Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,18

easy; it was the half-broken objects that were hard, the ones too slight or old to keep—a slingshot made crudely out of twigs and rubber bands, Boy Scout badges, worn baseball cards from the fifties. There were report cards. In second grade Hal had received an A in Deportment; in fifth he’d gotten a B– and the remark, in a slanted, loopy hand, At times, Hal can be boisterous.

Her own items were the bulk of it. She’d kept more than Hal had and the worst was something she’d thought she’d gotten rid of, a book of lists. It was a bound journal from years ago, from a few months after the accident, when she first started sleeping around. Mainly it was a list of men. She’d been incautious then, maybe half hoping Hal would catch her and she would be confronted, but he had never suspected, as far as she knew, and her desire for exposure had slowly waned. The book was a juvenile collection—the names, physical descriptions, the events of their meetings. She barely remembered all of them now, and looking at it felt ashamed by the childishness. It had always been about knowing and being known, about experience and diversity, but here it was clearly teenage games. Now that she was a murderer, now that she had homicide under her belt, it looked to her like evidence.

She crammed it down into the kitchen garbage, then cleaned out the refrigerator and rained down old vegetables on it—rubbery carrots, yellowing celery, a torrent of moldy beets.

She had spent her morning on real estate—showings on the beach, slick modern condos the realtor picked out with wide windows that looked out over the Pacific, balconies that gave a view of the headlands to the north—when the lawyer’s call came. Her great-uncle Albert, who had died a few months back, had named her in his will. She’d barely noticed the death when it happened; she had never known the great-uncle, had met him only once, as a child, when her parents took her over to his house on a weekend. Odd that she remembered it at all; the only reason was his player piano. The piano had stuck with her. He pressed a button and showed her how the white keys moved under the weight of invisible fingers. There was one other fragment too—a thin arm in a plaid shirtsleeve as it bent down and stuck a rusty wire hoop into the grass. That was all she recalled.

She drove to the lawyer’s office in Century City, a tall shining building with valet parking, and sat across from his desk with her right leg vibrating restlessly. The lawyer talked on the phone while she waited. He was a stubby man with a gleaming nose and ruddy cheeks and she wondered idly what he would say if she told him her husband had been stabbed to death. She considered blurting it out. Behind his head was a Chagall print. The décor in the office matched the colors in the print, down to the blue curtains and the flowers on the desk. Chagall had always irritated her. There was an obnoxiousness to the painting, a repugnantly coy quality, like a grown man talking baby talk to other grown men.

“There’s no cash to speak of,” said the lawyer when he hung up, cutting right to the chase and handing her a thick file. “The bulk of the estate is the house itself. The house and the contents. Those are yours. You’re the nearest next of kin, or at least the only one he bothered to name. Himself—as I’m sure you’re aware—he died without issue.”

“A house,” she repeated. The one with the player piano? She would inherit a player piano: a murderer, a black widow, the proud owner of a player piano.

If she suppressed the murder part, the thought gave her a lift of pleasure.

“Where is it, again? The Valley?”

“Pasadena,” he said. “The will, the title, the records he left are in the folder. Review them at your leisure. You may take possession at any time or of course you may also sell. Estate taxes are basically covered for you under the terms of a somewhat complicated trust. All in the file. Feel free to consult your tax preparer.”

She took a minute to shuffle through the file, the documents that were impervious to her scrutiny.

“It’s all there,” said the lawyer, apparently impatient. “Feel free to consult your accountant.”

“It’s such a coincidence,” she said, flustered. “It’s one of those