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Yesterday morning was a series of mini-disasters.
Somehow, I smashed a French press filled with boiling hot coffee.
And then, while I was cleaning up the broken glass, I looked down, and my thumb was gushing blood. (The cut was deep, but I keep surgical superglue in my medicine cabinet; no ER trip necessary.)
And then I looked down again, and my fave pink cotton lounging pants were covered with blood. Laundry emergency!
###
The gods are angry! thought I.
So, I got a haircut!
Must say, I got the better end of that deal.
I got a good haircut.
All the gods got was five pounds or so of truly ratty-looking hair.
The woman who cut my hair was deeply weird and would not STFU.
On and on, she prattled. About the paver stone department at Lowes. About how mean the kids at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School had been to her in 1977. About how her grandmother once looked at a photo of her (now X) husband and gasped and went running to rummage through ancient photo albums and pulled out a photo of the grandmother’s dead husband, and the two husbands looked exactly alike even though the woman’s husband looked like Brad Pitt and the grandmother’s husband looked like Clark Gable—
“Wait a minute,” I said, moved from censorious silence. “Brad Pitt and Clark Gable don’t look alike.”
“You kind of remind me of my grandmother,” she told me.
BEEP!
There goes your tip, I thought.
Because despite her weird styling and my lack of makeup, I reckoned we weren’t that far apart in age.
In the end, though, I tipped her munificently.
Because it really is a good haircut.
###
The salon was in the mall.
So after my haircut, I got to wander around and think bleak thoughts about the demise of capitalism.
I’m thinking the protagonist of the Edith Wharton story is plucky, gender-neutral, be-nose-ringed Dax, forced against their will to research the Mills Mansion in Staatsburgh.
The story’s backdrop is the stained glass windows Ogden Nash stole from the Chartres Cathedral after World War I.
Ogden Nash is haunted by the spirit of a broken-hearted French priest, references to whose spectral presence Dax gleans from original source materials—a trove of letters written by Edith Wharton. The existence of said letters has hitherto been unsuspected.
The chronology here is tricky: The letters (obvs) would have to have been written after 1919. Wharton, at that time, was living just north of Paris.
So I’m thinking the letters were written to Wharton’s X-husband Teddy. And never sent. Because Teddy’s acute depression and other mental derangements confined him to an insane asylum after 1913 when Wharton divorced him.
(Wharton, in my story, feels guilty.
I don’t think she did in real life.)
The letters are found at a Paris flea market. Bound with a ratty old ribbon, handwriting faded with age and hardly decipherable, etc, etc. Thus, provenance is disputable.
In the letters, Wharton reminisces about a house party at the Mills Mansion she and Teddy attended in 1902.
The French priest’s ghost appears to Ogden Nash before Nash steals the cathedral windows! In a vain attempt to dissuade Nash from the future act! And the only ones who can see the ghost will be Nash, Teddy, and Edith. Seeing the ghost is part of what drives Teddy mad.
Of course, it is on this visit that Edith decides to use the Mills Mansion as the model for Bellomont in The House of Mirth.
In the second-to-the-last scene in the story, Edith’s letter describes running into Ogden Mills on the French Riviera in her present tense (1919). Nash is still followed by the ghost of the French priest. Only whereas in 1902, the ghost was mournful and a bit pleading, in 1919, it is vengeful: Its hideous red eyes shoot fire.
In the last scene of the story, Dax themself sees the ghost. The ghost is mournful again, its expression heartbroken. It lurks outside St. Margaret Episcopal Church, where the stolen Cathedral windows have been installed.
###
Here is a photo I took of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church:
And here is a photo of one of the stolen Chartres windows:
I live very close to Staatsburgh.
(And come to think of it, the second-to-the-last scene described above would work better as a second scene.)
Somehow, I smashed a French press filled with boiling hot coffee.
And then, while I was cleaning up the broken glass, I looked down, and my thumb was gushing blood. (The cut was deep, but I keep surgical superglue in my medicine cabinet; no ER trip necessary.)
And then I looked down again, and my fave pink cotton lounging pants were covered with blood. Laundry emergency!
###
The gods are angry! thought I.
So, I got a haircut!
Must say, I got the better end of that deal.
I got a good haircut.
All the gods got was five pounds or so of truly ratty-looking hair.
The woman who cut my hair was deeply weird and would not STFU.
On and on, she prattled. About the paver stone department at Lowes. About how mean the kids at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School had been to her in 1977. About how her grandmother once looked at a photo of her (now X) husband and gasped and went running to rummage through ancient photo albums and pulled out a photo of the grandmother’s dead husband, and the two husbands looked exactly alike even though the woman’s husband looked like Brad Pitt and the grandmother’s husband looked like Clark Gable—
“Wait a minute,” I said, moved from censorious silence. “Brad Pitt and Clark Gable don’t look alike.”
“You kind of remind me of my grandmother,” she told me.
BEEP!
There goes your tip, I thought.
Because despite her weird styling and my lack of makeup, I reckoned we weren’t that far apart in age.
In the end, though, I tipped her munificently.
Because it really is a good haircut.
###
The salon was in the mall.
So after my haircut, I got to wander around and think bleak thoughts about the demise of capitalism.
I’m thinking the protagonist of the Edith Wharton story is plucky, gender-neutral, be-nose-ringed Dax, forced against their will to research the Mills Mansion in Staatsburgh.
The story’s backdrop is the stained glass windows Ogden Nash stole from the Chartres Cathedral after World War I.
Ogden Nash is haunted by the spirit of a broken-hearted French priest, references to whose spectral presence Dax gleans from original source materials—a trove of letters written by Edith Wharton. The existence of said letters has hitherto been unsuspected.
The chronology here is tricky: The letters (obvs) would have to have been written after 1919. Wharton, at that time, was living just north of Paris.
So I’m thinking the letters were written to Wharton’s X-husband Teddy. And never sent. Because Teddy’s acute depression and other mental derangements confined him to an insane asylum after 1913 when Wharton divorced him.
(Wharton, in my story, feels guilty.
I don’t think she did in real life.)
The letters are found at a Paris flea market. Bound with a ratty old ribbon, handwriting faded with age and hardly decipherable, etc, etc. Thus, provenance is disputable.
In the letters, Wharton reminisces about a house party at the Mills Mansion she and Teddy attended in 1902.
The French priest’s ghost appears to Ogden Nash before Nash steals the cathedral windows! In a vain attempt to dissuade Nash from the future act! And the only ones who can see the ghost will be Nash, Teddy, and Edith. Seeing the ghost is part of what drives Teddy mad.
Of course, it is on this visit that Edith decides to use the Mills Mansion as the model for Bellomont in The House of Mirth.
In the second-to-the-last scene in the story, Edith’s letter describes running into Ogden Mills on the French Riviera in her present tense (1919). Nash is still followed by the ghost of the French priest. Only whereas in 1902, the ghost was mournful and a bit pleading, in 1919, it is vengeful: Its hideous red eyes shoot fire.
In the last scene of the story, Dax themself sees the ghost. The ghost is mournful again, its expression heartbroken. It lurks outside St. Margaret Episcopal Church, where the stolen Cathedral windows have been installed.
###
Here is a photo I took of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church:
And here is a photo of one of the stolen Chartres windows:
I live very close to Staatsburgh.
(And come to think of it, the second-to-the-last scene described above would work better as a second scene.)
