Magnificence: A Novel Part 1

Magnificence : a novel.

Lydia Millet.

The author thanks Maria Ma.s.sie, Tom Mayer, Jess Purcell, Ryan Harrington, Denise Scarfi, Amy Robbins, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Tara Powers, Louise Mattarelliano, Steve Colca, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Dan Christiaens, and David Goldberg for all that they have done.

1.

It was a stricken love, but still love. It was the kind of love that gazed up at you from the bare white flood of your headlights-a wide-eyed love with the meekness of gra.s.s-eaters. Soft fur, pink tongue, and if you got too close a whiff of mulch on the breath. This was the love she cherished for her husband.

The love had other moments. Of course it did. But its everyday form was vegetarian.

She suspected it was the love of most wives for their husbands, after some time had pa.s.sed. Not for the newlyweds-that was the nature of the condition-but for the seasoned, the ones who had seniority. When she thought of conjugal love she saw a field of husbands stretched out in front of her-a broad, wide field. Possibly a rice paddy. They were bent over, hoeing. Did you hoe rice? Well, whatever. The way she saw them, the husbands had a Chinese thing going on. They toiled like billions of peasants.

Technically, historically, and at this very moment in most of the world it was the wives who toiled. The wives toiled for their livelihoods, for the husbands and the little children. Sure; those were the facts. It was the wives, historically and factually-in that limited historical, factual sense-that were the beasts of burden. Even in the richer places, it was the women who shortened their life expectancy by marrying, whereas the husbands lived longer than their freewheeling bachelor counterparts.

Still, there was something about the essence of husbands that made them seem like st.u.r.dy toilers. Husband, housebound. It might be the wives who were bound to the houses, materially speaking, but the husbands were bound to them. This was because of the narrow focus of most men, how they tended to have few intimates, in emotional terms. They left the social bonding to the wives, so they were bound to them.

And she was ready to tell him all the details, if that was what he wanted. She was prepared to come clean. But a toiler could so easily be hurt. A toiler was chronically exhausted from his long days of labor. What labor, you might ask? The labor of being a man, of course. It was hard to be a man. The men were all insane, basically, due to testosterone. You could see it in them, roiling under the surface. The few exceptions proved the rule, and the smart men were big enough to admit it. For instance, steroids made you more of a man, chemically, and also-not a coincidence-made you insane. She'd read that autism was thought by scientists to be an exaggerated form of maleness. So there was that. The latent madness and r.e.t.a.r.dation of men was compounded by the fact that most of them didn't get to kill their own prey anymore, stalk living things and slay them in a savage bloodletting.

The men, even when they didn't know it, were frustrated by this. They were unfit to live in civilized society.

Of course, women were also subject to hormonal madness-famously so. The estrogen or whatever, so-called premenstrual syndrome: the chemicals that, in excess, made them into caricatures of women. Hysteria, for instance, as Freud had called it. Neurosis. That time of the month. Of course Freud had been largely discredited. He had been a philosopher more than a scientist and Americans did not trust philosophers. Far from it. Also he did cocaine.

Still: no question, the fairer s.e.x was more changeable than the unfair one. In practice this meant that the women's madness sometimes receded. But with the men it was constant. When it came to insanity, women were indecisive while men never let up. Oddly the chronic insanity of men was often referred to as stability; the men, being permanent sociopaths, got credit for consistency. Whereas the women, being mere part-time neurotics, were typecast as flighty. Essentially, the female bouts of sanity were used as weapons against them. Sociopaths v. neurotics. It was a nontrivial distinction since many men took the thing a bit too far, frankly, becoming serial killers, wife beaters, dirty cops, or boy soldiers in roving gangs; war criminals, tyrants, and demagogues.

Not so much the women.

In one sense, though, she didn't blame the men. That would be blaming the victim. They were hobbled by their repressed rage and Asperger syndrome, variations on which were lavishly spread throughout the male population, but so what? Far from blaming them she had always loved them, loved them for their sad flaws. The men were tragic heroes. To be a tragic hero, all that was needed was manhood.

She loved them. Yes she did.

Casey was driving her to the airport, down La Cienega at rush hour. There was a comfortable silence between them. Susan gazed out the window at traffic. The traffic was full of men, most of whom were tragic. The tragic men sat in their cars, driving. Some played with radio dials, others picked their noses while staring gla.s.sily at nothing. In many cases, completely unaware of their tragic ident.i.ty. Women were also driving, of course-her own daughter, for one; Casey enjoyed driving and drove with speed and a certain measure of abandon-and yet these women, including Casey who was in a wheelchair, were less tragic per se than the men. The women might be unfortunate-take Casey, for instance-but few of them were Ophelia. No, when it came to tragedy the men had slyly cornered the market.

Driving gave Casey a feeling of mastery she didn't have in the chair, since she was higher up when she drove. In the driver's seat she was on the same plane with everyone else: the playing field was level. She was excited now, drumming her fingers on the wheel. Susan felt exhilarated herself. Her husband and her employer, both returning from the tropics. It was a homecoming, a heroes' welcome. Though come to think of it, the hero role, like tragedy, was unfairly, readily available to men. When she herself stepped off an airplane, no one would ever shriek in joy, jump up and down and hurl themselves into her arms.

Neither she nor Casey usually smoked but impulsively they had b.u.mmed Marlboro Reds off a burly biker at a bar, a guy covered in colorful tattoos with eagles feathering his biceps. The only reason they hadn't progressed to hard liquor, in a further festive gesture, was that the hour wasn't advanced. If Susan drank before sunset she tended to nod off. Her middle age began to show.

They would wait, Casey had said, and have their drinks with Hal and T. They would meet the two men at the airport and take them out to celebrate.

"Maybe move into the right lane?" she asked Casey.

"Oh yeah? Huh. Who's driving?"

"You are."

"Exactly."

"It'd be smoother sailing, though. Look!"

"Mother?"

"OK, OK."

"Relax. It's not so bad. We could be on the 405."

Anyway: she would tell him whatever he wanted to know, he had the right to such knowledge, but all in all it would be far better for him if he never asked.

Of course she would never describe the exact dimensions of her affection to him. Those microscopic inclinations were a best-kept secret-out of protectiveness for the other, more than anything-a secret she kept to herself, as everyone guarded their shameful, shrugged-in shadings of instinct. No one told the smallest increments of their feelings to their dearly beloveds. No one revealed the minute singularities-the slack of an a.s.s, say, how it could cause disgust. The response was involuntary.

There might be those, on second thought, who did reveal such things in times of anger, but mostly those people were not women. She would keep the hurting elements to herself, those subtle insults to a man's self-worth. In certain moments, for instance, his s.e.x could seem a forlorn, pugnacious servant, a servant that bowed its head and had a humble, comic quality. Anyway you could pity something, pity it as a brute and still want to use it: a brute part of a half-child, half-ape. Their handle, their use, their eagerness a panting hound. The metaphor was mixed, she knew that. Her love for husbands was like a love of deer, but then the men themselves were other animals, half-apes, and finally their s.e.xes were doglike. Quite the menagerie, all told.

She condescended to the s.e.xes of men, but it wasn't personal. Clearly they also condescended to hers. They had their own opinions about the s.e.x of a woman, and those opinions were not all positive. That much was obvious-from, say, p.o.r.nography, which almost every man loved, from the purest young boy to the jaded defiler. In other words small secrets were also held against her, and she did not need to know them.

p.o.r.nography, she thought. Degradation and debas.e.m.e.nt. A man liked to degrade a woman, in p.o.r.nography. It made perfect sense. If she were male, she'd like it too. Because a man might not know he was tragic, but he often suspected it. On a subconscious level, a man suspected himself of pathos. A man walked around bearing that half-aware, weary load; it was more stressful to suspect than to know for certain. Women were oppressed from the outside, via the patriarchy-girls raped in various African cultures, for instance, then put to death for their trouble. But men were oppressed from inside their own skin. She saw it this way: the testosterone was a constant barrage, not unlike an artillery sh.e.l.ling. They had doubtless needed it, in, say, prehistory, to run around spearing meat, build up muscles that impressed the breeding-age females, etc., much as baboons made their loud wahoo calls or sported shocking pink a.n.u.ses.

But now that the men were deprived of the endorphins of the chase and the butchering, the hormones were a call with no response, a ceaseless, useless siege upon the male psyche. Naturally the men, held hostage in bunkers of flesh, sought refuge in p.o.r.nography and violence. It was just self-expression.

At the airport she would see T., who had disappeared in the jungle and then, a miracle, been found again. She had thought he was gone and then he rose up like Lazarus-her employer, a real estate developer who fetis.h.i.+zed his Mercedes and wore no suits retailing at less than 5K, had been discovered a few weeks ago living on a tropical island with poor hygiene, ribs showing, and a hut made of twigs. Despite these choices her husband, who had found him, somehow claimed he was in robust mental health.

Admittedly it had been generous of Hal to fly down to Central America to search for T., a man he barely knew. Admittedly she was grateful. Even if the trip had been an excuse to get away from her, even if it was his answer to an unpleasant discovery, namely her having s.e.x with a coworker on the floor of her office. (She was still mystified as to exactly how he'd been a witness to that encounter: the front door to the office had been locked, the blinds, she was almost sure, closed tight?) Anyway a hard conversation was pending between them re: infidelity.

And his evaluation of the situation with T. could not be taken at face value. He had no history with the man. According to Hal her employer had reevaluated his life while he was wandering, starved and exhausted, in the rainforest, and this no doubt careful and rational appraisal had resulted in a decision to reside, for a time, as a hermit on a remote island with no indoor plumbing. Which Hal had tried to justify, over the phone, as a moment of growth, a sort of premature midlife crisis that headed in the monklike/whole grains/meditation direction instead of the more popular red sportscar/divorce/trophy wife. He harked back to his sixties roots: in his view T. had been seeking enlightenment.

But T. had lost a girlfriend recently, lost her to sudden death. And Hal was not perceptive, when it came to human interactions. Susan's husband was not what, in job interviews, you called a people person. Herself she thought T.'s condition resembled a schizoaffective disorder. She was no shrink, but she'd done some reading in the DSM-IV. She liked the Case Studies.

Casey's excitement was simple. T. was her friend and to her all that mattered was that he was rescued. If he was unfit for business that meant nothing to her. And it should mean nothing to Susan either; she should be thinking first of his long-term welfare. After all she and T. were also friends, beyond the work arrangement, and no matter what there was no risk for her: he would cover her salary.

But stress had worn her down, making financial decisions without him. She had never intended to sign up for a job that required actual thought. She'd become a secretary, after decades of thankless teaching in the L.A. Unified School District, in a half-relaxed and half-perverse gesture-purely for the anonymity it offered and the straightness. She had put her energy into other pursuits until recently, with a sleek and methodical urgency. T.'s disappearance had obstructed that. She needed relief. She needed him to come in and issue directions. "Do this. Do that." She longed to be absolved of agency. For all she knew she'd made bad decisions already, decisions that were draining his coffers.

But if he was insane he could not effect her rescue. He would lack the power to rea.s.sure.

"So hey, when Daddy settles in? He's probably going to want to talk to you about something," said Casey.

Susan hadn't talked to Hal for two nights now. It was T. who had called and left their flight number on her machine-sounding even farther away than he was, over their staticky connection, farther away than the tropics. Likely exhausted by his mania.

T., who had always seemed the most solid of young men. It went to show you. The madness lurked in all of them. Smack a man down in nature and he returned to his Cro-Magnon roots.

Casey was looking at her sidelong, waiting.

"What something?"

Could she know what Hal knew, could Hal have told her? He wouldn't. He would not.

"My job."

Relief.

"The telemarketing thing?"

"Yeah. The deal is, it's phone s.e.x."

Susan's head jerked to the left. Her neck hurt, it was so sudden. Past Casey's profile the side of a moving truck read STARVING STUDENTS.

"Case, please. You almost gave me whiplash. Can people get, like, sideways whiplash?"

"I'm serious, it's a 900 number."

The set of her lips was the confirmation: the lips and the chin, its slight lift. Even as a toddler she had lifted her chin like that when she was being stubborn.

"You actually mean it."

"Sleazy, yeah. That's what I like about it. I wanted to give you a heads-up, is all."

"Tell me you just connect the calls, or something."

"Come on. That wouldn't be any fun."

She found her eyes were watering annoyingly-couldn't she even take a joke? d.a.m.n it. Big deal. Laugh it off.

She turned away and looked out her window.

"And your father already knows this?" she asked, her gaze still steadily averted. Another truck; they were boxed in. This one was yellow and read PURITAN.

She looked to her left again, then back to the right: STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. And here they were, between the two. It was a clear rebuke. A rebuke from the world, which knew them both and knew everything. Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed-significance, but not purpose. The great collective knowingness of the world was a library of the hidden, a vast repository. But it was not meaning. It was the sum of an infinitude of parts, was all. There was the paint on the sides of trucks, the trucks themselves, which commerce and roads had brought beside her like this . . . in Casey's car, the car between the trucks, they were neither starving students nor puritans. They were s.l.u.ts.

She was a bad mother and a s.l.u.t; her daughter was a bad daughter and a s.l.u.t. Two s.l.u.ts.

The traffic started to move again.

Of course, personally she wanted to be a s.l.u.t. She rejoiced in it. It was the sole creative gesture of her life.

"s.h.i.+t," said Casey, and swerved around a pothole.

It was the private room in her house, it was Bluebeard's locked closet-the only s.p.a.ce, since the accident, where she was not only a dutiful mother or wife. Say what you liked about husbands: mother, now there was a role that typecast you for the rest of your days . . . being a s.l.u.t was a survival tactic. No more, no less-that sly, indulgent freedom, that liberty in its rotten deceit, the sweetness in the rot. It had saved her from despair more than once.

When she was young she'd been pedantic on the subject: monogamy was authoritarian, a form of property law. On occasion she'd even tried to convince Hal, who had a more conventional mindset. There had been long earnest nights of conversation, now blurred in retrospect-one ego struggling to free itself from the enc.u.mbrance of another. Since then she'd dropped all that as a series of rationalizations. Arguments could be made, but at its base sleeping with many men who were not her husband was a pure satisfaction, an expression of greed and vanity, a glorification of herself. She could freely admit it; she did. In those spans of time, sleeping with other men, she emerged from obscurity into the light. She was the subject of the biopic: the camera followed her face, thus slowing time, and a score accompanied her movements. She liked to see herself with others; she wanted to be known.

And Casey, in the wheelchair, how could she make that gesture? It was the wrong kind of freedom for Casey, it was a category error. Yet here was Casey, willful as always, stubbornly ignoring the fact that her gesture was compromised. Yes, yes, this was the manner of her revolt-it was parallel-Susan saw that now. The two of them were the same in this, though Casey had no idea.

But Casey could not walk. She could not walk and had no legs that moved.

Poor darling, poor sweetie.

Possibly this 1-900 thing was a way of keeping her leglessness private. Callers would never know that she was in a chair, so Casey could be pure voice-could gratify them in the warm and electronic darkness, the dark that bristled with mystery. Their private and dirty handmaiden.

Casey was always, always breaking her mother's heart-Susan had learned to withstand the familiar, crus.h.i.+ng pressure. She'd been forced to. This was only the newest and latest erosion of her hopes and dreams. Now she was forced to see a stark outline: her daughter as a phone-s.e.x drone. Well, yes. Of course. It was the logical next step. Casey had already done the rest-done the apathy, done the rebellion, done the resentment and the self-loathing. Now, apparently, it was high time for the paraplegic s.e.x work.

Susan could squint and make out the stereotypes of those outlines-archetypes, stereotypes that shone with depressing implications.

Gooseflesh crept up her arms.

"You told your father this?' she pressed after a minute, shaking her head. "And you didn't tell me?"

"I didn't tell him, actually," said Casey. "He figured it out. He just knew."

"He just knew?" It was embarra.s.sing. She hated to get teary in front of her daughter, who would shoot her a familiar filial look that neatly blended compa.s.sion with contempt. "But it's Hal. He never just knows anything."

"Don't be a b.i.t.c.h."

Susan shook her head. Her throat was closing.

The car was a cage-how did people not always think so? Cages on the a.s.sembly line, metal cages with bars and gla.s.s, cages along the roads by the billions with their tailpipes shooting out poisons. After the accident she thought of all cars as her enemies, thought viciously that she hated all of them for what they'd done to Casey, hated them like animate creatures, maggots or weevils or scorpions, and she would kill them all if she could. Not KILL YOUR TELEVISION; kill the cars. But of course, she also had one of her own and drove it all the time.

Cars were the life, here in L.A. Cars were the smallest and most portable of all homes. Even Casey, almost killed by a car, still lived in them without obvious reflection.

She felt for the vinyl shelf along the side of the door, pressing down with her elbow. There was a narrow well, half lined with lint, on the blue armrest, and she looked into it studiously. The lint blurred. What did they make these oddly shaped holes in the armrests for? What was supposed to fit there? Nothing fit. Or if it did, it was unknown, illusive, and not part of life at all.

The holes were useless, and these useless holes were irritants, ever-present, inexplicable, angering.

"He heard something, is all," said Casey, more kindly. "He overheard me talking to a friend."

"You wanted to be a professor," said Susan. "Remember?"

She was still shaking her head, minutely. It was almost involuntary. She wiped the corner of one eye quickly with the heel of her right hand and insisted on staring out the window.

"You wanted to get a Ph.D," she went on.

"Now, that was just stupid of me," said Casey.

They were on the road into LAX now. Taxis and cars lined up at the curb to their right.

"You were going to improve your French."

"I was i-di-o-tic."

"You were going to go to graduate school."

"I was eighteen! And now I'm not anymore. And I don't want to be some boring academic. Even if I could. It's not the chair, Mother. It's just me. It's like, a natural evolution."