Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,65
rectangle patterns against the white. She was impressed by the spareness of the rooms that contained Jim’s pared-down life, the neat stacks of folded shirts, the three small cases of law books.
•
That afternoon the new caregiver took up residence in the big house to prepare for Angela’s arrival the next day—a stout woman in her early sixties with dyed black hair and lipstick the color of traffic cones. It strayed over the edges of her lips.
Casey had decided to hire an older woman, essentially an imitation of Vera since her mother-in-law’s brief track record with young women was poor. In fact she had chosen another Eastern European lady, this one hailing not from the former Yugoslavia but from some obscure yet quite large district of the Russian Federation, one that sounded like a mouthful of half-chewed nuts. Her name was Oksana and she brought with her a tall bamboo cage, two zebra finches inside.
Angela would sleep in the bird room, which Susan regretted since it would no longer be free for Jim and her. But it was the only room on the ground floor that was set up with a bed and its own bath; Casey had said that Angela got up at night, not sleepwalking but wandering around bleary and half-asleep without the capacity to notice her surroundings. She thought the second floor would be dangerous. Oksana needed a location nearby but the best Susan could do was the drawing room full of raccoons and minks, a few doors down.
T. brought in a daybed, which they set behind a pair of the old man’s decorative screens, scenes of mallards swimming on glassy lakes with bulrushes in the foreground. Oksana hung up her cage, set up a small portable television with T.’s help, and unpacked her suitcase into the room’s narrow closet.
“We don’t know how long we’ll be,” he explained to Susan, as she surveyed the mounts.
She had to fix them in her memory. She wouldn’t be able to go into the room whenever she wanted to now and she resented it, though admittedly Oksana asked for almost nothing. The Russian even lacked her own bathroom; she’d have to walk down the hall to use the toilet or take a shower. The house was large but it wasn’t set up for assisted living.
Item 1: A coatimundi from Arizona needed repair; insects must have gotten to it recently because parts of the face looked mangy. Could be the larvae of carpet or fur beetles . . . and there was mold on it, she guessed, either mold or mildew; ask the repair people, install a dehumidifier if need be. Item 2: One of the minks was incorrect, she had learned from a reference book in the library. The teeth were not its own. Possibly they had belonged to a housecat. Replace. Also the eyes were bulging. The wadding inside had likely expanded: another humidity problem.
“So I’ve paid Oksana’s wages in advance,” he was saying. “Angela has an ample allowance. Let Oksana handle her food, her bills, all that, the same way Vera did. Here’s hoping she’s capable. I’ll take a look at the debits and credits when I get back, but you shouldn’t have to be involved at all. That sound OK to you?”
“Fine, sure,” she murmured. She wondered if Oksana would be disturbed by the flash of canines at night, if, say, a car passed outside and illuminated the crouching raccoon. It held a half-bitten slice of lurid fuchsia watermelon, made of vinyl chloride.
Then again, she’d noticed, some people didn’t notice the faces; to some, like the young architect girl, the taxidermy was nothing more than a design element, albeit a misguided one.
“Where we’re going,” he said, “there won’t always be reliable telecommunication. Casey doesn’t want you to be worried.”
“I promise,” she said after a minute. “This time I won’t send anyone to track you down.”
•
Jim was spending more nights in the big house now. While he did not seem overjoyed by the arrival of Angela and Oksana, he was not displeased either; he liked the arbitrariness of their encounters, Susan thought. He was amused by the sight of Angela wandering into the kitchen at some odd hour of late night or early morning, her hair twisted up into a peach-hued turban, matching kaftan floating out behind her as she walked and a muddy facial mask with holes around her eyes and mouth. He smiled at Susan when Angela summoned him into the bathroom to remove a stray hair from