” said Casey, when Susan opened the front door.

She was sitting out on the edge of the cobbled drive, a few feet from her car, with boughs of oak and laurel dipping over her head like a bower.

“What?” asked Susan.

“You’re f*cking kidding me,” she said. “All this?”

“I told you,” said Susan.

“You said a big house,” said Casey. “You didn’t say the Taj Mahal. This is ridiculous!”

“It’s eccentric,” said Susan.

Despite herself she felt puffed up by Casey’s admiration, as though the house was her personal creation.

“Come on, honey. Come see the back. The grounds are almost twenty acres.”

“No way,” said Casey, and followed her onto the tiles of the patio and past the tennis court.

Lonely, sometimes, that there were two of them—moments like this, when they were single-file.

It also struck her that Casey should have a new car, that her car was cramped and dinged and there was plenty of money now.

“Do you want a car?” she asked impulsively, turning. “We can get you one. With some of the money from the old house. The sale. I mean look, there’s some cash for once. There are taxes on this place, there are repairs I’m paying for, but other than that, with the proceeds from the house sale, maybe your father’s life insurance, eventually, we’re practically rich.”

Casey stared at her, surprised, and then over her shoulder.

“Are those—parrots?”

Susan turned and looked and saw light-green wings flapping and blurring near the tops of the alders.

“They look like parrots,” she said uncertainly.

“They are parrots,” said Casey. “It’s a whole flock of them. Look!”

A flash of red on their heads, yellow beaks, beady eyes. Susan wished one would alight nearby so she could see it closer up. Get a good look. But they blurred. Why did they have to fly the whole time?

“Parrots,” she repeated.

They watched the parrots, which made a racket with their squawking. People spoke of the beauty of birdsong, but not when it came to parrots. They were the exception that proved the rule.

“They give me the weirdest feeling,” said Casey dreamily. “It’s like they remind me of something I never saw.”

“My whole life I never knew we had wild parrots in L.A. County,” said Susan.

“Did they escape from somewhere?”

“So many?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be here,” said Casey. “When I see nature shows, typically, they don’t feature parrots in Southern California.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen them,” said Susan.

“Huh. I should ask T. He has this animal hobby,” said Casey.

“I meant to ask you about that,” said Susan. “The turnaround, the whole charity thing. So you don’t think he’s—unstable?”

“I don’t know about stable. But he’s less of an a*shole now.”

“High praise,” said Susan.

The parrots flapped and squawked, raucous screeches fading. Presently there was silence and the high branches stopped trembling and were still.

“So now,” said Casey. “About that car.”