Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,16

but there was something in the tone. She’d never liked him, Susan thought. She chewed her tomato and squinted up.

“Kids would have too. But they’re busy.”

“Studying art history.”

“Gil’s back East. Tommy’s at USC.”

“Mmm. Good for him,” said Casey.

“I’m really sorry about your dad,” said Steven.

Casey nodded. There was silence.

“Freak thing,” said Steven. “You get a lot of freak . . .”

He trailed off, his gaze lingering on her chair.

“Huh,” said Casey, and popped another tomato into her mouth. “Better quit while you’re ahead.”

She spun and wheeled off.

“. . . accidents in your family,” he finished, lamely.

“Uh, yeah,” said Susan.

“Hoo,” he said after a moment, with awkward jocularity, and shook his head. “Sensitive.”

“Well. Her father was just stabbed to death,” said Susan.

She left him groping a zucchini flower.

She called a real estate agent and put the house up for sale. Casey issued a grudging invitation to stay at her apartment but Susan was afraid of grating on her. Meanwhile T. was forcing her to stay home from work for a while. She was ambivalent about this: the office was somewhere to go, a location in which to exist. But he insisted she take a leave of absence, and she had no strength left to argue.

She established a simple pattern of avoiding the spaces where she and Hal had spent most of their time, moving out of the master bedroom into a smaller room that had once been Casey’s.

But even trying to sleep in that room—a room she’d thought might be safe because it held almost no specific memory of Hal—she was preyed upon as soon as she lay motionless. Apprehension crept over her, a fringe of blackness she could almost see rising slowly from the foot of the bed, covering her feet, her legs, her chest, her shoulders, coming to smother her chin and her mouth like earth. Hal’s death and her own were gathered wretchedly in the shadows, hunched down with teeth showing, sharp teeth and the talons of bony fingers. A heaviness made her heart beat hard with fear—a leaden certainty that her selfishness had killed him. There was no buoyancy at all, no river to drift on.

She shifted onto the living room couch for several nights and during the daytime moved the bedroom’s furniture around, trying to find a configuration that would ease the weight. If it were different enough, she thought, it wouldn’t cause pain like this, so she removed the shades from the windows and hastily painted the walls an eggshell blue. She made forays to housewares stores and returned with items that spoke to her of freshness—blue and white linens, cushions, a screen, a wall hanging, a cloudy glass vase full of pussy willows. She wanted it to feel like a replacement room, a surprise. But the change was so slight, after all that, as to be unnoticeable.

So she considered, every night after twilight, whether to go to a hotel. She thought of lobbies, their carpeting and warm lights and the people milling. But in the end she did not go to a hotel. In the end she stayed home. She went out for as long as she could, to bars or the promenade or the Santa Monica Pier, sitting and smoking and drinking and idly watching the movement of crowds. But then she came home to sleep, or to lie there trying. Maybe it was apathy or maybe it was penance. She couldn’t decide.

Daytime was better. She went out with first light and walked T.’s dog around the neighborhood; she got coffee in the morning and took her lunches in restaurants or diners. Sometimes she drove around in a daze. Other times she asked friends over, made sure there were people in the house to lift its grimness. When she had to be there by herself she kept to the sunporch and Casey’s room, venturing into the kitchen only when she had to. The two of them had spent years in the kitchen.

His car was still in the shop, having bodywork done after a fender bender, so she asked the man there to sell it for her. He said no at first, but when she told him why he relented and said yes. Then she began looking for a new place to live. It took her out of the house, it distracted her, it pushed her forward . . . she thought maybe a small one-room condo near the beach. That was the benefit of being alone: she needed little square footage, could buy