The men gave their tragedy to everyone else—handed it out like a gift. They gave it to the mammals, the birds and the amphibians. They handed it to whole species of trees, to the oceans and the forests, where her daughter had gone; handed it to the far-flung people who had fewer possessions. Beside them, as they handed it out, stood the wives, hostesses at the gathering—arranging the tables, placing the silver and linen, the fruit and the soup tureens. So gracious, nodding and smiling. Smoothing it all.
Her little girl lived with animals now—the ones who were still alive, though the condition, of course, was fleeting. But she herself existed in a kind of permanent sculpture, a kind of monument. When it came to the animals’ bodies, or what remained of them in the mounts, you couldn’t exactly call them the dead—or at least, they were a version of the dead that had, in the end, almost nothing to do with who or what the animals once had been. She would tell Jim, though his interest in taxidermy was limited. To say the least. She would reach out to him. I love you, Jim. And I was a slut back then but I loved my husband too. Now he’s gone—gone into other molecules. The binding is released, the molecules have not held. The molecules let him go. Now I’m with you, but I’m also with him and I always will be. I’m staying with both of you. We are the memory of others, we are the memory of ourselves.
“No, no, not by myself at all,” she called, though her voice was a mumble.
Jim! The dead have sent their bodies down to be with us—the ones with fur, the ones with skin, the ones with scales and hides and feathers. Some of them even have skeletons. They’re more beautiful than we are—golden, orange, an iridescent green, scarlet, the blue of tropical water, the blue of skies, the blue of violets. Lions and peacocks, auks and bears. The deep brown of comfort and hibernation. White like the snow. Their faces are so different, as different from each other as the faces of people are. But they’re not people and they never were; the people tracked them and killed them, then flayed off the skins. I was here the whole time, forgetting everything beyond my field of view. On rare occasions I caught sight of them, but still I never moved.
Jim, listen. I’m so drunk, I’m so drunk. Once God glorified us and made us burst with love—but love of ourselves, in most cases, is all that it turned out to be. And then our human sacrifice. Our sacrifice of everything. But museums are capacious, they can contain both God and molecules, even our passion for ourselves that brought smallpox to baby Indians. I never knew the old man and I never knew his friends; all I knew was keys moving on a piano, a liver-spotted hand and maybe a croquet mallet. We’ll keep the stuffed animals, OK Jim? I know you don’t like them but indulge me. We’ll have them here with us, figures from history, figures that once roamed beyond Pasadena, beyond Palos Verdes, where your rich ex-wife lives whom you will always love. Beyond the inland empire. Both of us love the gone ones, you and I, we live with them still, we always will, but Jim I welcome it. And I don’t care who made all this, Jehovah or Darwin—Jim? I really don’t give a fuck. My point is, it’ll never come back again.
I’ll look at them every day, I’ll touch them with my hands, I’ll listen as they make no sounds, to the ringing stretch of their silence. I’ll look at their details for as long as I live—the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails. I even like their eyes, made out of colored glass to look like the real ones. I’ll walk through the rooms and you can come with me. Here’s our ticket; now let’s go in. Let’s walk along the velvet rope and never touch the specimens. Stay with me, Jim. There’s still some time. We’ll keep each other company. Stay in these rooms for years and years, live on forever in a glorious museum.
About the Author
Lydia Millet is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Ghost Lights and eight other works of fiction. Her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives with her children outside Tucson, Arizona.
ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET
Ghost Lights
Love in Infant Monkeys
How the Dead Dream
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Everyone’s Pretty
My Happy Life
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
Omnivores
Review
“[Magnificence is] elegant, darkly comic… with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is.”
“Lydia Millet’s Magnificence is a novel of ideas. I mean that as a high compliment, for the ideas Millet invokes are the only ones that matter: life, death, love, longing, extinction, the ongoing existential quandary of what we are doing here…. [A]n ambitious book, not so much for the sweep of its action, which is essentially domestic, but for its deep and nuanced investigation of inner life….”
“Millet’s prose, which is both sensitive and strange… creates a thick atmosphere that immediately pulls the reader deep into this saga of love, death, sex, and taxidermy.”
“…[W]arm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashion… Millet’s lush prose has you in her thrall from the start.”
“…[U]unnervingly talented Lydia Millet completes a trilogy… each stands independently; you can read just one of them if you please. But you won’t want to, any more than you’d want to leave Chez Panisse after the appetizer…. There is something of Paula Fox in the way Millet provokes deep thinking without being overbearing. But I hate to compare Millet to anyone; she’s truly an original.”
“Millet is simply an incredible writer. Her prose displays the exceedingly rare combination of philosophical introspection with poetic grace and flourish.”
“[A] novel of ideas or philosophy, disguised as a portrait of one woman’s midlife upheaval.”
“Millet’s writing is as lush as the house Susan lives in. There’s a marvelous musicality to her prose; she’s a writer who tackles human emotions with scientific precision and an artist’s voice…. There’s a cataloging going on here of the ways that people navigate the world once their world has shifted; Millet does a fine job of breathing life into people who are surrounded by dead things.”
“Starred review. [An] elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even you’re not… A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story[,] …exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers.”