Magnificence A Novel

4


The koi was hanging beneath lily pads, long and bulbous and graceful—like a zeppelin, she thought. Orange and black fins flicked back and forth, barely moving. She knelt beside the pond and gazed.

A man’s voice interrupted.

“I hear people pay two thousand bucks for those things.”

She jumped to her feet, squinting and brushing dirt from her bare knees. It was her cousin Steven, the computer guy, dressed for leisure in khaki Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt; he wore highly reflective sunglasses in a giant wraparound visor, so the whole upper half of his face was missing in action. He was futuristic, a man who came with his own windshield.

She had to get the gate fixed, she realized. Then she could keep it locked.

“Yeah, there’s breeders and shit, all these fancy Japanese, like, fish farms,” said Steven, nodding sagely. “Big one outside Fresno, they sell the things to Chinese restaurants or whatever. For atmosphere. Not, like, for food. I know. I set up their network.”

“Mine was twenty dollars at the pet store,” said Susan.

“The things are what, obese goldfish?”

“Obese seems, I don’t know, judgmental.”

“OK then. F*cking fat.”

“They’re distant goldfish relatives, I think. A kind of carp.”

“So they’re like, goldfish on roids. Do they get roid rage?”

She found herself gazing at him.

“Hey!” he went on. “You should do mandatory drug testing.”

“Ha,” said Susan wanly. She looked down to the pool at her feet, the gold patches gleaming beneath the surface.

“Well, here we are, huh? Uncle Al left the whole dog-and-pony show to dear little Susan,” said Steven, with a quick sting of anger that took her by surprise.

He looked around, head bobbing in what seemed to be an ongoing skeptical nod. At least, she assumed he was looking around: his head swiveled slowly as it bobbed and sunlight flashed on his metallic lenses.

“Not so little,” she said, still taken aback and stalling. It had never occurred to her that he might feel entitled. Not once. She never had, herself.

She blundered on. “Middle-aged Susan, more like.”

“Nah, really. You don’t look a day over thirty.”

“Aw. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“Gimme the private tour.”

“Come on in.”

Inside the music room, which opened to the pool and backyard and was full of sheep and goat mounts, he looked around and whistled. Except for a faded, wine-colored velour couch the room was almost empty, only a stand with some colorful guitars in a corner and a dusty double bass with no strings.

“Old guy was crazier than I thought,” he said.

“I didn’t know him well,” said Susan.

“So why’d he pick you?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. Were you two still in touch?”

“We did a couple Turkey Day meals. That kind of shit. Mostly at our place, though, when we lived over in Reseda. He would come in from out of town with a pile of gifts for the kids. So they kinda liked him. Deb didn’t. She thought he was an old lech.”

“Oh yeah?”

“As far as invitations, he didn’t return the favor. Last time I was in this place I was a kid myself.”

“He had a player piano, remember? I haven’t found it yet, though. Maybe he got rid of it. The kitchen’s over here,” she said.

“Building’s massive. Jesus.”

“It’s large.”

“Guy musta had a full-time taxidermist on the payroll.”

“Was he a hunter? Do you know?”

“Well it’s sure as shit not roadkill.”

“Do you remember what he did? For a living?”

“It was like, commodities trading maybe? He was abroad a lot. He was traveling all the time.”

“What can I get you? I have coffee, tea, sparkling water—”

“No beer?”

“Oh. At ten-thirty . . . ?”

“Gimme a Bud, if you got one.”

She opened the refrigerator as he paced the room peering at the stuffed fish.

“Dos Equis OK?”

“Mexican pisswater? Enh, sure. I’m not picky.”

She almost decided not to hand it over, then reached for the bottle opener.

“What is that, a marlin?”

“I’m still learning. Whatever the label says.”

To occupy herself she reached into the freezer for the bag of coffee.

“So. What brings you by? Wanting to check out the place?”

“Yeah, you know. Though we probably won’t make a claim.”

“What claim?”

“Against the estate. You know.”

She gaped at him. The sunglasses were propped up on his head now, but his eyes didn’t tell her much either. He raised his beer bottle and drank.

A wave of illness moved through her.

“No—what?”

“Like I say, we probably won’t. Tommy’s giving me some pressure. He says it’s the principle of the thing. But listen. I’m like, she’s had a bad year already. That woman has nothing. Zip. Nada. She needed something like this. I go, She needs it more than we do, Tomboy.”

She was unsteady.

“Well. Thanks for that, Steve.”

“Yeah. Well. You know.”

“It was pretty clear in the will, wasn’t it? I mean what do I know.”

“See, though,” and he shook his head, taking a swig from the bottle, “the non compos thing. Not of sound mind.”

“Was he under care or something? In an institution?”

“He lived here by himself.”

“So what makes you think he was—?”

“Shit, woman. I mean the guy was a hermit. There’s no one to say if he was crazy or not.”

She might be having a panic attack. Her breath felt constricted. Spite, she thought. Spite and malice. She wouldn’t be surprised if the old man had left her the house expressly to make sure it wasn’t given to Steven. Possibly when he saw the guy, on holidays, the guy had irritated him. Possibly she was projecting, but possibly Steve’s poor character had been the source of her own good luck.

She fumbled with the coffee grinder as her breathing evened out. It was an excuse to turn away; she’d already drunk her coffee quota. As she pressed down on the lid and the grinder spun and shrieked she raised her eyes to the wall above her, which featured a mako shark. She felt reassured by it. She was a murderer, after all. For once it was a comfort to think so. Being a murderer made her equal to Steven.

She lifted her hands from the grinder and waited till it wound down, then pulled off the top and tipped the grounds into a filter.

“Well, I’m glad you convinced Tommy I wasn’t worth suing,” she said humbly.

A murderer, like a shark, must have rows of hidden sharp teeth behind the ones at the front.

What he said was true, of course, though his whole bearing filled her with resentment. Resentment and unease. Of course she didn’t deserve the house. No one deserved a house like this. She didn’t deserve anything, she knew that. But he deserved even less, she suspected. All she could think of to do was flatter him. She would show him some gratitude, presume a kindness in him and will it into existence. Maybe he would follow a rare generous impulse and leave her alone.

“You liquidated this property, we’re talking megamillions,” he said.

A month ago, T. might have bought it himself. Made her his partner, bulldozed the big house and converted the lot to rows of houses like cupcakes on a tray.

“I would hate to sell it,” she said softly. “They’d tear it down and build a subdivision.”

“Ee-yup.”

“But it’s beautiful,” she said, in a subdued tone. Needing somewhere else to look, she opened the refrigerator with a preoccupied air.

“Spacious accommodations for a single lady,” he badgered.

“I rattle around in here,” she said, though this was not at all the way she felt. In truth she glided through chains of rooms streamlined, perfectly graceful in the long halls. Perfect not in and of herself, but in and of the house.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“I’m not sure what to do with the house yet. I admit. But I will do something.”

“Do something?” said Steven, and drained his beer. “Like what?”

“You know there are parrots that live wild in the neighborhood?” she asked brightly. “Whole flocks of wild parrots!”

•

When she was ushering him toward the front door, two beers later, he stopped to pick through a box of odds and ends on a tabletop—she had it ready to go out to Goodwill—and lifted an old keychain. A dusty bronze ornament dangled.

“Oh yeah,” he mused. “Shit yeah. You know about this?”

“About what?”

“Some club. It’s the logo of that old club he was so into. You don’t remember? Only thing I remember from when I was over here as a kid. Those f*ckers were already ancient. They used to hang around the place with walkers and oxygen tanks.”

She held it up to the light: gold and red, with a lion. There had once been words, but they were too worn to read.

“Drive safe,” she said, as he got into his car. “And I really appreciate you respecting the spirit of the will. Going easy on me. It means a lot, Steve.”

Maybe her self-effacing tone would ring in his ears when he thought about litigation. She crossed her fingers behind her back like a schoolgirl and hoped hard, into the bare air, that he would not return—that he and his son Tommy, of high principle, would leave well enough alone.

He backed up in a spurt of pebbles and rolled out the gate; she watched through the holes in the hedge as his car flashed away. She clutched the medallion.

•

Later she stood out on the poolside terrace drinking wine with Jim the lawyer and listening to the fountain at the end of the pool, where water flowed over jumping marble porpoises. He came over once or twice a week in the early evening, when his wife worked late or had made other plans. There were no children.

“Look at me. Already I’m jealously guarding my property,” she said. “As though I earned it or something.”

“You don’t want your a*shole cousin coming in and trashing the place,” said Jim. “It’s hardly irrational.”

“Because it’s mine,” she said, shaking her head. “My personal Club Med.”

“Club Med is pathetic,” said Jim.

“You know what I mean.”

“What I think is, you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you twice in your life. This house is the first good thing that’s happened to you in a long time. Naturally you want to keep it. You’re human.”

“But you’re not,” she said, turning to press herself on him, holding her wineglass out to the side. “You’re a lawyer.”

“Your best bet is just to play defense. Wait and see. See if he bothers to make a claim.”

She looked up at his face, its gray, heavy-lidded eyes. He never seemed to open them as far as he could. His lassitude was calming.




Reading in bed, she put down her book and reached for the old letter from Hanoi. She held the yellow paper carefully and reread the looping, faded script: The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. It bore an embossment at the top, Charles Adams Sumter III. She flipped the papers over: his signature said Chip.

Chip had known the old man, she thought. The old man had known him. Long dead, no doubt.

A plane crossed the sky, blinking, and she lay back on the pillow. But then she woke up and it was early morning. She remembered the plane as though it should still be there; she had the sense that only a second had passed. It was so early the outside was still almost silent, and through her wide window she saw the yellow streaks of dawn. She reached out for her telephone. 411.

She said his name and the operator asked for an address.

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“Three listings in the metro area,” said the operator briskly, and rattled them off as Susan reached for a pen.

At the first number a woman answered, groggy, and mumbled something in Spanish. She sounded young. Susan apologized for waking her but didn’t regret it. The second number was out of service, and the third was an answering machine that seemed to belong to a young family.

She went downstairs to forage for breakfast but a stubbornness nudged at her so that midway through her bowl of cereal she got up and left the cornflakes soaking to call Information again. This time she asked for more listings, listings for the whole state. She had no evidence he was here, if he was even living, but it was her only lead. There were eight numbers in all, not too many, and she sat with her coffee at the kitchen table, the list in front of her, and dialed methodically. One man had an English accent, which gave her hope at first—maybe because it imbued him fleetingly with age or stature. But he hung up when she asked more. The next number gave her a voicemail with a generic message, so she left her own. The third rang for some time until she heard a distant voice at the other end: the name of a business, and she was disappointed. Then the words came again. Sunset Villas.

“Are you—I’m sorry. What are you?”

“We’re a residential community. For seniors.”

She stretched out the coils of the phone cord on a finger, then released.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Sumter. A Mr. Charles Sumter.”

There was the buzz of static, then nothing. She’d been cut off. But no—a click and someone else picked up.

“Switchboard. Mr. Sumter is away from his room,” said a second voice.

She asked if he went by Chip, but the woman didn’t know. She asked how old he was, and the woman didn’t know that either. It was an 805 area code, Santa Barbara.

•

The villas were condos that overlooked the sea, a blocky off-white complex built around a pool. It was a gray day, with a cold wind whipping down the coast, and the concrete paths that led between the buildings were mostly deserted. Here and there a palm tree with dry fronds scraped and flapped or a square bed of bright geraniums was laid flat by the wind. There were no signs on the paths so it was hard to know where the lobby might be. After a while she came up behind a woman with a walker, who was proceeding slowly enough to be caught easily. The woman pointed.

Stepping through the automatic doors into the reception area, with its turquoise carpet and framed posters of old musicals, she was surprised; it seemed low-rent for oceanside real estate. To her right was a wall that blared OKLAHOMA! and CATS, and to her left was a glass wall into a small cardio room, where elderly figures looked haggard but determined on StairMasters and treadmills. Their legs pumped doggedly beneath them and they were looking straight forward, looking right at her. She had to turn away quickly lest one of them suddenly collapse.

The woman at the desk gave her a photocopied floor plan of the kind they handed out at motels, with an apartment number circled, and then she was up a long ramp to the second floor, along a catwalk and at the room, ringing the doorbell. A nurse opened the door, a nurse in a baby-blue dress and sneakers, or maybe she was a cleaning person. Susan followed her down a white-walled hallway, their footfalls noiseless on the off-white carpet.

Chip sat on a floral couch in front of a large window. He was a dark form with the light behind him, but she could tell he was very old and thin, with white hair. He wore an argyle sweater. He must be in his nineties. Wind chimes hung behind him in multitudes: glass butterflies, aluminum pipes, hummingbirds dangling beneath bells.

But there couldn’t be wind; it was a picture window and did not open.

He struggled to rise, but she shook her head.

“Oh no, please. Mr. Sumter,” she said, and bent down to hold out her hand. His own was very soft. Behind him the fuzzy, blue-gray ocean was visible: he had been given a good room. Not all the residents could have so clear a view.

After she sat down across the wicker coffee table the cleaning woman brought them tea and poured the contents of two pink packets into his cup for him—or maybe not a cleaning woman, given the tea service. Her role remained unclear.

Susan told him who she was and asked if he had known her uncle, and when she said her great-uncle’s name a smile broke on the old guy’s face.

“Good old Bud,” he said fondly, and picked up his cup of tea.

“So how did you know him?” she asked. She was prepared to explain herself but Chip did not need an explanation. He was happy to talk and spoke slowly and carefully: they had known each other through the State Department, where Chip had been in service. But her great-uncle had not been in the department because he’d failed some kind of Foreign Service test, though Chip did not use the word fail. So Albert had not been a diplomat but because of his line of work, which was import-export, he had been a fixture in various expat communities during a certain era.

In Bali, said Chip, and Peru, and Japan, and Indochina under the French.

“He moved in our circles, you see,” said Chip warmly, and sipped his tea.

She remembered the phrase he had written. Much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.

“I found an old letter you wrote him,” she said, and fumbled to pull it from her purse and pass it across.

“Ah,” said Chip. He reached for his glasses, thick black-framed bifocals perched on an end table on top of a large-print book. He put them on and reached for the letter shakily.

“And I was wondering,” she said, “if you knew where he got so many trophies. I mean all the—I’m his heir, and the house is full of these—”

“The club,” said Chip. “Oh yes. Old Buddy ran the club.”

“He did?”

“He loved the hunt,” and Chip nodded. “He did. He loved the hunt. He liked the ponies, too.”

Then he was saying something about a horse race and a particular horse—the Belmont Stakes, he said, when it was won by the son of Man O’ War—did she know Man O’ War? Did she know Secretariat? The hats worn by the women, in times long past, he mused. The lack of hats in horse-racing nowadays—sometimes he went to Santa Anita, he said, or Del Mar or Hollywood Park to wager on the horse races and he was dismayed by the casual dress. In former times the ladies had worn hats.

“What club?” she asked.

“He started the club in that house, you see,” he said. “It moved, later—into the desert somewhere . . . published his own record books, even back then. The members’ books . . . trophy records, you know.”

“I haven’t seen those,” she said.

“All the big-game trophies. The trophies, owners’ names, the year they were taken . . . skin length.”

“There are so many,” she said. “There are hundreds.”

“Now, Teddy Roosevelt,” said Chip dreamily, “took down twelve thousand on his African safari. Of course some of those specimens were insects. Not all big game, you see. Big game alone, I think there were only five hundred. Had your rhinos, your elephants . . . my father knew Roosevelt. Called him T.R.”

“He knew him personally?”

The old man nodded absently.

“Buddy started the competitions. Started them and ran them, ran them for years. Who could have the most kills, you know. One of every kind of deer. Every bear. You won them all, you’d have to take maybe three hundred all by yourself . . . used to give them to the Smithsonian. Like T.R. Needed their help later to bring in the rare ones. After they passed the laws . . . back when I used to go over there, wasn’t any of that. At the beginning, the soirees were nothing much. No girls, you see. The ladies weren’t much interested in that. But later they came. Yes they did. The wives, the girlfriends. When he gave out the awards, and so forth. He would throw these . . .”

He started to cough and shook his head.

“Here you go,” said the nurse, and handed him water and pills.

“I went for the parties, mostly,” he said, after he’d swallowed the pills and taken a sip. “A bachelor back then, you see. I didn’t go so often after I married.”

“My uncle was always single. Wasn’t he?”

“Never found the right special lady.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any old pictures? Pictures of him? My family, we weren’t close. And I haven’t been able to find anything in the house.”

He got up with difficulty, leaning hard on her arm, and made his way slowly to a bookshelf. She gazed around the room: shelves with framed pictures on them, a philodendron, tourist posters of Greece and Hong Kong, an old map. Finally he pulled out a thick ochre-colored album but it seemed too heavy for him, balancing on the edge of the shelf, half out and half in, as he stood helplessly with a feeble hand on the spine. She rose quickly before he could drop it.

“Oh here, let me . . . thanks, thank you so much,” she said, and sat down with it.

“Might be one of Buddy near the beginning. Long time ago, you know. My wife marked everything.”

The photographs were elaborately annotated in a spidery, awkward hand, words standing on the gluey ridges of the paper. She sat with the scrapbook open on her knees as he puttered over to a cabinet in the corner, which had an old turntable on top, likely of seventies vintage: fake wood-grain on the sides of the platform. It took him some time to remove a record from its sleeve, so long that she considered offering to help but then reconsidered in case it might give offense. Instead she paged through the heavy leaves looking for her uncle’s name. They were all black-and-white at the beginning, then sepia-toned; there were color Polaroids throughout the 1960s.

It seemed the wife had even gone back and archived Chip’s photos from before they met, since one caption, under a black-and-white of Chip and a young blonde in evening dress, read Chip and his girlfriend Lettie “Lulabelle” Mae, May 1953.

Finally she hit paydirt with a caption that read Chip with, l–r, Arnie Sayles, Lou Redmond, Frank Davis-Mendez and Albert “Bud” Halveston. Spring Banquet, 1959. It was a row of middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Her uncle, at the end, was thin and angular with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a wave of shining hair standing up over his forehead.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember him like that. She had been thirteen years old; she would have known him then.

Still nothing but the croquet and the player piano.

Chip’s record was opera—a mournful aria. When he sat down again he was less lucid, rambling about the ancient festivities as she paged through his album. Once there had been famous people, he said. Bud was well known for lavish cocktail parties, catered dinners, fancy-dress balls . . . he remembered women with tall feather headdresses, feathers and sparkling beads, the fund-raising events for charity, the hunting expos and sportsmen’s banquets. The Reagans were there once, and Henry Kissinger. Zsa Zsa Gabor one time when she was between husbands. Ice statues in the swimming pool.

“Charity,” said Susan, clutching at straws. “So what were his charities?”

“Oh the club, freedom to hunt, like that,” and he flapped a hand wearily. A moment ago he had been eager but suddenly he was tired. She wondered if she should call the nurse.

The opera played behind them, suddenly more subdued.

“I’m trying to figure out what he would have wanted,” she went on. “What his wishes would have been, for the house and the collection. My instructions, more or less. I don’t know who he was, is my problem.”

“Of course his pet project was the legacy,” said Chip, nodding.

“The legacy?”

He bent forward, coughing, and the nurse was back beside them with another glass of water.

“So what was the legacy?” asked Susan, when he had calmed down again.

“The legacy,” he said.

She saw the letter, on the coffee table in front of him, was half soaked in water. It was no good anymore, she thought, and felt a curious sadness.

The old letter was gone.

“I’m sorry, the—?”

“That actress, what was her name, she had—oh, who was it—I heard that Buddy showed it to her . . .”

“Time for your doctor visit,” interrupted the nurse. “We have a checkup downstairs.” She was pushing a wheelchair.

“May I walk with you, then?” asked Susan.

The nurse held one of his elbows as he rose, steering him to the chair. His other hand pointed waveringly at the record player, so Susan went over and lifted the needle, trying for delicacy. In the silence after the ffft she could hear the whine of a car alarm cycling outside but the apartment itself seemed airless and sealed.

“You were saying,” she urged gently, walking beside the nurse over the carpet. The wheelchair squeaked slightly under Chip’s weight.

“Saying?” he asked.

“What was the legacy?”

“Wasn’t allowed to go in. Not in the inner circle anymore. Bitsy was very softhearted, you see, she didn’t like the hunting and so forth . . . that was where all his fortune went . . .”

“Where, though?”

No use.

The apartment door closed behind them and they were on the catwalk now, the car alarm shrieking louder and nearer. She had to squeeze in beside them due to the narrow passage. He looked up at her and smiled broadly and she thought, with a lift of hope, that he would say something oracular. He pointed past her and she turned and looked: a small plane passing over the ocean, pulling a yellow aerial banner. But there was nothing on it, or if there was the words were facing out to sea.




Later she half wished she’d asked for the picture of her uncle or even slipped it surreptitiously out of the scrapbook—what were the chances Chip would ever have noticed it missing? Instead of a constant reference point she had a new ghost image of her great-uncle Buddy that moved along beside her: a thin man in a white dinner jacket with Brylcreem stiffening his hair.

It was better than nothing.

To resolve the guilt she tried to be frank with herself. She was a murderer when she got up, a murderer when she walked, a murderer whenever she was moving. It was only during the quiet times that she tried not to think of the new title. With momentum behind her she could embrace her status: a murderer without a prison sentence, without a trial or a defense attorney, a secret and sure-footed murderer ranging beyond the confines of the penal colony. But when she was trying to get to sleep it was more difficult to reconcile. Doubts intruded. At first, before she knew she was a murderer, they had been doubts about her innocence. Now that those doubts were answered with the certainty of her guilt she thought she should be sure of everything. She should be past equivocation and bargains, now that she had embraced the murdering. Yet tensions still arose. It wasn’t enough, in the dark, to know your own sin. It wasn’t enough to admit it. There was still the silence that followed the admission.

When she felt restless in the night she got up from her bed, pulled on a fleece sweater and went down the hall, touching a switch to bring on the dim lights of the sconces. She went to the carnivore rooms usually; she found their open mouths in the dim light, their dark maws studded with the white teeth, and rubbed the points of canines with a finger. She slung her arms around the musty fur of their necks. There was something she should be learning from them, but she didn’t know what. The hawk was no more to blame than the rabbit, right? She’d done her own killing in the passage of daily life, not because she wished to inflict pain. The cats and the wolves only did it for food: they looked cruel but they weren’t, she told herself. By contrast she looked innocuous and that was equally deceptive. She’d been greedy, she’d been selfish: maybe greed was her sin, or the variant of it that was lust. She was irreligious but sin was a neat description: lust, gluttony, avarice and pride. In the end all of the sins seemed the same to her, softer and harder forms of the same murder.

Once she accepted her own judgment, there was also the question of whether more sinning would make for still more murder. If she kept being a slut, would someone die again? It was foolish to think so, but after all, she thought, she was a fool. If any sin was murder, she might have to start behaving.




They did their best to ignore Christmas. Casey went to a movie in a mall somewhere, maybe the Westside Pavilion—with a guy, Susan assumed, though it was left unsaid. Jim the lawyer had gone to Tahoe to be with his wife’s relatives and everyone else she knew was occupied celebrating, so Susan rented a couple of videos and picked up Indian food.

On New Year’s she made a resolution to be different, though she was still unsure. She had murdered once, so she would always be guilty. But that didn’t mean she had to be a serial killer.

She decided to tell Jim.

“So listen,” she said, in bed.

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, we’re not breaking up.”

She propped herself up on an elbow, curious.

He’d grown on her. At first she’d thought he was average, and then, slipping sideways somehow, the fact arrived that she almost loved him. At any rate she liked him far too much. She saw him only once every few days, but she’d come to depend on it—the pleasant welcome of his face. She wondered in passing if it was all about his skin and its sweet smell: his skin that reminded her of Hal’s, smooth and flawless.

He lay on his back now, eyes closed. Curiously at ease. There was a crescent scar near one eyebrow, a shallow nick.

“And how is that your call, Jim?”

He shrugged lightly, his shoulders barely moving.

“We’re not, is all.”

Despite herself she was impressed.

“What if I said I don’t like you?”

“But you do.”

“What if I said it was—I mean, better late than never—the fact that you’re married?”

“I’d say that fact was none of your business.”

She turned and lay on her back beside him, gazing at the rings of light on the ceiling. One, two, three, the yellow circles intersecting with their invisible overlaps like a Venn diagram, the lamps on the nightstands, the floor lamp in the corner. They were on the ground floor for a change, in the small guest bedroom with the green Tiffany lamps. There were waterfowl around them. The waterfowl were an exception to her usual rule against sex with stuffed animals watching. The ducks, the geese, the pink flamingo on its single leg bothered no one. They had beady little eyes but clearly no interest in looking.

“Of course it’s my business. Motherf*cker.”

“Come on, sweetie,” said Jim, and touched her briefly on the side of her leg with fingertips, not moving his arm. She liked how he expended no energy unless forced to. Male lions were like that, according to her uncle’s old encyclopedia. They slept all day in the sun and let the females do the hunting. “Let’s not argue.”

“I want to be better,” she said after a while.

“You’re good enough for me,” said Jim, and turned his head slightly to rest his face against her shoulder.

“Obviously you set the bar low.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said quietly.

“There’s a third party,” she said. “My new plan is not to be selfish.”

“That part is my life. Let me worry.”

A car passed somewhere outside, light glancing. Of course it was his life, but if she let herself off this easy her resolution was meaningless.

“I don’t want those boundaries,” she said abruptly, and sat up. Her robe was puddled on the floor beside the bed—she was still damp from the shower beforehand, she realized—and she leaned down to get it. “You don’t want to tell me, fine. It’s your business, I agree. But then I get to say if you stay or go.”

She stood and threw the robe over her shoulders. She felt glad of its lightness, its shine in the lamplight. She could make a smooth exit.

But also her slippers were somewhere lost in the dark of the floor. In the big house she almost never went barefoot. Sharp things were lodged in the elaborate tilework of the hallways, old, permanent dirt blackened the soles of her feet even after the women came to clean. She widened her eyes, tried to look harder. There, on the mirror lake with the long yellow reeds like Easter-basket stuffing, a flip-flop lay between a duck’s feet, the other tumbled beside it.

He mumbled something. She couldn’t quite hear and turned back to him as she pulled the robe’s belt tight.

“Sorry?”

“No love,” he said.

“No love?”

“She doesn’t love me.”

His eyes were still closed. She saw his chest in the light, hairless and lightly muscled. She’d even come to like his stomach, even its small roll. In the quiet she thought of asking him if he was sure, if he was just saying that, if he was rationalizing. But something in the tone of his voice stopped her.

“No love at all. Not for years. Really, I promise you. She doesn’t give a shit.”

“Then why are you still together?”

“Susan,” he said slowly, almost growling, and this pleased her. She remembered Fantasy Baseball and the way he’d said Susie, and how she had disliked him for it. She almost shivered. “Let’s not.”

She considered for a few moments and lay down.

•

In the morning she woke up and found he was still there, for once. He seemed unworried by the novelty of the infraction. He got up and shuffled around the kitchen in a T-shirt, boxers and his unlaced dress shoes without socks.

“Those shoes look ridiculous,” she said fondly.

“Next time I’ll bring the slippers and pipe,” he said, but didn’t glance up at her. He was breaking eggs for an omelet.

They shared it on a single plate, sitting on either side of a wrought-iron table at the end of the pool. Above them were the branches of a weeping willow. Then they smoked two of his cigarettes and drank their black coffee. Their faces were in the willow’s shade, and she shivered and felt good.

He was consulting his watch—it was a weekday morning and he had to go to work—when T. came around the corner from the front of the house, followed by Casey.

Jim looked sidelong at Susan, squinting and crossing his legs. She had only the robe on, the robe and her flips, though her hair was brushed and she was clean. He was less so, half-dressed, his hair mussed, the boxers a dead giveaway. The situation was clear.

She watched Casey’s face as it neared.

“How awkward,” she said.

Best to be brutally frank. Her daughter was.

“Chill out,” said Casey mildly.

“Sorry for the intrusion,” put in T. “I wanted to see the place.”

She looked from Casey’s face to T.’s as they came toward her alongside the pool. They were relaxed.

“I made him drive over here, actually,” said Casey. “So you should blame me.”

Susan recognized her own position, hers and Jim the lawyer’s, and at the same time she knew the position of Casey and T. It was the same, she was surprised to realize. She had thought so before, she recalled, but had never known.

She felt relief brimming in her. Relief.

“I called,” said Casey, “but no one picked up.”

She and Susan looked at each other, both of them in their chairs. Susan felt a beam between them, a generous current. Casey was happy, she realized, and this made her lighter in her bones, made her happier, she felt, than she had been for so long. Neither of them had been this happy before, at least not since the accident. Her daughter’s happiness was her own. She had forgotten it for a while.

Even if Casey was hurt by this in the end, she had to think next—and rapidly she was squeezed at the heart, narrowly constricted and wrenched by fear, then just as rapidly loosened—still it was better this way. Open again, after these years.

As she gazed at her girl in the wheelchair a cloud moved and the sun fell on Casey’s pale face, backlit her hair golden. In a trick of thought her daughter seemed young, eternal, all ages of herself that passed in wonder before her mother’s eyes—when she played outside in the sun often, her hair turned lighter blond. Now once again it might look as it used to when she was a little girl, a little girl in a blue swimsuit on the beach with her parents. Susan was almost back there, years ago sitting on a dune, almost sitting on the sand with Hal beside her as Casey ran up to them from the water, stopped and shivered, hands clasped in front of her, grains of sand on her skin. Then she was off again, down to the waves, shivering and running as they watched her go, wet braids on her shoulders. How children shivered—with passion, without reserve. They shivered with their whole bodies.

She loved them for it, the freedom of that shiver.

The scene retreated. She wondered idly if Jim would get up in front of Casey and T. and walk around in his boxers, whether the button fly was undone and gaped open.

“If it’s no trouble,” said T., “Casey can show me around.”

“It’s no trouble,” said Susan, and smiled at him.

She and Jim sat and watched them go around the house to the back, voices fading.

“If you want,” said Jim, and cleared his throat, “I could come over for dinner.”

She was confused for a second. A breeze lifted the branches around them and she thought Hal was here—not gone, then gone, still gone, gone still. Old, dead leaves from last fall were also stirred, moving along the pool’s deck. She felt so grateful: the turbulence of currents—the best of weather, the best of earth, a small whirlwind. Green branches wavered and jumped in the gusts over her shoulders and at her feet their leaf litter swirled and dove like swallows.

The air was warm. She was so lucky to exist.

And Hal, Hal would have done anything to see their baby happy like this again. He had, she thought, he had done anything—was he a saint after all? He had returned to earth. A sacrifice was made, the son came home, and now their daughter was happy.

She rose on a wave of love and grief—he had accomplished it, at the greatest possible cost. He had brought it all here, given it all to Casey.

Nonsense—sentimentality. Nothing but circumstance. Accident, manslaughter, or coincidence.

But for a fleeting second she thought she felt him in the marrow of her bones, the small hairs lifting on the backs of her arms before the tingle and the chill dissolved.

Molecules, molecules and atoms, sweet tiny points of being.

It was Jim across from her, inches beyond the table edge, and yet it could so easily not be.