Magnificence (17 page)

A caterwauling song by the heartbroken clown hero. It rose to a crescendo:
Ree-dee, pah-lee-ah-cho
. . . It was a caricature of opera, which was already a caricature of tragedy. Men’s tragic qualities were closely connected to their cluelessness; the tragic men suffered from a lack of self-awareness. Once you painted their faces in tawdry clown makeup and forced them to sing in high registers, at that particular point, frankly, the tragedy turned into chewing gum on your shoe.

She tried to recall the details of what Chip had said. He had called it a trophy book, she thought—maybe a trophy log or a trophy record, words to that effect. But in the library she would never find such a record book, even if it was stowed somewhere, because as usual she felt overwhelmed as soon as she went in. The books weren’t catalogued and there had to be thousands. She would need to hire someone if she wanted to get them in order—either that or go through them herself and in the process get rid of those she didn’t have a use for: the many shelves on heraldry, for instance. Maybe she could get a library science student to help her. She already had landscapers, art students, architects, taxidermists; she had a small army. Her friends these days were paid for their service.

Except Jim.

“So,” he said, the next time he was over. He had the Sunday paper and was reading the real estate classifieds. Rentals section. “The divorce will come through sometime this spring. Not long. There aren’t any disputes.”

“You’re moving out soon, right?” she asked.

“Next few weeks.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Still looking,” he said, and shrugged. “Silver Lake, maybe. Echo Park. Los Feliz. Say, little Craftsman bungalow.”

“You gonna do the whole running-every-day thing? Getting fit after the breakup? Diet? Sit-ups? Lifting weights and trying to feel young again?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and turned the newspaper page.

“Maybe I should go jogging with you. We could buy matching tracksuits. A his-and-hers type thing.”

She couldn’t help but think of the many rooms of her house, without inhabitants. But there was still Hal to consider.

•

The jackhammer man showed up only after she’d left several phone messages for him saying to come anytime, she was usually home, etc. She’d finally given up because he never answered the calls himself, and when he did call back he left messages that told her nothing. Then he was at the front door, a yellow unit of some kind pulled up behind his truck and parked in her driveway. She led him into the back and down the stone path into the trees and showed him the small slab.

“You want me to haul out the pieces?” he asked, cigarette dangling as he took a packet of earplugs out of a pocket.

“That’d be great,” she said. “Yes.”

“Not sure I can stretch the cord all the way to the compressor from here, where my truck is parked now. May have to drive onto your grass a bit.”

“OK. Try not to run over the flowers, though.”

“OK then.”

She left him unspooling an orange cord, thick as her wrist. A few minutes later one of her broken mounts was delivered and she forgot about the jackhammer as she stood in the entry hall and opened its crate with a crowbar. She wasn’t handy with tools, had only bought a kit when she realized they always sent the animals back to her in a mass of Styrofoam peanuts, packed deep inside wooden boxes that were solidly built and sturdily nailed. Leaning back and straining, she popped a nail out too suddenly and it hit her on the cheek and stung; then she snagged her shirt on a splintery board-end, tore a rent in the fabric and swore.

It was one of her favorites among the crocodilians: a small alligator in a swamp setting, dark-brown acrylic mud wrinkling around its clawed feet, a dozen white eggs in a twiggy nest behind it. Its green eyes, gone cloudy over the years as though with cataracts, had been replaced with clear new ones. The squat feet had polished-looking claws instead of the ragged toe ends that had preceded them; discolored patches on the leathery hide had been touched up. She was pleased. The whole assemblage was remarkably light—she could carry it herself.

So she lifted it, though its bulk was awkward, and walked slowly toward the reptile room, where she put it down on the table while she unlatched its glass case and raised the lid. As she did so she thought of archosaurs, the dinosaur lineage of which only birds and crocodilia remained . . . that was the problem with organization: it was never perfect. Sometimes she wished she could have laid out the house in evolutionary terms—put the birds and crocodilians together, for instance. But then there would be the strangeness of genetics to contend with, the oddness of the fact that some animals who seemed to be nearly the same had borne almost no relation to each other over the course of history, according to the scientists, and that, conversely, some animals who looked like they had zero business together were actually close relatives.

Only as she left the reptile room did she register the far-off drone of the jackhammer, still drilling. She wondered if the slab covered an old, capped well—they must have had wells here once, she thought. Pasadena had more of its own water than Los Angeles proper, she’d once been told. Maybe she could have her own well again, in that case, ask them to drill deeper, deeper, down to where cool water flowed beneath the soil, to where it trickled through the rock, the caverns of the earth. Maybe she could make the whole house into a living kingdom then—its flora and fauna, both dead and alive, its circulatory system of ponds and rivers . . . vegetables growing, the fruit of the trees to eat . . . but no. That was a pipe dream. It was a terrarium, the house. It should not attempt to simulate nature.

There were zookeepers, in the order of things, and curators. Previously she had been neither, but now she fell into the curator category. She was not going to keep a menagerie here, she was not going to farm and live off the land, clearly. Living, even the koi were too much work for her alone. But the dead animals were enough. In any case the dead were almost as beautiful as the living, sometimes more so. They had far fewer needs.

No: this was a museum of killed animals, pure and simple. An amateur museum, yes. It was not professional. But no less beautiful for all that—maybe more beautiful, even. She welcomed the flocks of suburban parrots as they alit in the trees and she wanted to keep the koi, could even foresee adding to them—bringing in native frogs or toads, maybe, or the cocoons of butterflies, as long as they weren’t a kind that would defoliate her trees. These were mere accents, of course: the center of the house was the skins hung on their plastic bones. The center of it was the crouching, leaping, preening, the frozen poses, the watchful blind eyes; it was a house of ghost prey, ghost predators, innocent killers trapped by the less innocent.

“Mother,” said Casey.

She jumped. She’d had no idea she wasn’t alone—had been staring at nothing. Staring at a door lintel.

But there was Casey, in the hall. Clearly had just entered.

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me,” said Susan.

“Sorry,” said Casey. “You know—I have that clicker in my car now. For the gate. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, no,” said Susan. “Course, make yourself at home. You want something to drink?”

“What is that, construction?” asked Casey, and cocked her head at the jabbering noise of the drill.

“Some cement in the backyard I’m having ripped up,” said Susan.

“Ground granulated blast-furnace slag?”

They smiled at each other. Susan knelt and put her hand on Casey’s arm.

“How’s married life treating you, honey?”

“I really like it.”

“Good. Good,” said Susan. “I’m really happy, then.”

She thought she might choke up at Casey’s unaccustomed sweetness.

“Angela came out of her room,” said Casey.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Susan.

“But here’s the thing,” said Casey.

Susan’s knees were hurting so she stood up again.

“Yeah?” she asked. “Follow me to the kitchen, I’m thirsty.”

“Wait,” said Casey. “Seriously.”

Susan waited, listening.

“We’re going away.”

“The rainforest thing?” asked Susan.

“Malaysia. Malaysian Borneo.”

“Oh,” said Susan.

“And it would be a lifesaver if you could take her again. Her and the dog. Both of them.”

“Her and the dog,” repeated Susan.

“And T. says we could pay for someone else to live with you here and help her. A new Vera. So you wouldn’t have to do much in the way of like, care or whatever. Just let her
stay
here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we’ve got her to come out of her own room finally but she’s still shaky. And there’s nowhere else she’ll willingly go.”

Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.

“Please,” she said. “Please?”

Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.

“You got a manhole in your backyard,” he said.

“A manhole?”

“Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing’s not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, hell if I know. If you want to open the lid you’re gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. Hell. The drill won’t do any more for you than it’s already done.”

“Oh. Well. Thanks, though,” said Susan, disappointed.

“Is it like a city manhole?” asked Casey. “It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there’s some high-voltage line or shit like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?”

“No letters I could see,” said the jackhammer guy.

“I’ll call the city anyway,” said Susan. “OK. So. Thank you.”

“I still gotta load up the truck. I’ll come back in when I’m done. Be a hundred fifty,” said the guy. “Cash or check.”

When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause—Casey’s request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There’d been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone sex, of Casey and phone sex and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the association was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut—it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression.
In a rut
could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.

It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.

“You’re not doing that phone-sex job still, are you? Now that you’re, you know, married and all that?”

“Nah,” said Casey. “It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted.”

“So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don’t see you living off T.’s money. I don’t see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings.”

“No,” said Casey. “No. Not indefinitely.”

“So?”

“Well, shit. I’d like to have an answer for you. I’d like to for myself. But the truth is, I don’t know yet. So I’m going to give it some time. I’m going to have this honeymoon period. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. I’m free-floating. Say for a year. And then I’ll decide.”

“I see,” said Susan, nodding.

“What the hell is that,” said Casey, and gestured. “An armadillo or something?”

“A nine-banded armadillo,” said Susan, surprised. “Of course. What did you think?”

“It’s weird-looking,” said Casey. “It’s basically a freak.”

“I really wouldn’t say that,” said Susan.

She felt annoyed.

“It’s like a giant pill bug with a rat head and a long, ratty tail,” went on Casey. “You know, those bugs that roll up into a ball? Or doodlebugs, some of the kids used to call them. It’s like one of those, but bigger and uglier.”

“If you’re trying to get me to do you a favor, you shouldn’t insult the collection,” said Susan testily.

“Wow,” said Casey. “You really like the thing.”

“It’s not a question of liking,” said Susan, but she felt increasingly agitated. “And it’s not a thing. Or it wasn’t. Anyway. I’m going to the kitchen. You can come with me or not.”

Casey followed, past a lone sea turtle in a case with a some fake kelp and a couple of lobsters.

“I dig the tortoise, though,” she said, in a clear attempt to curry favor.

“It’s not a tortoise at all. It’s a green sea turtle,” said Susan.

“I was just trying to get your goat,” said Casey. “I do that to T. too. I know what a sea turtle is. I watch the nature shows.”

“Uh-huh,” said Susan.

“But he doesn’t love all animals. He’s mostly interested in the ones that are about to go extinct,” went on Casey.

“Nice,” said Susan.

“The more common they are, the less interested he is.”

They were in the kitchen now, Susan opening the freezer to get a can of lemonade concentrate.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” said Casey.

“I know, because you’re trying to get something out of me,” said Susan. “So that would be a tactical error.”

“Listen. For whatever reason, she’s comfortable with you,” said Casey. “She feels safe when you’re around. And face it, I mean, the cousins are assholes, no question. But it’s true this place is enormous. You probably wouldn’t have to even see her that much at all, if you didn’t want to.”