If she sticks the knife point in Mr. Whittier's milky-cataract eyeball and pops it out on the floor for the cat to bat around—she's still right.
“In the face of that,” Mr. Whittier says, his necktie pulled tight in her fist, his face turning dark red, his voice a whisper, “let's start by doing what we promised.”
The three months. Write your masterpiece. The end.
The chrome wheelchair clatters when he lands, dropped by Miss America's hand. Carpet dust fills the air, and the chair's two front wheels lift off the carpet when he lands so hard. Both Mr. Whittier's hands go to his collar, to pull his tie loose. He leans down to take his coffee cup off the floor. His gray comb-over hairs, hanging straight down, fringe around the sides of his spotted bald head.
Cora Reynolds keeps eating the cherries and cream off the dusty carpet beside Saint Gut-Free's chair.
Miss America says, “This is so not over . . .” And she shakes the blade of the knife at everyone in the lobby. One fast sweep of her arm, a shudder and twitch of her muscles, and the knife is now stuck in the back of a palace chair across the room. The blade buried and humming in blue velvet, the handle still shivers.
From behind his video camera, Agent Tattletale says, “Print it.”
Cora Reynolds, his pink suede tongue still lick-lick-licking the sticky carpet.
The Earl of Slander writes something in his notebook.
“So, Mrs. Clark,” Lady Baglady says, “the Villa Diodati?”
“They had five cats there,” Mr. Whittier says.
“Five cats and eight big dogs,” Mrs. Clark says, “three monkeys, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon.”
It was a summer house party in 1816, where a group of young people spent most days trapped in a house because of rain. Some of them were married, some not. Men and women. They read ghost stories to each other, but the books they had were terrible. After that, they all agreed to write a story. Any sort of scary story. To entertain each other.
“Like the Algonquin Round Table?” Lady Baglady asks the diamond on the back of her hand.
Just a group of friends sitting around, trying to scare each other.
“So what did they write?” Miss Sneezy says.
Those middle-class, bored people just trying to kill time. People trapped together in their moldy-damp summer house.
“Not much,” Mr. Whittier says. “Just the legend of Frankenstein.”
Mrs. Clark says, “And Dracula . . .”
Sister Vigilante comes down the stairs from the second floor. Crossing the lobby, she's looking under tables, behind chairs.
“It's in there,” Mr. Whittier says, lifting a blurred finger to point at the auditorium double doors.
Lady Baglady looks off, sideways, to the auditorium doors where Miss America and the bowling ball have both disappeared. “My late husband and I were experts at being bored,” says Lady Baglady, and she makes us wait as she takes three, four, five steps across the lobby to pull the knife out of the chair back.
Holding the knife, looking at the blade, feeling how sharp with her finger, she says, “I could tell you all about how rich, bored people kill time . . .”
Think Tank
A Poem About Lady Baglady
“It only takes three doctors,” says Lady Baglady, “to make you disappear.”
For the rest of your natural life.
Lady Baglady onstage, her legs are waxed smooth. Her eyelashes, dyed thick-black.
Her teeth bleached bright as her pearls. Her skin, massaged.
Her diamond ring flashes, lighthouse-bright.
Her linen suit, first pinned and chalked, then tucked and trimmed
until it will fit no one else in the world.
All of her, a monument to sitting still
while a team of trained experts toiled long and hard,
for a lot of money.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
A veil of women dragging fur coats. The feeling of silk settles over her face.
On film, the armor of gold and platinum jewelry, warning you
with the red flash of rubies and canary-yellow sapphires.
Lady Baglady says, “It's no fun, having a genius for a father.”
Or a mother or husband or wife, ask anyone. Anyone rich.
Still, she says, it only takes three doctors . . .
Thanks to the Think Tank Sanitarium.
“Really brilliant people,” she says, “they're really most-happy, being . . .
fully committed.”
If Thomas Edison were alive. Madame Curie. Albert Einstein.
Their husbands, wives, sons, daughters would all sign the necessary paperwork.
In an instant.
“To protect their income stream,” says Lady Baglady.
That flow of money from fees and royalties for patents and inventions.
The veil of spa treatments and pedicures, charity balls and opera boxes, wiping
Lady Baglady's smooth face,
she says, “My own father included. For his own good.”
“He was . . . acting out,” she says. “Seeing a younger woman. Wearing a toupee.”
Not sharing the income from his product line. Neglecting his work.
So—three doctors later—there he is:
With all the other genius inventors. Behind locked doors.
Without telephones.
For the rest of his natural life.
From inside her veil of private islands . . . horse shows . . . estate auctions,
Lady Baglady says, “The acorn never does fall far.”
She says, “We're all . . . some kind of genius.
“Just,” she says, “some of us in other ways.”
Slumming
A Story by Lady Baglady
After you give up television and newspapers, the mornings are the worst part: that first cup of coffee. It's true, that first hour awake, you want to catch up with the rest of the world. But her new rule is: No radio. No television. No newspaper. Cold turkey.
Show her a copy of Vogue magazine, and Mrs. Keyes still gets choked up.
The newspaper comes, and she just recycles it. She doesn't even take off the rubber band. You never know when the headline will be:
“Killer Continues to Stalk the Homeless”
Or: “Bag Lady Found Butchered”
Most mornings over breakfast, Mrs. Keyes reads catalogues. You order just one single miracle shoe-tree over the telephone, and every week, for the rest of your life, you'll get a stack of catalogues. Items for your
