Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,14

save him. This failure had driven him far away, and from far away came the man with the knife and slit his belly open.

She stood at the lectern with her eyes wide, as though shocked. As though she was stupid. She had an impression of clumps of flowers around her, wreaths and bouquets, white and purple and red, their cloudy colors on the margins, and wondered how she looked as the words flowed out of her, as she gazed down at her paper, which trembled slightly beneath her fingers. She held the paper and read the words, but the words did not say what she meant. She might look aged, widowed, dull, sharp, or blurred by grief. She felt suddenly like a vague being, a form without definition. She smoothed the paper on the lectern and glanced up from it—imprecise words—and out at the crowd, curious for a moment as to whether an ex had come. She hoped none had, of course. Robert, at least, was not here. She had told him it was over and he barely cared, she suspected, though he had seemed slightly annoyed. Inconvenienced, anyway. She cared even less than he did and wondered idly if T. would lay him off. T. had hardly dealt with him, didn’t know him at all.

She could barely discern the faces. She saw their pinkness or brownness and their sympathy, an unsmiling sympathy but sympathy all the same. They sympathized because they had no clue that she herself was the murderer. They did not know Hal had been murdered. Or not, at least, by her. They knew of the stabbing but not the real culprit.

Not one of them had the least idea who she was.

Luckily.

Afterward, in their stiff dress clothes, they drank. She did, and so did Casey and even, she thought, T., though he could apparently hold his liquor better than either of them. There was an open bar. People came up to her and she was conscious of feeling better the more she drank—magnanimous even. She would be intimate, she would confide in them. When if not now? She went out in a radius from Casey, made forays into the passing crowds from a station at Casey’s elbow. T. was drinking whiskey, a lock of his hair fallen over his forehead, his shirt unbuttoned. He was wearing a suit for the first time since he’d come back and had a debonair way about him, Susan thought, like a man from the roaring twenties.

She left them together to join a smokers’ circle outside, near an angel statue. It seemed to be office people. A woman with frizzy hair and outsize earrings spoke to her.

“He was a special person,” she said.

Susan took the cigarette that was offered and let someone light it for her, surprised at how bad it tasted. The first one always did.

“If there’s anything we can do,” said a man.

“This is a good beginning,” she told him, raising the cigarette, and took a drag.

“Hal talked about you all the time,” said another woman. Bookish-looking and gangly.

“He did?” asked Susan.

“He was devoted to you. And Casey.”

“Casey, definitely,” agreed Susan. She had put her plastic wine cup down near the angel’s stone toes; now she reached for it and sipped. “He lived for Casey.”

“He had a way with people,” said the earrings.

“Really? I used to kid him about not having one.”

There was a shocked silence at this.

“One time,” went on the big earrings, as though to politely cover the transgression, “there was a crazy, you know, a hostage taker? Did he tell you that story?”

Beyond the woman the hedges were carefully trimmed into long boxes. If they grew wild, she thought, they would be far more lovely. Did people want to be buried beneath topiary?

“. . . turned out it wasn’t a real gun. It was a water pistol! But there was real, I mean, fear, you know? People were freaking out. And Hal, you know, he totally defused the whole situation.”

“Mmm, yeah,” said Susan. “The squirt-gun thing.”

She did remember, or almost. The anecdote had a punch line, if she recalled correctly: the squirt gun had been green. Hal liked to tell stories, when he was in the right mood—mostly about his coworkers, their foibles and idiosyncrasies.

“The guy was a legend,” said a young Hispanic man earnestly. He had a pathetic pencil mustache, a concave chest, and his pants were too long. Or no: they were belted just below the rib cage. “Name’s Arlo, by the way.”

“Oh,” said Susan.

Rodriguez,