Lydia Millet - Magnificence

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.

Everything 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 THE 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 ARROWand VAN HEUSENhanging 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 .

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.