Lydia Millet - Magnificence

“Yeah. Yeah,” said Casey distractedly. “No. It is. Plus T. wants to go to Borneo.”

“Borneo?”

“Saving-the-rainforest deal.”

“Huh. He’s hell-bent for leather on the nature stuff, isn’t he.”

“What can I say. He’s always been a workaholic.”

After they hung up Susan wandered out the back door, over to where a technician stood beside a pond with a small bridge arching above it. He was young, freckled and sported a crew cut. Once she might have seen him as a prospect.

“You don’t happen to know anyone who could tear up a piece of concrete for me, do you?” she asked. “Who has a jackhammer or something?”

“I could find out for you,” he said. “Sure. How big of a job is it?”

“It’s pretty small,” she said.

“So what’s in it for me?”

She looked at him for a few seconds. He looked at her and smiled slowly.

“You want a finder’s fee?” she asked finally.

It wasn’t what he meant, clearly.

“Nah,” he said. “I was just kidding. I’ll get you a number.”

But he seemed disappointed, as though he’d expected otherwise. She must be giving off a trace amount of desire, though she was not, in fact, currently a slut.

•

The taxidermists were busy. It surprised her: there seemed to be a booming business in animal stuffing in Southern California. West Virginia or Texas she might have expected, but not here. Her repair jobs were often accepted but then put on lengthy waiting lists; sometimes the taxidermists turned her down outright. One came to the house to look at the collection and tell her what maintenance it needed, but he was a hobbyist, not a professional. Lacking experience, she decided to entrust her charges only to the practitioners whose livelihoods depended on their skills.

On her computer, which was finally unpacked after the move, she kept an electronic log of the mounts she sent out, when and where, with estimated completion dates. Meerkat , read the spreadsheet. African Taxidermy, (818) 752-9254. Out 2/5/95. ETA 4/15/95. Oryx head, Dan’s Taxidermy & Tanning, (510) 490-9012. Out 2/7/95. ETA 6/1/95. Once, making an entry, she thought of something the aging diplomat had said — something about a record, a log book the old man had kept, a list of which skins were taken, when, where, the hunters’ names. It occurred to her that the names in such a logbook could be helpful — one of the hunters, if any were still alive, might know what the legacy was that Chip had mentioned, might be more lucid than he’d been. It was possible the old man had wanted some of the better-quality mounts to be sent to a museum or something, and the possibility nagged at her so she called Chip’s resting home to ask him about it.

“Mr. Sumter’s room, please,” she told the receptionist.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” said the woman, after a pause.

She should have called sooner, should have been more grateful. A small thank-you note after she left.

She poured herself a cup of tea and cut a slice of lemon. The single apartment with its beige carpet, glass wind chimes catching a cold light. Even a butterfly could be ugly in the form of a wind chime. . the chimes would have been his wife’s, likely. Two posters of foreign cities — what had they been? It was already faded. Maybe Venice or Rome. Hanging from the ceiling, a spider plant with brown tips. An opera playing. It was the one with a clown on the front, she had noticed as she left: the opera about clowns. You didn’t have to know anything about opera to recognize it. There was a famous scene from that opera in a gangster movie: the tough Italian mobster was deeply moved by the plight of a clown who was crying inside. Robert De Niro as Al Capone, one moment weeping at the tragic beauty, the next bashing heads in. He stove in a man’s cranium with a baseball bat in that particular movie, if she remembered right — a baseball bat at the dinner table. Not much subtlety there.

A caterwauling song by the heartbroken clown hero. It rose to a crescendo: Ree-dee, pah-lee-ah-cho . . It was a caricature of opera, which was already a caricature of tragedy. Men’s tragic qualities were closely connected to their cluelessness; the tragic men suffered from a lack of self-awareness. Once you painted their faces in tawdry clown makeup and forced them to sing in high registers, at that particular point, frankly, the tragedy turned into chewing gum on your shoe.

She tried to recall the details of what Chip had said. He had called it a trophy book, she thought — maybe a trophy log or a trophy record, words to that effect. But in the library she would never find such a record book, even if it was stowed somewhere, because as usual she felt overwhelmed as soon as she went in. The books weren’t catalogued and there had to be thousands. She would need to hire someone if she wanted to get them in order — either that or go through them herself and in the process get rid of those she didn’t have a use for: the many shelves on heraldry, for instance. Maybe she could get a library science student to help her. She already had landscapers, art students, architects, taxidermists; she had a small army. Her friends these days were paid for their service.

Except Jim.

“So,” he said, the next time he was over. He had the Sunday paper and was reading the real estate classifieds. Rentals section. “The divorce will come through sometime this spring. Not long. There aren’t any disputes.”

“You’re moving out soon, right?” she asked.

“Next few weeks.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Still looking,” he said, and shrugged. “Silver Lake, maybe. Echo Park. Los Feliz. Say, little Craftsman bungalow.”

“You gonna do the whole running-every-day thing? Getting fit after the breakup? Diet? Sit-ups? Lifting weights and trying to feel young again?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and turned the newspaper page.

“Maybe I should go jogging with you. We could buy matching tracksuits. A his-and-hers type thing.”

She couldn’t help but think of the many rooms of her house, without inhabitants. But there was still Hal to consider.

•

The jackhammer man showed up only after she’d left several phone messages for him saying to come anytime, she was usually home, etc. She’d finally given up because he never answered the calls himself, and when he did call back he left messages that told her nothing. Then he was at the front door, a yellow unit of some kind pulled up behind his truck and parked in her driveway. She led him into the back and down the stone path into the trees and showed him the small slab.

“You want me to haul out the pieces?” he asked, cigarette dangling as he took a packet of earplugs out of a pocket.

“That’d be great,” she said. “Yes.”

“Not sure I can stretch the cord all the way to the compressor from here, where my truck is parked now. May have to drive onto your grass a bit.”

“OK. Try not to run over the flowers, though.”

“OK then.”

She left him unspooling an orange cord, thick as her wrist. A few minutes later one of her broken mounts was delivered and she forgot about the jackhammer as she stood in the entry hall and opened its crate with a crowbar. She wasn’t handy with tools, had only bought a kit when she realized they always sent the animals back to her in a mass of Styrofoam peanuts, packed deep inside wooden boxes that were solidly built and sturdily nailed. Leaning back and straining, she popped a nail out too suddenly and it hit her on the cheek and stung; then she snagged her shirt on a splintery board-end, tore a rent in the fabric and swore.

It was one of her favorites among the crocodilians: a small alligator in a swamp setting, dark-brown acrylic mud wrinkling around its clawed feet, a dozen white eggs in a twiggy nest behind it. Its green eyes, gone cloudy over the years as though with cataracts, had been replaced with clear new ones. The squat feet had polished-looking claws instead of the ragged toe ends that had preceded them; discolored patches on the leathery hide had been touched up. She was pleased. The whole assemblage was remarkably light — she could carry it herself.