Magnificence by Lydia Millet Page A

seas, the winds of the atmosphere. Moon and stars, firmament: the ocean and the sky. This second part of her life was two kinds of freedom and two kinds of blackness. The future yawned over her, the heavens were endless. They were an observatory. Was that what plenty gave you? Everything was offered, nothing was necessary. She was less bound, standing there at the window by night. She had sails, she had wings, she had the lift of low gravity.
    She also had the shudder of regret, a sadness that clung forever. She was the sliver of rot in the wood.
    Airborne, though, maybe she could stand it. Before her the indigo sky of predawn, the black lacework of sheltering trees. She and Hal had never been poor. They’d always had enough income to qualify as middle-class, at least until it came to Casey’s medical bills. But this life was something else by an order of magnitude—a state of exuberance, a lazy abundance that bristled with energy.

    O ne morning she stood at the bedroom window half-naked while Ramon was working alone in the backyard, and then, when he looked up, she smiled.
    That was all you needed, typically. He was young, shy and deferential, and you had to be obvious with men: she had learned that early. To get what you wanted without undue worry, obvious was the key. Men would take anything that was offered, as a general rule. Most were so surprised they never contemplated refusal. That was the advantage of other women’s submission. In a society of aggressive or even merely confident women, she would be overlooked; but since most of them were passive, and most men were lazy, the field was wide open.
    She led him into the Himalayas on impulse because the bed in there had new sheets—the only sheets in the house that didn’t smell of mold. She had made the bed for herself before she chose horned beasts and not yet bothered to switch the linens, preferring to sleep in dust and oldness every night, half out of apathy. And he was clean, cleaner than average, she felt, and smelled slightly of aftershave or soap—eucalyptus, maybe—which she found she didn’t mind. He gave an impression of instinctive knowledge: something about the fullness of skin, a generosity that made the context fade.
    But then he stayed shy, downcast eyes and an expression of regret or modesty, hard to tell which. She guessed he was ashamed of them, that their behavior nagged at his Catholicism. Maybe the age difference made him awkward, maybe she reminded him of his mother. She would prefer not to. Younger men were a recent event for her, a passing accident. Usually it was competence that attracted her to men more than the way they looked, and older men were more likely to be competent, though they didn’t have a monopoly on it. Baseball had been almost incompetent, which made him less than compelling in the end. Ramon was not; Ramon had competence enough to give solidity to his attractiveness. Also he did not have a girlfriend—she had asked—and so she was unsure where his regret came from, save maybe shame about pleasure.
    She always tried to meet shame gracefully where she found it, felt sympathy for those who believed that pleasure deserved punishment (although she herself even suspected it sometimes, more superstitiously than anything). She felt the sadness of this inheritance, religious, social, even a casual hand-me-down, and tried small tender gestures to soften the exchange. Often she suspected these gestures were only perceptible to her, though—too subtle or subjective to convey.
    They were surrounded by clarity in the Himalayas—the snow-topped mountains in two dimensions, the robin’s-egg skies above. Around the king bed was a menagerie: the goat-like animal labeled BLUE SHEEP , the otter, the cat whose glass irises were a deep-spiraling well of gold. She turned her head to the window. Inside the square were power lines and palm trees and above these a yellow-gray haze of smog. The brief white frame divided those elements