Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,54

a blackbelly rosefish, she spread out the drawings. There were several pages and she wasn’t good at correlating the lines on them to the real house, but soon she had glasses weighting the corners and could study the one marked BASEMENT & SUBCELLAR. She wondered if it had been filled in since—was that even possible? She’d never noticed a door to the basement, yet there it was on the plans. As far as she could tell it had been as large as the ground floor, had extended over the same area—maybe nine thousand square feet. The subcellar was smaller and seemed to have been designed for wine storage: there were built-in racks on the plan, if she was reading it right.

She called the architect, who had a phone in his car.

“Could it have been, I don’t know, filled in or something? I’ve never seen a basement here. I mean, I’ve lived in the house since December.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled. Let’s look for it.”

He was back in half an hour.

“So you’ve never seen a door?” he said.

“Never,” she said firmly, and shook her head. “They’re not where the plan says they should be. See? Here?”

“The plans indicate there—there—two doors, two staircases,” and he tapped the flattened paper. “Let’s go look.”

He lifted the glasses off the drawings and took the plans with him. She followed him out of the kitchen, along the main hall to the raptor room with the sunken floor.

He looked around for a second and then consulted the drawing.

“Huh,” he said, and turned around a few times.

“What?”

“I don’t think this room was ever built as the plan stipulated. Either that, or it was gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. See? This should be a supporting wall. Nothing. Instead the support’s over there,” and he pointed.

“So what does that mean?”

“First we check where the other staircase was supposed to be,” he said, shaking his head, and this time she followed him to the music room.

“No,” he said, and shook his head again. “Hmm. Surprising.”

“Will it affect the application?” she asked abruptly, quickly worried that her curiosity had jeopardized the house’s future.

“Oh no. Shouldn’t be relevant,” he said vaguely, looking around and then back at the drawing.

“Oh good. Good.”

“OK. We’ll have to walk it. We can start from the east end,” he said finally.

“Wait. Are you hungry? I know you’re missing your lunch hour right now. Would you like me to make us some sandwiches first?”

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

In a few minutes they were standing with their sandwiches in the parlor off the cavernous front hall—the drawing room, full of raccoons and ringtails and coati, weasels and otters and minks. “Procyonids and mustelids,” she told the architect, as he nodded and masticated his ham and cheese, casting his eyes to the molding and ceiling beams.

She liked knowing the nomenclature, even took pride in it. They were beautiful words, the terms from Greek and Latin: careful words to be kept and valued, along with the collection.

“All this furniture has been here? Since you took possession?”

“This room is unchanged, pretty much, except for the taxidermy. That’s all been moved around. But I don’t think it blocks anything.”

He walked along the one interior wall, rapping with one hand, sandwich in the other.

“Moving along,” he said, when the last bite of sandwich was gone.

He checked the hallway next, the wall behind the grand staircase; he went back and forth between rooms, measuring closet spaces and the depths of walls with his eyes. She was impressed by this, how he could know measurements without using a measuring tape. He knew the volume of hidden spaces without seeing both sides of them at the same time. But in room after room he shook his head, and finally—by this time she was impatient and the balls of her feet were hot and sore from standing—they had made it to the west end of the house without new information.

There had been some shelves and cabinets and wardrobes they’d need to get out of the way, he said, if she wanted him to be sure—some walls he couldn’t get to without the furniture being moved, pieces that were too heavy for just the two of them to shift. He wrote down the list of rooms and the walls he needed to check if she wanted a definitive answer.

“I can send over a couple of burly guys who work for one of our contractors, if you don’t mind paying his fees,” he offered at the