Lydia Millet - Magnificence

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“I’m not sure what to do with the house yet. I admit. But I will do something.”

“Do something?” said Steven, and drained his beer. “Like what?”

“You know there are parrots that live wild in the neighborhood?” she asked brightly. “Whole flocks of wild parrots!”

•

When she was ushering him toward the front door, two beers later, he stopped to pick through a box of odds and ends on a tabletop — she had it ready to go out to Goodwill — and lifted an old keychain. A dusty bronze ornament dangled.

“Oh yeah,” he mused. “Shit yeah. You know about this?”

“About what?”

“Some club. It’s the logo of that old club he was so into. You don’t remember? Only thing I remember from when I was over here as a kid. Those fuckers were already ancient. They used to hang around the place with walkers and oxygen tanks.”

She held it up to the light: gold and red, with a lion. There had once been words, but they were too worn to read.

“Drive safe,” she said, as he got into his car. “And I really appreciate you respecting the spirit of the will. Going easy on me. It means a lot, Steve.”

Maybe her self-effacing tone would ring in his ears when he thought about litigation. She crossed her fingers behind her back like a schoolgirl and hoped hard, into the bare air, that he would not return — that he and his son Tommy, of high principle, would leave well enough alone.

He backed up in a spurt of pebbles and rolled out the gate; she watched through the holes in the hedge as his car flashed away. She clutched the medallion.

•

Later she stood out on the poolside terrace drinking wine with Jim the lawyer and listening to the fountain at the end of the pool, where water flowed over jumping marble porpoises. He came over once or twice a week in the early evening, when his wife worked late or had made other plans. There were no children.

“Look at me. Already I’m jealously guarding my property,” she said. “As though I earned it or something.”

“You don’t want your asshole cousin coming in and trashing the place,” said Jim. “It’s hardly irrational.”

“Because it’s mine ,” she said, shaking her head. “My personal Club Med.”

“Club Med is pathetic,” said Jim.

“You know what I mean.”

“What I think is, you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you twice in your life. This house is the first good thing that’s happened to you in a long time. Naturally you want to keep it. You’re human.”

“But you’re not,” she said, turning to press herself on him, holding her wineglass out to the side. “You’re a lawyer.”

“Your best bet is just to play defense. Wait and see. See if he bothers to make a claim.”

She looked up at his face, its gray, heavy-lidded eyes. He never seemed to open them as far as he could. His lassitude was calming.

Reading in bed, she put down her book and reached for the old letter from Hanoi. She held the yellow paper carefully and reread the looping, faded script: The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. It bore an embossment at the top, Charles Adams Sumter III. She flipped the papers over: his signature said Chip .

Chip had known the old man, she thought. The old man had known him. Long dead, no doubt.

A plane crossed the sky, blinking, and she lay back on the pillow. But then she woke up and it was early morning. She remembered the plane as though it should still be there; she had the sense that only a second had passed. It was so early the outside was still almost silent, and through her wide window she saw the yellow streaks of dawn. She reached out for her telephone. 411.

She said his name and the operator asked for an address.

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“Three listings in the metro area,” said the operator briskly, and rattled them off as Susan reached for a pen.

At the first number a woman answered, groggy, and mumbled something in Spanish. She sounded young. Susan apologized for waking her but didn’t regret it. The second number was out of service, and the third was an answering machine that seemed to belong to a young family.

She went downstairs to forage for breakfast but a stubbornness nudged at her so that midway through her bowl of cereal she got up and left the cornflakes soaking to call Information again. This time she asked for more listings, listings for the whole state. She had no evidence he was here, if he was even living, but it was her only lead. There were eight numbers in all, not too many, and she sat with her coffee at the kitchen table, the list in front of her, and dialed methodically. One man had an English accent, which gave her hope at first — maybe because it imbued him fleetingly with age or stature. But he hung up when she asked more. The next number gave her a voicemail with a generic message, so she left her own. The third rang for some time until she heard a distant voice at the other end: the name of a business, and she was disappointed. Then the words came again. Sunset Villas .

“Are you — I’m sorry. What are you?”

“We’re a residential community. For seniors.”

She stretched out the coils of the phone cord on a finger, then released.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Sumter. A Mr. Charles Sumter.”

There was the buzz of static, then nothing. She’d been cut off. But no — a click and someone else picked up.

“Switchboard. Mr. Sumter is away from his room,” said a second voice.

She asked if he went by Chip, but the woman didn’t know. She asked how old he was, and the woman didn’t know that either. It was an 805 area code, Santa Barbara.

•

The villas were condos that overlooked the sea, a blocky off-white complex built around a pool. It was a gray day, with a cold wind whipping down the coast, and the concrete paths that led between the buildings were mostly deserted. Here and there a palm tree with dry fronds scraped and flapped or a square bed of bright geraniums was laid flat by the wind. There were no signs on the paths so it was hard to know where the lobby might be. After a while she came up behind a woman with a walker, who was proceeding slowly enough to be caught easily. The woman pointed.

Stepping through the automatic doors into the reception area, with its turquoise carpet and framed posters of old musicals, she was surprised; it seemed low-rent for oceanside real estate. To her right was a wall that blared OKLAHOMA!and CATS, and to her left was a glass wall into a small cardio room, where elderly figures looked haggard but determined on StairMasters and treadmills. Their legs pumped doggedly beneath them and they were looking straight forward, looking right at her. She had to turn away quickly lest one of them suddenly collapse.

The woman at the desk gave her a photocopied floor plan of the kind they handed out at motels, with an apartment number circled, and then she was up a long ramp to the second floor, along a catwalk and at the room, ringing the doorbell. A nurse opened the door, a nurse in a baby-blue dress and sneakers, or maybe she was a cleaning person. Susan followed her down a white-walled hallway, their footfalls noiseless on the off-white carpet.

Chip sat on a floral couch in front of a large window. He was a dark form with the light behind him, but she could tell he was very old and thin, with white hair. He wore an argyle sweater. He must be in his nineties. Wind chimes hung behind him in multitudes: glass butterflies, aluminum pipes, hummingbirds dangling beneath bells.