Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,1

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 glassily at nothing. In many cases, completely unaware of their tragic identity. 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 bummed 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 ass, 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 sex 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 sexes were doglike. Quite the menagerie, all told.

She condescended to the sexes of men, but it wasn’t personal. Clearly they also condescended to hers. They had their own opinions about the sex of a woman, and those opinions were not all positive. That much was obvious—from, say, pornography, 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.

Pornography, she thought. Degradation and debasement. A man liked to degrade a woman, in pornography. 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;