Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,67

word,” said T. “If mobility is a problem, we’ll leave.”

“Don’t get all paternalistic just because we’re married,” said Casey. “If I want to leave I’ll say so. I have the power of speech.”

“Not what we meant,” said Susan.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. But I think you both get me.”

“OK,” said Susan. “OK. I just worry.”

“You don’t have to,” said Casey.

Susan stared down for a while and finally leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.

“Do my best, then,” she said.

She watched as the black Mercedes reversed, Casey waving out the open window, and pulled away.

8

“It’s not one of theirs,” said Jim, when he got off the phone with the city of Pasadena.

There were old women milling around them in the kitchen, wearing pastel colors and cheerfully garish prints. One blouse had numerous teddy bears, with pink and blue bows around their necks.

Angela had invited some friends over, unbeknownst to Susan, who had believed she had none. Without prior warning the house had filled with elderly ladies from a church book club.

Angela wore a delicate crucifix and went to mass now and then, when she suddenly felt the need, but her beliefs were opaque to Susan. The other churchgoers she knew were all old and most were also female; only the old attended church these days, she’d told Susan solemnly, unless you counted the poverty-stricken, ethnic, or Deep South states where, if you believed the statistics, millions were joyously awaiting the Rapture. But these were not Catholics. Angela’s church was part white and part Mexican, she said, and the whites were all old because young whites did not believe in God. Thus the book group was elderly white ladies devoted to reading Christian novels and discussing them.

There were, said Angela, some old white men in the congregation too, but if they read at all they tended to avoid fiction, which they believed was frivolous. And anyway the novels favored by the book club often had a romantic bent, even though they contained references to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, the saints, and other popular and interesting characters in the Bible. Some were historical, telling the stories of these biblical figures, while others were just about regular people now, Angela said—regular people who were godly. Usually they were also Catholic, but not always.

Angela had recently attended a meeting of the group on impulse, her first time. She quickly volunteered Susan’s house for the next meeting, then forgot she’d done so until the ladies arrived. They’d brought food with them—macaroni casseroles, triangular white-bread sandwiches, powdered diet drinks and frozen layer cakes. Curiously they had also brought stacks and stacks of paper napkins, napkins by the hundreds.

“They don’t know anything about it,” went on Jim, over the white, wavy head of a half-deaf woman sipping lemonade from a paper cup. “The guy said he never heard of that—a manhole in someone’s backyard that wasn’t authorized by the city. I got the feeling he didn’t actually believe me.”

“I should probably just leave it alone, shouldn’t I,” said Susan. “It could be part of some ancient sewage system the city doesn’t use anymore.”

Jim shrugged. The white-haired lady hovered between them, not moving or seeming to register their presence; she drank her lemonade with sucking sounds and stared with watery blue eyes into the great beyond.

“I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “You wanted to do something with that part of the yard, was that it?”

“I want to make sure there isn’t a basement,” said Susan.

“A basement? It’s a manhole. It’s hundreds of yards from the house.”

“I know.”

“Listen,” he said, and looked down again at the white wave hovering beneath his chin. “I really need to get going to the office. It’s halfway through the day already.”

“So go, so go,” she said, and smiled at him as the lady drinking lemonade kept standing there, clueless.

He loved his wife, she thought as he left the kitchen, or rather his ex-wife, now; he loved her and he always would. In this house there was unrequited love and there was love of the dead. She and Jim cherished these two streams of affection, at once different and the same: they lived inside two loves that went out and did not come back to them.

•

Casey had decided to send faxes instead of letters. Airmail from Borneo took too long, she wrote, while faxes were instant.

She had them sent to the machine in T.’s office, and Susan would come in on good mornings to find their curled pages waiting for her, thin