Magnificence (16 page)

•

In the morning she waited till Vera’s replacement arrived, a pretty young Latina who walked expertly on black stiletto heels. Susan opened the door for her and right away Angela eyed her tight clothes with suspicion.

“My name is Merced,” said the woman, and smiled. “You must be Angela?”

“Mrs. Stern,” said Angela coldly.

“Of course: Mrs. Stern,” said Merced, not missing a beat.

Angela ignored the outstretched hand but Merced took that in stride too and patted her arm kindly.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Stern,” she said. “We’ll do fine. I’ll take good care of you until Vera comes home again.”

She put down her purse on the counter.

“So what happened?” asked Susan, as Angela wandered out of the room.

“It was an unfortunate situation,” said Merced. “The receptionist was a temp, because the regular girl just went on maternity leave, and then this temp, who I guess, it turns out, is bipolar?—she just all of a sudden walked out on the job. So no one got Vera’s message. And then . . .”

“Something could have happened to her,” said Susan.

“They’re extremely concerned about the error,” said Merced, and nodded earnestly. “Are you the family?”

Susan was explaining when Angela came back in and began to rearrange items nervously on end tables and shelves.

“Excuse me, Susan? May I speak to you privately?” she asked after a minute.

Susan followed her into her bedroom, where she shut the door behind them.

“I don’t
know
that woman,” said Angela. “She’s a
stranger
.”

“It won’t be for long,” said Susan. “Probably just a few days.”

“I don’t know her at all. And she doesn’t know me.”

Angela had flipped open a jewelry box on her dresser and waggled her fingers in its miniature compartments until she found a sparkly rhinestone brooch in the shape of a bow.

“It’ll be fine. She’s a professional. Just like Vera. When Vera first came you didn’t know her either, but still you got along fine. Remember? This one’s good too. She knows what she’s doing.”

“But she doesn’t know anything about me,” said Angela.

“Is there anything you’d like me to discuss with her, before I go?” asked Susan.

Angela had opened the pin on the back of the brooch and was picking at her cuticles with the sharp point, agitated. They were already torn into ragged hangnails and soon they would be bleeding.

“I tell you what,” said Susan, reaching out and taking her hand to stop her. She pried the fingers gently off the brooch pin as she spoke. “You try to get along here for the day with just the two of you. All right? Because I have an appointment. I have some men coming to the house to move some heavy furniture for me. So I have to get back to Pasadena now. But if you still don’t feel comfortable with Merced by dinnertime you can call me. And I’ll come back again. Does that sound fair?”

Angela said nothing.

“I want you to relax,” said Susan. “She’ll take good care of you. She really will.”

“She’s low-class,” said Angela, and put out her bottom lip in a sulk. “She looks like a prostitute.”

Infantile, scattered, then distant and poised—but after all it must be par for the course. If Hal had lived, if both of them had lived together into their dotage they might have been like this. They might have ended as ancient children, half-gone, fumbling, and rarely if ever themselves.

“It’s the style,” said Susan. “She’s young. They all dress like that these days.”

As though she and Angela were already the same—old biddies far past sex and fashion.

“Prostitute shoes,” said Angela.

“Look, I like her,” said Susan, thinking that maybe a more personal testimony would help. “She’s nice. Give her a chance. I think she’ll grow on you.”

After a few more minutes of wheedling she was able to steer Angela back into the kitchen and persuade her to accept a glass of iced tea. Quiet in the background, she slipped out the door while the other two were talking—fled down the walk gratefully in her slept-in clothes, her teeth gritty and unbrushed.

•

Construction workers came and moved the large pieces of furniture from the walls marked by the architect. When they had gone, dark, massive old wardrobes stood anchorless in the center of rooms.

It bothered her. The investigation had to be finished quickly or she would grow restless at the disorder. But when she called his office the architect was busy with
real work
, he said testily. He pawned her off on a junior associate who could come by in his stead.

The associate was a young recent graduate named Leigh, her hair pulled back in a tight platinum-blond ponytail, wearing the same trendy horn-rimmed glasses favored by her colleague. Susan admired her self-possession and wondered if all architects had this—a punctilious, almost rigorous and pared-down sense of style, clothing with clean lines and expensive labels. Leigh showed no interest in the mounts, only the house itself—as though the animals were not there, as though she saw right through them.

Susan could tell she was less expert than the older guy but she seemed to know enough for the purpose. She rapped on walls and moved a small yellow stud finder over their surfaces, Susan watching as its green light flashed on and off again.

“Nothing there,” she said in the first room.

“Nope, nothing,” she said in the second.

“My guess would be crawl space,” she said in the third. “Not enough room for stairs.”

“Sorry, no,” she said in the last room.

Susan was disappointed.

Only then, resigned to a nonevent and walking the architect girl to the door, did she remember the slab.

“Wait,” she said excitedly, and stopped. “There’s this one place in the yard—it’s not that near the house, actually, it’s in the backyard, way back there in the fir grove—but when I first moved in, we were doing some garden work and we found it. It’s just a piece of concrete sunk into the ground. You don’t really notice it, normally. He said there might have been a root cellar under there once, something like that. I mean, it’s just a slab. Cement or whatever. With grass growing over the edges. But can you quickly take a look?”

Leigh followed Susan out the service entrance and around to the back, where they picked their way down the flagstone paths toward the copse at the rear of the property. The further they went the more discouraged she felt: it was too far from the house. It was unlikely to be connected.

A few steps into the fir trees they ducked under some boughs, crunched over a sparse litter of cones and then stood over the slab: overgrown, concrete, about three feet square.

Almost nothing.

“Enh,” said the architect girl, and shrugged. She poked at the slab with the smooth toe of her pump. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

•

The intercom buzzed a little past midnight. She looked out the window of her new bedroom—it faced the crescent drive instead of the backyard—and saw a taxi waiting at the front gate.

She was hoping it was Casey, and she took the wide stairs quickly, lightly, two at a time. But when she pressed the button to talk to the driver he said, “I got a Angela here. Angela Stern.”

She almost said
Oh no
right then. But instead she sighed, buzzed open the gate and went out front to meet them.

“Does she know where you are?” she asked Angela, as soon as she stepped from the taxi.

It could mean Merced’s job, she was thinking.

“She fell asleep,” Angela said.

“We have to call. She’ll be worried sick by now.”

Angela walked slowly, peering down through the dark at her footing as the taxi’s headlights swept back. She was wearing a long winter coat, a coat she’d never have a use for in L.A., over a sheer lacy nightgown.

“So what went wrong?” asked Susan, a hand on her arm to steer. As they drew near the house again the motion sensors were triggered and the outside lights flicked on.

“It wasn’t safe. It was
unsafe
,” said Angela, and shook her head.

“Unsafe.”

“What if she stepped on you,” said Angela. “Those shoes—those shoes would be like daggers. They could stab me.”

“Uh-huh,” said Susan.

It took her a moment to register the words. And then she found Angela was standing there stricken. Her face looked white.

“I’m so
sorry
,” she said, exactly as a person might who wasn’t insane at all. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” said Susan.

Inside she sat Angela down in the kitchen, gave her a glass of water and called the apartment, where Merced picked up the phone right away.

“She’ll stay with me,” Susan told her, resigned. “She’ll stay till Vera gets back. So have them call me as soon as that happens. Would you?”

She looked over at Angela, who was sitting very straight on her kitchen chair under a fish and holding her water glass carefully, with two hands. She put her to bed in North American Birds.

W
hen the children returned, Angela was still there. They showed up at the big house one evening around dusk, while Susan and Jim and Angela were eating Thai on the patio beside the pool—though Angela was not eating. After the food arrived she’d decided she distrusted food of any “ethnicity” and had requested instead a Tom Collins.

Casey was brown from the sun and T. wore faded jeans. The three-legged dog loped along beside them.

“Oh, dears, dears!” called Angela joyfully. “How was the Mexican wedding?”

Susan rose as they approached the table, rose and put down her napkin.

“Good,” said T., and rested a hand lightly on Casey’s shoulder. “It was good.”

7

S
he wanted to show she was happy about the wedding news. And for the most part she was, or she would be when she assimilated the information—she felt a kind of rising anticipation on Casey’s behalf—but there was also petty confusion. Her pride was injured as much as her feelings. She would have been grateful for anything—the most nominal warning, the most casual tip of a hat.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know,” said Casey.

They’d gone to get a bottle of white wine from the kitchen. Susan didn’t keep champagne in the house, so it would have to serve.

“But Angela did,” she said, rummaging in a drawer for a corkscrew and trying to contain the seed of resentment. No whining; keep it pure and simple, be remembered well.

“Oh yeah?” asked Casey. Give her credit: it sounded like real surprise.

“She told me you were on your honeymoon,” said Susan.

“Huh. Not exactly,” said Casey. “In the first place, I only went along for the ride. At the last minute. I wasn’t planning to. It was Baja—the Sea of Cortez. A whale stranding.”

“A
whale
stranding?” asked Susan, looking up from the wine.

“A mass stranding. There were over twenty of them. Beaked whales, which is a kind that dives deep, I guess? They look like dolphins to me, they have those kind of long noses. Anyway the biologists inspected some of the dead ones and said they had these hemorrhages around the ears. They think navy sonar caused them. You know, the navy does this sonar in the ocean? It’s for detecting diesel submarines, or something. So anyway the whale guys think the sound waves hurt whale brains. They get confused or they’re in pain and it disorients them and then they beach themselves. They lie there baking in the sun and dying. It’s one of the worst things I’ve seen. You wouldn’t believe the smell.”

“So what did you do?” asked Susan.

“We helped get some of them back in the water. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Answer: I sat on my crippled ass behind a folding table and handed out bottled water to the volunteers. Tame shit like that.”

“But it’s good,” said Susan softly. “I’m glad you did.”

“T.’s idea, he got on some kind of emergency phone tree for marine mammal rescue. He’s on a bunch of lists now. Your basic Good Samaritan shit. Some of it’s just giving out money. Like with the foundation. He just paid a bunch of poachers in Africa to stop shooting rhinos. They sell the horns to make into, like, fake Chinese aphrodisiacs. Now they’re getting a salary for guarding the rhinos instead of killing them. Who knew?”

“That sounds like a great idea,” said Susan drily.

“But with the whales I kinda got into it,” said Casey. “It was a life-or-death thing. It had—I don’t know. It wasn’t nothing.”

“You take the wine, OK? I’ll take the glasses,” said Susan, and handed down the bottle. She put five goblets on a tray and they started out of the kitchen, toward the patio. “So where did, you know, the getting-married part come in?”

“Spur-of-the-moment,” said Casey behind her. “That was his idea too.”

“You going to have a reception? At least a big party?”

“Fuck if I know,” said Casey happily. “Haven’t thought about it. He’s moving in, though. He likes my place better than his.”

“I like it better too.”

“He does things,” said Casey. “You know. I miss how walking on sand used to feel. I was telling him that, after the whale thing was over. We were on our way out of town, we’d driven down to the shore to look at it one more time. So he picked me up and carried me down to the waterline and put me down and he got down there with me. And then we kind of crab-walked. We walked on our elbows. There were waves, you know, and I can’t go fast on my elbows, I’m not built in the shoulders like Sal or someone. Anyway, I’m not going to say it was some romantic shit, because actually it ended up sucking. I mean after three minutes I was soaking and shivering, I had these scratches on my knees from dragging them, because there were pebbles in the sand too, shit, there were probably syringes, what the hell would I know. And then the finer sand, for like
days
after that, was killing me. It got way down in my goddamn ears and I couldn’t get it out of there. I was afraid it would do some damage, if you want to know the truth. To the ear drums or whatever. Then I’d be crippled
and
deaf. So finally I had to go to a Mexican doctor, on our way back up here, in some shitty border town crossing into Arizona where the doctors make most of their salaries selling Ritalin prescriptions to American
turistas
. For snorting, not for the hyperactive kids. I had to go to one of those guys and get my ear canals irrigated. It was actually disgusting.”

They passed through the French doors, saw the other three talking and laughing at the poolside table.

“The guy tried to sell me a scrip for Ritalin just as an extra bonus. After he squirted six gallons of warm water into my ears.”

“Sounds like T. showed you a really good time,” said Susan.

“His heart was in the right place, though,” said Casey.

As they drew near the table Jim glanced up, smiling. T. was smoothing a lock of his mother’s hair behind her ear.

Family, thought Susan. She was surprised.

“D
on’t look now,” said Jim, a couple of days later. They were on the tennis court, whose clay surface was far too cracked for serious players. Luckily they were not serious. They had two old wooden racquets from a closet in the rec room and a bag of dull gray balls with hardly any bounce.

“Don’t look where now,” said Susan, walking up to the net.

“Outside the gate there’s a guy with a camera, taking snapshots of us,” said Jim, and bent down to pocket a ball.

She turned to look.

“Well shit. What did I just say,” said Jim, shaking his head. But he didn’t seem upset.

“Who is it? The cousins?”

Jim shook his head. “Doubt it. They have no incentive to document us.”

“But then—who would?”

“I think maybe my wife,” said Jim. “Apologies.”

Susan had been reaching down for her water bottle, at the end of the net, but stopped and glanced up.

“Your wife?”

“Someone who’s working for her, anyway. They’re gathering ammunition.”

“Ammunition?”

“For the divorce.”

She lifted the bottle to her lips and gazed at him steadily as she drank.

“I had no idea,” she said, after she wiped drops off her lips.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Can’t she—you mean for alimony, or something?”

“Ha. No. There was a prenup. She’s wealthy, her family made me sign it. Evidence of infidelity means I won’t get anything.”

“Oh,” said Susan. They stood opposite each other, wooden racquets in hand, with only the net between them. The top of the net was cracked, like the court, its white hem barely holding together across the top of the sagging green mesh.

“Sorry for the invasion of privacy,” he said, and gazed down at his shoes. They were Converse; Hal had owned a pair.

“I don’t care,” she said. “But are you—I mean we could call the cops or something, couldn’t we? That’s actually my property there, where he’s standing. I think he might be trespassing.”

Jim shook his head and shrugged. “I always knew it would happen. She’s been waiting me out. Waiting for me to do this. For years. So now she’s free to get rid of me. Even before, any settlement would have been minuscule. Fine with me. But she likes to win completely. She didn’t want me to see a penny.”

“So why did you—I mean, why did you stay? If you weren’t in it for the money . . .”

“Why do you think,” said Jim. “Let’s hit the ball, OK?”

He backed up.

“You love her,” said Susan, nearly under her breath. “You love her even though she doesn’t love you.”

He stood and tossed a ball, waiting for her to move into position.

“I can’t help it,” he said finally, as she walked to the service line.

The ball came early, while she was still turning toward him to receive. It bounced and hit the fence.

V
era was not coming back; a sick relative needed her in New Jersey. Angela was upset by the news and sequestered herself in her bedroom.

“She won’t eat anything but candy,” reported Casey over the telephone. “She refuses to have anyone else come and stay. Except for T. or me, but we can’t go there every night. She drinks water from her bathroom tap, out of the toothbrush cup. She eats these little bags of red licorice. She had them left over from giving out to the kids at Halloween and she took them in there with her and now she won’t eat anything else. If you try to give her real food she lets it sit there and rot.”

“Maybe,” ventured Susan, “maybe it’s time to consider—?”

“Not happening. We’re not putting her in an institution. First of all, she would hate it. And T. doesn’t like the idea much either.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Susan. “Taking care of her is kind of a full-time occupation.”

She was looking out the window at the backyard, where the guys who serviced the koi ponds were dipping tubes into the water to test it.

“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.