Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,15

Hal had called him. The pants were the tip-off.

She shook his hand.

“Pleased to meet you. Again.”

Surely she had met him.

“Yeah, Christmas party, right?”

“Right,” she agreed. One of the few she’d attended.

“I’m serious. He was a legend. Old-school. Last of the Titans, man.”

“Hal Lindley, last of the Titans,” she repeated wistfully.

“Man, you know what? I gotta tell someone this,” said Rodriguez, and bent forward as though pained. “I totally offered to go with him. I woulda had his back. I told him that. He told me he was going down there. I go, Take me with. Seriously! I hadda gone, you know, maybe this wouldna . . .”

He trailed off. He looked lost.

“You can’t think like that,” said Susan gently. “He didn’t want company. It was his choice, Arlo.”

“Yeah, but.”

“It was his adventure,” she said. As she said it she felt its accuracy: Arlo was comforting her, not the other way round. It was not that she denied her part in it—it was still murder she had done, at least manslaughter. But she remembered Hal’s voice on the phone. A tensile strength, an alertness she had missed for a long time before that. How he had looked in the casket: curiously alive.

Her adventure had been without him, his without her. A last freedom.

The bookish woman was crying; the one with large earrings sidled close and put a fleshy arm around her, pulled her in. Susan rested her eyes on the woman’s blouse, a pattern of wine-red and dark-blue leaves. Flesh was always a consolation—flesh, not beauty. Beauty was social, flesh was private. These days Susan consoled no one. When Casey was a baby and Susan still had weight from the pregnancy, baby Casey had nestled against her. She had kneaded the flesh and buried her face in it. Later when Casey was a toddler and the weight was gone, Casey had not liked the change or trusted it. She even complained. Susan remembered now: the toddler Casey had said her mother’s stomach was no longer beautiful. She bemoaned its absence. To her consolation was beauty; small Casey had not thought of forms or majesty. She wanted body all around.

Susan felt a rush of affection for the earrings woman, as if by putting her arm around the other she had put it around her too. A common mother, a small mothering for all. Susan thought of her own mother. Then how rarely she thought of her. As though her mother had been a mother in another life, a life long past, a faint image or pattern of a mother.

And yet—at least when she was a baby, a small child—her mother must have felt for her, as she herself did for Casey, a deep and wrenching love.

But they hadn’t been close; the love had been squandered. Somehow along the way Susan had squandered it.

A terrible remorse threatened.

She would go inside now to see Casey again.

“Let me get some more drinks,” she said, for an exit. “Drinks? Anyone?”

•

A first cousin was in attendance, the only one she still knew. He was a consultant, something to do with computers. He wore a metallic gray jacket and a violet tie and was balding. She hadn’t seen him for years; they’d never had much in common. They collided at the buffet table, near a vegetable platter.

“So how’ve you been,” she asked, after condolences. She picked up a piece of celery. It seemed like days since she’d eaten.

“Oh, you know,” he said. His hand made a gesture of dismissal.

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t at all. Tell me.”

“Well, Deb left,” he said.

The wife, must be.

“Oh. I’m really sorry.”

He shrugged.

“Nah, it’s for the best.”

“And how are the kids?” She thought there were two of them. Both boys.

“College.”

“Uh-huh? They liking it?”

“Engineering. That’s Tommy. He’s gonna be an earner. Gil’s doing something useless. Art history.”

Now she remembered. The guy was a tool.

“Hardly useless.”

“Whatever. No money in it.”

“Better than phone sex,” said Casey.

There she was, drunk and flushed. Less pale than usual. She reached for a cherry tomato.

“You remember Casey. Casey, your second cousin. Steven.”

“I remember Gil. And Tommy. We played with a soccer ball in the street. He did that thing where you head-butt it.”

It struck her that Steven might not have seen Casey since the accident. He must have known; it could not be new information. But he looked mildly embarrassed.

“Casey, good to see you.”

No, he had seen her once in the chair, that was right, a birthday thing for his own kid.

“Thanks for coming,” said Casey.

She probably meant it,