Magnificence (14 page)

Sal’s head jerked up. He blinked at her blearily.

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought you were . . .”

“I gotta have the music,” he said.

“When you’re—?”

“To sleep, man.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t sleep without music,” and he took the Walkman back and placed it on his thigh again.

“I apologize, then,” she said.

He grunted, pressed
PLAY
and crossed his arms, leaning back.

Down on the couch, Casey moved her head restlessly.

“Good night,” whispered Susan in Sal’s direction. She was turning to leave when she saw the two from the garden approaching—the girl ahead, Addison stumbling behind.

“He needs to crash,” whispered the girl, and then: “I would—go home, but all of them . . .”

“You came together,” whispered Susan.

The girl nodded. “In a van.”

“It’s always hardest for the sober ones,” said Susan, as though she knew.

Behind the girl—possibly headed for the corner recliner—Addison tripped abruptly and fell sideways onto the platform that held the rearing lion. He turned and grabbed at it as he fell and the hind paws came up off the platform, ripping off their bolts, so that he and the lion fell together, in a clinch.

“Oh my God,” said the girl.

“Oh no,” said Susan.

Sal’s head jerked up again.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Addison lay on the shag rug loosely holding the beast, whose front paws stretched above his head.

“Passed out,” said the girl, after a second.

“I think you’re right,” said Susan.

“No shit,” said Sal, and shook his head.

“I’m sorry about the lion,” said the girl.

“Me too,” said Susan, and gazed down at the lion’s ripped feet. She bent to look closer: the four gray pads of the toes, a yellow-white fur around them, another soft pad further back. It was torn open now with a bolt sticking out to reveal part of the white-plastic mold inside. Their pose, she thought, was like two animals on a shield or flag in one of the old man’s heraldry books. Some flags pictured lions and unicorns facing each other, standing on their hind legs, or griffins and dragons. Two animals poised to pummel each other. Lying inert, Addison pummeled a lion.

“Why don’t you come with me,” she said to the girl. Sal was already nodding off. “There’s another room on this floor you can sleep in. More comfortable than here.”

They left Addison where he had fallen, tangled with the great cat, a high-pitched beat leaking out of Sal’s headphones.

“T
hey’re going to claim he had delusions,” said Casey in the morning.

She was in the bathroom with Susan, who stood up from the sink, her face dripping, and reached for the hand towel, her eyes squeezed shut.

“What?”

“Yeah. They’ve got a lawyer. They’re going to say the will isn’t valid.”

“You’re kidding.”

“But Jim says that they’re full of it.”

“Jim knows?”

“Yeah, he was standing there when they told me.”

Susan dried her face and walked out, looking for him. He was in bed still. She pulled the curtains open and flooded them both with whiteness, bleaching the flamingo.

“You didn’t think I’d want to know?”

He groaned and rolled onto his back, feet splayed under the sheet, arms wide.

“Listen. I don’t think you really need to worry.”

“Don’t need to worry? They’re trying to take this all away from me!”

“The standard for legal capacity is low,” he said, and raised himself onto his elbows, rubbing his eyes wearily.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Jim. What are you telling me?”

“They’d have to prove that he was delusional under 6100, and there’s no evidence of that. Or under Section 811, they’d have to have evidence he couldn’t reason logically. Or recognize familiar objects or people. Or have any memory. They’re not objecting to the trust. The trust is irrelevant to them. And that’s a benefit to you, because with trusts the legal capacity standard is higher. There’s no presumption of undue influence here, either. So chances are slim they’ll prevail.”

“Slim?”

“Very slim, Susan.”

She was silent for a second, biding her time. Then she realized the legalese was oddly erotic. His competence. His knowledge of the probate code. She wanted to get back into bed.

The door was open, though, and outside in the corridor was Casey, sitting impatiently in her chair beneath a woody canopy of fallow-deer antlers.

“You’re not just saying that?” she asked him finally.

“I’m telling you. It’s a long shot at best. It’s frivolous, in my view.”

“Do I have to—then should I do anything?”

“Try to relax.”

Now that the cousins’ decision was made, she saw, it was possible. The lawsuit was actually a relief; she could behave exactly as she wished. No more need to try to impress them, no need to fail so miserably.

She was smiling at the lawyer from the white-lit dust. Motes were adrift in the beam, and floated horizontally.

6

I
f you lived in a very beautiful house your life became the house, and like the house the life could acquire a quality of completion. It was something about order, she thought, order and its sufficiency. Before now, she had never seen how the mood of her life was defined by the spaces where she existed. Other people knew this—on one end of the spectrum architects and interior designers, on the other the guys who lived in appliance boxes in alleys—but it had never been so obvious to her.

When she left the house, three days a week on Mondays through Wednesdays, to drive to the office and do T.’s paperwork, she walked out the side door onto the driveway in a familiar path straight across the gravel. She parked the car in the same position every afternoon and so the path to it was always the same in the morning—behind her, as she emerged from the house, thick English ivy and Virginia creeper climbing the mansion wall, lilac bushes on either side of what had once been a service entrance.

To her left as she went out the door was the pool enclosure: the sounds of the fountain, a bird dipping over the water, a flicker at the edge of her eye. To her right was the driveway as it stretched out toward the wide front gate, the straight line of it with a branch curving off to the right, as you moved to the street, to round the front of the house in a semicircle. From where she stood it was mostly a line between grassy expanses, a simple gravel line in the grass. Beyond it rose the hedge that screened her from her neighbors; this was the closest point of contact with the other properties—the towering oleander that guarded them, rising easily eighteen feet, already thick with gaudy pink and red blooms.

Once she pulled through the gate—which was fixed now and glided open before her—and the lush gardens and shady trees were behind her, the gray buzz of the city replaced the oasis. There was the confusion of crowding, sometimes of ugliness: the concrete of overpasses and buildings, air thick with pollution, black and yellow digital signs with words unfurling constantly, velocity and noise, the haphazardness of garbage, the pall of commerce and everyday filth. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, exhaust fumes, the possibility of bad drivers, hostile passersby, sudden accidents, contagious illness, but more overwhelming still than these variables was the slightness and insecurity of her position in space—she could be anywhere, once she was out of the house.

She understood agoraphobics. As soon as she left the perfection of home her location, if not exactly arbitrary, was constantly and sometimes impulsively changing. Her being was subject to the many conditions of wherever she was, the trivial details of her momentary needs; outside the house the sequence of events was chaotic, could not express a clean design. This situation, she realized, was tolerated by most of the five billion people on earth. But more and more she had no idea how they did it—this normal state of mutability and flux, which she had always presumed and often preferred, was not only displeasing but almost unacceptable.

In her old life she’d gone out looking to make things happen because home was a resting place between these happenings; now home was more like a temple, inviting a routine of poise and deliberation. She could move peacefully between the walls as though she walked a neat path in history, as though her time and place were not the product of chance at all but of an ancient arrangement. She lived in the soft footprint of a ceremony. And the longer she lived there, the rarer were the thoughts of the knife. The winces as she expected the blade, awaiting the invisible cut, receded noticeably whereas out in the city she was anyone again. Anyone, to whom anything could happen; anyone, which she had once embraced.

Not anymore.

•

With students from the Art Center—art students whose names she’d found on a bulletin board—she began reorganizing the mounts. Before she had them rehung and restaged she had to encode a new system, and for that she went to a reference librarian who helped her order museum floor plans. She studied the organizing schemes.

There was geography, there was taxonomy, and there was the collection itself, the variety of animals she had and the spaces she needed to house them. She made her own plan according to those needs.

The main part of the ground floor would be given over to North American mammals, each order with its own section. The deer, the bison, the sheep and goats and pronghorns would occupy the
great room
, as she thought of it now, where previously foxes and wild dogs had slunk along the sideboards. The library would hold the big carnivores—the bears and the cats, the wolves and foxes—while the smaller meat-eaters, the weasels and raccoons, would spill over into a drawing room off the front hall. Rodents would live in the music room, rabbits and hares in the ballroom. Bats
fit into an alcove once meant for a telephone and a lone armadillo fit into a display case in the hall, where once a forest of antlers had interrupted the air. She made a reptile room out of the old breakfast nook to house tortoises, alligators and snakes; birds of prey now had the rec room to themselves—the rec room where the lion had stood before it was rudely felled by Addison. Owls perched there, hawks, falcons, eagles and a lone vulture.

She knew the second floor should follow the same principle, but she loved the dioramas. Also the foreign collections were small, with the exception of Africa—Africa, land of safaris, was a horn of plenty, and when the African cats migrated from the ground floor, the gazelles and the zebras along with them, it was clear that the horned beasts room could never fit them all. So she took herself out of it and reinstalled the buffalo and the wildebeest. Two of the art students were mural painters so the wide hallway, too, turned into Africa: out the walls of her former bedroom flowed the grasses and the great lonely flat-topped savannah trees, curling to the right and left as they emerged from the doorway. Long yellow grasses grew up from the hallway floor as they grew in horned beasts, and then, along the hall, ceded the way to wetter and greener terrain as the plain became a jungle. And on the Rainforest walls the art hangers put up a small colobus monkey, an antelope, a spiny lizard, and a gray parrot.

The birds seemed to demonstrate a lack of interest in her personal business, so she put her bed in Birds of the World, which once had been Russia. She had the squat, dun-colored horse and shaggy yak moved, and in the former Soviet Union students painted over Lenin and sketched the lines of treetops in a light sky, arching branches and tree hollows. She watched as the lines were filled in and dimensions came out. On a wooden platform a whooper swan raised its wings; against the wall that faced her bed stood a peacock with its shimmering tail open.

But in the other bedrooms the collections stayed where they were, in their quaint geographic compartments. She told herself that even the Natural History Museum in New York, even the British Museum in London, whose floor plans she had photocopied, displayed a less than symmetrical arrangement.

When the project was finished the house had a globe-like aspect in its sectioning off, its variety of scenes, its separation by palette. It was multicolored like a globe, and also like a globe it represented reality only partly, with the failure of all maps but also the same neatness, the same quiet satisfaction. The Himalayas and the Arctic were cold rooms, light-blue and gray-white; the tropics were emerald green, with the bright splashes of toucans and macaws, the savannahs yellow and gold, and in two of the rooms there were sunsets, pink and mauve.

She had loved austere institutions, as a child—old churches, universities, art galleries, museums. She’d cherished the high ceilings, the deep walls, the wide doorways. Now she thought she had also liked what she hadn’t recognized back then: an air of permanence and contentment, the happy captivity of precious things.

J
im the lawyer had an attitude of indulgence when it came to her interest in preservation. It was the kind of indulgence you would rarely find in a spouse, she thought—the benevolence of a third party with little stake in the matter, someone whose agreement was not required and therefore not contentious.

It wasn’t only the taxidermy; there were trees in the garden that were historic, which the state declared it was illegal to cut down. She learned the names of all these trees and tried to find out about them, and then the trees gave her an idea for the house, for how to keep it the way it was. It had never been put up for historic status but it could be, it might well qualify if she pursued that course . . . and she decided she would, in case the cousins won their suit, in case the place passed out of her hands. She’d try for state landmark status, Criterion 3:
Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region or method of construction or represents the work of a master
. She’d need to hire an architect to evaluate the place—she thought it would qualify as an example of California Mediterranean, like Pasadena City Hall—but first she needed the records.

So on a Thursday morning she drove down to the permit center to pull the old building plans. She filled in forms, waited in lines, paid fees for duplication and processing, and at the end of a dreary morning was handed some rolled-up plans. On her way across the parking lot she unrolled one of them: an architect’s drawings of additions to the main building made in 1928—outbuildings, a shed near the pool. There was a greenhouse, she saw, which sadly had since vanished. Sitting in her car with the curls of paper spilling off her lap, she found, to her annoyance, that there were no plans of the original construction in all of it. There was a drawing of a garage renovation done in 1950, a 1954 repair of the dome, and an old schematic she didn’t pretend to understand. But there was no drawing of the building in its entirety.

There was the name of an architecture firm on the 1928 drawings, though, a firm that had been absorbed by another one and moved from Pasadena to Westwood. She made an appointment to consult with an architect there.

C
oming into the office one morning—the new, small office in Culver City to which T. had downsized—she found a message on the answering machine.

They’d gone away for a while, said T.’s calm voice. While they were gone, it would mean a lot if she could look in on Angela every so often.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said aloud in the empty, airless room. It was still full of unopened white boxes of files, stacked into crooked towers that stood around awkwardly. The venetian blinds were angled open slightly so that, standing beside the desk, her finger on the rewind button, she registered the dark masses of cars flicking past.

She wished Casey had told her.

The message didn’t say where they’d gone or when they planned to come back. T. had left a few jotted instructions about the business on a legal pad, but that was it.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered.

The only people she saw for the rest of the day were a FedEx man, a guy selling copiers, and, when she went out to move her car around midday, a woman walking a dog.

•

Still, a few days later she did as they’d asked. She set it up so that Jim could come with her—made a late reservation for dinner on Abbot Kinney and scheduled the visit to Angela between that reservation and an early date at a bar. The trip would seem less dutiful then; they could stroll over from the bar half-drunk, in the moist sea air of early evening, and be garrulous the way drinks let you be. Angela wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t know the difference.

She met them at the door in what appeared to be a kimono, orange and satiny with stylized white birds. They stepped over the threshold shaking hands and smiling. Behind the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, setting crackers onto a tray, Susan saw the live-in helper, formerly of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose name she always forgot.

“Vera,” said the woman, without being asked.

“Of course, of course,” said Susan to Vera, apologetic. “Hello. Susan. And this is Jim. He also works with T.”

“A criminal, like my son,” said Angela smoothly. She turned to a small wine rack with flourishes of grape leaves and began looking at bottles distractedly.