Magnificence (2 page)

“Come on. That wouldn’t be any fun.”

She found her eyes were watering annoyingly—couldn’t she even take a joke? Damn 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 sluts.

She was a bad mother and a slut; her daughter was a bad daughter and a slut. Two sluts.

The traffic started to move again.

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

“Shit,” said Casey, and swerved around a pothole.

It was the private room in her house, it was Bluebeard’s locked closet—the only space, 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 slut 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 encumbrance 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, crushing 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-sex 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 sex 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 embarrassing. She hated to get teary in front of her daughter, who would shoot her a familiar filial look that neatly blended compassion with contempt. “But it’s
Hal
. He never
just
knows
anything.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

Susan shook her head. Her throat was closing.

The car was a cage—how did people not always think so? Cages on the assembly line, metal cages with bars and glass, 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.”

“So you
evolved
from a Ph.D. candidate into a phone-sex worker?”

“I evolved from a teenager to a grownup.”

“But you’re more,” said Susan.

“Jesus. It’s not the end of the world, OK?” said Casey. “Chill out. Take a deep breath. It’s just a job.”

She spun the wheel into the parking structure.

•

At the baggage claim carousel they waited awkwardly. Susan watched her daughter’s face, the lashes shading the cheekbones. She had not always been so slight and wan. Before the chair she had often been tanned, cheeks flushed, hair lightened by the sun. She had a boyfriend who surfed and then one who was a skateboarder; on weekends they disappeared down the beach in sneakers and ratty, faded shorts and came home with peeling noses and salt tangling their hair.

Now she was always pale. But she was still beautiful. In her mind’s eye Susan saw baby pictures.

God damn it. Stay presentable.

“You actually choose to do this?” she started, over the background murmur punctuated by loudspeaker announcements. “Because if it’s money—”

“I choose,” said Casey firmly.

Susan stared past her at a poster of a hotel: a white high-rise with looming palms in the foreground. She stared at the high-rise. She stared at the palms.

Casey caught sight of him first, coming toward them in ragged pants and shirtsleeves. He was thin and too darkly tanned, like a Florida retiree, but lacking the beard Hal had described. A recent shave had left the sides of his face paler than the rest, the lower cheeks and the chin.

But what alarmed her was his expression—heavy, anxious. He bent over Casey first, knelt down at the chair and took her face in his hands. Susan saw how she looked at him, noticed it fleetingly, but then already—in the shock of this—the recognition faded as he stood up straight again, still holding Casey’s wrist.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you this over the phone. I have very bad news,” he said.

I
n an instant the whole of existence could go from familiar to alien; all it took was one event in your personal life. You might think you were only a mass of particles in the rest of everything, a mass exchanging itself, bit by bit, with other masses, but then you were blindsided and all you knew was the numbness of separation.

Casey clung to T.’s hand and Susan stood beside her with her own hand on Casey’s other shoulder. She was pinching the shoulder, she realized slowly, quite hard though she did not intend to—out of anxiety, out of tension, pressing the hard ridge of the collarbone between her thumb and forefinger. She made herself relax her hold and the sensation melted into others, unnamed and nonspecific, hazy and suffocating as they stood there in a kind of dumbness. She felt buzzing around her from some unknown source. Was it electric? Was it imagined?

Casey did not seem to have felt the pinch. Her eyes were forward, fixed on the dark wood.

“Sorry if it’s not—there weren’t that many choices,” said T.

The scene was theatrical, three people presiding stiffly at a glass airport wall as coffins were lowered from the belly of the plane and rolled across the tarmac. More than one coffin, she thought, looked like an army of them.

“There are bodies on most commercial flights,” said T.

Often, when you flew, bodies flying beneath you, yet the proposition that on this flight one of them had been Hal’s—that Hal’s body had come in on this flight with T.—was absurd. The plane might have begun its descent just as Susan was leaning along the counter with her cleavage showing to ask the tattooed man for a couple of Marlboros—trying to picture, as she always did, whether he would be a strainer and heaver or a graceful thick beast. Whether his tongue would be stubby and awkward or pointed and cunning. Certainly, as a smoker, he would taste bad.

Hal’s body slim and tall, compared to the big man’s. And now also dead, compared to the big man’s.

It was almost her own body. Or it was hers without being her own, hers in the way that a home was, those spaces where you spent your time—as much hers as another body could be. By that token she too was almost dead. Wasn’t she? She had been with him forever, through all of it. Since the goddamn sixties. Three decades. He was hers and there were only two years between them; he had been fifty and she was forty-eight. She liked the smell and feel of his skin, she had always liked those things in him: his strangely delicate smell and the way he felt when she touched him. It was the skin that bound you most, the contact of two skins.

At that moment, because Casey had asked him, T. revealed quietly—trying to hedge at first but then, since there was clearly no way to dull the blow, said it outright—
He was
killed, killed with a knife in a mugging
.

“Stabbed,” said Casey, inflectionless. “You’re saying my father was stabbed.”

When she forced him to it he went on, persevered with the dutiful exposure of facts: Hal had lain alone in a gutter and bled till he died. He had died where he fell. A crowded city and no one found him in time.

Susan asked when and then computed the hours: it had happened only half an hour after the last time they talked. Stabbed to death for a wallet that might have held nothing but forty dollars total, the rest in traveler’s checks. The cops had found it close by, in the trash.

Hal, hers. Thoughtful, sad, getting old. But not now. He would never be an old man.

The thought of him as he walked down the street, and then the sudden impact of the knife—maybe they threw him against the wall, maybe they knocked him down before they did it . . . she almost cringed as she stood there, thinking of pain, but then again it was nothing like real pain or shock, she recognized, nothing like them at all. The mere idea of a cringe, the projection of it—an anticipation of impact. She tried to feel it and not feel it at once. Pain and suffering, they said, were not the same, but stabbed in the stomach—it happened in war movies: gut-shot, the soldiers shivered and said plaintively, “I can’t feel my legs, man.” She’d seen it more than once. The same scene must occur in dozens of movies. She strained toward an intuition of bleeding, of an opened-up stomach, but failed miserably because the insides of her arms were against her own ribs, feeling her own stomach: regular stomach, enclosed and protected. Regular arms, smooth and unbloody. She moved her hands across the skin.