Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,51

knife. The winces as she expected the blade, awaiting the invisible cut, receded noticeably whereas out in the city she was anyone again. Anyone, to whom anything could happen; anyone, which she had once embraced.

Not anymore.

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With students from the Art Center—art students whose names she’d found on a bulletin board—she began reorganizing the mounts. Before she had them rehung and restaged she had to encode a new system, and for that she went to a reference librarian who helped her order museum floor plans. She studied the organizing schemes.

There was geography, there was taxonomy, and there was the collection itself, the variety of animals she had and the spaces she needed to house them. She made her own plan according to those needs.

The main part of the ground floor would be given over to North American mammals, each order with its own section. The deer, the bison, the sheep and goats and pronghorns would occupy the great room, as she thought of it now, where previously foxes and wild dogs had slunk along the sideboards. The library would hold the big carnivores—the bears and the cats, the wolves and foxes—while the smaller meat-eaters, the weasels and raccoons, would spill over into a drawing room off the front hall. Rodents would live in the music room, rabbits and hares in the ballroom. Bats fit into an alcove once meant for a telephone and a lone armadillo fit into a display case in the hall, where once a forest of antlers had interrupted the air. She made a reptile room out of the old breakfast nook to house tortoises, alligators and snakes; birds of prey now had the rec room to themselves—the rec room where the lion had stood before it was rudely felled by Addison. Owls perched there, hawks, falcons, eagles and a lone vulture.

She knew the second floor should follow the same principle, but she loved the dioramas. Also the foreign collections were small, with the exception of Africa—Africa, land of safaris, was a horn of plenty, and when the African cats migrated from the ground floor, the gazelles and the zebras along with them, it was clear that the horned beasts room could never fit them all. So she took herself out of it and reinstalled the buffalo and the wildebeest. Two of the art students were mural painters so the wide hallway, too, turned into Africa: out the walls of her former bedroom flowed the grasses and the great lonely flat-topped savannah trees, curling to the right and left as they emerged from the doorway. Long yellow grasses grew up from the hallway floor as they grew in horned beasts, and then, along the hall, ceded the way to wetter and greener terrain as the plain became a jungle. And on the Rainforest walls the art hangers put up a small colobus monkey, an antelope, a spiny lizard, and a gray parrot.

The birds seemed to demonstrate a lack of interest in her personal business, so she put her bed in Birds of the World, which once had been Russia. She had the squat, dun-colored horse and shaggy yak moved, and in the former Soviet Union students painted over Lenin and sketched the lines of treetops in a light sky, arching branches and tree hollows. She watched as the lines were filled in and dimensions came out. On a wooden platform a whooper swan raised its wings; against the wall that faced her bed stood a peacock with its shimmering tail open.

But in the other bedrooms the collections stayed where they were, in their quaint geographic compartments. She told herself that even the Natural History Museum in New York, even the British Museum in London, whose floor plans she had photocopied, displayed a less than symmetrical arrangement.

When the project was finished the house had a globe-like aspect in its sectioning off, its variety of scenes, its separation by palette. It was multicolored like a globe, and also like a globe it represented reality only partly, with the failure of all maps but also the same neatness, the same quiet satisfaction. The Himalayas and the Arctic were cold rooms, light-blue and gray-white; the tropics were emerald green, with the bright splashes of toucans and macaws, the savannahs yellow and gold, and in two of the rooms there were sunsets, pink and mauve.

She had loved austere institutions, as a child—old churches, universities, art galleries, museums. She’d cherished the high ceilings, the deep walls, the wide doorways. Now she thought she had