This was the time where dew beaded on her forearm hairs and reminded her of cobwebs or silver mail. Waves of heat were visibly coming off her body, distorting the grass and trees. She thought of a start corral at a winter race; the bodies packed together made a similar blur of heat throbbing just above their heads. A thermopolis. Raza shivered. That was years ago, when just the sight of great clumps of runners could change the weather or at least her mood.
She spit her remaining saliva into the dirt to show it didn’t matter that she was under siege. They were down to eating rats but they threw the last of the meat over the castle walls to show their attackers that it didn’t matter. Thoughts were doing that pearls on the parquet thing again. She had run, and then walked, and then limped, and then crouched, coughing and sighing, only to stand up – head rush – to begin running again. There was severance in the perfection of whatever we called union with whatever we called God, she thought, then, no, that isn’t right, you’ve missed it again.
The perfection comes from the union and the separateness together, she thought, slowing to a shuffle. The perfection comes from being with God and then being cut off. In that order precisely. The not happy ending and being okay with it. That’s what made Tereza a saint, she figured: Oneness, or whatever, and then her failure, her loss, the dark space, the white arm without dew reaching into darkness and there was nothing there except her reaching.
The peace comes from the knowing that the bow no longer sings and the bell is stuffed with paper and feathers, too full to chime. She wished she could read and write in Latin or Greek, preferably both. She wished she was fast like RoboSnatch here, passing her on the left. R.S. was squeezed into a two piece black spandex thing, no hips, almost no breasts, built like a guy, running like a horse with a bit in her mouth, chin tucked down and eyes up.
Kelsie had fallen behind weeks ago. There was no doubt Raza ran without pity, even if other hopefuls like R.S. made her look somewhat gauche. The pity in fact leeched out of her all through the beginning of the run and she was left adamantine, sunburnt over her usual tawny sallowness. Kelsie however was greenish white and then she got that mottled color tourists got before they ignite in a second and third degree burn. And then eventually she had to stop.
Just leave me here, she told Raza. I can’t go any more. Just leave me in the shade.
There is no shade, she replied.
Kelsie put her palm up to shield the sun from her eyes and she looked at her friend.
My journey ends here, she said. Leave me here, I’m gonna watch the birds. I want them to be the last thing I see. I’ve dreamed of this moment my whole life.
Raza was startled. Kelsie had never spoken like that before and Raza honestly didn’t think she was capable of any … she didn’t know what. Self poetry, maybe. She felt guilty for thinking Kelsie, probably her final friend, was dumb.
The sun was getting lower and the mountain on the other side of the strait had turned pink. It was not a breathtaking view but it was something else. She didn’t give a shit about the view or any view but she wanted some clean water. Her father told her that dreams were held in the mouth and honey vinegar and hot water at the bedside and sipped first thing in the morning would wash the hidden dreams into your mind and you’d be able to speak them. She would drink that in her white bedroom in Miami. Miami. The word alone conjured another life, nights and days of doing her toenails inches away from the new white berber, aqua and lilac roofs, hair down to her ass, writing her name in steam, the sweet and alluring smell of dry ice, cigarette smoke, the feeling behind her knees after a snort of dope, music so loud it decayed and became something else. The black guys in matching cheap black sweatsuits and picked-out floaty hair standing by their cars on Old Ocean Drive at dawn, feet wide apart, hatches up, vibrating. They always seemed to be waiting or watching. She thought they liked having people watch them listen to music that had been blasted into something else.
Raza hadn’t seen her reflection in a long time and she didn’t care to.
Now I am further ahead/ than either of us dreamed/anyone would be. What Kelsie said half delirious lying on the grass reminded her of a poem by some lady about a doomed climbing team. “I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back … we are moving almost effortlessly in our love” And: “We will not live to settle for less”
Now here she was on a road with no name, passing and being passed by other – and she had no other word for the living except -- hopefuls. Or the road once had a name but it had been forgotten, blissfully forgotten.
She would live to settle for less. She was in the process of settling for less and less right now and it was bringing her to perfection.
In fact it was pink to begin with because of the fucking feldspar in the granite. Why why why. She couldn’t help her friend.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
fragment, c. 2011
I chose the Housatonic because I am a river lover, and I’ve been a champion of the Housatonic ever since I splashed my kayak under a railroad trestle years ago in Great Barrington on a listless July afternoon and took her south, way south, to the Connecticut border. The trip was enchanting – I saw bank swallows, pale carp, heron, and a loping water road through Berkshire County previously unknown to me. At the same time, the trip was squalid; my guidebook warned that the muddy river bottom and much of the wildlife were still afflicted by PCBs, the carcinogenic compound that is the legacy of Pittsfield’s General Electric plant. In many places, the riverbanks were littered with trash – a reminder that our waterways are often neglected and used as dumping grounds for our refuse.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.
Monday, February 21, 2011
My Life in Furs: Hate Me If It Makes You Feel Good
I've been looking for this nasty nugget for a good long time. Here it is--my errant farewell to NYC.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000
by Jessica Willis
She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.
We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.
I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.
"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."
Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.
His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.
"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.
"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."
This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."
The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.
"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.
Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.
Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."
She thinks about this for a moment.
"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."
Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.
And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.
There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.
"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.
She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.
She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.
Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.
And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.
Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.
A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.
And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?
Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.
Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.
I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"
Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.
Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.
I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.
"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.
"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."
Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?
Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.
Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.
"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.
The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.
Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.
"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.
Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.
It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000
by Jessica Willis
She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.
We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.
I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.
"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."
Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.
His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.
"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.
"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."
This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."
The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.
"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.
Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.
Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."
She thinks about this for a moment.
"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."
Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.
And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.
There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.
"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.
She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.
She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.
Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.
And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.
Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.
A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.
And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?
Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.
Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.
I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"
Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.
Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.
I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.
"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.
"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."
Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?
Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.
Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.
"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.
The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.
Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.
"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.
Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.
It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The steel-mirror of her smile
13 October 1904. And so we ride. In July we purchased the vehicle of passion – a Pope-Hartford touring car, and whenever I am not writing or gardening or on the terrace star- gazing I am bundled in the car, with dogs, Teddy, HJ, and dear Charles Cook as charioteer. Yesterday we toured Lee and Becket, and the voyage reminded me that one has to glimpse only a sliver of a scene to know it complete.
A vision I won’t soon forget– We turned off Main Street in Becket village & began to climb a high street; where I saw sheds built from rough boards clinging to the stark mountainside. An inhabitant of one such place stood motionless in a black doorway, her face gnarled like the granite flank on which she lived. My heart pounded at the scene–HJ beside me saw it too but I don’t believe he had the same reaction. We motored on; the shadows bruised and grew long. The burnished Lenox autumn around Laurel Lake suddenly was very far away.
Some time ago Rev. Lynch in Lenox told me about a woman who became seriously ill in such a shack on Bear Mountain. She was from one of the drunken mountain outlaw families who live
on the fringes of the Berkshire hilltowns. When he arrived to administer last rites, he found her already dead, flung on a bare mattress on the floor, her skirts bunched up to reveal one glistening leg, swollen with rot. She lay there like a dead dog in a ditch, her family in the shadows, half-drunk and inchoate with animal grief. The Rev said the sight of the living faces too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death. There was no coffin. Someone had dug a hole for her body, and they carried her out into the bitter cold on the mattress. These glimpses of squalid misery are but a fragment; I see the entirety with something other than my weary old eyes. Perhaps my possession of this other sight is what compels Teddy to call my writing a form of witchcraft. My dear old man doesn’t see me, and for that matter I no longer see him ...
Newborns screaming in a cold shack, slippery with blood, brown bread and a dull knife on a greasy table, smoke and fire spluttering in a cold hearth– they all flash between the trees, in the steep periphery, on every motor-flight. I cannot evade these images, they’re in my chest, crying to come out, needing to be told.
All Soul’s Day, 1904. The Mount. Will be closing up soon for the season and then on to warmer climes. Finishing the final edits to House of Mirth, revising the ending. Charming letter from Walter arrived today, asking if House’s interior decoration is being attended to...and praying that none of its chimneys smoke. Seated at my desk in the library now, I have to smile.
In the end, Lily was right. Freedom is a draught meant to be drained to its lees, and success is not a country with a pass-code known only by those who see no difference between money and poverty. Those who see no difference are fools. There is a difference.
In the end, Lily is no longer a case to be clinically studied by Selden; nor is she a butterfly writhing on the end of a pin, praying for suffocation between two dusty panes of glass. Her face, once mobile, is cold and impassive in death. I agonized over this final scene and slashed at it last week; this morning some sort of grace blew off the lake and into my chilly bedroom. It is late fall here but I gave Selden a spring morning and a smarting chill light to look one last time at her now expressionless face. Lily’s actual death and the close of the book were easier to write than her living death, earlier in the story. In the Baroque phase of Lily’s life, she poses, sensationally, as “Mrs. Lloyd,” the Sir Joshua Reynolds painting, as part of a tableau vivant amusement. I situated the scene at a party hosted by the freshly minted Wellington Brys. In her silken, almost sheer gown, it seemed as though she wore nothing underneath, and her onlookers – the petrol of the great machine – were at once uplifted and disgusted by her display. Humiliations to follow. Birth, marriage, death – the polite woman’s lot ... Lily transcends all three. Scribner’s will be serializing House of Mirth in its issues starting January. The novel will publish in October 05. May none of its chimneys smoke, indeed.
le 3 Mars 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris. T & I and the dogs and the servants are settled in to the new apt. I can breathe freely, a home in Paris at last; even Teddy thinks I’m in fine form again. And yet my hand shakes as I write this. Not certain what this feeling is. But I am not naive; I know its connected to something, or someone, very new. At Rosa’s salon last week I met an American journalist named Morton Fullerton; I believe he’s a Parisian correspondent for the Times. My mind is wandering at these inanities even as I write. His eyes are a mocking icy blue, framed by dark lashes and gleaming black hair. He is almost my height; compact, coiled. Physically at ease with himself, stunning to see in a male. Lithe, almost an effeminate air I find immensely attractive, what with the transparency and devotedness of most of my men friends...Henry, Walter, etc. I know M can be of help for me for French serialization of The House of Mirth; trying to reserve some time so we can speak privately about the matter. Want him to have tea with H & me. There’s something very mysterious about Fullerton, something hidden behind the magnetic emptiness of those eyes. Very knowledgeable about Franco-American relations, George Meredith (M is a fan and a friend, evidently), etc. Easy to talk to – when one can find him.
6 March 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne. Yes, there is something mysterious about dear Monsieur Fullerton. He doesn’t respond to my notes or request for help in placement of House of Mirth. Sally tells me he has family in eastern Massachusetts and some sort of business there this summer. I’ll send him a note asking if he would like to visit The Mount in the fall.
7 March 1907. M replied and said he most certainly will visit; Mon cher Henry however tells me he’ll make an excuse at the last minute and not come. I refuse to believe it and already look fwd to October in Lenox.
28 October 1907. The Mount. Whatever sadness was upon me, mocking me...I have succeeded in waving away its black wings. M was here last Monday and Tuesday–already a week ago. It was a brief visit, and I am just beginning to feel its reverberations now.
On Tuesday I took M and Eliot on a motor-flight, and despite the chill and the early snow I was warm inside, looking at M’s glossy head in the front seat, next to Cook. We stopped so Cook could put chains on the wheels; M and I sat in the wet leaves (did I get cold? I can’t remember). I noticed a wych-hazel in bloom nearby. To me, the shrub is the sign of the late-bloomer... an old woman’s blossom. At 45 years of age (although the same probably could be said of me at 18), I am a late-bloomer. We dropped M off in Westfield so he could get on to his family in Brockton; E and I continued on; I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the trip. The air was dazzlingly clear; I drank it down gratefully...a white note on my tongue.
I received a thank-you note from M today, and folded inside the paper was a sprig of wych-hazel. I read the kind letter in my boudoir and held the tough little brown and yellow sprig in my fingers, and tears of emotion welled up in my eyes and pressed against my chest. Forty-five years of lonely interior life and only now am I feeling this ache which must be love, I can deduce as much for I am falling; this is the plunge I have, until this moment, only read about.
Without M here now I only wish to return to Paris.
Le 22 mai 1908. 58 Rue de Varenne. After the events of this spring, it seems errant and incorrect, somehow, to be leaving for Lenox tomorrow. After Teddy, in misery, left Paris for a spa in Arkansas in March, I have taken many liberties with M. Or as many as possible what with my schedule. Have been snatching time to meet with him whenever I can. Lately he has been teasing me about my lack of experience in matters of love; his taunts are almost not playful and they make my cheeks burn with shame. It is true–I am inexperienced. Lately my lack has been v. much in the foreground. I am not pretty enough, not young enough, not many things enough for M. I have been too sad, for too long, & something in my nature – some lack, I suppose– has left me starving for what other women seem at least once in their life to know.
And yet those bitter feelings are washed away by other afternoons. The other day we sat in le jardin de Lux and took in the warmth; in my feverish ear he whispered that I was his love, his darling, and I stared at the other lovers walking carefully side by side and I wondered if they knew what I knew...that my bottomless appetite for this man has drained the world of its blood. I can’t bear the thought of a summer and fall in Lenox. I will miss the constant bleus...our word for the little notes that fly between us several times a day. Meet me at the Louvre, le Bois du Boulogne, les Tuileries. Jusqu’a le moment prochain...I love it, you know I do...with these fragments of scribbled phrase on my breakfast tray an entire scene unfolds in my mind as I hurtle toward our next meeting.
1 October 1908. Lenox. Nothing. No letters, no bleus, nothing. Curt replies through the spring and early summer have dwindled and no longer arrive. I wrote M today asking for my letters back, for what can remain? He has forgotten me, or has forgotten what was between us. I cannot know what is worse. Anything on earth wd be better ... than to sit here and wonder: What was I to him, then?
I am reminded of George Meredith’s Modern Love, a favourite of M’s...written in 1862, after Meredith’s marriage crumbled under his wife’s infidelity. Written the year I was born. I find myself returning to the verses again and again: Yea filthiness of body is most vile,/but faithlessness of heart I do hold worse./The former, it were not so great a curse/To read on the steel-mirror of her smile.
Also I am reminded of the poem’s original subtitle —This is not meat for little people or for fools. Aah, I am still too young and tender, somewhere, to be hurt this way And too old to play these girlish games that end in heartache. The silence and too-obvious faithlessness of his heart is crushing me. It’s still suffocatingly hot here and I cannot bear to be in my once beloved Lenox paradise a moment longer.
5 June 1909, Charing Cross Hotel, London. Sensing last night was a coda or terminus of sorts. I thought as much even as I was crying into M’s open mouth, as we lay in the sooty bed, bathed in lurid red light, palm to palm, breast to breast. He left some time ago and sent roses just now. Outside the window the train thrumming within and without as we made love, and the rhythm jolted me into a meter I must try to master—
14 July 1911, The Mount. Yesterday’s horrors tell me I have no choice but to sell the house. Teddy initially agreed, but is now vehemently opposed. He returned from a fishing trip yesterday and immediately became abusive, much to H’s horror. After tearing through the gallery, and up the stairs to my boudoir (I could hear him clattering below) he told me that I must save myself and leave him. But he still won’t agree to sell this boat anchor of a house and then begs me not to turn my back on him. Oh, if I were free—free—free! Isn’t it awful to have a chain snaffled around one’s neck all the time, without knowing it? And again, a miserable heat wave. H left today, mortified by the scene.
26 Sept 1911, Rue de Varenne. When I landed a few days ago I received a cable that Teddy had sold The Mount. All this, after I made him promise to do no such thing until I cabled him from Paris and could consult with him. I wish I could be more pleased about the publication of Ethan Frome, but I have received news from the doctors in French Lick, Indiana that Teddy does have some sort of psychosis.
Feeling terrible vertigo and shock. Have much in common with Mr. Frome and his crushed hopes. Little else makes sense to me. Without The Mount for us to share there is truly nothing for me and the dear old man. I no longer recognize the gallant, supportive, and gentle soul I married 26 yrs ago. I timidly write the word I have been avoiding with heart and pen: divorce.
27 July 1914, Poitiers. It’s nonsense. It cannot be. Yet there it is, tonight, on a heavy lidded evening, one of many in summertime France. A reality is drifting into my hotel window: passerby are singing La Marseillaise, and rousing us from a pleasant doze. Walter and I both craned our necks out of our windows and gazed into the square, as people raced below, taking up the rousing refrain. It can’t be war.
3 August 1914, Rue de Varenne. After reading my last entry, I can only reply: It most certainly is. Germany declared war on Belgium yesterday, and today, on France. One can only hope that this conflict ends within a few weeks.
20 October 1914, Rue de Varenne. After a foolishly-timed late summer sojourn in England – where I tried to convince myself that my destiny is this dear domestic paradise – the quaint Anglo countryside I returned to Paris in late September and found a new mistress to run my sewing shop on the rue de l’Univ. Hopefully the shop can help unmarried ladies or war widows...friends are offering plenty of financial and moral support. American friends included, of course...but why is my native country not offering its military aid? These American pacifists in Washington and beyond don’t know the monstrous results of their decision not to act!
17 Feb 1915. Vauquois. Writing this from the relative safety of the Mercedes. Cook has taken us to Vauquois, and I can hear and see the battle Even Walter thinks our travels have been thrilling. What a motor-flight After months of brutality in the Argonne, France seems to be fighting back against the hideous Boche and finally gaining ground. In the distance, on the butte, I can see men in silhouette, running and falling, running and falling. It looks like a story I should write one day, but it is not. War has somehow extinguished all narrative. War is “like” nothing. Blood is not a crimson seal, dying with dirt in your mouth, while what used to be the sky erupts and liquefies overhead (a wounded soldier the other day used these words to describe the Front to me), is not “like” being buried alive. It is not “like” hell.
Cannon fire thrums until we scarcely notice it. Smeared faces with blood on their teeth walk on. And, to that end, a refrain we hear again and again: Sauvez, sauvez la France. I will not abandon you again.
FIN
“The steel-mirror of her smile” is a work of fiction. However, some of the passages have been taken directly from Edith Wharton's novels, letters, and actual diary entries. Those brief phrases are bolded in this text. Sources for this work are Hermione Lee’s 2007 biography of Edith Wharton (Vintage Books), Modern Love and Other Poems by George Meredith (Kessinger Publishing, 2008), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905) and Summer (1993, Bantam Books).
A vision I won’t soon forget– We turned off Main Street in Becket village & began to climb a high street; where I saw sheds built from rough boards clinging to the stark mountainside. An inhabitant of one such place stood motionless in a black doorway, her face gnarled like the granite flank on which she lived. My heart pounded at the scene–HJ beside me saw it too but I don’t believe he had the same reaction. We motored on; the shadows bruised and grew long. The burnished Lenox autumn around Laurel Lake suddenly was very far away.
Some time ago Rev. Lynch in Lenox told me about a woman who became seriously ill in such a shack on Bear Mountain. She was from one of the drunken mountain outlaw families who live
on the fringes of the Berkshire hilltowns. When he arrived to administer last rites, he found her already dead, flung on a bare mattress on the floor, her skirts bunched up to reveal one glistening leg, swollen with rot. She lay there like a dead dog in a ditch, her family in the shadows, half-drunk and inchoate with animal grief. The Rev said the sight of the living faces too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death. There was no coffin. Someone had dug a hole for her body, and they carried her out into the bitter cold on the mattress. These glimpses of squalid misery are but a fragment; I see the entirety with something other than my weary old eyes. Perhaps my possession of this other sight is what compels Teddy to call my writing a form of witchcraft. My dear old man doesn’t see me, and for that matter I no longer see him ...
Newborns screaming in a cold shack, slippery with blood, brown bread and a dull knife on a greasy table, smoke and fire spluttering in a cold hearth– they all flash between the trees, in the steep periphery, on every motor-flight. I cannot evade these images, they’re in my chest, crying to come out, needing to be told.
All Soul’s Day, 1904. The Mount. Will be closing up soon for the season and then on to warmer climes. Finishing the final edits to House of Mirth, revising the ending. Charming letter from Walter arrived today, asking if House’s interior decoration is being attended to...and praying that none of its chimneys smoke. Seated at my desk in the library now, I have to smile.
In the end, Lily was right. Freedom is a draught meant to be drained to its lees, and success is not a country with a pass-code known only by those who see no difference between money and poverty. Those who see no difference are fools. There is a difference.
In the end, Lily is no longer a case to be clinically studied by Selden; nor is she a butterfly writhing on the end of a pin, praying for suffocation between two dusty panes of glass. Her face, once mobile, is cold and impassive in death. I agonized over this final scene and slashed at it last week; this morning some sort of grace blew off the lake and into my chilly bedroom. It is late fall here but I gave Selden a spring morning and a smarting chill light to look one last time at her now expressionless face. Lily’s actual death and the close of the book were easier to write than her living death, earlier in the story. In the Baroque phase of Lily’s life, she poses, sensationally, as “Mrs. Lloyd,” the Sir Joshua Reynolds painting, as part of a tableau vivant amusement. I situated the scene at a party hosted by the freshly minted Wellington Brys. In her silken, almost sheer gown, it seemed as though she wore nothing underneath, and her onlookers – the petrol of the great machine – were at once uplifted and disgusted by her display. Humiliations to follow. Birth, marriage, death – the polite woman’s lot ... Lily transcends all three. Scribner’s will be serializing House of Mirth in its issues starting January. The novel will publish in October 05. May none of its chimneys smoke, indeed.
le 3 Mars 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris. T & I and the dogs and the servants are settled in to the new apt. I can breathe freely, a home in Paris at last; even Teddy thinks I’m in fine form again. And yet my hand shakes as I write this. Not certain what this feeling is. But I am not naive; I know its connected to something, or someone, very new. At Rosa’s salon last week I met an American journalist named Morton Fullerton; I believe he’s a Parisian correspondent for the Times. My mind is wandering at these inanities even as I write. His eyes are a mocking icy blue, framed by dark lashes and gleaming black hair. He is almost my height; compact, coiled. Physically at ease with himself, stunning to see in a male. Lithe, almost an effeminate air I find immensely attractive, what with the transparency and devotedness of most of my men friends...Henry, Walter, etc. I know M can be of help for me for French serialization of The House of Mirth; trying to reserve some time so we can speak privately about the matter. Want him to have tea with H & me. There’s something very mysterious about Fullerton, something hidden behind the magnetic emptiness of those eyes. Very knowledgeable about Franco-American relations, George Meredith (M is a fan and a friend, evidently), etc. Easy to talk to – when one can find him.
6 March 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne. Yes, there is something mysterious about dear Monsieur Fullerton. He doesn’t respond to my notes or request for help in placement of House of Mirth. Sally tells me he has family in eastern Massachusetts and some sort of business there this summer. I’ll send him a note asking if he would like to visit The Mount in the fall.
7 March 1907. M replied and said he most certainly will visit; Mon cher Henry however tells me he’ll make an excuse at the last minute and not come. I refuse to believe it and already look fwd to October in Lenox.
28 October 1907. The Mount. Whatever sadness was upon me, mocking me...I have succeeded in waving away its black wings. M was here last Monday and Tuesday–already a week ago. It was a brief visit, and I am just beginning to feel its reverberations now.
On Tuesday I took M and Eliot on a motor-flight, and despite the chill and the early snow I was warm inside, looking at M’s glossy head in the front seat, next to Cook. We stopped so Cook could put chains on the wheels; M and I sat in the wet leaves (did I get cold? I can’t remember). I noticed a wych-hazel in bloom nearby. To me, the shrub is the sign of the late-bloomer... an old woman’s blossom. At 45 years of age (although the same probably could be said of me at 18), I am a late-bloomer. We dropped M off in Westfield so he could get on to his family in Brockton; E and I continued on; I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the trip. The air was dazzlingly clear; I drank it down gratefully...a white note on my tongue.
I received a thank-you note from M today, and folded inside the paper was a sprig of wych-hazel. I read the kind letter in my boudoir and held the tough little brown and yellow sprig in my fingers, and tears of emotion welled up in my eyes and pressed against my chest. Forty-five years of lonely interior life and only now am I feeling this ache which must be love, I can deduce as much for I am falling; this is the plunge I have, until this moment, only read about.
Without M here now I only wish to return to Paris.
Le 22 mai 1908. 58 Rue de Varenne. After the events of this spring, it seems errant and incorrect, somehow, to be leaving for Lenox tomorrow. After Teddy, in misery, left Paris for a spa in Arkansas in March, I have taken many liberties with M. Or as many as possible what with my schedule. Have been snatching time to meet with him whenever I can. Lately he has been teasing me about my lack of experience in matters of love; his taunts are almost not playful and they make my cheeks burn with shame. It is true–I am inexperienced. Lately my lack has been v. much in the foreground. I am not pretty enough, not young enough, not many things enough for M. I have been too sad, for too long, & something in my nature – some lack, I suppose– has left me starving for what other women seem at least once in their life to know.
And yet those bitter feelings are washed away by other afternoons. The other day we sat in le jardin de Lux and took in the warmth; in my feverish ear he whispered that I was his love, his darling, and I stared at the other lovers walking carefully side by side and I wondered if they knew what I knew...that my bottomless appetite for this man has drained the world of its blood. I can’t bear the thought of a summer and fall in Lenox. I will miss the constant bleus...our word for the little notes that fly between us several times a day. Meet me at the Louvre, le Bois du Boulogne, les Tuileries. Jusqu’a le moment prochain...I love it, you know I do...with these fragments of scribbled phrase on my breakfast tray an entire scene unfolds in my mind as I hurtle toward our next meeting.
1 October 1908. Lenox. Nothing. No letters, no bleus, nothing. Curt replies through the spring and early summer have dwindled and no longer arrive. I wrote M today asking for my letters back, for what can remain? He has forgotten me, or has forgotten what was between us. I cannot know what is worse. Anything on earth wd be better ... than to sit here and wonder: What was I to him, then?
I am reminded of George Meredith’s Modern Love, a favourite of M’s...written in 1862, after Meredith’s marriage crumbled under his wife’s infidelity. Written the year I was born. I find myself returning to the verses again and again: Yea filthiness of body is most vile,/but faithlessness of heart I do hold worse./The former, it were not so great a curse/To read on the steel-mirror of her smile.
Also I am reminded of the poem’s original subtitle —This is not meat for little people or for fools. Aah, I am still too young and tender, somewhere, to be hurt this way And too old to play these girlish games that end in heartache. The silence and too-obvious faithlessness of his heart is crushing me. It’s still suffocatingly hot here and I cannot bear to be in my once beloved Lenox paradise a moment longer.
5 June 1909, Charing Cross Hotel, London. Sensing last night was a coda or terminus of sorts. I thought as much even as I was crying into M’s open mouth, as we lay in the sooty bed, bathed in lurid red light, palm to palm, breast to breast. He left some time ago and sent roses just now. Outside the window the train thrumming within and without as we made love, and the rhythm jolted me into a meter I must try to master—
14 July 1911, The Mount. Yesterday’s horrors tell me I have no choice but to sell the house. Teddy initially agreed, but is now vehemently opposed. He returned from a fishing trip yesterday and immediately became abusive, much to H’s horror. After tearing through the gallery, and up the stairs to my boudoir (I could hear him clattering below) he told me that I must save myself and leave him. But he still won’t agree to sell this boat anchor of a house and then begs me not to turn my back on him. Oh, if I were free—free—free! Isn’t it awful to have a chain snaffled around one’s neck all the time, without knowing it? And again, a miserable heat wave. H left today, mortified by the scene.
26 Sept 1911, Rue de Varenne. When I landed a few days ago I received a cable that Teddy had sold The Mount. All this, after I made him promise to do no such thing until I cabled him from Paris and could consult with him. I wish I could be more pleased about the publication of Ethan Frome, but I have received news from the doctors in French Lick, Indiana that Teddy does have some sort of psychosis.
Feeling terrible vertigo and shock. Have much in common with Mr. Frome and his crushed hopes. Little else makes sense to me. Without The Mount for us to share there is truly nothing for me and the dear old man. I no longer recognize the gallant, supportive, and gentle soul I married 26 yrs ago. I timidly write the word I have been avoiding with heart and pen: divorce.
27 July 1914, Poitiers. It’s nonsense. It cannot be. Yet there it is, tonight, on a heavy lidded evening, one of many in summertime France. A reality is drifting into my hotel window: passerby are singing La Marseillaise, and rousing us from a pleasant doze. Walter and I both craned our necks out of our windows and gazed into the square, as people raced below, taking up the rousing refrain. It can’t be war.
3 August 1914, Rue de Varenne. After reading my last entry, I can only reply: It most certainly is. Germany declared war on Belgium yesterday, and today, on France. One can only hope that this conflict ends within a few weeks.
20 October 1914, Rue de Varenne. After a foolishly-timed late summer sojourn in England – where I tried to convince myself that my destiny is this dear domestic paradise – the quaint Anglo countryside I returned to Paris in late September and found a new mistress to run my sewing shop on the rue de l’Univ. Hopefully the shop can help unmarried ladies or war widows...friends are offering plenty of financial and moral support. American friends included, of course...but why is my native country not offering its military aid? These American pacifists in Washington and beyond don’t know the monstrous results of their decision not to act!
17 Feb 1915. Vauquois. Writing this from the relative safety of the Mercedes. Cook has taken us to Vauquois, and I can hear and see the battle Even Walter thinks our travels have been thrilling. What a motor-flight After months of brutality in the Argonne, France seems to be fighting back against the hideous Boche and finally gaining ground. In the distance, on the butte, I can see men in silhouette, running and falling, running and falling. It looks like a story I should write one day, but it is not. War has somehow extinguished all narrative. War is “like” nothing. Blood is not a crimson seal, dying with dirt in your mouth, while what used to be the sky erupts and liquefies overhead (a wounded soldier the other day used these words to describe the Front to me), is not “like” being buried alive. It is not “like” hell.
Cannon fire thrums until we scarcely notice it. Smeared faces with blood on their teeth walk on. And, to that end, a refrain we hear again and again: Sauvez, sauvez la France. I will not abandon you again.
FIN
“The steel-mirror of her smile” is a work of fiction. However, some of the passages have been taken directly from Edith Wharton's novels, letters, and actual diary entries. Those brief phrases are bolded in this text. Sources for this work are Hermione Lee’s 2007 biography of Edith Wharton (Vintage Books), Modern Love and Other Poems by George Meredith (Kessinger Publishing, 2008), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905) and Summer (1993, Bantam Books).
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