Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,5

loudspeaker announcements. “Because if it’s money—”

“I choose,” said Casey firmly.

Susan stared past her at a poster of a hotel: a white high-rise with looming palms in the foreground. She stared at the high-rise. She stared at the palms.

Casey caught sight of him first, coming toward them in ragged pants and shirtsleeves. He was thin and too darkly tanned, like a Florida retiree, but lacking the beard Hal had described. A recent shave had left the sides of his face paler than the rest, the lower cheeks and the chin.

But what alarmed her was his expression—heavy, anxious. He bent over Casey first, knelt down at the chair and took her face in his hands. Susan saw how she looked at him, noticed it fleetingly, but then already—in the shock of this—the recognition faded as he stood up straight again, still holding Casey’s wrist.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you this over the phone. I have very bad news,” he said.

In an instant the whole of existence could go from familiar to alien; all it took was one event in your personal life. You might think you were only a mass of particles in the rest of everything, a mass exchanging itself, bit by bit, with other masses, but then you were blindsided and all you knew was the numbness of separation.

Casey clung to T.’s hand and Susan stood beside her with her own hand on Casey’s other shoulder. She was pinching the shoulder, she realized slowly, quite hard though she did not intend to—out of anxiety, out of tension, pressing the hard ridge of the collarbone between her thumb and forefinger. She made herself relax her hold and the sensation melted into others, unnamed and nonspecific, hazy and suffocating as they stood there in a kind of dumbness. She felt buzzing around her from some unknown source. Was it electric? Was it imagined?

Casey did not seem to have felt the pinch. Her eyes were forward, fixed on the dark wood.

“Sorry if it’s not—there weren’t that many choices,” said T.

The scene was theatrical, three people presiding stiffly at a glass airport wall as coffins were lowered from the belly of the plane and rolled across the tarmac. More than one coffin, she thought, looked like an army of them.

“There are bodies on most commercial flights,” said T.

Often, when you flew, bodies flying beneath you, yet the proposition that on this flight one of them had been Hal’s—that Hal’s body had come in on this flight with T.—was absurd. The plane might have begun its descent just as Susan was leaning along the counter with her cleavage showing to ask the tattooed man for a couple of Marlboros—trying to picture, as she always did, whether he would be a strainer and heaver or a graceful thick beast. Whether his tongue would be stubby and awkward or pointed and cunning. Certainly, as a smoker, he would taste bad.

Hal’s body slim and tall, compared to the big man’s. And now also dead, compared to the big man’s.

It was almost her own body. Or it was hers without being her own, hers in the way that a home was, those spaces where you spent your time—as much hers as another body could be. By that token she too was almost dead. Wasn’t she? She had been with him forever, through all of it. Since the goddamn sixties. Three decades. He was hers and there were only two years between them; he had been fifty and she was forty-eight. She liked the smell and feel of his skin, she had always liked those things in him: his strangely delicate smell and the way he felt when she touched him. It was the skin that bound you most, the contact of two skins.

At that moment, because Casey had asked him, T. revealed quietly—trying to hedge at first but then, since there was clearly no way to dull the blow, said it outright—He was killed, killed with a knife in a mugging.

“Stabbed,” said Casey, inflectionless. “You’re saying my father was stabbed.”

When she forced him to it he went on, persevered with the dutiful exposure of facts: Hal had lain alone in a gutter and bled till he died. He had died where he fell. A crowded city and no one found him in time.

Susan asked when and then computed the hours: it had happened only half an hour after the last time they talked. Stabbed to death for a wallet that might have held nothing but forty dollars total,