Magnificence A Novel

7


She wanted to show she was happy about the wedding news. And for the most part she was, or she would be when she assimilated the information—she felt a kind of rising anticipation on Casey’s behalf—but there was also petty confusion. Her pride was injured as much as her feelings. She would have been grateful for anything—the most nominal warning, the most casual tip of a hat.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know,” said Casey.

They’d gone to get a bottle of white wine from the kitchen. Susan didn’t keep champagne in the house, so it would have to serve.

“But Angela did,” she said, rummaging in a drawer for a corkscrew and trying to contain the seed of resentment. No whining; keep it pure and simple, be remembered well.

“Oh yeah?” asked Casey. Give her credit: it sounded like real surprise.

“She told me you were on your honeymoon,” said Susan.

“Huh. Not exactly,” said Casey. “In the first place, I only went along for the ride. At the last minute. I wasn’t planning to. It was Baja—the Sea of Cortez. A whale stranding.”

“A whale stranding?” asked Susan, looking up from the wine.

“A mass stranding. There were over twenty of them. Beaked whales, which is a kind that dives deep, I guess? They look like dolphins to me, they have those kind of long noses. Anyway the biologists inspected some of the dead ones and said they had these hemorrhages around the ears. They think navy sonar caused them. You know, the navy does this sonar in the ocean? It’s for detecting diesel submarines, or something. So anyway the whale guys think the sound waves hurt whale brains. They get confused or they’re in pain and it disorients them and then they beach themselves. They lie there baking in the sun and dying. It’s one of the worst things I’ve seen. You wouldn’t believe the smell.”

“So what did you do?” asked Susan.

“We helped get some of them back in the water. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Answer: I sat on my crippled ass behind a folding table and handed out bottled water to the volunteers. Tame shit like that.”

“But it’s good,” said Susan softly. “I’m glad you did.”

“T.’s idea, he got on some kind of emergency phone tree for marine mammal rescue. He’s on a bunch of lists now. Your basic Good Samaritan shit. Some of it’s just giving out money. Like with the foundation. He just paid a bunch of poachers in Africa to stop shooting rhinos. They sell the horns to make into, like, fake Chinese aphrodisiacs. Now they’re getting a salary for guarding the rhinos instead of killing them. Who knew?”

“That sounds like a great idea,” said Susan drily.

“But with the whales I kinda got into it,” said Casey. “It was a life-or-death thing. It had—I don’t know. It wasn’t nothing.”

“You take the wine, OK? I’ll take the glasses,” said Susan, and handed down the bottle. She put five goblets on a tray and they started out of the kitchen, toward the patio. “So where did, you know, the getting-married part come in?”

“Spur-of-the-moment,” said Casey behind her. “That was his idea too.”

“You going to have a reception? At least a big party?”

“F*ck if I know,” said Casey happily. “Haven’t thought about it. He’s moving in, though. He likes my place better than his.”

“I like it better too.”

“He does things,” said Casey. “You know. I miss how walking on sand used to feel. I was telling him that, after the whale thing was over. We were on our way out of town, we’d driven down to the shore to look at it one more time. So he picked me up and carried me down to the waterline and put me down and he got down there with me. And then we kind of crab-walked. We walked on our elbows. There were waves, you know, and I can’t go fast on my elbows, I’m not built in the shoulders like Sal or someone. Anyway, I’m not going to say it was some romantic shit, because actually it ended up sucking. I mean after three minutes I was soaking and shivering, I had these scratches on my knees from dragging them, because there were pebbles in the sand too, shit, there were probably syringes, what the hell would I know. And then the finer sand, for like days after that, was killing me. It got way down in my goddamn ears and I couldn’t get it out of there. I was afraid it would do some damage, if you want to know the truth. To the ear drums or whatever. Then I’d be crippled and deaf. So finally I had to go to a Mexican doctor, on our way back up here, in some shitty border town crossing into Arizona where the doctors make most of their salaries selling Ritalin prescriptions to American turistas. For snorting, not for the hyperactive kids. I had to go to one of those guys and get my ear canals irrigated. It was actually disgusting.”

They passed through the French doors, saw the other three talking and laughing at the poolside table.

“The guy tried to sell me a scrip for Ritalin just as an extra bonus. After he squirted six gallons of warm water into my ears.”

“Sounds like T. showed you a really good time,” said Susan.

“His heart was in the right place, though,” said Casey.

As they drew near the table Jim glanced up, smiling. T. was smoothing a lock of his mother’s hair behind her ear.

Family, thought Susan. She was surprised.




“Don’t look now,” said Jim, a couple of days later. They were on the tennis court, whose clay surface was far too cracked for serious players. Luckily they were not serious. They had two old wooden racquets from a closet in the rec room and a bag of dull gray balls with hardly any bounce.

“Don’t look where now,” said Susan, walking up to the net.

“Outside the gate there’s a guy with a camera, taking snapshots of us,” said Jim, and bent down to pocket a ball.

She turned to look.

“Well shit. What did I just say,” said Jim, shaking his head. But he didn’t seem upset.

“Who is it? The cousins?”

Jim shook his head. “Doubt it. They have no incentive to document us.”

“But then—who would?”

“I think maybe my wife,” said Jim. “Apologies.”

Susan had been reaching down for her water bottle, at the end of the net, but stopped and glanced up.

“Your wife?”

“Someone who’s working for her, anyway. They’re gathering ammunition.”

“Ammunition?”

“For the divorce.”

She lifted the bottle to her lips and gazed at him steadily as she drank.

“I had no idea,” she said, after she wiped drops off her lips.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Can’t she—you mean for alimony, or something?”

“Ha. No. There was a prenup. She’s wealthy, her family made me sign it. Evidence of infidelity means I won’t get anything.”

“Oh,” said Susan. They stood opposite each other, wooden racquets in hand, with only the net between them. The top of the net was cracked, like the court, its white hem barely holding together across the top of the sagging green mesh.

“Sorry for the invasion of privacy,” he said, and gazed down at his shoes. They were Converse; Hal had owned a pair.

“I don’t care,” she said. “But are you—I mean we could call the cops or something, couldn’t we? That’s actually my property there, where he’s standing. I think he might be trespassing.”

Jim shook his head and shrugged. “I always knew it would happen. She’s been waiting me out. Waiting for me to do this. For years. So now she’s free to get rid of me. Even before, any settlement would have been minuscule. Fine with me. But she likes to win completely. She didn’t want me to see a penny.”

“So why did you—I mean, why did you stay? If you weren’t in it for the money . . .”

“Why do you think,” said Jim. “Let’s hit the ball, OK?”

He backed up.

“You love her,” said Susan, nearly under her breath. “You love her even though she doesn’t love you.”

He stood and tossed a ball, waiting for her to move into position.

“I can’t help it,” he said finally, as she walked to the service line.

The ball came early, while she was still turning toward him to receive. It bounced and hit the fence.




Vera was not coming back; a sick relative needed her in New Jersey. Angela was upset by the news and sequestered herself in her bedroom.

“She won’t eat anything but candy,” reported Casey over the telephone. “She refuses to have anyone else come and stay. Except for T. or me, but we can’t go there every night. She drinks water from her bathroom tap, out of the toothbrush cup. She eats these little bags of red licorice. She had them left over from giving out to the kids at Halloween and she took them in there with her and now she won’t eat anything else. If you try to give her real food she lets it sit there and rot.”

“Maybe,” ventured Susan, “maybe it’s time to consider—?”

“Not happening. We’re not putting her in an institution. First of all, she would hate it. And T. doesn’t like the idea much either.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Susan. “Taking care of her is kind of a full-time occupation.”

She was looking out the window at the backyard, where the guys who serviced the koi ponds were dipping tubes into the water to test it.

“Yeah. Yeah,” said Casey distractedly. “No. It is. Plus T. wants to go to Borneo.”

“Borneo?”

“Saving-the-rainforest deal.”

“Huh. He’s hell-bent for leather on the nature stuff, isn’t he.”

“What can I say. He’s always been a workaholic.”

After they hung up Susan wandered out the back door, over to where a technician stood beside a pond with a small bridge arching above it. He was young, freckled and sported a crew cut. Once she might have seen him as a prospect.

“You don’t happen to know anyone who could tear up a piece of concrete for me, do you?” she asked. “Who has a jackhammer or something?”

“I could find out for you,” he said. “Sure. How big of a job is it?”

“It’s pretty small,” she said.

“So what’s in it for me?”

She looked at him for a few seconds. He looked at her and smiled slowly.

“You want a finder’s fee?” she asked finally.

It wasn’t what he meant, clearly.

“Nah,” he said. “I was just kidding. I’ll get you a number.”

But he seemed disappointed, as though he’d expected otherwise. She must be giving off a trace amount of desire, though she was not, in fact, currently a slut.

•

The taxidermists were busy. It surprised her: there seemed to be a booming business in animal stuffing in Southern California. West Virginia or Texas she might have expected, but not here. Her repair jobs were often accepted but then put on lengthy waiting lists; sometimes the taxidermists turned her down outright. One came to the house to look at the collection and tell her what maintenance it needed, but he was a hobbyist, not a professional. Lacking experience, she decided to entrust her charges only to the practitioners whose livelihoods depended on their skills.

On her computer, which was finally unpacked after the move, she kept an electronic log of the mounts she sent out, when and where, with estimated completion dates. Meerkat, read the spreadsheet. African Taxidermy, (818) 752-9254. Out 2/5/95. ETA 4/15/95. Oryx head, Dan’s Taxidermy & Tanning, (510) 490-9012. Out 2/7/95. ETA 6/1/95. Once, making an entry, she thought of something the aging diplomat had said—something about a record, a log book the old man had kept, a list of which skins were taken, when, where, the hunters’ names. It occurred to her that the names in such a logbook could be helpful—one of the hunters, if any were still alive, might know what the legacy was that Chip had mentioned, might be more lucid than he’d been. It was possible the old man had wanted some of the better-quality mounts to be sent to a museum or something, and the possibility nagged at her so she called Chip’s resting home to ask him about it.

“Mr. Sumter’s room, please,” she told the receptionist.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” said the woman, after a pause.

She should have called sooner, should have been more grateful. A small thank-you note after she left.

She poured herself a cup of tea and cut a slice of lemon. The single apartment with its beige carpet, glass wind chimes catching a cold light. Even a butterfly could be ugly in the form of a wind chime . . . the chimes would have been his wife’s, likely. Two posters of foreign cities—what had they been? It was already faded. Maybe Venice or Rome. Hanging from the ceiling, a spider plant with brown tips. An opera playing. It was the one with a clown on the front, she had noticed as she left: the opera about clowns. You didn’t have to know anything about opera to recognize it. There was a famous scene from that opera in a gangster movie: the tough Italian mobster was deeply moved by the plight of a clown who was crying inside. Robert De Niro as Al Capone, one moment weeping at the tragic beauty, the next bashing heads in. He stove in a man’s cranium with a baseball bat in that particular movie, if she remembered right—a baseball bat at the dinner table. Not much subtlety there.

A caterwauling song by the heartbroken clown hero. It rose to a crescendo: Ree-dee, pah-lee-ah-cho . . . It was a caricature of opera, which was already a caricature of tragedy. Men’s tragic qualities were closely connected to their cluelessness; the tragic men suffered from a lack of self-awareness. Once you painted their faces in tawdry clown makeup and forced them to sing in high registers, at that particular point, frankly, the tragedy turned into chewing gum on your shoe.

She tried to recall the details of what Chip had said. He had called it a trophy book, she thought—maybe a trophy log or a trophy record, words to that effect. But in the library she would never find such a record book, even if it was stowed somewhere, because as usual she felt overwhelmed as soon as she went in. The books weren’t catalogued and there had to be thousands. She would need to hire someone if she wanted to get them in order—either that or go through them herself and in the process get rid of those she didn’t have a use for: the many shelves on heraldry, for instance. Maybe she could get a library science student to help her. She already had landscapers, art students, architects, taxidermists; she had a small army. Her friends these days were paid for their service.

Except Jim.

“So,” he said, the next time he was over. He had the Sunday paper and was reading the real estate classifieds. Rentals section. “The divorce will come through sometime this spring. Not long. There aren’t any disputes.”

“You’re moving out soon, right?” she asked.

“Next few weeks.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Still looking,” he said, and shrugged. “Silver Lake, maybe. Echo Park. Los Feliz. Say, little Craftsman bungalow.”

“You gonna do the whole running-every-day thing? Getting fit after the breakup? Diet? Sit-ups? Lifting weights and trying to feel young again?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and turned the newspaper page.

“Maybe I should go jogging with you. We could buy matching tracksuits. A his-and-hers type thing.”

She couldn’t help but think of the many rooms of her house, without inhabitants. But there was still Hal to consider.

•

The jackhammer man showed up only after she’d left several phone messages for him saying to come anytime, she was usually home, etc. She’d finally given up because he never answered the calls himself, and when he did call back he left messages that told her nothing. Then he was at the front door, a yellow unit of some kind pulled up behind his truck and parked in her driveway. She led him into the back and down the stone path into the trees and showed him the small slab.

“You want me to haul out the pieces?” he asked, cigarette dangling as he took a packet of earplugs out of a pocket.

“That’d be great,” she said. “Yes.”

“Not sure I can stretch the cord all the way to the compressor from here, where my truck is parked now. May have to drive onto your grass a bit.”

“OK. Try not to run over the flowers, though.”

“OK then.”

She left him unspooling an orange cord, thick as her wrist. A few minutes later one of her broken mounts was delivered and she forgot about the jackhammer as she stood in the entry hall and opened its crate with a crowbar. She wasn’t handy with tools, had only bought a kit when she realized they always sent the animals back to her in a mass of Styrofoam peanuts, packed deep inside wooden boxes that were solidly built and sturdily nailed. Leaning back and straining, she popped a nail out too suddenly and it hit her on the cheek and stung; then she snagged her shirt on a splintery board-end, tore a rent in the fabric and swore.

It was one of her favorites among the crocodilians: a small alligator in a swamp setting, dark-brown acrylic mud wrinkling around its clawed feet, a dozen white eggs in a twiggy nest behind it. Its green eyes, gone cloudy over the years as though with cataracts, had been replaced with clear new ones. The squat feet had polished-looking claws instead of the ragged toe ends that had preceded them; discolored patches on the leathery hide had been touched up. She was pleased. The whole assemblage was remarkably light—she could carry it herself.

So she lifted it, though its bulk was awkward, and walked slowly toward the reptile room, where she put it down on the table while she unlatched its glass case and raised the lid. As she did so she thought of archosaurs, the dinosaur lineage of which only birds and crocodilia remained . . . that was the problem with organization: it was never perfect. Sometimes she wished she could have laid out the house in evolutionary terms—put the birds and crocodilians together, for instance. But then there would be the strangeness of genetics to contend with, the oddness of the fact that some animals who seemed to be nearly the same had borne almost no relation to each other over the course of history, according to the scientists, and that, conversely, some animals who looked like they had zero business together were actually close relatives.

Only as she left the reptile room did she register the far-off drone of the jackhammer, still drilling. She wondered if the slab covered an old, capped well—they must have had wells here once, she thought. Pasadena had more of its own water than Los Angeles proper, she’d once been told. Maybe she could have her own well again, in that case, ask them to drill deeper, deeper, down to where cool water flowed beneath the soil, to where it trickled through the rock, the caverns of the earth. Maybe she could make the whole house into a living kingdom then—its flora and fauna, both dead and alive, its circulatory system of ponds and rivers . . . vegetables growing, the fruit of the trees to eat . . . but no. That was a pipe dream. It was a terrarium, the house. It should not attempt to simulate nature.

There were zookeepers, in the order of things, and curators. Previously she had been neither, but now she fell into the curator category. She was not going to keep a menagerie here, she was not going to farm and live off the land, clearly. Living, even the koi were too much work for her alone. But the dead animals were enough. In any case the dead were almost as beautiful as the living, sometimes more so. They had far fewer needs.

No: this was a museum of killed animals, pure and simple. An amateur museum, yes. It was not professional. But no less beautiful for all that—maybe more beautiful, even. She welcomed the flocks of suburban parrots as they alit in the trees and she wanted to keep the koi, could even foresee adding to them—bringing in native frogs or toads, maybe, or the cocoons of butterflies, as long as they weren’t a kind that would defoliate her trees. These were mere accents, of course: the center of the house was the skins hung on their plastic bones. The center of it was the crouching, leaping, preening, the frozen poses, the watchful blind eyes; it was a house of ghost prey, ghost predators, innocent killers trapped by the less innocent.

“Mother,” said Casey.

She jumped. She’d had no idea she wasn’t alone—had been staring at nothing. Staring at a door lintel.

But there was Casey, in the hall. Clearly had just entered.

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me,” said Susan.

“Sorry,” said Casey. “You know—I have that clicker in my car now. For the gate. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, no,” said Susan. “Course, make yourself at home. You want something to drink?”

“What is that, construction?” asked Casey, and cocked her head at the jabbering noise of the drill.

“Some cement in the backyard I’m having ripped up,” said Susan.

“Ground granulated blast-furnace slag?”

They smiled at each other. Susan knelt and put her hand on Casey’s arm.

“How’s married life treating you, honey?”

“I really like it.”

“Good. Good,” said Susan. “I’m really happy, then.”

She thought she might choke up at Casey’s unaccustomed sweetness.

“Angela came out of her room,” said Casey.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Susan.

“But here’s the thing,” said Casey.

Susan’s knees were hurting so she stood up again.

“Yeah?” she asked. “Follow me to the kitchen, I’m thirsty.”

“Wait,” said Casey. “Seriously.”

Susan waited, listening.

“We’re going away.”

“The rainforest thing?” asked Susan.

“Malaysia. Malaysian Borneo.”

“Oh,” said Susan.

“And it would be a lifesaver if you could take her again. Her and the dog. Both of them.”

“Her and the dog,” repeated Susan.

“And T. says we could pay for someone else to live with you here and help her. A new Vera. So you wouldn’t have to do much in the way of like, care or whatever. Just let her stay here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we’ve got her to come out of her own room finally but she’s still shaky. And there’s nowhere else she’ll willingly go.”

Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.

“Please,” she said. “Please?”

Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.

“You got a manhole in your backyard,” he said.

“A manhole?”

“Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing’s not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, hell if I know. If you want to open the lid you’re gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. Hell. The drill won’t do any more for you than it’s already done.”

“Oh. Well. Thanks, though,” said Susan, disappointed.

“Is it like a city manhole?” asked Casey. “It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there’s some high-voltage line or shit like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?”

“No letters I could see,” said the jackhammer guy.

“I’ll call the city anyway,” said Susan. “OK. So. Thank you.”

“I still gotta load up the truck. I’ll come back in when I’m done. Be a hundred fifty,” said the guy. “Cash or check.”

When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause—Casey’s request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There’d been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone sex, of Casey and phone sex and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the association was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut—it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression. In a rut could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.

It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.

“You’re not doing that phone-sex job still, are you? Now that you’re, you know, married and all that?”

“Nah,” said Casey. “It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted.”

“So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don’t see you living off T.’s money. I don’t see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings.”

“No,” said Casey. “No. Not indefinitely.”

“So?”

“Well, shit. I’d like to have an answer for you. I’d like to for myself. But the truth is, I don’t know yet. So I’m going to give it some time. I’m going to have this honeymoon period. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. I’m free-floating. Say for a year. And then I’ll decide.”

“I see,” said Susan, nodding.

“What the hell is that,” said Casey, and gestured. “An armadillo or something?”

“A nine-banded armadillo,” said Susan, surprised. “Of course. What did you think?”

“It’s weird-looking,” said Casey. “It’s basically a freak.”

“I really wouldn’t say that,” said Susan.

She felt annoyed.

“It’s like a giant pill bug with a rat head and a long, ratty tail,” went on Casey. “You know, those bugs that roll up into a ball? Or doodlebugs, some of the kids used to call them. It’s like one of those, but bigger and uglier.”

“If you’re trying to get me to do you a favor, you shouldn’t insult the collection,” said Susan testily.

“Wow,” said Casey. “You really like the thing.”

“It’s not a question of liking,” said Susan, but she felt increasingly agitated. “And it’s not a thing. Or it wasn’t. Anyway. I’m going to the kitchen. You can come with me or not.”

Casey followed, past a lone sea turtle in a case with a some fake kelp and a couple of lobsters.

“I dig the tortoise, though,” she said, in a clear attempt to curry favor.

“It’s not a tortoise at all. It’s a green sea turtle,” said Susan.

“I was just trying to get your goat,” said Casey. “I do that to T. too. I know what a sea turtle is. I watch the nature shows.”

“Uh-huh,” said Susan.

“But he doesn’t love all animals. He’s mostly interested in the ones that are about to go extinct,” went on Casey.

“Nice,” said Susan.

“The more common they are, the less interested he is.”

They were in the kitchen now, Susan opening the freezer to get a can of lemonade concentrate.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” said Casey.

“I know, because you’re trying to get something out of me,” said Susan. “So that would be a tactical error.”

“Listen. For whatever reason, she’s comfortable with you,” said Casey. “She feels safe when you’re around. And face it, I mean, the cousins are a*sholes, no question. But it’s true this place is enormous. You probably wouldn’t have to even see her that much at all, if you didn’t want to.”

Susan turned and leaned back against the counter, the thin coat of frost on the cardboard tube melting swiftly against her fingertips.

“So because I’m single and live in a big house, all of a sudden I’m in loco parentis to your senile mother-in-law. You think I have no life of my own, right? I’m some kind of convenient middle-aged caregiver?”

“Not caregiver,” said Casey. “That’s why we’d hire someone. More of a hostess. A rich relative offering room and board.”

“Huh,” said Susan. She peeled the white ring from around the lid of the tube and dropped it into the sink.

“It makes sense,” said Casey. “You have to admit.”

“For you it does, sure,” said Susan. “Yes. It works out perfectly for you. Then there’s me. If Angela decides she doesn’t like the woman you hire, she’s my responsibility. And I’m basically up a creek. Like with that nice girl Merced. Angela ran away from her because she didn’t like her footwear. Did I tell you that already? She accused her of wearing shoes a hooker would wear. And then she showed up here in the middle of the night in a taxi that cost me like two hundred dollars. She left her wallet at home. Of course. I mean Jesus. I’m fond of T. and all, but I’m not the one who married him.”

“She won’t show up in the middle of the night, though, because she’ll already be here.”

Susan turned. She was holding up the tube, letting clumps of concentrate drop into the pitcher.

“I think you’re missing my point there, Case.”

Casey just gazed up at her, large-eyed.

“F*cking fine, then,” said Susan finally. “God damn it.”

Casey crowed with delight and threw her arms around Susan’s waist.

•

After Casey left she went out to the backyard and through the trees. The jackhammer guy had left a gray moon of dust on the trampled grass around the manhole cover. She knelt beside the lid, traces of cement still adhering to the grooves, and studied it: no words, only a diamond pattern that reminded her obscurely of pineapples and beehives. Couldn’t she just lift it up? But there was no handhold, no opening.

“Backhoe,” she said to herself.

Certainly it was a fool’s errand. Still, she would make some calls to the city.




Jim rented a U-Haul and drove his few possessions from the house he had shared with his wife in Palos Verdes, which Susan had never seen, to a small dove-gray bungalow in Silver Lake.

She went over the morning he moved in, carrying tall cups of coffee for both of them, and stood on the covered front porch with its square stucco columns. She liked the view out the uncovered wing of the porch, down to the bottom of the hill where the narrow street of cottage-like houses, about as quaint as you got in L.A., gave way to a dirty wide street of businesses and fast traffic. Rows of palms like truffula trees, with blowzy tops and spindly, bending trunks, stood out against the sky.

She liked the house, which was a finer, older version of the one she and Hal had lived in back in Santa Monica. It had more style but some of the same elements: the burnished-looking hardwood floors, the well-carved mantel over the fireplace, dark beams on the ceilings that crossed each other to make rectangle patterns against the white. She was impressed by the spareness of the rooms that contained Jim’s pared-down life, the neat stacks of folded shirts, the three small cases of law books.

•

That afternoon the new caregiver took up residence in the big house to prepare for Angela’s arrival the next day—a stout woman in her early sixties with dyed black hair and lipstick the color of traffic cones. It strayed over the edges of her lips.

Casey had decided to hire an older woman, essentially an imitation of Vera since her mother-in-law’s brief track record with young women was poor. In fact she had chosen another Eastern European lady, this one hailing not from the former Yugoslavia but from some obscure yet quite large district of the Russian Federation, one that sounded like a mouthful of half-chewed nuts. Her name was Oksana and she brought with her a tall bamboo cage, two zebra finches inside.

Angela would sleep in the bird room, which Susan regretted since it would no longer be free for Jim and her. But it was the only room on the ground floor that was set up with a bed and its own bath; Casey had said that Angela got up at night, not sleepwalking but wandering around bleary and half-asleep without the capacity to notice her surroundings. She thought the second floor would be dangerous. Oksana needed a location nearby but the best Susan could do was the drawing room full of raccoons and minks, a few doors down.

T. brought in a daybed, which they set behind a pair of the old man’s decorative screens, scenes of mallards swimming on glassy lakes with bulrushes in the foreground. Oksana hung up her cage, set up a small portable television with T.’s help, and unpacked her suitcase into the room’s narrow closet.

“We don’t know how long we’ll be,” he explained to Susan, as she surveyed the mounts.

She had to fix them in her memory. She wouldn’t be able to go into the room whenever she wanted to now and she resented it, though admittedly Oksana asked for almost nothing. The Russian even lacked her own bathroom; she’d have to walk down the hall to use the toilet or take a shower. The house was large but it wasn’t set up for assisted living.

Item 1: A coatimundi from Arizona needed repair; insects must have gotten to it recently because parts of the face looked mangy. Could be the larvae of carpet or fur beetles . . . and there was mold on it, she guessed, either mold or mildew; ask the repair people, install a dehumidifier if need be. Item 2: One of the minks was incorrect, she had learned from a reference book in the library. The teeth were not its own. Possibly they had belonged to a housecat. Replace. Also the eyes were bulging. The wadding inside had likely expanded: another humidity problem.

“So I’ve paid Oksana’s wages in advance,” he was saying. “Angela has an ample allowance. Let Oksana handle her food, her bills, all that, the same way Vera did. Here’s hoping she’s capable. I’ll take a look at the debits and credits when I get back, but you shouldn’t have to be involved at all. That sound OK to you?”

“Fine, sure,” she murmured. She wondered if Oksana would be disturbed by the flash of canines at night, if, say, a car passed outside and illuminated the crouching raccoon. It held a half-bitten slice of lurid fuchsia watermelon, made of vinyl chloride.

Then again, she’d noticed, some people didn’t notice the faces; to some, like the young architect girl, the taxidermy was nothing more than a design element, albeit a misguided one.

“Where we’re going,” he said, “there won’t always be reliable telecommunication. Casey doesn’t want you to be worried.”

“I promise,” she said after a minute. “This time I won’t send anyone to track you down.”

•

Jim was spending more nights in the big house now. While he did not seem overjoyed by the arrival of Angela and Oksana, he was not displeased either; he liked the arbitrariness of their encounters, Susan thought. He was amused by the sight of Angela wandering into the kitchen at some odd hour of late night or early morning, her hair twisted up into a peach-hued turban, matching kaftan floating out behind her as she walked and a muddy facial mask with holes around her eyes and mouth. He smiled at Susan when Angela summoned him into the bathroom to remove a stray hair from the sink. He enjoyed her sporadic remarks about the hazards of all-American dining chains like Denny’s, to which she objected strenuously. It had to do with the portion size and the dominance of fried foods, apparently. Also the fact that the menus contained large photographs of each selection and were covered with plastic.

He found her humorous, Susan thought, despite the fact that her comedic value stemmed from mental decline. He was not worried about the moral dimensions of his entertainment.

Oksana also amused him. She represented an enigma.

“What’s with the lipstick all over the place,” he said after dinner one night, when the old women had gone to bed.

He and Susan were drinking wine in the backyard, watching helicopters cross the sky and listening to a chorus of far-off sirens. Jim liked the sound.

“Does she do it on purpose? It makes her look even crazier than the other one.”

“I think it was the fashion once,” said Susan. “To kind of draw on the contours of your upper lip. To make it look like you had, you know, these Cupid’s-bow lips.”

“Cupid’s bow?”

“With two, kind of, bumps on top? Like Lucille Ball or someone.”

“She wants to look like Lucille Ball? She looks like a bag lady. Seriously. With the dyed black hair that gets gray at the roots and the day-glo lips. We have a bag lady living with us. Are you sure she’s a nurse?”

“She’s not exactly a nurse. I don’t really know what she is.”

She dropped one of her shoes on the ground and trailed her bare toes in the pond water. She wondered if the fish would come nibble at them.

“Nothing wrong with a bag lady. It’s not a criticism, per se,” said Jim. “I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, don’t ask me,” said Susan vaguely. She was feeling the water, soft and cool as her foot swept through it. “All I care about is that Angela likes her.”

“So far,” said Jim. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

•

The dog came last. Casey and T. dropped her off the day before they left. They were booked on a series of flights to get to Borneo—through Hong Kong, Taipei, and Jakarta.

“I still don’t get what you’re going across the globe to do,” said Susan to Casey, standing talking to her through the window of the parked car while T. took the dog inside.

“His deal is, poor people that need to make a living, and then these dying-off animals,” said Casey. “He wants to make it so people don’t have a good reason to do things that kill the wildlife. So what there is, over there, is some kind of jungle forestry project. Community harvest of non-timber products is what they call it. It sounds so wonky, right? He’s trying to help these local guys set it up so the people can live off this one forest without cutting it or burning it down. There’s animals living there that need the forest. This Sumatran rhino that’s practically gone. Also orangutans and pygmy elephants. He loves those little f*ckers.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We’ve got this cabin lined up,” said Casey. “It’s primitive. No indoor toilets. But you can send faxes from this town that isn’t so far away, you just give them to the driver who comes out with food deliveries. Two times a week, they said. And sometimes we’ll go into town for errands and I can call you then. So my job? I’m going to handle the paperwork, to start with.”

“Huh. No toilets?” said Susan.

“Other priorities.”

“But what if . . .”

“What if what,” said Casey.

“Health concerns,” said Susan. “The lack of pavement.”

“Oh please,” said Casey.

Susan saw her wheels caught in rainforest mud, her chair sinking into quicksand. It seemed wrong.

“All settled in,” said T., opening his car door and sliding behind the wheel. “She’s in my mother’s room right now.”

“T. How’s Casey going to get around, in Borneo?” asked Susan. “I’m serious. She has to have her independence. What about emergencies? Seriously. The jungle?”

“Listen,” said T. “We don’t want you to worry. We bought her an all-terrain wheelchair. A power chair with these big wheels. She’s been practicing on it at the beach. But more to the point, the facility where we’re staying is part of a research-station complex. It has gravel paths between the buildings. A couple are even paved. It’s not all dirt.”

“It just doesn’t seem like an appropriate setting,” said Susan after a few seconds, anxious.

“F*ck appropriate,” said Casey.

“I don’t—”

“And f*ck setting,” said Casey. “I’m not a lawn ornament.”

“Susan, you have my word,” said T. “If mobility is a problem, we’ll leave.”

“Don’t get all paternalistic just because we’re married,” said Casey. “If I want to leave I’ll say so. I have the power of speech.”

“Not what we meant,” said Susan.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. But I think you both get me.”

“OK,” said Susan. “OK. I just worry.”

“You don’t have to,” said Casey.

Susan stared down for a while and finally leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.

“Do my best, then,” she said.

She watched as the black Mercedes reversed, Casey waving out the open window, and pulled away.