Lydia Millet - Magnificence

Then, in the dining room, she made Robert remove his clothes while she took a cigarette from the pack he’d brought in, lit it and poured herself a drink. He wore a half-wary expression and she knew exactly why: he was disgusted by the smoking, being a tan, buff, fantasy-baseball type. But not disgusted enough by the smoking to say no to the sex. He was neither shocked nor disgusted enough to say no to the cigarette-tainted sex. Rather he said yes. In fact he said yes speedily.

Most men were like that, when it came to sex. Their own desires came first, before whatever scruples, even revulsion they professed. Most women also. That was the definition of a scruple: something you consciously ignored to do whatever you wanted. Hell, what did he care. For him, no one had died.

And for herself, on this specific point — the timing of the sex — she did not feel guilt. She knew she should, likely. She felt anger, but it had no target beyond herself. As far as she went, she had ended Hal already. That black deed was done. Hal was over. Nothing could bring him back, nothing she did — no virgin purity, no nuns. Everything she did now was irrelevant, irrelevant to Hal, and though she would always be unredeemed Hal was not here to see. Hal did not care and Hal would never care again.

She closed her eyes, swaying with the drinking she’d done, and felt, uncalled-for, the edge of things, the brittle, slicing edge — the yellowing edge of old bone. . she pushed it away by bringing Robert down. They were a warm mass against the woolen throw rug, which she and Hal had bought long ago at Ikea. Blocks of warm red, brown and beige. At the time they had thought the rug was a temporary measure, but then the rug from Ikea had stayed. As it turned out, she thought while Robert went down on her, the cheap rug from Ikea had stayed with them forever.

Robert was not particularly skilled despite the pointers she’d given him over time — had a robotic technique, in fact. In any case her mind wandered. What made her pull him off her after a couple of minutes and ask him to finish was a decision that arrived inappropriately: she had to see Hal’s body. His body was in her mind, suddenly.

She had never seen a body, she didn’t come from an open-casket culture. Her family had been more or less Protestant, uptight anyway and not given to sordid spectacles, and as a result to this day she had never been to a funeral where you saw the deceased. But she needed to see Hal. She needed to touch the seam.

“Sorry, not in the mood,” she said, when Robert asked why she had stopped him.

“No kidding,” he said, and got up, sticky and dangling, to get Kleenex for her stomach. He had slight rug burns on his knees.

Most other men she’d been with wouldn’t have asked, would have realized the effort was futile from the start. A failed comfort. It was where she went, but of course it was a dismal failure. So what.

Lying on her back, she looked up at the chandelier, whose dimmer had been turned down so that the filaments of the bulbs glowed a deep, warm orange. That was, in a sense, the benefit of Robert, whose critical capacity was low. He did not examine past a point, and was therefore unobtrusive. Almost streamlined, in fact. He was not hindered by complexity. Whereas Stellan, for instance, from about four months ago, had been overly given to psychoanalysis. Sex with Stellan, who hailed from some cerebral northern land like Finland or Sweden, was an extended therapy session. Nothing could be more annoying. Still, for a while she had relished her annoyance. Stellan, whose habit it was to sit naked afterward, smoking pot and discussing the quote-unquote relationship, was like a persistent itch — aggravating, but satisfying to scratch.

Was she relieved, slut that she was? Was there something in her that was relieved by any of this? If anyone could admit to such a thing, she should be able to. She was not only a slut but a killer.

But no. She was not relieved: she was robbed and it had left her empty. Hal had been robbed and she was robbed too, robbed of him, and now she was missing something and she always would be. That was all she had now: the freedom of nothing.

Nothing.

She realized she wanted Robert to stay, wanted it with a rare desperation despite the bad-sex episode and the fantasy-baseball element. She would smoke the cigarettes he had brought and drink his booze and talk to him: she would use Robert as a sounding board. That was what she would do, talk, smoke and drink, pretend she had velocity. Robert would be her shield against slowness and the loneliness that came from it, the morbid tranquillity. She would keep him here until morning, until the sun came up and the birds were in the trees and she could take him out to breakfast. Scrambled eggs did not remind you of death. (Did they? Yellow eggs on a blue plate. A warm feeling, farms or home, the morning sun, a nook with folded cotton napkins. Unless you thought instead about the beginning of eggs and then you went from beginning to end — eggs found in an autopsy — eggs themselves in their sensuousness or sterility — once, when she was pregnant with Casey, she had found a red fleck in an egg and thrown up.)

Whatever, she didn’t have to have eggs.

Toast maybe. A waffle. A waffle could not remind you of death.

Could it?

What she didn’t want above all, she knew — watching him as he knelt down beside her with a tissue bunched in his hand to wipe the cleft of her belly button — was to lie there in the half-empty bed waiting to fall asleep. She was afraid of the certainty of those minutes, the cold night shining through the window onto the threads of her white cotton sheets.

The complex was manicured and bland, a sprawling suburb for the dead. Susan had taken a backseat and let Casey and T. handle the arrangements, so this was her first visit: for the coffin, the funeral service, the burial, all of it, Hal couldn’t have cared less and she followed his lead.

Once she’d asked him to make a will — she’d read a magazine article in a dentist’s waiting room that ridiculed people for dying intestate — and he had said absentmindedly that he would, but then he never bothered. She’d asked once if he had a preference for his body, in terms of being dead. She asked that mainly because she panicked one night about claustrophobia and beetles and wanted to tell him her own preference (cremation). But he had shrugged and said only yes, his preference would be not to be dead. On the subject of disposal he had no strong opinion; overall he was an agnostic, with a secular, institutional orientation and a general lack of interest in matters of the spirit. So-called matters of the spirit, he would have said, so-called spiritual matters.

T. had already seen his body, long before it was embalmed. He had seen it in Belize City when it lay on the ground, seen it there in the street, seen it right where he fell. When Hal failed to meet him he’d flagged down a rattletrap taxi and told the driver the name of Hal’s hotel. He had described this part to both of them, under duress, after Casey badgered him.

From the half-open window of the taxi, breathing the fumes as it sat idling in stopped traffic, he had noticed rubbernecking crowds gathered curbside. Without a clear motivation he had paid the driver and got out. The crowds had nothing to do with him, for all he knew, but still he found himself walking across the street and peering over the heads of bystanders. People were shorter there, he added.

And then he’d seen Hal on the ground, dying — already dead or maybe still dying, he never found out which. He pushed his way through and fell down on his knees beside him, soaked the kneecaps of his pants in the warm pool of blood, but Hal’s eyes were closed and he lay unmoving. T. felt no pulse, felt no breath. Finally the ambulance came.