Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,55
front door, consulting a sleek wristwatch. “Some cement guys or roofers or something.”
“Yes, please send them,” she said. “Or give me the number. Whatever’s quick.”
“The secretary will call it in to you.”
It hadn’t occurred to her to sleep with him, she thought, despite his competence and a passing attraction. She wondered at this, and when he was gone she put her feet up on the couch in the library and gazed into the face of a black bear.
“Vera’s gone,” said Angela.
Susan had picked up the phone at two in the morning, with Jim asleep beside her.
“What?”
“She’s gone. She had to go away.”
She sat up, discomfort growing.
“You mean—she’s coming right back, though?”
“She had to go because someone was sick. But now I’m all alone.”
She could hear thinness in the voice, a lost quality.
“She—Vera left in the middle of the night?”
“She left in the afternoon.”
“And she didn’t call for a substitute?”
“No substitute has come.”
“No one’s with you? No one?”
“I’m all alone.”
“I’m in Pasadena, you know. There’s really no one there with you?”
Silence.
“Angela. Why don’t you give me the agency’s number and go back to bed, and then I’ll call them for you first thing in the morning?”
“. . . I’m all alone,” said Angela again.
Susan sighed, sat for a minute in inertia and resentment, and then got out of bed.
“What?” asked Jim, as she flicked on the closet light and stood blinking at the clothes hanging.
“I have to go make sure she’s OK,” she said.
“She? Who? Casey?”
“Angela. Her attendant apparently left her. Unless she’s making it up, for some reason.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Have to drive over there,” she said.
“There? Where?”
“Santa Monica.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Why you?”
“There’s no one else.”
“But why . . .”
“There’s no one else,” she repeated, and reached into the hanging clothes to grasp the folds of anything.
•
The drive was faster than usual since the freeways were empty, but it still took almost forty minutes. When she got to the townhouse the lights were all out. After several minutes of her knocking and waiting, increasingly impatient, Angela appeared at the door in a lacy dressing gown and old-school hair curlers.
“Did you go back to sleep?” asked Susan. “After you called me?”
Angela shook her head firmly. But there was a waffle pattern printed on the side of her face.
Irritated that she’d driven across the whole city for what seemed to be nothing, Susan slipped past her and flicked on the overhead. Apparently Angela was fine with shuffling around in pitch black.
“OK, listen,” she said. “I told your son I would check in on you while he and Casey were gone. So I’ll sleep here tonight, until I can call Vera’s agency in the morning. I’ll just sleep on the couch, right here. And you need to go back to sleep too.”
“I’m sorry. T. will be back soon,” said Angela, lucid for a moment.
“Well, good,” said Susan. “I’m glad. And I have to say, I’m surprised at Vera. Even if she had to leave on an emergency, she still should have made sure you had someone.”
She plumped a pillow on the edge of the couch and slipped off her shoes.
“Back from the honeymoon,” said Angela, and nodded.
Susan stared at her.
“Pardon me?”
“Back from the honeymoon.”
“Vera went away on her honeymoon?” asked Susan, and studied Angela’s face, her pale blue eyes and carefully plucked brows. Maybe Vera did the plucking for her. Personally she wouldn’t trust Angela with a sharp pair of tweezers in the eyeball vicinity.
“Not Vera, T.,” said Angela.
Not lucid anymore.
She had to be inventing it—very likely she was. Still, Susan remembered what Angela had said about T., when he was missing in the jungle and she herself was convinced he was dead. Possibly the woman had some kind of savant deal going on.
“Let’s get you back to bed,” said Susan gently, and took her arm. “Here. I’ll walk with you to the room. Were you going around in the dark before I got here?”
After she’d left Angela in her room she tossed on the couch for a while beset by images of Casey with vanilla cake smeared around her mouth, Susan not there at all, Susan all alone and separate and completely forgotten. Casey in the middle of sunlight, sunlight and other people who knew her—flowers and dresses, pomp and circumstance, ceremony and dancing, white frills and hideous ruffles.
•
In the morning she waited till Vera’s replacement arrived, a pretty young Latina who walked expertly on black stiletto heels. Susan opened the door for her and right away Angela eyed her tight