Magnificence (7 page)

After a while she realized she had the wrong rock. The fake rock was beside it, hollow. Underneath was a set of keys.

Once she’d pushed one side of the gate open and driven through, the car bumping and shaking over the cobbles, she could peer around at her leisure: a wide lawn with long, leaf-littered grass. There was a fountain off to the left and on her right a pool enclosure. The house, straight ahead, was sprawling and off-white and was surmounted by a green dome, probably oxidized copper. She saw archways over a slate terrace, white metal tables and chairs and parasols with scalloped edges that fluttered. The key stuck at first in the front door, which was intricately carved—some kind of nature scene with odd flat-topped trees—but finally the door opened. No alarm.

Inside it was dim, streaks of light through a window somewhere, and smelled of mothballs. She slid her hand along the wall, feeling for a light switch. Instead it hit something strange—both smooth and furry, bulbous. She snatched her hand away, heartbeat quickened, and tried another wall as her eyes adjusted. She stood in an entryway painted deep red, deer gathered on the walls. Their antlers protruded, their glass eyes stared.

The murderer inherited a house full of deer. My deer, my deer. The universe showed off its symbolic perfection; the atoms bragged.

“Jesus,” she said.

She moved forward. The next room was spacious, opened up to the dome above. A weak daylight filtered down and she could make out a wide staircase that circled up into a bristling dimness and still more deer heads, mounted on walls, sideboards, above doorways. Maybe not all deer, she thought: some were delicate and unfamiliar, striped or with elaborate curling horns—antelope or gazelle, maybe. There was a huge bull moose.

The ceilings were high and vaulted. Beneath the dead herds the place was startling in its elegance, though oddly decorated: purple curtains grayed by age and dust, crystal sconces on the walls, thick swoops of gold brocade—a magician’s stage, a goth bordello. She pulled the curtains open as she passed them, turned on lights and moved past the staircase, into a living room with more animals still. Here there were cats. Cheetahs or leopards maybe, she didn’t know the difference—not tigers, anyway. More than just heads, there were whole bodies posed leaping, posed stalking, streamlined with huge, round eyes and fur that seemed less their own than the coats of the rich black ovals on one, black rings with golden centers on another, the trappings of starlets. She looked closely into a face—the golden eyes, the fangs—then turned away.

The cats were captured forever in the seventies: stone fireplace, sunken lounge area, shag carpet and an L-shaped leather couch. Over the sofa was a lion rampant: its great mane flaring, it reared up, held its front paws in the air as if ready to box. It was either foolish or majestic. She gazed, trying to decide, but her eyes watered as she gazed.
The murderer’s eyes watered.

It was the dust, no doubt. They said dust was composed of human epidermal cells, but in this house it was the dust of Africa, she thought. The dust of the flesh of the veldt, the aged, slowly dispersing brawn of the Serengeti.

In a cavernous dining room with dark ceilings, wild dogs and foxes lurked. Here some of the animals had labels, ranging from finely etched brass plaques to a kind of dark-red tape with raised white letters on it that she remembered from the seventies. She leaned in close to read them: a timber wolf in a cabinet with sliding glass doors, an American mink on a sideboard. The teeth were sharp. She hadn’t known minks had such sharp teeth. She kept on into the hallway with a shiver, where she found birds at her shoulders. Birds of prey—hawks, owls, eagles. An owl perched on a branch, an eagle spread its wings over a nest of twigs, a nest full of speckled eggs. A hallway led into a smaller room, a guest bedroom possibly or servant’s quarters, with Tiffany floor lamps shedding a green and yellow light. It was still birds, but they were not so fierce.

She felt slightly relieved: she’d run the gauntlet.

In the small bedroom there was a pink bird that must be a flamingo, standing with one leg lifted gracefully on a mirrored pool. She leaned down to touch the reeds—reeds of glassy plastic, glorified Easter-basket stuffing. Ducks, geese, pheasants. She barely noticed the furnishings, so abundant was the stuffed game. The specimens were labeled now: a line of small plump birds, a mother followed by three tiny stuffed chicks, bore a shiny plaque beneath that read
COMMON QUAIL
,
OLD
WORLD
. She leaned in close to it and wondered if the chicks were real. How could you shoot something so small and put it together again?

Past the bird rooms she came into a large study, ceiling-high bookshelves all around but no ladder in sight. It had the other hallmarks of an old-fashioned library—wainscoting, reading lights with beaded strings to pull, end tables that gleamed with a cherry warmth beneath their patina of dust. An antique brown globe on a stand, crossed sabers over the mantelpiece. She was displeased to see she was back among animals with sharp teeth and claws. Bears protruded from the walls between shelves, fangs bared, black and brown bears of varying sizes. One stood upright and ferocious in the corner, beside a coat stand. Its head was huge and marked on the plaque were the words
KODIAK
,
ALASKA
.

She knew it was irrational but still she felt nervous, alone in the house with the predators. Their glass eyes followed her.

But that would be easy enough to set right, she thought, looking for the nearest door—she would escape the eyes by stepping outside, get out of the dark wood and fustiness and old fur and take a free, full breath. She would have the stuffed animals cleared out as soon as she could, hire some movers to get rid of them. Not wishing to insult her uncle’s memory, though, she couldn’t throw them in the garbage, she’d have to donate them somewhere—a third-string natural history museum, maybe, or a moth-eaten roadside attraction. She would redecorate the place from top to bottom. It would be an ambitious project, a difficult task—a task so large in scope that it could occupy her for as long as she wished it to.

Finally she found a door that led outside through a small utility room, in which she blundered around until she found the lightbulb cord. Daylight shone at the end but there were obstacles crowding in: she made her way around the handles of vacuum cleaners and mops in buckets, toolboxes and stands for sewing machines, piles of yellow ripple-edged phone books on metal shelves, a roll of chicken wire that snagged on her skirt. At last she stood in a shaft of natural light from a frosted window. Beneath it was a rusty bolt, which she struggled with till it slid open, her fingertips sore. When she stepped outside there were cobwebs on her face. A dot-sized red spider skittered up her arm. She brushed it off and blew the strands from her eyes.

The backyard was nothing like the front. It was overgrown in places, drying in others but still gorgeous, a sumptuous dereliction. There were ponds, filmed over and stagnant, shrubs with flowers, shrubs browning at the base. There were mounds of reedy grass, birdhouses, delicate hummingbird feeders of blown glass. There were trees of all kinds, tall conifers towering, and paths wended back into the undergrowth, half covered by leaves and pine needles. She felt she could barely walk without ruining her shoes but went out anyway, pushed along over the muddy litter on the paths till she was coolly shaded.

One of the ponds, outlined in smooth, rounded river rocks, was partly covered in lily pads and a scum of green algae so light it was almost luminescent. She thought she saw something move beneath the dark surface and stopped, holding her breath. A slow bubble burst on the water.

There was a fragrance in the garden, not just the smell of decay but also the pines, or spruce, or whatever they were, in the sun, and flowers—jasmine possibly, she thought, sweet and rich. At her elbow were the leaves of a huge rhododendron. She found a fruitless avocado tree, which she recognized because she’d had one in her backyard as a child. There was an orange tree, a lemon. She wondered how far back the garden went, kept walking even when the paths seemed to trail off through the bushy undergrowth. It look several minutes to reach the very back: a wall taller than she was, a pebbled wall. At the wall she turned back and gazed at where she’d come from. Her path wound through trees, between bushes, beneath limbs. The house was only visible in pieces through the complexities of green, its creamy white ramparts. But it stretched far to the right and the left; it did not seem to end.

True, it was not the ocean. She had planned for the ocean, when she considered a new home. The ocean was what she had foreseen. She had always been drawn to the sea, to the symbol of it more than what you could see—she thought of the untold depths, the deep blue mystery. But then, from the beach itself, the ocean could be flat and unknowable. The beach itself was mundane, compared to this—the beaches of L.A., at least, with the throwback hippies of Venice, the crowds of sweating tourists, bimbos rollerblading in headphones and bikinis.

Here it was lush, there was a hidden splendor. To the ones that had it, anyway: minutes ago she had been on the other side of the line, now she was here. A minute ago she might have hated who she was now. This sumptuous luxury.

The real selfishness, she thought, the only real selfishness was wealth like this. The commandeering of places, their fencing in, the building of palaces there—arches, gardens. No other selfishness mattered. All other selfishness was petty, as tiny as blown dust.

Her heart was beating fast, her cheeks were hot though she shivered when a breeze passed through the branches. She disbelieved it, then she couldn’t help herself. She was filled with elation.

3

S
usan 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.

E
verything 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
T
HE
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
.