2

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 12:18 P.M.

I finished the Nifty Fifties catalog up around noon Sunday and had a whole afternoon to kill before my dinner date appearance in my official capacity as judgment-caller and name-taker of the Wicca. I’d even dressed for the occasion, all in Urban Black: boots, jeans, turtleneck on one of its last outings before being packed away for the summer.

I wasn’t alone in the studio, even if it was Sunday. Seiko was there, working on a project of her own. Seiko dresses like an all-night viewer of the S/M Shopping Channel, but the one time I dropped a few names from that area of reality I got nothing but a blank look. I can’t think of any reason she’d feign ignorance while wearing all that leather, so I’m forced to the conclusion that Seiko wears chains and studs and leather because she likes wearing chains and studs and leather, and not for reasons of recreational athletics.

For what it’s worth, Seiko is also the one who brought the Teenage Mutant Ninja lime Jello-O mold containing the secret ingredient of two bottles of vodka to the studio Christmas party last year. Ray recited all the verses of “Christmas Day in the Workhouse” and Mikey Pontifex actually smiled. It was a memorable occasion.

I packed up all thirty boards of the catalog with the desktop page-for-page front and back matter (the catalog would run about fifty pages once a printer was done with it) and left it on Ray’s desk so he could give it the Houston Graphics seal of approval when he got in tomorrow morning. I threw my used razor blades into the coffee can full of similar razor blades that I keep beside my desk and washed out my Number Triple Zero Mars Technograph and filled the reservoir with ammonia so that it would continue being a Number Triple Zero Mars Technograph pen and not, say, a cute and useless piece of modern sculpture, and even washed out my coffee cup.

Wasting time. If these were delaying tactics, my subconscious had a lousy sense of timing: the only appointment I could conceive of not wanting to go to was five hours in the future. I had all of Sunday afternoon before me. April in New York. The day was soggy and cool; raining again. You’ll love New York, the ad campaign says. I put on my hat and coat and went out.

This hat was the latest in a series of hats: wide-brimmed black leather suggesting that I might be the biggest attitude case east of the Pecos. I like hats, but I never seem to be able to strike up a permanent relationship with one. But I keep hoping.

I didn’t want to go home. Belle was off taping a week’s worth of little recorded squibs for WBAI, and I felt too anticipatorily broke to want to spend money loitering in any of the innumerable cafés the Big Empty has to offer.

I had, in short, that rootless, disconnected feeling that comes of knowing there is a place you want to go, which for some reason you can’t go to.

And as Katharine Hepburn always used to say, “Human nature, Mr. Alnut, is what we are put on this earth to rise above.” So I squared mental shoulders (try it sometime) and headed for the Snake.

The Snake – also known as the Serpent’s Truth – is on the northernmost fringe of the Village, on a street that’d be a dead-end street if it weren’t between Broadway and Sixth.

The Snake is, was, and always will be the kind of occult bookstore that makes the professional god-botherers’ eyes light up in greedy anticipation. It is trashy, vulgar, tacky, and unabashedly commercial, with some of the highest markups for the sleaziest merchandise known to man or beast.

It also boasts a neon-purple industrial-strength chrome jukebox that contains every 45 that Elvis ever recorded. It is just too bad that among my many failings I can count an inability to listen to rockabilly in any form. Trismegistus, who owns both the Snake and the jukebox, knows this. He also maintains a Nietzschean faith in the perfectibility of humankind.

This is why, when he saw me coming up the street this particular afternoon, he dropped six quarters into the Mighty Wurlitzer’s gaping neon violet maw and kicked the side. Elvis began telling me and everyone else within a two-block radius that he’d found a new place to dwell, with enough wof and yabber thrown in to make me hope that the speakers would explode.

Despite this encouragement, I persevered.

“Hi,” I said to Tris, who, since he was loitering negligently against the jukebox, was also blocking my way into the Snake. Tris is not much seen in the Snake during the week, though where he goes and what he does no one knows. He keeps informed, though, and occasionally, in a truly heartwarming upswing of amateur standing over commercial instinct, Tris will ban someone from setting foot within the Snake’s hallowed precincts for social crimes unspecified. I wondered if I’d somehow made it onto his blacklist.

“Howdy,” Tris said after a moment, moving to let me by. I was reassured. I glanced downward and saw what I expected to.

The Boots. To be exact, bright red leather cowboy boots with snakeskin insets. Trismegistus, need it be said, has never been west of the Hudson in all his five decades, and has never been seen in any other footwear.

I rely for a certain amount of my mental equilibrium on intermittent sightings of the Boots, and in weaker moments have been known to fantasize the making of a perverse Nashville music video starring Moira Shearer and those boots.

Possibly my sense of humor is too obscure.

Having sidled into the Snake at last, I ran headfirst into a palpable wall of Three Kings incense, which effectively insulated my sinuses from any other scent in the store. There was some slightly-older-than-New-Age tape dueling with Elvis over the antique sound system in the hope of encouraging the purchase of its brothers, and the narrow aisle that runs down one wall of this retail designer’s nightmare and up the other was stuffed full of regulars, for whom a weekly pilgrimage to the Snake takes the place of a more conventional religious observance.

I inserted myself into their midst, a process not unlike that of a salmon’s heading upstream to spawn. Safely wedged in among them, I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the elevated platform that holds the cash register and felt a perverse jolt.

Julian was there. He was, as usual, wearing a Roman collar, a (probably) secondhand hammertail coat, and those tiny oval clerk’s glasses. In my boots with two-inch heels I am about half an inch taller than he is, and I outweigh him by at least ten pounds. Makes a girl feel safe at night, superior strength does.

Julian, I hasten to add, had every right to be where he was, since he was the manager of the Serpent’s Truth – aka the Snake – the man who ordered the books, the candles, the gen-U-wine Magus-Brand purple polyester acetate satin wizard robes, those commodities the sale of which kept the Snake in the black.

He was also the man who’d given my legal name and unlisted phone number to someone I would really have preferred not to have them.

This would have been a relatively minor crime, in the greater cosmic New York Metropolitan scheme of things, except for the fact that I had lusted after Julian and his tubercular seraphim good looks in unrequited silence for years, and to have him take just enough notice of me to sell me down the river was a betrayal on the supernaturally disproportionate order of the ones you experience in junior high.

Old scars are the rawest.

It was another reason I’d been avoiding the Snake. And the lowering grown-up consciousness that Julian had no idea what I’d managed to do to my psychic landscape with his (actually marginal) assistance did not make me feel one whit better, thank you very much.

So I buried myself in rapt contemplation of the Snake’s antique herb collection, displayed in equally antique flint-glass jars all down the right-hand wall of the shop, and worked my way along the aisle, past the congested knot of browsers in front of the “Witchcraft and Women’s Mysteries” section. The herbs had been new sometime around 1957. I didn’t know about the jars.

Eventually I made it all the way down to Theosophy and Ancient Atlantis, which meant I was about as far from Julian as it was possible to get without going into the Snake’s backroom ritual space. It also meant I was in a prime position to cruise the back-wall display of Santeria accessories.

I have no earthly need for a two-foot-high plaster polychrome statue of Saint Barbara (patroness of artillerymen and demolitions experts, a.k.a. the orisha Chango), but there’s always the possibility I can talk myself into one someday. Besides, I was low on Uncrossing Floorwash and jar candles.

“I trusted you!”

Theatrical venom delivered in an undertone is always interesting. I opened my ears and turned sideways, as if my attention had suddenly been riveted by a four-volume boxed set of The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled.

The dialogue was coming from the space in front of the Santeria supplies. It’s the largest open space in the shop – when Tris has someone here reading cards this is where the reader sets up her table.

“– gave it to you in good faith –” The speaker was doing a good job of keeping her voice down while filleting somebody fast and furious. I turned a little more and reached for one of the books.

“Xharina –” A man’s voice this time. I almost dropped the book. I did look up. Xharina. Definitely Xharina.

Xharina – sometimes known as Xharina, Princess of Pain – is what you might call an ornament of the Community. Xharina runs an otherwise all-male coven in Brooklyn, and is a very decorative addition to any Pagan Festival, although not a real good advertisement for the Community at large.

I don’t know what her day job is, and I don’t want to know. I just wish I had the money she spends on boots, let alone the price of something like the laced-in little number she was wearing today, which looked like it had started life as a Victorian riding habit before it got its sleeves removed in order to display Xharina’s full-glove tats to an admiring world.

At the moment the Princess looked like she wished she had the riding crop that went with the outfit. She was glaring up at the leatherboy who was probably one of her coveners – and, judging from the color of her complexion, wasn’t going to be for much longer.

“I gave it to you to copy,” she said in a low dangerous tone. “What do you mean, ‘It’s gone’?”

This was even more interesting than the admittedly interesting sight of Xharina. I could think of few things that one person would hand another to copy and get that bent out of shape at the loss of besides a Book of Shadows.

On the other hand, the boyfriend could have come up with a better place to tell her than the center ring at Gossip Central.

I sneaked another look around the end of Madame Blavatsky. Xharina was breathing in the jerky fashion of somebody who couldn’t quite get enough air, and her Max Factor Sno-Pake was clearly outlined by the deep maroon of an approaching coronary.

“I just – I kept it safe, Xharina. I’d never –” The leatherboy’s New York Nocturnal complexion was currently turning that shade of greenish white that is nearly impossible to fake.

“Just get it back,” Xharina said. She turned her back on him and plowed through a knot of tourists as if they didn’t exist.

More food for the legend.

She was moving too fast for me to catch her, and I wasn’t sure what I’d say to her, anyway. I knew what she’d say, though, because it was what I’d say if some semistranger came up and asked me if my BoS’d gone for a walk.

Just like Glitter’s.

I picked up a pamphlet on the Rollright Stones and tried to herd my wandering brain cells into some kind of order.

If I was placing the correct interpretation on what I’d just heard, Xharina had loaned her book to young Heather in Leather, from whose custody it had vanished.

It was, of course, possible that he’d gotten careless and lost it. It was also possible that the Pope would be marching in the gay rights parade come June.

Nothing else I did that afternoon was nearly as interesting.

*   *   *

I got to the Hunan Balcony on 116th a little before seven o’clock and spotted Edward Skelton instantly. He had that desperately eager air that was too intense for even the best blind date you ever wanted to go on, because Edward Skelton’s blind date wasn’t any mere corporeal bimbo, but Revealed Truth Herself.

He was also, I was pretty sure, Ned, the clerk at Lothlorien.

I needed a beer. I pushed open the door and headed for the PLEASE WAIT HERE TO BE SEATED sign.

Edward lunged to his feet instantly as I came in. It could have been the immense aura of witchy power that surrounded me, or, then again, it could have been the fact that you could smell the incense on my clothes from three feet away.

“Um, excuse me, are you…” he said, pushy and tentative all at once.

I felt an instant flare of irritation, and suppressed it because this is an awkward situation for anyone and he didn’t need me to slam-dunk him on top of it.

“Reservation for a party of four,” I said to the hostess who showed up about then, “under Flowers.”

I turned back to Edward as the hostess began gathering up menus. “I think we’re both waiting for Bellflower,” I said with as much pleasant neutrality as I could muster. “Why don’t you come on?”

We sat down. I ordered a Tsingtao. Edward looked surprised and ordered a Coke. I hoped he wasn’t a better-living-through-dietary-fascism type, but even if he was, it wouldn’t have much effect on either my life or the possibility of his inclusion in Changing.

He was here because he was looking for a coven to join, and because he’d either met someone who’d referred him to Belle or because of her show on WBAI. They’d talked on the phone a couple of times, and now Belle’d decided to let it go a step further. If Belle and Daffydd liked what they saw tonight, he’d be invited to one of Changing Coven’s open meetings.

It’s not much of an intake process, but it’s all we have. You can’t quantify sincerity – and sincerity alone isn’t a virtue, anyway. The Craft, like all religions, deals in intangibles.

With that much settled, I took the opportunity to make a detailed survey of Edward Skelton, Wiccan-wannabe.

He looked like he was within hailing distance of thirty, but high or low I couldn’t quite peg. I already knew that he was taller than I was. He had one of Per Aurum’s medium pentacles on a leather cord around his neck and one of those big steel watches on his wrist that does everything but send a fax. A CZ stud in one ear. His hair was the darkest possible brown, a spiky buzz-cut that reminded me of porcupine quills or feathers, and his eyes were one of those extraordinary color combinations that hazel sometimes produces: a vivid green star around the pupil, the rest of the iris light brown with a dark rim.

But even with that promising beginning, something wasn’t quite right. To this crucial meeting he had chosen to wear a white polyester short-sleeved shirt over a light green T bearing a design I couldn’t quite make out through the translucent shirt. Blue jeans, dirty sneakers (when, as everyone knows, the current fashion is for dirty work boots instead). With that kind of fashion sense he was probably straight, not that it mattered to Belle, Changing, or me.

What mattered was that I didn’t like him.

It was irrational; a telegram from the unconscious mind, swift and final.

We don’t always get these flashes when they’d do us any good. Usually they arrive when they’re an active social embarrassment, since, having made my mind up about Edward in the first five seconds of seeing him, I was reduced to playing devil’s advocate to my better self for the rest of the evening, toting up items for the plus side of the ledger.

Our drinks came. I resisted the urge to order a second beer immediately. My day hadn’t been that bad, and my night wouldn’t be either.

“So. Have you known Bellflower long?” Edward said. “I’m Edward Skelton. Ned.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve met.”

“You were at the bookstore,” Ned said, pleased with himself for remembering. I nodded, and was instantly irritated with myself for being so condescending.

Ned began to talk. He turned out to be one of those people who show up somewhere full of questions and then engage in a nonstop monologue about themselves. This was an unfair assessment, and I wrestled with my better nature while I consumed the first of what would be not-too-many Tsingtaos and learned that Ned was the youngest of four and the only boy, came from upstate New York, and had come to the City in the face of massive parental disapproval.

“They wanted me to be a doctor – my dad’s a doctor – but I couldn’t really see going through all that when what I wanted to do was write.” He sipped his Coke. “I’m a writer, really.”

In Manhattan we spell this word unemployed.

“Anything published?” I asked, although I could guess the answer.

Ned shrugged, embarrassed. “A couple of things. You know, like in magazines? Small press.”

About then Daffydd and Belle arrived.

Daffydd is tall and spare and favors tweed jackets with black turtlenecks, giving him a passing resemblance to a member of a road show company of Bell, Book, and Candle. Other than a pentacle ring and his HP bracelet he looks absolutely mundane and very reassuring.

Daffydd’s interest in the Craft is – to put it tactfully – mild; his association with Changing is primarily in the nature of a favor to Belle, whose friend he has been since her student days twenty-something years ago. The reason for his involvement is that Craft law – from the olden days around 1957, when there was only one Craft and it was Gardnerian – once mandated that all covens be organized in perfect pairs, just like Noah’s Ark.

Magically speaking, it makes sense, but magical theory has never been popular with the masses. These days women outnumber men on the New Aquarian Frontier by about five to one, and the Noah’s ark theory of Wicca has gone the way of the hula hoop and casual sex. Meanwhile, Belle and Daffydd go on like an old-time married couple, and Daffydd comes to coven about as often as most people go to church.

Introductions all round. Ned and Daffydd shook hands, then we arranged ourselves again and contemplated the menu. Daffydd ordered a Miller Draft. I had another Tsingtao. Daffydd and I did a little catching up – not much, as Ned wouldn’t know any of the people and it wasn’t polite to underline how much of an outsider he was.

Belle did bring up the subject of the picnic, though, which was Ned’s cue to realize that I was not an outsider like himself, but one who had already attained Ned’s desired goal. He shot me a look of betrayal.

“Not very big,” Belle was saying. “I thought we’d start small. We can get High Bridge Park –”

“I know a lot of people you could get to come,” Ned burst in, friendly and tactless as a Labrador puppy.

Belle looked at him, wanting to include him but taken a little aback. “We can put up flyers in the bookstores,” she said, pitching it as if she were answering him. To me: “I’ll call you next week.”

“It sounds pretty exciting,” Ned said heartily to the table at large. I winced, remembering a time when I would have greeted news of a gathering where I could meet actual Witches with the same maladroit glee.

“I hope you’ll come,” Belle said. “I’m sure Bast will post it down at the Snake.”

“Is Bast your Witch name?” Ned asked me. I thought of telling him my parents were rogue Egyptologists and decided against it. “Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

Eventually we got down to the fortune cookies and vanilla Häagen-Dazs with fresh ginger.

Ned waited – first with confidence, then with increasing apprehension – for the invitation that didn’t come.

We settled the check.

Ned waited, waited, waited …

“I’ll call you next week, all right, Ned?” Bellflower said.

“Sure.” He smiled, covering his disappointment. “Or I’ll call you.”

He went to retrieve a jacket, and then went out the door.

Was it only my overheated and guilty imagination that told me how rigidly Ned Skelton schooled himself not to look back, not to linger, not to look in our direction?

“My place?” said Daffydd to Belle.

“Sure. Coming, Bast?” Belle asked me.

“Sure.” I followed Daffydd and Belle out onto Broadway.

*   *   *

I hate this part. I hate having this much power over someone else’s happiness, and I hate the possibility that because I’m tired, because I’m irritated, I’ll use that power without thinking and leave welts on someone else’s psyche that a lifetime can’t erase.

This is why non-judgmentalism is so very popular. Because judging and choosing and making decisions means saying yes to one possibility and no to all the others. To do that is to take back all the responsibility that Society encourages you to give away.

Real freedom scares most people to death.

*   *   *

Daffydd has a little apartment on the top floor of one of those former stately homes that line Riverside all through the hundred-teens. His two rooms are decorated in English Docent Classic and contain more material than Belle’s eight rooms and my one put together. Every possible wall is covered in bookshelves. Rolled maps, esoteric fan-tods, and books too big to be conventionally shelved jut from the shelves at all angles. You move through Daffydd’s space at your peril.

We arrived. Belle took the hassock, I took the chair that went with it – both upholstered in villainous nappy mauve wool. Daffydd went into the kitchen and came back with three glasses and a bottle with a cork. He extracted the cork and poured, and sat down in a foldable wooden contraption that would have looked perfectly at home in Alexander the Great’s RV. He looked at Belle. Belle looked solemn.

Apparently none of us had thought Edward Skelton was right for Changing.

Belle looked at me. I shrugged and pretended I was fascinated by my drink. It was a sweet dessert thing, the kind Belle likes. And me too, come to that. Wine snobbery is not among my virtues.

Neither, apparently, was acceptance. I sat there and disliked myself.

“I don’t know if Ned Skelton would really be comfortable in a traditional Wiccan group,” Daffydd said, when it became plain that nobody else was going to say anything.

To call Belle’s coven “traditional” is just plain inaccurate, but after a moment I thought I saw what Daffydd meant.

I looked up and saw that both of them were looking at me.

“Traditional meaning Goddess-oriented,” I said. Daffydd smiled and raised his glass in salute.

“Hmm,” Belle said, thinking it over. Lady Bellflower of the Wicca does not believe in magic, and doesn’t trust hunches. “You think he might be uncomfortable with what we do in Changing,” she said, trying it on for size.

At least half of the Craft traditions – and all the Gardnerian-descended ones – venerate the perfect balance of male and female energies, as symbolized by the God and Goddess. But to senses blunted by centuries of anthrocentrism, equal time often looks like preferential treatment – which is why, inaccurately, Wiccans are referred to as Goddess-worshipers, as if She had no consort.

I thought over what Daffydd had said. Ned Skelton didn’t fit. He just didn’t, for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Saying he wouldn’t like our rituals was as good a polite excuse as any for following a prompting that none of us could put into words.

“He’s been working cyber-Welsh down at the Snake,” my better self said, unasked.

Lorelli Lee is the Snake’s general-purpose Pagan priestess. She works a different godform every Saturday; if Ned had been going any length of time he’d already been exposed to old-fashioned God/Goddess polarity as well as to rituals featuring Gaia Parthenogenete, Herne the Biker, Triple Hecate, and Gilgamesh/Enki.

Belle looked a little surprised. I could see her inclining toward inviting Ned to an Open Circle with Changing so that everyone could meet him and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

“The picnic will give him a good chance to meet a lot of people,” Daffydd said, coming to my rescue.

“Works for me,” I said. Yeah. Maybe Xharina’d have an opening.

“That sounds good.” Belle looked relieved, and that settled Edward Skelton’s fate.

Not for Changing. For someone, but not for us.

Thinking about Xharina made me think about missing Books of Shadows. Belle already knew about Glitter’s bereavement. A second loss – of which I wasn’t even certain – could be only coincidence.

And Belle didn’t believe in Witch Wars, didn’t believe in Pagan-on-Pagan lawlessness, didn’t believe in the High Gothic silliness that so many of us love to indulge in, with secret passwords and coded recognition signals.

Secrecy is second only to conspiracy as a cheap euphoric decorator accent for Reality.

“Bast?” said Daffydd. I realized I was staring off into space.

“I was just thinking. About Mary, Queen of Scots,” I added quickly, grabbing the first name that popped into my head so that Belle wouldn’t think I was still wasting any brain cells on Ned.

“Why the sudden interest?” Daffydd asked, leaning forward.

“Well,” I said, “Beaner’s singing in that opera.”

“And probably filled your head with all sorts of nonsense,” Daffydd said disapprovingly. Which meant he was, as Beaner would say, one of Them. “Interested in more unbiased information?”

Daffydd’s day job is something in the soft sciences at Columbia, which means a lot of people send him free books. In a stunning conflation of resources and inclination, Daffydd’s great passion in life is loaning books to people.

“Oh, sure,” I said innocently. Hadn’t Beaner said I should read more history?

Daffydd went off. He came back with a book. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “This should give you the basics.”

Yeah. To start a fight with my closest friends and selected strangers over someone who’d been dead for four centuries. Oh, yeah – and eight years. I glanced at it. Academic press; small, heavy, acid-free paper. Blue buckram binding (the optimal meld of economics and respectability) with title-name-and-publisher stamped in gold (Optima 24-point for the title; Times Roman 18-point for the author’s name; publisher in 12-point Caslon Antique plus stamp-blurred colophon) on the spine. It might even have come through Houston Graphics – we do a lot of academic press work.

“Call me if you have any questions,” Daffydd said as I flipped through Mary Stuart: A Rose in the Shadows by Olivia Wexford Hunt. “History can be a little daunting when you’re dropped into the middle of it, but it’s just – history.” Daffydd shrugged. I recollected that he’s also a member of the Richard the Third Society; possibly Daffydd’s interests lie in being spin doctor for dead royals in need.

The talk turned to the picnic and Belle’s hopes for it.

Despite all of us being stuffed onto one island and/or five boroughs, the New York Metropagan Community is really fragmented. Some of us only meet at festivals far outside the city. Getting us together where we lived sounded like a better idea the more Belle pitched it – but then, Belle can talk almost anyone into almost anything.

We finished the wine. I agreed to coordinate Beltane Ecumenipicnic I. Daffydd insisted I take a cab home. He was probably more concerned about Mary than about me.

*   *   *

I live across Bowery (which used to be a high-rent district about 150 years ago) in the usual sort of crumbling Middle European prewar monocultural neighborhood that developers love to target. My landlord would love them to target it, too: my building’s one of those prix fixe renter’s dreams.

I had to pay three months’ key money to get in, and my apartment strongly resembles a coffin – being ten feet wide and something more than twice that long with a fifteen-foot ceiling – but I’ve never regretted it, not with my rent being what it is.

I paid off the cab and went up five flights and opened three locks and I was home. I dumped my hat, jacket, and bag on my old-enough-to-be-an-antique-but-not kitchen table and went to check my answering machine. It used to be the only techno-toy I had, but at Yule I blew myself to a “portable” boom box with two cassette decks and a CD player. I doubt if I’ll go any farther into consumer electronics, though – anything more would probably blow the building’s wiring.

Even though it was well after midnight, I wasn’t sleepy. I put on the water for tea, scaring the roaches half to death, and decided to take a look at Daffydd’s book. The only other thing I had on my To Be Read pile was a romance by Pat Califia, anyway.

The water boiled. I made tea. I put Ned Skelton and peripatetic Books of Shadows out of my mind in favor of the musical question of what made someone four centuries dead hot news?

*   *   *

The basic facts Beaner had given me were correct. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. Raised in the French court, the Manhattan of its day. Married at sixteen, widowed at seventeen. Superfluous to her de Medici mother-in-law (Mary wasn’t in the succession for the French throne), she was packed off home to Scotland – away from glamour, away from sophistication, away from the meeting of like minds.

As far as I could tell, Mary did not handle being formerly important well. She was still a queen, but in Scotland she was a queen surrounded by people who were not at, who could not aspire to be at, the center of the world.

Every transplanted New Yorker – even those leaving voluntarily and for the best of reasons – knows the regret of leaving Avalon, Atlantis, the Hesperian garden that is the biggest and most golden apple of them all, and Mary Stuart was no exception. Her life was spent attempting to regain that same orient and enchanted sense of place that living at the center of the world had given her.

Looked at that way, Mary Stuart’s life had a sort of grisly relevance to modern times. If there’s something you want, something you think you need to have to survive as the person you think you are, what price is too high to pay for it?

Compared to her cool Apollonian cousin to the south – Elizabeth the First, England’s virgin queen of cities – Mary does not come off particularly well in the historical accounts. As Beaner said, a moron who failed Interpersonal Politics 101.

But as a woman who had been at the hub of her century’s Manhattan glitterati circle and would do anything to regain that place, I understood her. She wanted the only important thing, and its gift was in the hands of others. Like Ned Skelton, she was desperate, obsessed – not to return to France, but to transcend France, by making her own island kingdom even more glorious.

Surrounded by incomprehension of what she was, maybe even knowing that what she wanted more than anything she could never have, but driven desperately to try for it …

That woman I knew.

Maybe too well for my peace of mind.

The sun was finally coming up when I turned out my lights.