Magnificence: A Novel Read online

  Robert answered, groggy.

  “Come to my place,” she said. “OK? And bring me Camel Lights and something strong to drink.”

  “But you don’t smoke, Susie.”

  “I do at times like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Susie was not her name. No one had ever called her that; no one had been invited to, though Hal had fondly called her Suze, on occasion. She had been planning to stop seeing Robert since even before Hal found out, kept meaning to—the breakup was like an item on a grocery list, something to cross out, but then she kept forgetting it and pushing it back the way you’d forget to buy something and tell yourself: big deal, no cereal this week. But now she needed someone neutral, someone unimportant. She needed someone who had no ties to Hal, whose feelings were irrelevant. It was insulting to Hal that the very least of her encounters, the most purely trivial of them all, was the one that killed him. Because Robert was a lightweight, a person almost completely devoid of substance. The guy played fantasy baseball, and worse, lacked the discernment to kid about the subject.

  Play fantasy baseball: fine. But at least have the wit to make a joke out of it.

  His selling points were a taut, muscular stomach and well-built shoulders. Also he was submissive in a way that was almost dutiful, as though he was honoring an obligation—civic or military. There was something twisted in his simplicity.

  “Times of mourning,” she said.

  •

  When she told him, in the entryway of the house, he was mildly surprised. Not floored even. At this lackluster response a part of her was incredulous. And then, as the moment expanded quietly between them, infuriated. Apparently he was too insensitive to be shocked even by sudden death. A human block of wood. On the other hand, he was easy to shock with sex. The news of Hal’s death barely moved him, but when she indicated that they could proceed from that sound bite to having sex he was uncomfortable. She relished his discomfort. She led the dog into the backyard and closed the door behind it.

  A dog was not sexy. Also it was T.’s dog, which she and Hal had been taking care of after T. disappeared—practically a proxy for T. and thus also for Hal, for both of them conflated.

  Then, in the dining room, she made Robert remove his clothes while she took a cigarette from the pack he’d brought in, lit it and poured herself a drink. He wore a half-wary expression and she knew exactly why: he was disgusted by the smoking, being a tan, buff, fantasy-baseball type. But not disgusted enough by the smoking to say no to the sex. He was neither shocked nor disgusted enough to say no to the cigarette-tainted sex. Rather he said yes. In fact he said yes speedily.

  Most men were like that, when it came to sex. Their own desires came first, before whatever scruples, even revulsion they professed. Most women also. That was the definition of a scruple: something you consciously ignored to do whatever you wanted. Hell, what did he care. For him, no one had died.

  And for herself, on this specific point—the timing of the sex—she did not feel guilt. She knew she should, likely. She felt anger, but it had no target beyond herself. As far as she went, she had ended Hal already. That black deed was done. Hal was over. Nothing could bring him back, nothing she did—no virgin purity, no nuns. Everything she did now was irrelevant, irrelevant to Hal, and though she would always be unredeemed Hal was not here to see. Hal did not care and Hal would never care again.

  She closed her eyes, swaying with the drinking she’d done, and felt, uncalled-for, the edge of things, the brittle, slicing edge—the yellowing edge of old bone … she pushed it away by bringing Robert down. They were a warm mass against the woolen throw rug, which she and Hal had bought long ago at Ikea. Blocks of warm red, brown and beige. At the time they had thought the rug was a temporary measure, but then the rug from Ikea had stayed. As it turned out, she thought while Robert went down on her, the cheap rug from Ikea had stayed with them forever.

  Robert was not particularly skilled despite the pointers she’d given him over time—had a robotic technique, in fact. In any case her mind wandered. What made her pull him off her after a couple of minutes and ask him to finish was a decision that arrived inappropriately: she had to see Hal’s body. His body was in her mind, suddenly.

  She had never seen a body, she didn’t come from an open-casket culture. Her family had been more or less Protestant, uptight anyway and not given to sordid spectacles, and as a result to this day she had never been to a funeral where you saw the deceased. But she needed to see Hal. She needed to touch the seam.

  “Sorry, not in the mood,” she said, when Robert asked why she had stopped him.

  “No kidding,” he said, and got up, sticky and dangling, to get Kleenex for her stomach. He had slight rug burns on his knees.

  Most other men she’d been with wouldn’t have asked, would have realized the effort was futile from the start. A failed comfort. It was where she went, but of course it was a dismal failure. So what.

  Lying on her back, she looked up at the chandelier, whose dimmer had been turned down so that the filaments of the bulbs glowed a deep, warm orange. That was, in a sense, the benefit of Robert, whose critical capacity was low. He did not examine past a point, and was therefore unobtrusive. Almost streamlined, in fact. He was not hindered by complexity. Whereas Stellan, for instance, from about four months ago, had been overly given to psychoanalysis. Sex with Stellan, who hailed from some cerebral northern land like Finland or Sweden, was an extended therapy session. Nothing could be more annoying. Still, for a while she had relished her annoyance. Stellan, whose habit it was to sit naked afterward, smoking pot and discussing the quote-unquote relationship, was like a persistent itch—aggravating, but satisfying to scratch.

  Was she relieved, slut that she was? Was there something in her that was relieved by any of this? If anyone could admit to such a thing, she should be able to. She was not only a slut but a killer.

  But no. She was not relieved: she was robbed and it had left her empty. Hal had been robbed and she was robbed too, robbed of him, and now she was missing something and she always would be. That was all she had now: the freedom of nothing.

  Nothing.

  She realized she wanted Robert to stay, wanted it with a rare desperation despite the bad-sex episode and the fantasy-baseball element. She would smoke the cigarettes he had brought and drink his booze and talk to him: she would use Robert as a sounding board. That was what she would do, talk, smoke and drink, pretend she had velocity. Robert would be her shield against slowness and the loneliness that came from it, the morbid tranquillity. She would keep him here until morning, until the sun came up and the birds were in the trees and she could take him out to breakfast. Scrambled eggs did not remind you of death. (Did they? Yellow eggs on a blue plate. A warm feeling, farms or home, the morning sun, a nook with folded cotton napkins. Unless you thought instead about the beginning of eggs and then you went from beginning to end—eggs found in an autopsy—eggs themselves in their sensuousness or sterility—once, when she was pregnant with Casey, she had found a red fleck in an egg and thrown up.)

  Whatever, she didn’t have to have eggs.

  Toast maybe. A waffle. A waffle could not remind you of death.

  Could it?

  What she didn’t want above all, she knew—watching him as he knelt down beside her with a tissue bunched in his hand to wipe the cleft of her belly button—was to lie there in the half-empty bed waiting to fall asleep. She was afraid of the certainty of those minutes, the cold night shining through the window onto the threads of her white cotton sheets.

  2

  The complex was manicured and bland, a sprawling suburb for the dead. Susan had taken a backseat and let Casey and T. handle the arrangements, so this was her first visit: for the coffin, the funeral service, the burial, all of it, Hal couldn’t have cared less and she followed his lead.

  Once she’d asked him to make a will—she’d read a magazine article in a dentist’s waiting room that ridiculed people for dying int
estate—and he had said absentmindedly that he would, but then he never bothered. She’d asked once if he had a preference for his body, in terms of being dead. She asked that mainly because she panicked one night about claustrophobia and beetles and wanted to tell him her own preference (cremation). But he had shrugged and said only yes, his preference would be not to be dead. On the subject of disposal he had no strong opinion; overall he was an agnostic, with a secular, institutional orientation and a general lack of interest in matters of the spirit. So-called matters of the spirit, he would have said, so-called spiritual matters.

  T. had already seen his body, long before it was embalmed. He had seen it in Belize City when it lay on the ground, seen it there in the street, seen it right where he fell. When Hal failed to meet him he’d flagged down a rattletrap taxi and told the driver the name of Hal’s hotel. He had described this part to both of them, under duress, after Casey badgered him.

  From the half-open window of the taxi, breathing the fumes as it sat idling in stopped traffic, he had noticed rubbernecking crowds gathered curbside. Without a clear motivation he had paid the driver and got out. The crowds had nothing to do with him, for all he knew, but still he found himself walking across the street and peering over the heads of bystanders. People were shorter there, he added.

  And then he’d seen Hal on the ground, dying—already dead or maybe still dying, he never found out which. He pushed his way through and fell down on his knees beside him, soaked the kneecaps of his pants in the warm pool of blood, but Hal’s eyes were closed and he lay unmoving. T. felt no pulse, felt no breath. Finally the ambulance came.

  When given the opportunity to see the body herself, Casey had shaken her head and said no, she preferred not to remember her father that way. Susan thought she was right, Susan was glad. But herself she had to see him, so she was going alone. They had insisted on laying him out formally in a private room. A young man in a gray suit escorted her to the door of the room and then left.

  She went in with a feeling of duty, trying to carry herself well. The walls were a placid beige and there were flower arrangements on a sideboard and the cloying smell of a deodorizer: a bouquet called orange blossom, she suspected, or tangerine breeze or mango blush. Its chemical sweetness conjured industrial parks along the Jersey Turnpike where scents were manufactured for cosmetics, malls, fast food. And here was the coffin, its lid propped up to show a white satiny liner. She approached with her breath held—half-frightened, she realized, her hands shaking. She thought of crime shows on TV, procedurals with all manner of corpses. They used real actors first, then dummies for the grisly autopsy scenes—she recalled a bright crimson, the flaps of chests spread out like butterfly wings. Her parents had died and she had never seen them; Hal’s mother and father had died too, years since, and she had not seen their bodies either.

  There he was.

  She had expected waxy and limp—that was her expectation—but he was not. Like T. he was tanned, and his graying hair had lightened to blond at the temples. What shocked her was how good he looked—better than the last time she’d seen him alive. He almost looked young again. And it wasn’t makeup but the effect of real sun. With the contrast of light hair against the bronze skin he looked, in fact, healthy.

  Briefly she entertained the notion of laughing. But the room was airless and resisted sound.

  On the other hand, it might not be Hal at all. Where was Hal? This was a dummy, after all—the real actor was gone. They’d dressed it in a suit and tie, a dark suit she’d never seen before and a discreet tie over a white shirt. T. must have bought it and brought it to them. He had not mentioned this. Maybe, on the other hand, the suit was one of T.’s own. She could check, if she dared to reach for the tags, touch the back of the dead, still neck. She knew T.’s size and she knew that if it was his it would have to be Prada or Armani, since that was all he owned. Or all he used to own before he appeared at LAX in the threadbare garb of a street person, with Hal as his luggage.

  She stood there beside the casket. Particles of air were touching both of them, touching Hal’s skin and then her own. His skin wasn’t living, she knew that all too well, but maybe energy subsisted there. Maybe there was silent movement within, particles sweeping down over the planes of her cheeks, the streams, the rivers of atoms, sweeping down over all of her and sweeping over him. This was the last time they would share a space, the last time their skins would be close. After this they would always be separate, on and on past the end of time, until the sun burned out and everything dissolved. And yet even if they were apart from now on, there must be others like them, shadows or mimics, unconscious reflections. People were not unique, surely: there were no anomalies in nature, were there? Individuals were permutations of longing, moments, tendencies. They were variations. So other shades of Hal and her, their many versions, crossed each other’s paths elsewhere, crossed over and merged, their cells swimming among the billions … Except for Casey. In Casey they were together. If Casey were to have children, if Casey could—possible, in theory; at least, no doctor had said otherwise—they would remain together there, the molecules of Hal and her, diminishing as time went on but never entirely gone.

  Impossibly he was putting her to shame—complete, reposing there calmly while she was still amidst the chaos of growth and change, the mess of life, the stew and whirl of microorganisms. Although death too was disorderly, she conceded—simply delayed by chemicals as she stood here. Only the deathless were neat.

  She thought of the stone biers of saints, of relics lying in state in ancient churches. They had seen one in Europe, a saint. Oh not the saint, but his image—graven in stone while his bones lay beneath. The church had been built over his dead body. Where was it? France? A church built over the laid-out saint, to house his sanctified remains. After you left that ancient church, in retrospect, you somehow confused the two, you thought the saint was in the stone—the saint was the figure itself, its contours smooth and pristine. A stone man, a stone virgin: people were always less beautiful than the images of them.

  Hal was not stone. No one would build a church to him.

  But everyone deserved a church, she thought, feeling naïve, feeling twelve again: all the tragic heroes that were dead men, once infants—each hobbled soul that wished and was undone. Maybe that was how someone had thought of mausoleums. Personal churches, skyward-pointing buildings. There were whole cemeteries of them. In some places it had to do with flooding, she knew, low cities like New Orleans or Buenos Aires, but here at Forest Lawn the mausoleums appeared ostentatious, the opposite of holy.

  It was in the lying-down figure of a man that holiness arrived. If a saint were interred standing up, his stone image vertical like a statue, there would be no grace in that. A man had to be lying down or he was not even an offering.

  She had tears on her cheeks, felt the wet streaks cool the skin, but did not feel them in her eyes. She wondered how she had missed her own crying.

  Hal had not given himself up, but someone else had offered him. The thieves, she thought at first, but they were only a proximate cause: the root cause was still and always her. The death might technically be a random event, sure, but she couldn’t stop there, the shape of her responsibility was too clear. She felt the struggle of trying to make death describe a single point, mean one thing that could be understood, but at the same time she knew she was spinning a tale out of physics, out of atoms. A bus lurching to a stop, a tree branch swaying and bobbing in the moving air, why, that was all that death was—a shifting of microscopic parts through time. The parts shifted and left you alone.

  Hal might look good now but he would not stay good for long. From now on he was the property of the dirt and the water beneath the surface, the property of gnarled tree roots, grasses and microbes, larvae and slugs, rats, beetles, putrefaction, fermentation and dry decay. That was the allure of cremation, of course: when you thought of your body in future time you did not have to see it decomposing. Better to see yourself as ash
es, ashes and rising smoke. But she had never liked ovens either. They had it right in India, where they wrapped them in white and lifted them onto pyres.

  Hal had been good. Good friend, kind father and kind man.

  And yet she had to think of herself. She always went back to her. Not even this dedicated moment could be selfless. Damn it! You had to see yourself there, where the loved one was, you couldn’t help it: because finally you too would be forced out, would have to let it all go. Finally she would be a dummy in someone else’s eyes, the living would look upon her from above. She would cease to be and join him, as was said. Join him in the sense of not joining him at all, in the sense of a parallel but utterly separate annihilation; join him in the sense of an eternal nonexistence that contained nothing.

  Still they said join, they said join as though there was a throng there waiting, because that was their desperate hope, there was a throng there waiting with arms spread wide to embrace you—there they all were, all the ones you had known, cavorting on the alpine meadows green in stately, shining ballrooms.

  It was unbearable that he should look so perfect, with what was coming to him next. Obscene. She leaned over the coffin and jerked his shirt up from under the pant waist.

  The shirt cleared the belt line and she saw his stomach, a shade lighter than his face but still tan. What had he done there, down in the tropics? He must have been on the beach! She saw him walking into the surf, surveying the vast beyond. And there was the wound, the means of this ending. A small line. She reached out with fingers shaking and felt the bump of its lips against her finger pads. Life was a skin.

  She would tell him she was sorry. Or no: too late. The body would not listen. It was a corpse, not him—but then it was him, it was. Wasn’t it? The last him she would know—the trace of him, the path he left. The raw materials. Or possibly all there was, all there had ever been. It was not hers to know; no one would let her in. The door of knowledge kept her out, her and legions, the masses of the undecided—the living ones, the ones who had been living and were not anymore—try as they might to look through the windows, they could not get in. You knew nothing of death, then you died.