Wordplay Feels You on Fake News

Today was a nice enough summer day, I guess, but nothing like as simple as some of the lazy summer days I remember from the past. Modern life is constantly throwing complications at you. If reading the news makes you cry, forget the news and just find a good book, right? Sounds good in concept, so you head over to the library and wait for it to open, getting bitten by mosquitoes and sweating in the humidity, because the building opens late on Sundays. Finally, the hour arrives, and you go in with the other patrons, looking forward to getting a new book in your hands, although experience has taught you not to get too excited these days about anything.

You plug in, pull up NoveList, and start browsing titles. You know, because you’ve done this before, that some of them will sound amazing but prove to be disappointing, but still, facts are facts: English majors are ever hopeful about books. After looking for a while, taking the time to check your account to make sure that newfangled “Book History” is still turned off (because, a little too Big-Brotherish, even if seemingly harmless for someone with mild tastes), you home in on a couple of books. One sounds Edwardian and mildly interesting, and the other catches your eye because you saw it at the bookstore’s checkout counter recently and noted that it was a retelling of a Shakespeare play.

You check out both and settle in for a little reading in a refreshingly quiet back section of the library (relatively speaking: all libraries are noisier than they once were, especially this one). You’re a few pages into the first book when that familiar sinking feeling sets in, because, alas, the story is not what you thought it would be at all. You’re not losing yourself in the pages, you’re getting annoyed, whether because the story is not what you were hoping for or because the author’s mannerisms draw attention away from the story, you’re not sure which.

Fine, put that one down and pick up the other one, the one based on Shakespeare. This is an author whom, despite his having lost you completely on his last outing, you have decided to gift with another chance. At one time, he seemed unobjectionable and even distinguished, but now . . . Did you even get off the first page or were you all the way to the second page before you began to quoth, “Nevermore!” and slam that book shut, too.

Many artists seem preoccupied these days with “peacocking.” What else do you call it when a capable and even remarkable writer good enough to write a bestseller and/or literary prize winner starts preening, winking, talking to you from the back of his/her hand, and spouting nonsense. They might as well title the book, The Only Book You Need to Read, and in substitution for other content, drop in the words, “I know everything, I’m so important, and even if I don’t know what I’m talking about, I need your undivided attention.” Someone has gotten hold of these people and ruined them.

In complete fairness, let me say that the day may come when I will have to retract some of my opinions, too. I’ve considered opposite points of view too many times for all of the ideas I’ve expressed to be true—some of them have to be wrong. You do the best you can with what you know, and when people seem determined to spread disinformation, it’s difficult to know where the truth is. In that case, you consider alternate possibilities and try not to get overly attached to a single point of view. Rather than “wishy-washy,” I prefer the Keatsian term “negative capability”—the capacity to move among different points of view without settling too firmly into one entrenched position. Yes, confusion and doubt are the hazards of this type of thinking, but I’ve never been able to understand how some people can be so sure of everything anyway. How do you know that? Don’t you think it might be better to hold off on trumpeting something until you know more about it? I feel on firm ground with very few things besides the Golden Rule as a good (though not perfect) starting point.

When I write non-fiction, I try to be accurate and without malice. When I write fiction, I just try to capture the story out of my head (no small task) and tell it as well as I can. Artistic integrity, to me, is keeping the crafting of the story as your single aim. Name-dropping, scoring points on enemies (yes, I know Dante did it, thanks for bringing that to my attention), and spreading propaganda are artistic sins that we hope most people try to avoid.

If you’re wondering, I did end up leaving the library with a book, a collection of the short novels of John Steinbeck. When I’m in doubt, I go back to the classics. I’m sure Mr. Steinbeck had his faults, too, but at least he can’t alienate me by trying too hard to be in-the-know.

Reader’s Guide to a Headlong Flight

After years of studying the writings of others, I now have the experience of sending my own out into the ether. I know now that some of the questions I was used to asking about other writers’ influences and inspirations are, in my case, relatively easy to answer, while others are not. The question of what I might have been thinking about when I wrote last week’s blog post, “The Illustrated St. Agnes Eve,” goes back as far as my first reading in the early 1980s of John Keats’s famous poem on that same subject, although the entire answer isn’t that simple. I think it was a dream I had several years ago—recounted in a 2014 post called “Madeline’s Casement”—that first gave me the idea of writing a modern version of the Keats romance, loosely based on the superstitions surrounding St. Agnes Eve. But there is more to it than that.

I know I came up with the idea of setting my version in a modern urban skyscraper instead of a medieval castle sometime after having the dream, and I’ve been thinking about it for at least a couple of years. My original conception included the dinner party and the nightmarish escape of two people down the stairwell and out into the snowstorm; at some point, the little boy in the lobby appeared and wouldn’t let go of me, even though there is no character like him in Keats’s poem. I played around with the idea of both main characters arriving as guests at the same time, but I eventually decided that my first instinct to make the female character, at least, a long-term inhabitant  (or guest) was necessary to the story. She has been trapped in the place for some time, which creates a pent-up energy to escape that wouldn’t be there for someone newly arrived. Ralph is a catalyst to the action but doesn’t “belong” to the scene in the same way Estelle does; he instantly recognizes the danger, though, and joins forces with her.

There’s a certain vagueness in the way the tower is presented that’s not accidental: it seems at the same time to be an office tower and a place in which people live. It encompasses the lives of many people and not just a single family. Estelle knows that she has a long history with the place but that it has fallen under an evil influence that baffles and troubles her; it is as if, she, too, is under a spell whose power is partly broken by the arrival of Ralph, an outsider. The other inhabitants of the tower are either unaware of or untroubled by the peculiar miasma that enshrouds the building but is almost invisible.

In my story, Estelle dreams not of her future husband, as per tradition, but of her fellow dinner guests, a dream that encapsulates her feelings about the surreal atmosphere of the proceedings. I was inspired to put animal heads on the dinner guests by an exhibit of animal portraits I happened to catch from a bus window while visiting San Francisco some years ago. I still don’t fully understand why that exhibit affected me so strongly, although part of it must be the peculiar intelligence with which the artist had imbued his subjects. There was something almost human in their gazes, at least to my mind. I got the horses’ heads from an actual dream of my own in which statues of horses came to life, and I must have been thinking of Egyptian mythology when I put dogs’ heads on the rest of the guests.

My story is not a traditional romance in the way of Madeline and Porphyro, who run away to be together, but more of an instant attraction that becomes the vehicle for an escape from danger. Perhaps it will blossom later, but the immediate need is to get the hell out of Dodge. Estelle has the knowledge and the will (and a flashlight, modeled on one that I actually own); Ralph has the clear view of someone newly arrived on the scene and is more certain of the way out. He is a sort of “Virgil” to Estelle’s “Dante,” and the extended vertical escape is in some ways more reminiscent of The Inferno than of Keats’s romance. I have long been captivated by the Dantean geography that begins in a dark wood and ends in a climb out of hell to a view of the familiar night sky: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (“and so we emerged, to see—once more—the stars”) [Mandelbaum translation, Inf. 34.139]. It was from this line that I derived Estelle’s name, after considering several others with celestial connotations. Ralph’s name is a derivative that is probably a bit more obscure but may be a story for another time.

Estelle’s “suite” is loosely based on my memory of the rooms in my “Madeline’s Casement” dream, although none of the other particulars of that dream have made their way into this story. It was more the feeling and the tone of the dream, rather than its details, that survive here. When I started typing, my caps lock feature came on accidentally, which gave me the idea of playing a bit with the typeface in a manner reminiscent of John Barth in “Lost in the Funhouse.” I also had Franz Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” in mind both for its existentialism and its brevity. The main rule I had in mind while writing the story was to keep things simple and not over-complicate matters.

So if this isn’t a romance, what is it? That seems like a good question to leave up to readers. To me, it’s a short story of epic proportions, but that’s probably just because it has so much personal resonance, deriving in part from dreams and in part from other poems that have loomed so large in my imagination—and maybe in no small part from the time in which we live. The illustration is from the Tarot of Marseille, which bears no real relation to superstitions surrounding the Eve of St. Agnes but that came to my mind as representing the urgency of an escape (or a fall) from a high place. It is probably both. These Tarot images are not only in the public domain but have the advantage of carrying an archetypal energy that suits the movement of the story.

The Illustrated St. Agnes Eve

(A Short Story)

It’s a dinner party, but she isn’t sure how she came to be there. It seems to have been going on forever, as if she had strayed into the Mad Hatter’s tea party and is unaccountably unable to find her way to daylight EVER AGAIN. Much nonsense is spoken by various guests, and little sense, BUT SHE SUSPECTS A METHOD TO THE MADNESS. What that may be, though, she does not know.

The dining table resembles a conference table, around which the guests are assembled. Does she live here? Was she invited? The answers to these questions are vague, though she has the sense that what was once a familiar place has suffered a sea-change, becoming nearly unrecognizable. It’s difficult to say what’s different, but the atmosphere is no longer welcoming. The house is cold, and a mist seems ever to creep from the corners, hanging in the air like a gray film that impedes clear sight. No one else seems bothered. They all speak loudly, some with high-pitched voices, and they all seem to know just what they are about, though no doubt some of them, at least, are wrong (confidence not always being commensurate with correctness). She once lived here, she thinks, but she walked through an invisible door one day and came out the other side to a place where everything had shifted an infinitesimal degree. That has made, as the poet said, all the difference.

She is on the 52nd floor of the mansion, that she knows. The dining room is in the center of the building and has no windows. Her bedroom is dark, with expensive tapestry hangings and heavy wooden furniture, but she can see the road below. Her car, looking like a Matchbox toy, is parked on the other side of the street, next to a greensward filled with leafless trees. If she could find her way down, she could leave, but she can never remember where the door is, and any time she asks about it, it is as if no one can hear her.

“Kindly point me to the nearest exit,” she might say. “Please pass the salt,” responds her neighbor. “Do you think it will rain tomorrow?”

(Of course it will rain. It rains nearly every day. Not to be unkind, but you know, that’s a really stupid question.)

Tonight, though, she sees a face that she may or may not have seen before. He sits at the other end of the table and may have been there for a while. She isn’t sure. He looks a little out of place among the company. HERE’S WHY: his face is stern and lined, but his eyes look alive. He does not look as if he is dreaming, like the other guests. He looks as if he is aware of himself and everything around him.

Here is a brief description of the company: a woman in an evening gown wearing a tiara tilted at a rakish angle; a suave gentleman with highly brilliantined dark hair, parted in the middle; a pale woman in black with red lips and scarlet nails who speaks in cultured tones and drinks champagne from a tea cup; a dandy with magnetic eyes and a foppish air; a soft-spoken, dark-skinned man who sports brightly colored ties and smells of expensive cologne; a drunken priest who may actually be an archbishop; a plastic surgeon with the whitest smile imaginable and beautifully manicured hands; a fast-talking man with a huge appetite who talks incessantly of real estate; a government man with big ears, a black suit, and a black tie who cracks his knuckles occasionally. And of course, herself, and the man with the lined face, who wears dark pants, a white shirt, and a leather jacket. Without moving a muscle, he is instantly more masculine than the other seven men combined. How does that work?

She would not mind talking to him, but he is several seats away from her. The evening passes in a blur.

That night, in her room, she looks out upon a world consisting entirely of a swirling snowstorm. (When it doesn’t rain, it usually snows. Fog is also a possibility in these parts.) The wind whistles around the corners of the building, occasionally rising in force to a near-shriek and then subsiding. It has been winter for as long as seven years now, she is nearly certain. The moon is a pale luminescence barely visible through the storm. She gets into bed and dreams.

Here is what she dreams of: her fellow dinner guests! (Proof positive that that St. Agnes superstition stuff doesn’t work.) One has the head of a wolf; another, the head of an owl. Still another bears the face of a tiger, and the next one, a gorilla. The rest are an assortment of horses and dogs heads. Huh? She does not see the man with the lines in his face and has a feeling (in the dream) that he has never really been there. It’s a sad thought. But she’s only dreaming.

Suddenly, she is awake. Just like that. Her eyes are open, and she is looking at the ceiling, a wilderness of tracery in an old-fashioned room. She gets up. I have to get dressed, she is thinking. She knows with a certainty that she should. She goes into the fussy, well-appointed bathroom and washes her face, even applying lipstick. She goes back to her room and puts on the clothes she had left out for the next day, noticing that her bag is already packed. I seem to have already decided to leave, she thinks. Then she remembers: the bag has been packed for a long time.

There is a knock; when she answers, the man with the lined face is standing in the hallway.

“I want to get out of here,” she says, without preamble. “My bag is packed, but I can’t find the door. It’s like ‘The Hotel California’ with inferior weather.”

“I know where the door is,” he says, “but my cell phone doesn’t work here, and I can’t imagine getting a taxi in this storm.”

“I have a car,” she says. “But how did you get here?”

“I was invited. But I only arrived yesterday.”

“There’s something wrong here, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve been trying to understand it.”

“I agree with you,” he says. “Is there an elevator?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work.”

“Then the stairs it is. Shall we go?”

She picks up her bag. They TIP-TOE DOWN THE HALL. At the end of a long corridor, they turn right into a small alcove in which a heavy door is set. At that exact moment, the dim light in the ornamental sconce next to the door goes out. Standing there in darkness, she says, “Wait, I have a flashlight.” There is a noise of fumbling. Then a whirring, mechanical sound. Then there is a small light. She is holding a pink plastic flashlight shaped like a pig. “I have to crank the battery to charge it up,” she explains. “I’m surprised it still works.”

He winks at her and pushes the door, which opens into a concrete stairwell with a metal railing painted blue. The door closes softly behind them, and they listen for a moment. All is silent. NOTHING IS STIRRING, or so it seems.

“I have a feeling,” he says to her, “that it’ll get worse before it gets better.”

“Probably,” she says. “But the only way out is down. We may as well start.”

So they tread lightly down the stairs, guided by the tiny light of the plastic torch. There are no floor numbers on the landings, but sometimes there are noises—cries, whispers, shouts, explosions; sometimes there are snatches of music, sometimes there is a rumbling in the walls, as if they are just outside a theater with an action feature playing at top volume. She feels that to open most of these doors would be to risk heartbreak, even the ones that are ominously silent, so they press steadily on, placing their feet cautiously. It seems to take hours. She is beginning to wonder if the staircase goes all the way to the center of the earth when they come to a place where there are no more stairs. He pushes the door open, and they are faced with a grand marble lobby with a ticking clock, a checkerboard floor, and mullioned panes on either side of a massive front door. The expanse of the lobby seems endless, as if they are contemplating crossing the prairie instead of an entrance hall. They hear the wind howling faintly beyond the building’s heavy walls.

They have just stepped into the hall when they see that they are not alone. A young boy, shivering, looks up at them from the shadow of the grand staircase that sweeps up to a mezzanine. He is about eight years old.

“Can you take me home?” he says. “Please, I want to go home.”

“Where is your mother?” she asks. “She wouldn’t want you to go with strangers, you know.” (But she sure wouldn’t want you here, either.)

“She isn’t here,” he says, insistently. “Please. She lives in Brooklyn. I know she’s wondering where I am, but I can’t get to her. I can tell you how to get there.”

The man looks at her. He is deferring to her, since she is the driver.

“Yes,” she says. “We’ll take you home. Though it would be better if your mother came to pick you up.”

“She could never find her way here,” says the little boy. (Which may be true.)

There is a lull in the storm, and it is as if the building is listening. The three of them hurry across a marble floor so highly polished that it is almost like a skating rink, and the big front door seems miles away, and someone is sure to stop them, but no—they scramble across the expanse, the door opens, and they are out in the storm, disappearing into it the moment they leave the threshold. On the other side of the street, her car is buried in snow, but they knock the worst of it off. She puts her key in the ignition, and the car starts, a reassuringly normal sound in the Stygian darkness. As they scrape the ice off the windshield and the boy climbs into the backseat, the man says to her:

“We haven’t been properly introduced—my name is Ralph.”

And she says, “I’m Estelle. I’m glad to meet you. Now let’s go.”

Then they get into the car and drive away, the mansion disappearing behind them like a mirage in the storm. They find a good indie rock station, and life instantly gets a lot better. (This version does not record what happened to the old beadsman or Madeline’s nurse, since they are not in this story. We presume the hare hopped off to a warm fireside.) OK?

"This Living Hand"

A week or two ago, I was browsing in the Mystery shelves of the public library when I came across a trove of Robert B. Parker's books. At one time, I read quite a few of his Spenser novels (and was also a fan of the TV series based on the books). It had been years since I'd read any, and I don't remember why I stopped, but in any case I was pleasantly surprised to see so many titles that seemed new to me. Mr. Parker was always an entertaining writer and one that I thought I would enjoy getting reacquainted with.

The book I selected had an interesting premise involving a woman swindled out of a large sum by a romantic partner who had ties to arms dealers, espionage, and a number of other hazy entities. She hired Spenser to find him and get her money back. The story started off strongly and brought in the regular cast of characters I remembered from the earlier books, including Spenser's girlfriend, Dr. Susan Silverman, and his associate, the formidable Hawk. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters, which I read in the library, and I was considering checking the book out when I happened to glance at the inside back cover, curious to see what Mr. Parker looks like now.

That was when I discovered what I might already have known but somehow forgot, that Mr. Parker is actually deceased. The author of the book I was holding was another writer who has been given the job, by Mr. Parker's estate, of continuing the Spenser series. I was taken aback to discover this, both saddened to understand I wasn't reading Mr. Parker's own words and put off to realize that even though his name was on the cover, someone else had taken over. Although I had already become interested in the story, I put the book back. I'm not sure I would have done the same if I had realized immediately that another author had taken over the franchise, but under the circumstances, with Mr. Parker's name on the cover, I felt kind of cheated.

This is not a commentary on the quality of the writing. It's been so long since I read anything of Mr. Parker's that I'm not sure whether or not I would have recognized anything different in the authorial voice if I had continued to read. Maybe, maybe not. The book seemed firmly in familiar territory, and the case seemed very much like one that Spenser would have taken on. I'm sure that most of Mr. Parker's fans are delighted that someone has been able to pick up the torch and keep the series alive, but I was bothered by the fact that I started the book thinking it was the genuine article only to find out by chance that it wasn't. There's a big part of me that feels that if someone dies, people are being a little greedy to want more after that. An author has a distinctive voice that should be appreciated while the person is alive and revered after he or she is gone, but the business of "cloning" bothers me. Of course, that's not how publishers sell books.

I hope that I have many years of life ahead; at the same time, I have no immediate prospects for profiting greatly from any of my writing, good, bad or indifferent. But I don't like to think that, if I were to become a famous writer, someone else would try to become me after I was gone, to try to imitate my style and to take over what I had created. This seems altogether different to me than the writers who take characters made famous by someone else and put their own spin on them, using their own names so that everyone understands what they're doing.

There are some authors, including Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who stand up beautifully to this type of treatment. Variations on a theme can be vastly enjoyable as long as they are labeled as such and the reader knows he is reading the work of a different mind. Paying tribute to the original author's genius with a fresh interpretation and not merely imitating his or her style falls into the category of what I would consider "dreaming the myth forward."

So consider this a pre-directive should I ever become famous: there is only one of me, and when I'm gone, there isn't any more. Appreciate me now, if you like, but don't go creating a Wordplay franchise once I'm gone. I like to think that each person is unique, meaning that each artist is, too. If people think that a mere death is no impediment to stopping the flow of creative output, then that, to me, cheapens the value of both the individual's life and work. Maybe people would value things more if they acknowledged more readily that life is temporary and that people can't be brought back once they're gone.

Oh, by the way, if someone decides to ignore me, be assured I will come back and haunt you. Not quite sure how that works, but I have a feeling I would find a way.

Winnowing

Last week, I didn't wax poetic about the beauties of autumn, so this week, I will. A lot of us have mixed feelings about fall, but it has its compensations. Why it is that I find myself wanting to write about it in rapturous tones every year might seem a bit mysterious, since it actually isn't my favorite season. I've thought about that, and here's what I think explains it: the movement of summer into fall is more momentous than anything else in the year other than the transition from winter into spring.

Around here, spring changes into summer almost imperceptibly, and there's not that much difference between a day in late autumn and an average winter day, at least to look at. All the bright colors of mid-autumn, the golden light, and the harvest festivals mark the culmination of the year and its fulfillment. It's a burst of exuberance before things settle down for the long sleep of winter. Underlying the celebration is the knowledge that the light and warmth of summer are going, and there's cold and snow and windshield-scraping somewhere ahead, but somehow you don't think about that on a beautiful Indian summer afternoon with leaves drifting lazily down and acorns crunching underfoot.

I seem to recall past times when fall colors were brighter than they have been in recent years--I may even have read something about climate change potentially affecting the vibrancy of autumn leaves--but I'm not sure I could reliably call it a trend. It does seem to me that both spring and autumn have been somewhat delayed in their arrivals of late. On the other hand, I remember a particular autumn day in college when a class held outside a few days before Thanksgiving had the benefit of a gorgeous blue sky and leaves of every riotous hue imaginable still on the trees. I usually think of October as the colorful month, but that's proof it isn't always the case.

You can be happy in any season. I've been elated on gloomy days and out-of-sorts on sunny ones and think it's best to let the seasons be the background to life, not the map to it. Still, it's never bad to enjoy the things that only happen at certain times of the year. Emerson said that "each moment of the year has its own beauty . . . a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." Earlier this evening, for instance, when I took something to the recycling bin, I glanced toward the west and noticed, behind the trees, a sunset not particularly showy but unique in being a particular shade of orange I don't remember seeing in the sky before. I had to look at it for a minute to try to figure out what it was. Apricot? Peach? The color of a creamy orange sherbet, melted in a bowl? A quiet color, but a pretty one, framed by houses and subtly variegated foliage, and I bet I never see another sunset quite like it.

If there's any poet who captured the feeling of autumn successfully, it has to have been Keats. I think of his ode "To Autumn" every fall, and various lines about "mellow fruitfulness" and "ripening to the core" start running through my head round about September each year. There's his famous personification of autumn as a woman(?) winnowing her hair in a barn, a sort of late-in-the-year Botticelli or Pre-Raphaelite type, I would guess. A lovely image, and a poetic one, though I can't help thinking that if I had a barn and saw such a creature sitting in it, I'd have to ask her what she was doing there. It's my practical streak, at war with my aesthetic side. (You never know--she might be the Loathly Damsel.) Even poetry has its limits.

But enough of that . . . it's almost time to start baking gingerbread cookies for Halloween.

Madeline's Casement

Does the unconscious have a sense of humor? I'm only asking because of the dream I had the other night, which seemed in some way a response to my blog post of last week, in which I talked about two previous dreams I had eight years apart. My dreaming mind wasted no time in coming up with another installment of the cliff's edge/oceanic/sea creature saga that sprang to life so vividly in the first dream and turned sort of Moby-Dickish in the second.

First off, I have to say that the latest dream was in no way as dramatic as the previous two. There's no rapidly rising tide and no sea monster. In the beginning, the dream didn't even seem to be taking place near the sea. I worked for someone who lived in a large house and was apparently a wealthy invalid. I was in the role of a personal assistant and went into an upstairs bathroom to check on a bottle of medicine; then I went into my own room, which opened out of it. There was a small desk in front of a tall window, and I opened the drawer.

To my surprise, opening the desk caused the bottom to slide out and tilt down at an angle. There was no glass in the window, though the bottom of the desk drawer appeared to be glass--and its contents were hanging precariously over a rocky cliff that plunged into the ocean about 50 feet below. I could see a man cliff diving from the rocks, and I wanted to slide the bottom of the drawer back in so as not to drop anything into the water. There was a long, cylindrical object on the right side of the drawer, but as if it had a will of its own, the drawer slipped further down, tumbling the contents into the water.

The cliff diver had just made another dive, so he and my projectile hit the water at about the same time. I waited to see him come up, and he did. I was glad I hadn't inadvertently drowned him, but it was a near thing. After that, I noticed other people of various ages swimming nearby, none of whom seemed to have noticed that contents were raining down on their heads from an open window. I hadn't knocked anyone out, but on the other hand, wasn't their carefree attitude a bit surprising? I stood looking in some perplexity at the desk that turned gravity into a launch pad.

In this dream there was no sense of danger to me. I was an actor--though an unwitting one--not a reactor. The ocean posed no threat, I did not mourn the loss of the contents, and I was more concerned with the safety of the people in the water than they appeared to be. Above all, I was mystified by the trick drawer that seemed to have been set up to act as it did. There was an inevitability about the scene and a feeling of a sly sense of humor at work.

If you're interested in setting, I will say that the house, while having a more or less 20th-century look (and an up-to-date bathroom) had the heavy atmosphere of established wealth. I believe I had driven there in my car, which was parked on the street. As for the room with the desk, it was something like Madeline's chamber in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, except for the fact that it wasn't winter (or even nighttime), there was no stained glass, and in fact no feeling at all of anything medieval. I'm not sure there was even a bed. 

If you're thinking, "That doesn't sound much like Madeline's chamber," all I can say is it must have been the slightly ponderous air of the house, the feeling of looking down from a height, and the unexpected drama of the window treatment. Her window was pretty to look at, but mine was notable for its absence, the difference between a romance and the dream of a modern writer, I suppose. At least I was dry this time.