Magnificence by Lydia Millet Page A

estate—showings on the beach, slick modern condos the realtor picked out with wide windows that looked out over the Pacific, balconies that gave a view of the headlands to the north—when the lawyer’s call came. Her great-uncle Albert, who had died a few months back, had named her in his will. She’d barely noticed the death when it happened; she had never known the great-uncle, had met him only once, as a child, when her parents took her over to his house on a weekend. Odd that she remembered it at all; the only reason was his player piano. The piano had stuck with her. He pressed a button and showed her how the white keys moved under the weight of invisible fingers. There was one other fragment too—a thin arm in a plaid shirtsleeve as it bent down and stuck a rusty wire hoop into the grass. That was all she recalled.
    She drove to the lawyer’s office in Century City, a tall shining building with valet parking, and sat across from his desk with her right leg vibrating restlessly. The lawyer talked on the phone while she waited. He was a stubby man with a gleaming nose and ruddy cheeks and she wondered idly what he would say if she told him her husband had been stabbed to death. She considered blurting it out. Behind his head was a Chagall print. The décor in the office matched the colors in the print, down to the blue curtains and the flowers on the desk. Chagall had always irritated her. There was an obnoxiousness to the painting, a repugnantly coy quality, like a grown man talking baby talk to other grown men.
    “There’s no cash to speak of,” said the lawyer when he hung up, cutting right to the chase and handing her a thick file. “The bulk of the estate is the house itself. The house and the contents. Those are yours. You’re the nearest next of kin, or at least the only one he bothered to name. Himself—as I’m sure you’re aware—he died without issue.”
    “A house,” she repeated. The one with the player piano? She would inherit a player piano: a murderer, a black widow, the proud owner of a player piano.
    If she suppressed the murder part, the thought gave her a lift of pleasure.
    “Where is it, again? The Valley?”
    “Pasadena,” he said. “The will, the title, the records he left are in the folder. Review them at your leisure. You may take possession at any time or of course you may also sell. Estate taxes are basically covered for you under the terms of a somewhat complicated trust. All in the file. Feel free to consult your tax preparer.”
    She took a minute to shuffle through the file, the documents that were impervious to her scrutiny.
    “It’s all there,” said the lawyer, apparently impatient. “Feel free to consult your accountant.”
    “It’s such a coincidence,” she said, flustered. “It’s one of those things. Because I’m selling my own home right now.”
    The lawyer nodded and took another call.
    When she left she felt thrilled. She paid the valet and pulled out onto the street, her accordion folder on the passenger seat, then found a side street and parked to rifle through the papers till she found the address. It was unfamiliar—she barely knew Pasadena—so she dug in the glove compartment for her dog-eared Thomas Guide and flipped through it.
    There were keys stashed, the lawyer had said.
    •
    She did not let her hopes rise as she drove, expended effort to tamp them down. A derelict bungalow that was two-thirds garage, a trailer with fruit stencils decorating the kitchen walls . . . thick-walled refrigerators from the fifties strewn across a dry lawn, their rounded edges speckled with rust. With sagging roof and umbrella clotheslines, it would sit hunkered down on cinderblocks on a grim street where the lots were separated by chain-link and pit bulls jumped at you when you passed, backed up to a fast-food chicken joint or a video store or freeway.
    But the nearer she got the smoother the pavement beneath her tires, the deeper and older the covering trees.