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  In their last minute alone, just them in the green room, the slick guy asks if he can do our blonde girl another favor.

  “You want to give me your block?” she says. And she smiles, just like in the picture. And her teeth aren't too awful.

  “No,” he says. “But when somebody's being charming . . . when they tell you a joke . . . ,” the slick guy says, and he tears her ugly before picture in half. The two halves he puts together and tears into quarters. Then eighths. Then whatever. Shreds. Little bits. Confetti. He says, “If you're going to succeed on television, you need to at least fake a smile.”

  At least pretend to like people.

  There in the green room, the blonde's pink-lipstick mouth, it peels open and open and open until it hangs. Her lips go open and shut two, three times, the way a fish will gasp for breath, and she says, “You ass . . .”

  It's then the floor producer walks in with the old goober.

  The producer says, “Okay, I think we'll go with the investment video for this last segment . . .”

  The old goober looks at the slick guy, the way you'd look at some department-store buyer who orders a half-million units, and he says, “Thomas . . .”

  The blonde's just sitting there, holding her cup of cold black coffee.

  The floor producer is unclipping the radio mike off the back of the man's belt. She's handing it to the slick guy.

  And to the old goober, he says, “Good morning, Dad.”

  Grabbing the slick guy's hand and shaking it, the goober says, “How's your mom?”

  The Nev-R-Run Pantyhose Girl. The girl you leave behind.

  Our Miss Blonde stands. She gets to her feet, to give up, go home, fail.

  And, taking the radio mike, checking the switch, to make sure it's not hot, the slick guy says, “She's dead.”

  She's dead and buried, and he'll never say where. Or, if he does, he'll lie about the city.

  And, splash.

  His hair and face, cold and wet.

  He's covered all over in coffee. Cold coffee. His shirt and tie, ruined. His slick hair washed down across his face.

  Our blonde reaches to take the radio mike, and she says, “Thanks for the advice.” She says, “I think this makes me next . . .”

  And tons worse than being too blonde, worse than wrecking his slick clothes and hair, our skinny girl has fallen in fucking love with him.

  4

  In the blue velvet lobby, something comes thudding down the stairs from the shadows of the first balcony. Step by step, the thudding gets louder until it's rumbling, round-dark, rolling down from the dim second floor. It's a bowling ball, thudding down the center of the staircase. Rolling black-silent across the lobby's blue carpet, Sister Vigilante's bowling ball passes Cora Reynolds where he licks his paws, then past Mr. Whittier drinking instant coffee in his wheelchair, then past Lady Baglady and her diamond husband, then the ball knocks, heavy-black, through the double doors, disappearing into the auditorium.

  “Packer,” Lady Baglady tells her diamond, “there's something locked in here with us.” Making her voice low, almost a whisper, she asks the diamond, “Is it you?”

  That little square of glass you're only supposed to break in the event of a fire, Miss America has already broken it. Every little window framed in red-painted metal with a little hammer hanging next to it on a chain, she breaks the glass and pulls the switch inside. Miss America does this in the lobby. Then in the red-lacquered, Chinese-restaurant-styled promenade with all its carved plaster Buddhas. Then in the Mayan-temple-styled foyer in the basement with its leering carved warrior faces. Then the Arabian Nights gallery behind the second-balcony boxes. Then in the projection booth tucked up against the roof.

  Then nothing happens. No bells ring. No one comes to chop through the locked fire doors to rescue her. To rescue us.

  Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

  Mr. Whittier sits on a blue velvet sofa in the lobby, under the glass leaves of a chandelier big as a sparkling gray cloud above him.

  Already, the Matchmaker was calling the chandeliers “trees.” The row of them hanging down the center of each long salon or gallery or lounge. He called them orchards of glass grown out of chains wrapped in velvet and rooted in the ceiling.

  Each of us seeing our own private at-home reality in these same big rooms.

  The Earl of Slander is writing in his notepad. Agent Tattletale, videotaping. Countess Foresight, wearing her turban. Saint Gut-Free, eating.

  With her whole arm, Director Denial tosses a fake mouse, and it lands halfway to the auditorium doors. With the other hand, she rubs the shoulder of her throwing arm while the cat, Cora Reynolds, brings the mouse back, his paws raising a rooster tail of boiling dust from the carpet.

  Watching them, one arm folded across her chest to support her breasts, one hand twisted around to rub the back of her neck, Mrs. Clark says, “In the Villa Diodati, they had five cats.”

  Saint Gut-Free eats instant crêpe Suzette out of a Mylar bag with a plastic spoon.

  Shaping her fingernails with an emery board, Lady Baglady watches every dripping pink spoonful move from the bag to his mouth, and she says, “That can't be any good.”

  And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.

  That's until Miss America comes to stand in the middle of us, saying, “This is illegal.” What Mr. Whittier has done is kidnapping. He's holding people against their will, and that's a felony.

  “The sooner you do as you promised,” Mr. Whittier says, “the sooner these three months will go by.”

  Throwing the fake mouse, Director Denial says, “What is the Villa Diodati?”

  “It's a house on Lake Como,” Lady Baglady tells her fat diamond.

  “Lake Geneva,” Mrs. Clark says.

  Looking back, it was Mr. Whittier's stand that we're always right.

  “It's not a matter of right and wrong,” Mr. Whittier would say.

  Really, there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality.

  You can never set off to do the wrong thing.

  You can never say the wrong thing.

  In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take—what you do or say or how you choose to appear—is automatically right the moment you act.

  His hand shaking as he lifts his cup, Mr. Whittier says, “Even if you were to tell yourself, ‘Today, I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way . . . from a dirty boot.' Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.”

  Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right.

  Even when you say, “I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong . . .” you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot.

  “No matter how stupid your idea,” Mr. Whittier would say, “you're doomed to be right because it's yours.”

  “Lake Geneva?” Lady Baglady says with her eyes closed. Pinching her temples, rubbing them between the thumb and index finger of one hand, she says, “The Villa Diodati is where Lord Byron raped Mary Shelley . . .”

  And Mrs. Clark says, “It was not.”

  We're all condemned to be right. About everything we can consider.

  In this shifting, liquid world where everyone is right and any idea is right the moment you act on it, Mr. Whittier would say, the only sure thing is what you promise.

  “Three months, you promised,” Mr. Whittier says through the steam of his coffee.

  It's then something happens, but not much.

  In that next look, you feel your asshole get tight. Your fingers fly to cover your mouth.

  Miss America is holding a knife in one hand. With her other hand, she grips the knot of Mr. Whittier's necktie, pulling his face up toward her own. Mr. Whittier's coffee, dropped, spilled steaming-hot on the floor. His hands hang, shaking, swirling the dusty air at each side.

  Saint Gut-Free's silver bag of instant crêpe Suzette drops, spilled out on the cornflower-blue carpet, the sticky red cherries and rec
onstituted whipped cream.

  And the cat runs over for a taste.

  Her eyes almost touching Mr. Whittier's, Miss America says, “So I'm right if I kill you?”

  The knife, one of the set that Chef Assassin brought in his aluminum suitcase.

  And Mr. Whittier looks back into her eyes, so close their lashes touch when they blink. “But you'll still be trapped,” he says, his few gray hairs hanging loose from the back of his skull. His voice choked to a croak by his necktie.

  Miss America waves the knife at Mrs. Clark, saying, “What about her? Does she have a key?”

  And Mrs. Clark shakes her head, No. Her eyes popped-open wide, but her baby-doll pout still silicone-frozen.

  No, the key is hidden somewhere in the building. A place only Mr. Whittier would look.

  Still, even if she kills him she's right.

  If she sets fire to the building and hopes the firemen will see the smoke and rescue her before we all suffocate—she's right, again.

  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 home. Your garden. Time-saving. Space-saving gadgets. Tools and new inventions.

  Where the television used to be, there on the kitchen counter, she put an aquarium with the kind of lizard that changes color to match your decor. An aquarium, you flip the switch for the heat lamp and it's not going to tell you another transient wino was shot to death, his body dropped in the river, the fifteenth victim in a killing spree targeting the city's homeless, their bodies found stabbed and sho
t and set on fire with lighter fluid, the street people panicked and fighting their way into the shelters at night, despite the new tuberculosis. The outbound boxcars packed full. The social advocates claiming the city has put out a hit on panhandlers. You get all this just glancing at a newsstand. Or getting into a cab with the radio turned up loud.

  You get a glass tank, put it where the TV used to be, and all you get is a lizard—something so stupid that every time the maid moves a rock the lizard thinks it's been relocated miles away.

  It's called Cocooning, when your home becomes your whole world.

  Mr. and Mrs. Keyes—Packer and Evelyn—they didn't use to be this way. It used to be not a dolphin died in a tuna net without them rushing out to write a check. To throw a party. They hosted a banquet for people blown apart by land mines. They threw a dinner dance for massive head trauma. Fibromyalgia. Bulimia. A cocktail party and silent auction for irritable bowel syndrome.

  Every night had its theme:

  “Universal Peace for All Peoples.”

  Or: “Hope for Our Unborn Future.”

  Imagine going to your senior prom every night for the rest of your life. Every night, another stage set made of South American cut flowers and zillions of white twinkle lights. An ice sculpture and a champagne fountain and a band in white dinner jackets playing some Cole Porter tune. Every stage set built to parade Arab royalty and Internet boy wonders. Too many people made rich fast by venture capital. Those people who never linger on any landmass longer than it takes to service their jet. These people with no imagination, they just flop open Town & Country and say:

  I want that.

  At every benefit for child abuse, everyone walked around on two legs and ate crème brûlée with a mouth, their lips plumped with the same derma fillers. Looking at the same Cartier watch, the same time surrounded with the same diamonds. The same Harry Winston necklace around a neck sculpted long and thin with hatha yoga.

  Everyone climbed in or out different colors of the same Lexus sedan.

  No one was impressed. Every night was a complete and utter social stalemate.