Magnificence (8 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She took a deep breath. Murderer, murderer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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