Lydia Millet - Magnificence

The opera played behind them, suddenly more subdued.

“I’m trying to figure out what he would have wanted,” she went on. “What his wishes would have been, for the house and the collection. My instructions, more or less. I don’t know who he was , is my problem.”

“Of course his pet project was the legacy,” said Chip, nodding.

“The legacy?”

He bent forward, coughing, and the nurse was back beside them with another glass of water.

“So what was the legacy?” asked Susan, when he had calmed down again.

“The legacy,” he said.

She saw the letter, on the coffee table in front of him, was half soaked in water. It was no good anymore, she thought, and felt a curious sadness.

The old letter was gone.

“I’m sorry, the—?”

“That actress, what was her name, she had — oh, who was it — I heard that Buddy showed it to her. .”

“Time for your doctor visit,” interrupted the nurse. “We have a checkup downstairs.” She was pushing a wheelchair.

“May I walk with you, then?” asked Susan.

The nurse held one of his elbows as he rose, steering him to the chair. His other hand pointed waveringly at the record player, so Susan went over and lifted the needle, trying for delicacy. In the silence after the ffft she could hear the whine of a car alarm cycling outside but the apartment itself seemed airless and sealed.

“You were saying,” she urged gently, walking beside the nurse over the carpet. The wheelchair squeaked slightly under Chip’s weight.

“Saying?” he asked.

“What was the legacy?”

“Wasn’t allowed to go in. Not in the inner circle anymore. Bitsy was very softhearted, you see, she didn’t like the hunting and so forth. . that was where all his fortune went. .”

“ Where , though?”

No use.

The apartment door closed behind them and they were on the catwalk now, the car alarm shrieking louder and nearer. She had to squeeze in beside them due to the narrow passage. He looked up at her and smiled broadly and she thought, with a lift of hope, that he would say something oracular. He pointed past her and she turned and looked: a small plane passing over the ocean, pulling a yellow aerial banner. But there was nothing on it, or if there was the words were facing out to sea.

Later she half wished she’d asked for the picture of her uncle or even slipped it surreptitiously out of the scrapbook — what were the chances Chip would ever have noticed it missing? Instead of a constant reference point she had a new ghost image of her great-uncle Buddy that moved along beside her: a thin man in a white dinner jacket with Brylcreem stiffening his hair.

It was better than nothing.

To resolve the guilt she tried to be frank with herself. She was a murderer when she got up, a murderer when she walked, a murderer whenever she was moving. It was only during the quiet times that she tried not to think of the new title. With momentum behind her she could embrace her status: a murderer without a prison sentence, without a trial or a defense attorney, a secret and sure-footed murderer ranging beyond the confines of the penal colony. But when she was trying to get to sleep it was more difficult to reconcile. Doubts intruded. At first, before she knew she was a murderer, they had been doubts about her innocence. Now that those doubts were answered with the certainty of her guilt she thought she should be sure of everything. She should be past equivocation and bargains, now that she had embraced the murdering. Yet tensions still arose. It wasn’t enough, in the dark, to know your own sin. It wasn’t enough to admit it. There was still the silence that followed the admission.

When she felt restless in the night she got up from her bed, pulled on a fleece sweater and went down the hall, touching a switch to bring on the dim lights of the sconces. She went to the carnivore rooms usually; she found their open mouths in the dim light, their dark maws studded with the white teeth, and rubbed the points of canines with a finger. She slung her arms around the musty fur of their necks. There was something she should be learning from them, but she didn’t know what. The hawk was no more to blame than the rabbit, right? She’d done her own killing in the passage of daily life, not because she wished to inflict pain. The cats and the wolves only did it for food: they looked cruel but they weren’t, she told herself. By contrast she looked innocuous and that was equally deceptive. She’d been greedy, she’d been selfish: maybe greed was her sin, or the variant of it that was lust. She was irreligious but sin was a neat description: lust, gluttony, avarice and pride. In the end all of the sins seemed the same to her, softer and harder forms of the same murder.

Once she accepted her own judgment, there was also the question of whether more sinning would make for still more murder. If she kept being a slut, would someone die again? It was foolish to think so, but after all, she thought, she was a fool. If any sin was murder, she might have to start behaving.

They did their best to ignore Christmas. Casey went to a movie in a mall somewhere, maybe the Westside Pavilion — with a guy, Susan assumed, though it was left unsaid. Jim the lawyer had gone to Tahoe to be with his wife’s relatives and everyone else she knew was occupied celebrating, so Susan rented a couple of videos and picked up Indian food.

On New Year’s she made a resolution to be different, though she was still unsure. She had murdered once, so she would always be guilty. But that didn’t mean she had to be a serial killer.

She decided to tell Jim.

“So listen,” she said, in bed.

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, we’re not breaking up.”

She propped herself up on an elbow, curious.

He’d grown on her. At first she’d thought he was average, and then, slipping sideways somehow, the fact arrived that she almost loved him. At any rate she liked him far too much. She saw him only once every few days, but she’d come to depend on it — the pleasant welcome of his face. She wondered in passing if it was all about his skin and its sweet smell: his skin that reminded her of Hal’s, smooth and flawless.

He lay on his back now, eyes closed. Curiously at ease. There was a crescent scar near one eyebrow, a shallow nick.

“And how is that your call, Jim?”

He shrugged lightly, his shoulders barely moving.

“We’re not, is all.”

Despite herself she was impressed.

“What if I said I don’t like you?”

“But you do.”

“What if I said it was — I mean, better late than never — the fact that you’re married?”

“I’d say that fact was none of your business.”

She turned and lay on her back beside him, gazing at the rings of light on the ceiling. One, two, three, the yellow circles intersecting with their invisible overlaps like a Venn diagram, the lamps on the nightstands, the floor lamp in the corner. They were on the ground floor for a change, in the small guest bedroom with the green Tiffany lamps. There were waterfowl around them. The waterfowl were an exception to her usual rule against sex with stuffed animals watching. The ducks, the geese, the pink flamingo on its single leg bothered no one. They had beady little eyes but clearly no interest in looking.

“Of course it’s my business. Motherfucker.”

“Come on, sweetie,” said Jim, and touched her briefly on the side of her leg with fingertips, not moving his arm. She liked how he expended no energy unless forced to. Male lions were like that, according to her uncle’s old encyclopedia. They slept all day in the sun and let the females do the hunting. “Let’s not argue.”