Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,50

His knowledge of the probate code. She wanted to get back into bed.

The door was open, though, and outside in the corridor was Casey, sitting impatiently in her chair beneath a woody canopy of fallow-deer antlers.

“You’re not just saying that?” she asked him finally.

“I’m telling you. It’s a long shot at best. It’s frivolous, in my view.”

“Do I have to—then should I do anything?”

“Try to relax.”

Now that the cousins’ decision was made, she saw, it was possible. The lawsuit was actually a relief; she could behave exactly as she wished. No more need to try to impress them, no need to fail so miserably.

She was smiling at the lawyer from the white-lit dust. Motes were adrift in the beam, and floated horizontally.

6

If you lived in a very beautiful house your life became the house, and like the house the life could acquire a quality of completion. It was something about order, she thought, order and its sufficiency. Before now, she had never seen how the mood of her life was defined by the spaces where she existed. Other people knew this—on one end of the spectrum architects and interior designers, on the other the guys who lived in appliance boxes in alleys—but it had never been so obvious to her.

When she left the house, three days a week on Mondays through Wednesdays, to drive to the office and do T.’s paperwork, she walked out the side door onto the driveway in a familiar path straight across the gravel. She parked the car in the same position every afternoon and so the path to it was always the same in the morning—behind her, as she emerged from the house, thick English ivy and Virginia creeper climbing the mansion wall, lilac bushes on either side of what had once been a service entrance.

To her left as she went out the door was the pool enclosure: the sounds of the fountain, a bird dipping over the water, a flicker at the edge of her eye. To her right was the driveway as it stretched out toward the wide front gate, the straight line of it with a branch curving off to the right, as you moved to the street, to round the front of the house in a semicircle. From where she stood it was mostly a line between grassy expanses, a simple gravel line in the grass. Beyond it rose the hedge that screened her from her neighbors; this was the closest point of contact with the other properties—the towering oleander that guarded them, rising easily eighteen feet, already thick with gaudy pink and red blooms.

Once she pulled through the gate—which was fixed now and glided open before her—and the lush gardens and shady trees were behind her, the gray buzz of the city replaced the oasis. There was the confusion of crowding, sometimes of ugliness: the concrete of overpasses and buildings, air thick with pollution, black and yellow digital signs with words unfurling constantly, velocity and noise, the haphazardness of garbage, the pall of commerce and everyday filth. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, exhaust fumes, the possibility of bad drivers, hostile passersby, sudden accidents, contagious illness, but more overwhelming still than these variables was the slightness and insecurity of her position in space—she could be anywhere, once she was out of the house.

She understood agoraphobics. As soon as she left the perfection of home her location, if not exactly arbitrary, was constantly and sometimes impulsively changing. Her being was subject to the many conditions of wherever she was, the trivial details of her momentary needs; outside the house the sequence of events was chaotic, could not express a clean design. This situation, she realized, was tolerated by most of the five billion people on earth. But more and more she had no idea how they did it—this normal state of mutability and flux, which she had always presumed and often preferred, was not only displeasing but almost unacceptable.

In her old life she’d gone out looking to make things happen because home was a resting place between these happenings; now home was more like a temple, inviting a routine of poise and deliberation. She could move peacefully between the walls as though she walked a neat path in history, as though her time and place were not the product of chance at all but of an ancient arrangement. She lived in the soft footprint of a ceremony. And the longer she lived there, the rarer were the thoughts of the