Magnificence (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

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

“Let’s get out of here,” said Casey.

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

“Anywhere,” said Casey, shaking her head.

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

Or was it not sad? Not sad at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wanted to cry but her eyes were dry.

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

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

But here it was. The car was beside them.

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

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

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

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

Robert answered, groggy.

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

“But you don’t smoke, Susie.”

“I do at times like this.”

“Like what?”

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

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

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

“Times of mourning,” she said.

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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