Lydia Millet - Magnificence

I love it, love it, love it. Mmm-hmm. I love it and I love all self-expressions, ironic and otherwise, all of them under the sun. I love pornography, gangsta rap, war video games, all fantasies of violence. These fantasies preoccupy the insane men and keep them from their actual work of angrily murdering. Let us not condemn these proliferating, vibrant simulations, these models of brutality. No, let us praise them as though they were condoms. Maybe that explained Terry Gross and her rap appreciation. Maybe the gangsta rap was viewed, by Terry Gross, less as an incitement to gangsta-type acting out than as an artistic, prophylactic screen against it. Maybe the rap Terry Gross and the Planned Parenthood Terry Gross were actually one and the same.

I am a nice person, Susan thought steadily. No one will take my house from me. She was a murderer, sure, like the angry men who did not listen to enough rap music — perhaps this was her own problem also, perhaps she needed a larger dose of rap — but not of the angry variety; she was a polite murderer, the white kind, white-skinned and white-collar. Although, come to think of it, she had liked an Ice Cube song Sal forced them all to listen to after the dinner at Casey’s apartment, the night before Hal flew off. Hal had been sleeping then, passed out, and Sal played for them an album titled Death Certificate .

In fact the song had been hilarious. Her favorite part was a line concerning oral sex, where the slutty daughter ate nuts voraciously, not unlike, said Ice Cube, hummingbirds. It could be ascribed to poetic license, she thought, but let’s face it: Ice Cube lacked a solid education on the subject of bird diets. He was funny anyway, whether because of the curious nut-eating hummingbirds, undiscovered in the annals of nature, or despite them. It was hard to say. The natural history of hummingbirds was not the point. The point was that they rhymed with cummingbird .

Too late. The probate court judge would either rule without her or not; it was out of her hands now. It always had been, of course. But still she should have left the house earlier, prepared for something like this. . up ahead they might be carting a dead person away. Oh, poor, dead people. No more rap music for you. No more of Terry Gross either.

Hal had liked Terry Gross, but had not liked, as far as she knew, rap music, except for the kind sometimes referred to as old-school , from the seventies or maybe the early eighties, say “White Lines” or “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. He had liked those very much when they first came out and he and Susan were younger, but the nineties brand of rap he’d had less patience with. He might have been surprised at this new Terry Gross version, this new rap-music-loving Terry Gross.

No ambulances had passed her on the shoulder, she realized — where were they all, the sirens and the lights? Maybe they’d passed this way before she came onto the entrance ramp herself. . the man had seemed sure of what he said, sure it was a pileup. She opened the door and got out, stood beside her car and squinted ahead, searching for even the faintest sign of movement. But there was a gradual curve in the road and she couldn’t see past it.

You didn’t know what was happening out of view; you never did. You lived your life in a small part of the world, with only the faintest inkling of what was everywhere else.

To celebrate she thought she would sleep in. She would lie in bed and yawn and not get up for a long time. She had won, she had won, she had won.

When Jim called and told her she was gleeful; then she felt sheepish and somehow frustrated in the effusive moment of rejoicing by herself. Tonight they’d go out, eat at a restaurant for once — maybe have sushi or Korean barbecue, something they didn’t get at home. And then they could stay up late and drive up into the Hollywood Hills and look down at the great sea of lights. She’d always liked it up there, the strange, huge agave plants with their ten-foot-high stalks that grew along the ridgelines and far beneath the millions of stars that signaled homes, rolling in waves all the way out to the Pacific.

Later, when they got home in the small hours, they could sleep as long as they wanted to, sleep till the sun rose high enough to fall across her face and she woke up and cast off the too-heavy covers. Then she would feel the light and warmth and think of the long gardens of the mad, dead kings of France.

It was a thought of luxury but the luxury wasn’t what made her happy. The luxury was an afterthought — embarrassing, ridiculous, and also now familiar. No, it was the safety of what could never be replaced, the house and the collection. It was the fact that the law said, now — on behalf of the house and the animals and the gardens and even on her behalf — the law expressly stated: No one could plunder them.

Then the doorbell rang and as she hurried down the wide hall to answer it she passed the church ladies, who were sitting in the rec room and playing cards — gin rummy was the usual. The oldest lady, the white-haired trembler named Ellen Humboldt, seemed always to be here these days. She stayed over three nights a week, whenever her son went out of town for work and couldn’t be on call — stayed in Susan’s house as an alternative to a rest home, apparently. The son was a commercial pilot. Angela seemed to have formed an instant attachment to Ellen, and Ellen to her. They walked everywhere together with a painstaking slowness, calling each other “Ellie” and “Angie” and holding each other fast by the arm.

“Susan!” called Angela from the card table. “We need to talk about elevators.”

She shook her head in disbelief; yet she was almost giddy enough to say yes. Hell, they should just put beds in the music room or something, make more bedrooms on the ground floor for the benefit of the old people. She’d seen four of them at the rummy table, Angela, Ellen, Portia — as always, regal and in command — and the slight woman in gray like a shade, trying not to be noticed. Susan was always forgetting the gray woman’s name but never forgot the name of her little dog: Macho. The elderly terrier came with her every time and so it was in the house at least three days a week, a curly black thing with bad breath and red bows on its head. It attended the Christian book club meetings, held on Thursdays, and liked to lie in the inside scoop of the three-legged dog’s body — the three-legged dog, which was far younger than the old, small one, curled around it protectively.

There were two sweaty-looking men outside the front door, and behind them, through the closed gate, a yellow machine. The pedestrian gate had been left open, she saw.

“Here about the digging,” said one of them. “Backhoe. A Mrs. Friedrich.”

“Friedrich?” she asked, blankly.

“Portia Friedrich,” said Portia, at her elbow. “I am she. The challenge will be getting it in without tearing up the vegetation. I ordered the smallest unit possible, of course, but still: that’s going to be difficult.”

Susan hung back as one of the men drove his backhoe in the gate, up the driveway, and through the garden, weaving slowly between trees and fishponds. Portia walked backward in front of him directing his steering; she wore a flowing robe with wide-open sleeves that made her look like a pudgy Merlin. When Susan tried to step in she was waved back impatiently, till finally the backhoe stopped, wedged between a rhododendron bush and a weeping willow.

“Great,” said Susan, shaking her head. “Great.”

“This was the only way,” said Portia sharply. “Over there you hit the pond with the little cherrywood Japanese bridge. There’s a steep grade on the other side, and the third option is over your lovely bed of angel’s-trumpet. I’m sure you don’t want that.”