Lydia Millet - Magnificence

“It’s not one of theirs,” said Jim, when he got off the phone with the city of Pasadena.

There were old women milling around them in the kitchen, wearing pastel colors and cheerfully garish prints. One blouse had numerous teddy bears, with pink and blue bows around their necks.

Angela had invited some friends over, unbeknownst to Susan, who had believed she had none. Without prior warning the house had filled with elderly ladies from a church book club.

Angela wore a delicate crucifix and went to mass now and then, when she suddenly felt the need, but her beliefs were opaque to Susan. The other churchgoers she knew were all old and most were also female; only the old attended church these days, she’d told Susan solemnly, unless you counted the poverty-stricken, ethnic, or Deep South states where, if you believed the statistics, millions were joyously awaiting the Rapture. But these were not Catholics. Angela’s church was part white and part Mexican, she said, and the whites were all old because young whites did not believe in God. Thus the book group was elderly white ladies devoted to reading Christian novels and discussing them.

There were, said Angela, some old white men in the congregation too, but if they read at all they tended to avoid fiction, which they believed was frivolous. And anyway the novels favored by the book club often had a romantic bent, even though they contained references to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, the saints, and other popular and interesting characters in the Bible. Some were historical, telling the stories of these biblical figures, while others were just about regular people now, Angela said — regular people who were godly. Usually they were also Catholic, but not always.

Angela had recently attended a meeting of the group on impulse, her first time. She quickly volunteered Susan’s house for the next meeting, then forgot she’d done so until the ladies arrived. They’d brought food with them — macaroni casseroles, triangular white-bread sandwiches, powdered diet drinks and frozen layer cakes. Curiously they had also brought stacks and stacks of paper napkins, napkins by the hundreds.

“They don’t know anything about it,” went on Jim, over the white, wavy head of a half-deaf woman sipping lemonade from a paper cup. “The guy said he never heard of that — a manhole in someone’s backyard that wasn’t authorized by the city. I got the feeling he didn’t actually believe me.”

“I should probably just leave it alone, shouldn’t I,” said Susan. “It could be part of some ancient sewage system the city doesn’t use anymore.”

Jim shrugged. The white-haired lady hovered between them, not moving or seeming to register their presence; she drank her lemonade with sucking sounds and stared with watery blue eyes into the great beyond.

“I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “You wanted to do something with that part of the yard, was that it?”

“I want to make sure there isn’t a basement,” said Susan.

“A basement? It’s a manhole. It’s hundreds of yards from the house.”

“I know.”

“Listen,” he said, and looked down again at the white wave hovering beneath his chin. “I really need to get going to the office. It’s halfway through the day already.”

“So go, so go,” she said, and smiled at him as the lady drinking lemonade kept standing there, clueless.

He loved his wife, she thought as he left the kitchen, or rather his ex-wife, now; he loved her and he always would. In this house there was unrequited love and there was love of the dead. She and Jim cherished these two streams of affection, at once different and the same: they lived inside two loves that went out and did not come back to them.

•

Casey had decided to send faxes instead of letters. Airmail from Borneo took too long, she wrote, while faxes were instant.

She had them sent to the machine in T.’s office, and Susan would come in on good mornings to find their curled pages waiting for her, thin and slick, some of them always fallen or fan-blown to the floor. The pages had no numbers, typically, only long disorderly paragraphs of Casey’s barely legible scrawl interspersed with !!! and ??? so often she had to piece them together painstakingly, the last word of one to the first word of the next, before she could begin to read.

At first the places and even the facts seemed purely fictitious.

From here in Long Banga to the clear-cuts in Gulung Mulu. .

On the way we stopped in what claims to be “Berkeley’s sister city”: Uma Bawang.

Among the Penan of Upper Baram, murder, rape, and robbery are unknown. Selfishness is considered a crime.

After a few letters she stopped grinning reflexively every time she encountered a foreign word. It wasn’t funny, of course. Indeed the current events Casey described were alarming: episodes of police brutality, conflicts between the natives and the logging companies, the wholesale liquidation of primary forests, the erosion of mountaintops and massacre of wildlife. But there was also the day-to-day, and Casey included rough, childish sketches of the local fauna, as though they might be added, by proxy, to Susan’s collection.

She started with a mount that hung in a tourist lodge near the research station, a civet cat, and then moved on to living subjects. There was a male proboscis monkey with a huge dangling nose like an ancient drunkard, beneath which she had written The big nose is thought to be attractive to females ; there was a pangolin, a distant anteater relative, with the legend Talk about freaks . The monkey had its dangling, pear-shaped nose, then also a large potbelly and beneath that a small red penis sticking out. Susan knew the color because Casey had drawn an arrow toward the offending organ and written red .

Next there were drawings of people, women with earlobes stretched all the way down to their chests, heavy earrings pulling down the impossibly long holes — six inches, seven or eight. Orang Ulu , wrote Casey. An ancient man with boar’s teeth piercing the tops of his ears: Village elder, Bungan festival in Punan Sama .

Casey rarely wrote about herself or her feelings except to mention a casual fact briefly: Our shower is a bag of water with holes in it . Or I do miss the junk food . And Sucks to do laundry once a month . Still her daughter was close there, in the unkempt script and the abrupt turns of thoughts — in some ways closer than when she was home.

Susan hoarded the faxed letters. She read them to remind herself of the realness and texture of Casey whenever she felt afraid. One foreign place was not the same as all others; Casey would not fall under a knife. She kept the pages stapled, smoothed flat, although they wanted to curl, and pressed between two big dictionaries she carried up to her bedroom from the library.

But they did not last. She was distressed to notice how quickly the ink faded.

One afternoon she got home after a half-day at the office to find Angela leading some church ladies through the second-floor rooms, pointing out both the taxidermy and the house’s architectural features.

“The building has been nominated for historic status,” she said proudly, as Susan hovered in the hallway.

There was a message from the estate lawyer in Century City, whom Jim had pushed to give her case more attention: a date had been set for the adjudication of the cousins’ will contest. She felt her stomach sink when she heard this — did that mean the case had not been dismissed, or something, as they had hoped it would? Or could it still be dismissed?