Nowadays, Mrs. Keyes, she's the opposite of homeless. She has too much home. She's burdened with home. Buried in home. She reads her catalogues. Looking at the glossy pictures of garden ornaments. Diamond jewelry made from the cremains of your dead loved ones.
Of course, she still misses her friends. Her husband. But it's like Inky would say: Being absent is the new being present.
And she still buys tickets for the charity events. The silent auctions and dance recitals. It's important to know she's doing something to make the world a little bit better. Next, she'd like to go swimming with endangered gray whales.
Sleep in the canopy of some dwindling rain forest.
Photograph some vanishing zebras. Eco-slumming.
It's important to be aware. She still wants to make a difference.
5
That summer at the Villa Diodati, Mrs. Clark tells us, it was just five people:
The poet, Lord Byron.
Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, Mary Godwin.
Mary's half-sister, Claire Claremont, who was pregnant by Byron.
And Byron's doctor, John Polidori.
Listening, we're sitting around the electric fireplace in the second-balcony smoking room. The Gothic smoking room. Each of us pulled up in a yellow leather wing chair or a needlepoint sofa or tapestry loveseat we'd dragged from somewhere, the carved, pointed legs leaving ruffled trails in the dusty, matted carpets.
All of us, here, except for Lady Baglady, who went to bed early. And Miss America, off picking locks.
The electric fireplace is just a rotating light under a bed of red and yellow glass chunks glued together. Light without heat. All our hanging crystal trees turned off, and the red-and-yellow light dancing across our faces, shapes of red-and-yellow light move across the wood paneling and the floor of flat stones fit together.
Just those five people, Mrs. Clark says, bored and trapped indoors by the rain. Shelley and company. They took turns reading to each other from a collection of German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana.
“Lord Byron,” Mrs. Clark says, “couldn't stand the book.”
Byron said there was more talent in the room than in the book they were reading. He said they could each write a better horror story. They should, each of them. Write a story.
This was almost a century before Bram Stoker's Dracula, but out of that summer came Dr. John Polidori's book The Vampyre, and our modern idea of a bloodsucking demon.
On one of those rainy nights, with the thunder and lightning over Lake Geneva, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin had the dream which would become the Frankenstein legend. Both monsters the basis for countless books and movies that followed.
Even the house party itself had become a legend. Around the shores of Lake Geneva, the vacation hotels set up telescopes in their lakeside windows so guests could watch what everyone said was an orgy of incest at the villa. Middle-class tourists, bored on their summer tour, they put their worst fears under Lord Byron's roof. Just that handful of young people, trying to live outside the million rules of their culture, and people spied on them through telescopes, expecting to see monsters.
Here, we were the modern equivalent of the people at Villa Diodati.
We were the modern version of the Algonquin Round Table.
Just people telling stories out loud to each other.
People looking for one idea that would echo for the rest of time. Echo into books, movies, plays, songs, television, T-shirts, money.
It was these same faces—among three times as many, a mob—when we first met in person, in the back of a coffeehouse. Us: the faces who made the final cut. Even then, Countess Foresight wore her signature turban. The Duke of Vandals, his blond ponytail. The Missing Link, his long-hanging nose and dark wilderness of beard.
The way people gossip about the Villa Diodati today, in time people will talk about that coffee shop. People who never saw the advertisement will swear they were there. They were smart and didn't agree to go along on the retreat. Otherwise, they might be dead. Or rich. Over time, that coffeehouse, with its racks of free newspapers and bulletin board pinned full of business cards offering colonic irrigation and holistic pet counseling, that shop would have to be the size of a stadium to hold the people who will claim to have been there that night.
That night will become a legend.
The Mythology of Us.
The hemp people and poets and housewives and us, standing with paper cups of coffee, we listened while Mrs. Clark talked. Her out-there breasts and that silicone pout making some people giggle. When someone asked about a phone number for the outside world to reach people on retreat, Mrs. Clark said, yes. She said, “It's 1-800-FUCK-OFF.”
It's that moment, some people walked away.
Meaning, No. No contact with the outside world. No television or radio or telephone or Internet. Just you and what you bring in your one suitcase.
Meaning more people walked away.
The people who walked away, the first-round survivors. The smart ones who get to tell their own story. The camera behind the camera behind the camera, Mr. Whittier would say. They'll have their ultimate truth—but just about that night.
Those poor idiots sold short.
We all saw the advertisement, just in different ways. On different bulletin boards around town, it said:
WRITERS' RETREAT:
ABANDON YOUR LIFE FOR THREE MONTHS.
Just disappear. Leave behind everything that keeps you from creating your masterpiece. Your job and family and home, all those obligations and distractions—put them on hold for three months. Live with like-minded people in a setting that supports total immersion in your work. Food and lodging included free for those who qualify. Gamble a small fraction of your life on the chance to create a new future as a professional poet, novelist, screenwriter. Before it's too late, live the life you dream about. Spaces very limited.
The advertisement was printed on an index card. A recipe card. Boxed inside a dashed line, like a coupon you'd cut out. And at the bottom was a phone number. It was
