Magnificence (19 page)

“Young lady,” said the portly dowager in red, turning in her armchair with sudden severity, “you know, we may be getting on, but we’re certainly not deceased yet.”

“Oh no, I didn’t—” started Susan, but Jim interrupted from behind her.

“Oksana,” said Jim, “why don’t you come and get me when these ladies want to go upstairs. Or, of course, when you’d like to go to bed yourself. I’ll be glad to accompany them.” He looked at the imperious one. “No offense intended, madam. I’m a lawyer by trade. I’m thinking purely of our liability here as homeowners. Or call it responsibility. A broken hip could be costly.”

With the ladies staring at him Susan withdrew and he followed.

“I can’t believe you said that,” she whispered.

“Angela’s taking advantage of you,” he said. “She should have asked first. It’s bullshit.”

“I mean, she does have dementia,” said Susan.

“She’s also manipulative.”

•

It was almost midnight when Oksana came to get them, with tired eyes and traces of cold cream on her cheeks. Jim went to escort the women upstairs while Susan got towels out of the linen closet and sorted them into groups, a bath towel, hand towel and washcloth for each lady, and then carried them up the narrow back stairs formerly used by servants.

She went to the rooms and laid the towels out—a small pile each on the twin beds of the Arctic and another on the queen bed in the Himalayas—before meeting the guests in the upstairs hallway, where they stood with Jim under the dome. After they had shown them to the rooms, walking back to their own, she stopped Jim with a hand on his arm.

“I murdered Hal,” she said. “I killed him. You should know that about me.”

I
n the morning she went into the bright kitchen happy because Jim had been kind to her, Jim understood that she had killed and though maybe
forgive
wasn’t the word, he saw and didn’t give up on her. She came down in a good mood and found them seated around the table, four ladies in nightdresses with gleaming fish overhead, eating toast with marmalade and listening to some kind of quaint homily about daily life: National Public Radio. Angela had made breakfast for them, even brewed them a carafe of her weak, stale coffee from a can, which she preferred to Susan’s gourmet beans.

Angela was animated, rising to get them fresh toast as it popped up in the toaster, and Susan saw she had been changed by their presence: the older ones made her energetic, gave her a central role, bustling around. But surely she couldn’t sustain it, Susan thought, she’d have to absent herself again or even perform a broadly insane act, such as stripping naked or locking herself in a room. Then the ladies would quietly take their leave.

Jim had gone off to the office so it was only Susan and the ladies; her kitchen felt crowded. She spooned up some yogurt, drank a half-cup of the weak coffee and then went outside and crossed quickly to the shed in the backyard, where she chose a shovel from the dirt-encrusted fleet of them propped up against a shelf. Backhoe, she thought, wasn’t that overkill anyway? She could find out what was beneath the manhole without the help of large earth-moving machines. Of course she could.

On the shelf beside the shovels she found an old, dusty gray pair of gloves, shook them in case there were spiders or splinters in the finger holes and then pulled them on. Last time she’d tried to wield a shovel she’d rubbed blisters on her palms and torn them open. A kind of water had flowed out when they ripped: was that pus? But it had been light—transparent, inoffensive.

We know so little of our molecules, she thought, the molecules we are . . . so little about them. A proof they’re in control: they guide our hands, they make us grow, they form our children inside our bodies—miracles come from them, all that has ever been, all that will be. Meanwhile our conscious selves perform their rudimentary acts, those simple sums. What shall I be, whom shall I love: those are the easy parts, behaviors that we call ourselves, they’re only icing, floral borders, all that we think we are is trivial while what we really are is not even known to us. If there is a machine, a ghost in the machine—they always said the machine was the body, didn’t they? Philosophers?—but no! The body’s both of them, machine
and
ghost. The body’s not only the vessel but also its spirit, the body is visible but its animators impossible to see. Materialism, she thought, sure—she might be a proponent. But she didn’t like the flatness of answers, the stolid and dull arithmetic of being, not at all! Rather the glory of the unseen. She believed in the ineffable, great mystery, great creation, only that it was lodged in molecules, in molecules, beyond the human ability to see.

The final authority of the microscopic.

She carried the shovel into the back, through the trees, stuck its blade into the ground a few inches from the manhole and then stood on it with one foot. She hopped awkwardly to sink it further, then dismounted, scooped and flung. And again. It was hard, boring work and soon she was dizzy and distracted. As the minutes passed she felt blisters starting on her hands again despite the gloves, felt dirt down the backs of her sneakers and in between her toes, and just as she was thinking how tedious it was the spade hit underground metal.

“Well of course,” said someone, and she looked up to see the elderly dominatrix, now clad not in the red and gold ensemble of yesteryear or her ruffled nightgown from the breakfast hour but in a voluminous dress of deep and vibrant purple. Around her neck hung a crescent-moon pendant in silver, vaguely redolent of Wicca or perhaps the New Age.

Were there obese Wiccans?

“Of course what?” asked Susan, out of breath.

“You’ve hit the shaft.”

“I didn’t know there’d be one,” said Susan. She stood resting, catching her breath. What a stupid idea, digging. Of course some Wiccans were obese. Sure—even morbidly so. No different from other Americans, most likely. One of Casey’s best friends in high school had been Wiccan. She worshiped the moon goddess, the feminine principle, and told Casey not to use tampons. She advised Casey only to use sea sponges when she had her period. The use of tampons was a denial of the sacred nature of womanhood. The tampons were the patriarchy. Sponges by contrast came from the ocean, which some viewed as feminine. And also by contrast with the tampons, manufactured by companies that men owned and designed to men’s specifications, the sponges were not shaped like penises or missiles.

But with sponges you had to wash the blood off in the sink.

Susan had run interference. She spoke of practical benefits. After the accident Casey lost touch with the Wiccan friend, who went to college and presently joined the Young Republicans.

Susan squinted at the purple-clad woman and tried to imagine her dancing at midnight before an altar to the horned god.

“You think it goes deep?” she asked.

“Too deep to tackle with that thing. Don’t make me laugh. It’s probably solid iron. You could be talking twenty feet deep.”

“I’m sorry,” said Susan. They’d never been properly introduced. “I’m not sure I even know your name! I’m Susan, Susan Lindley.”

She stepped forward and stuck out a gloved hand, which the large woman took and pressed lightly. She wasn’t without grace, Susan thought. Around her own mother’s age, if her mother were still alive—older than Angela by almost a generation but clearly far more coherent.

“Portia,” she said.

“Porsche?”

“No, not the sportscar,” said the woman haughtily. “The moon of Uranus, for instance, discovered by
Voyager 2
. I myself predate the
Voyager
s by several decades, needless to say. I was, like the moon, named after the heroine of
The Merchant of Venice,
if you knew your Shakespeare. All of the Uranus moons are named after characters in Shakespeare. And Pope, of course.”

“I don’t know my Shakespeare
or
my planetary trivia,” said Susan. “How many Uranus moons
are
there?”

“Perhaps you recognize this line: ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath.’ Sound familiar?”

“It does. The gentle rain part. Definitely.”

“That line’s Portia’s.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Portia.”

“About the moon,” went on Portia, lifting the too-large necklace off her chest, “little is known.”

“I see.”

“And to answer your question: there are twenty-seven.”

“Many moons.”

They were gazing at each other. Susan realized she tended to like the woman, found a kind of reassurance in the woman’s pompous presence.

“Any
hoo
,” said Portia. “What you need here is simple: a backhoe.”

“I’m not sure I know where to get one,” said Susan. “I did find a guy with a jackhammer. But a backhoe, that’s a whole other level.”

Hal had ridiculed people who used that turn of phrase.
A whole other level. A whole ’nother level.
Both, according to Hal, were not only annoying but also ignorant. His least favorite common phrase had been
Can I help who’s next?
But Susan had stubbornly used the language he looked down upon. She saw his point, certainly, but she couldn’t get behind the snobbery.

Like Hal, this woman seemed the type to value correct speech.

“Child’s play,” said the woman. “Leave it to the Yellow Pages and to me. If money is no object?”

“Well, it
is
an
object
,” said Susan, as they started back to the house. She carried the shovel parallel to the ground, trailing clods of earth as they went.

T
he day of the court date Casey called. It was hard to hear her—a delay in the connection so that their voices often crossed. Susan talked over Casey without meaning to and only heard half of what she was saying.

She was hazy on time zones, but it was so many hours different there that it was almost the same time—was it across the international dateline? She did not know. She strained to hear over a kind of swishing windy sound—the sound of space, she wanted to believe, the sound of the stratosphere, of falling interstellar dust . . . though it was probably none of these, it was probably the sound of wires and circuits, metal and fiberglass. Casey was talking about bamboo—something about the properties of bamboo. Bamboo was good, was the gist of what she was saying. She mentioned the Dayak, who were apparently a tribal people. It rhymed with
kayak
.

Susan pictured them in loincloths, although she had no evidence for this. They would look better in loincloths than she did, that much was certain. Smiling, wearing loincloths, the whole ear thing, and now also carrying bamboo. Possibly in spear form, sharpened at one end, or then, in a more modern context, as strips of light-colored flooring. Bamboo floor coverings were increasingly popular.

Searching for something to prove her own attentiveness, though she could still only half hear, she asked after the other tribal people Casey had written about.

“But how are your friends, the Penan and the Punan Bah?” she asked loudly, enunciating as best she could, though as usual the names made her want to laugh wildly. No offense to the Penan or Punan Bah, she thought, none meant at all, it was the phonetics.

“. . .
are
the Dayak, Mother,” came Casey’s voice.

•

Jim was supposed to meet her outside the court building so she was driving there in her own car. She was nervous, dressed neatly in conservative clothes with pearl earrings and flat, unglamorous heels, and she listened to the radio as she drove—she had always been irritated by NPR, all her adult life, and yet all her adult life she had listened to it faithfully.

One exit’s worth of freeway driving was all it would be: first surface streets, then a mile on the freeway, then surface streets again. And yet as soon as she merged onto the 110—on NPR a well-known interviewer, Terry Gross, was earnestly complimenting a rap musician on his genius—she knew she would never make it. The traffic was stopped, bumper-to-bumper, as far as she could see, though in the opposite direction it was moving freely. Technically it was spring, but the smog was more like summer smog, heat rippling in the dirty air, and a torpor had descended over the long lines of cars. Up ahead people had gotten out of their vehicles and were walking back and forth, some standing aside by themselves and smoking cigarettes, others in groups, talking and gesticulating. It had to be an accident.