The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  The Ladies called on the Hand when they needed to hire a coach. But Eleanor and Sarah rarely required a coach—they stayed home. That was the point, or part of their point. The retired life was the cloistered life. Secular nuns.

  No wonder I begin my not very leisurely tour of leisure with them. You and your nuns! he used to say, charmed in his amused non-Catholic way by my “nun thing.” He loved to call out in mock horror from the living room if I was in the kitchen—Oh no, The Nun’s Story is on Public TV again tonight!

  Cue my reply: I have three words for you, mister—Super Bowl Sunday.

  All the ways we contrived, over the years, over all the differences, to say crazy about you, just crazy about you.

  * * *

  —

  Within five years of their taking up residence in Llangollen, the Ladies’ renown was so far advanced that the queen was asking to see the plans of their cottage and garden. The plans were lost—or perhaps discarded: Queen Charlotte was known to abhor the scent of musk, the very perfume the Ladies lavished on their linens and all correspondence sent from Plas Newydd. Anything posted from the Cottage was redolent of their signature funky fragrance. But in spite of the musk, the word from those who visited was that the Cottage and environs were beguiling—and the Ladies themselves “enchantresses.”

  Llangollen is hardly a straight shot from London, even today. It might have been easier to hire a coach in the eighteenth century to visit the Ladies at Plas Newydd. I used public transport, not trusting my American self to drive on the left side of the road without him in the passenger seat saying without alarm left, darling, left, when (not if) I made a turn into the right lane.

  After the train from London Euston to Chester (two hours), a branch line train to a place called Ruaton that appeared to be an abandoned station. The next step was a bus. Where was that? No one around to ask. I lugged my roller bag across the railroad overpass, and wandered out to a roadway, overjoyed to see a bus stop a block up the way with a weather-beaten sign. Cars (not many) went by, a truck or two. Finally, the bus.

  And was told I was standing on the wrong side of the road for the bus to Llangollen. Opposite side, luv. It felt like a time warp, merrie olde England, cuppa tay, though this was Wales. The road signs were in Welsh (bigger) and English (underneath), as if to make clear what mattered in these parts.

  It was late afternoon by the time I got to Llangollen, the bus dropping me by the river on the edge of the action. Casino, hotels offering teas, B&Bs to the left, hotels to the right. A tourist town—not because of the Ladies. I seemed to be alone in coming to the little town on the river Dee to find them. Hiking, biking, whitewater rafting, a steam train chugging along an otherwise abandoned track to be had for an afternoon outing, canal boats and horse-cart rides. Families and young cyclists streaking by in the eely skintight garments they wear, and their reverse number, retired couples (not the soulful retirement the Ladies sought) on modest walking tours, lumbering along, stopping for afternoon cake, drinks before the beef dinner. Or up to the romantic ruins of Valle Crucis (the outing the Ladies sometimes undertook with their visitors).

  I had a reservation at a hotel I had chosen for the name—the Falls, assuming it must overlook the river, picking up on Josiah Wedgwood’s fascination with the area’s wild landscape. It soon became evident I should have chosen the Cornerstone, directly across the street: it had the river view.

  The entry door of the Falls was locked, the attached wine bar closed. I bumped my roller bag across to the Cornerstone. It looked like an illustration for The Old Curiosity Shop, mullioned windows, dark interior.

  In a trice, fairytale fast, the door was opened by the owner, who introduced herself as Carol—C’min, c’min, cold as winter, hardly any kind of June day. She took charge of the roller bag and me. You’ll want tea. Taste for cake? I was told to sit by the fire. And fell into a voluminous sofa, deep with oversize pillows. I’m not sure what a peat fire is, but I think this was a peat fire, the smell of something danker than a wood log, heavy with compounded forest. Lap of comfort, if not luxury. Tea and a hard little cake (meant to be dipped—dip it, my dear!) arrived on a tray, milk, demerara sugar cubes, thin paper napkin.

  Did Carol know about the Ladies? Oh yes, quite the pair, they.

  As for the owner of the Falls, she did not wish to speak ill—neighbor, friends across the divide, all that—but well, where was he? Allowing herself a professional shrug—what do you expect? Didn’t live on the premises. She lived on the premises.

  Unfortunately, the Cornerstone was entirely booked—pity.

  I felt a stab of disappointment, as if the Ladies, who had brought me all this way, had cozied up together by their peat fire, reading La Nouvelle Héloïse to each other, and then dispatched me to the Hand.

  I was nicely settled in by the Cornerstone fire when the owner of the Falls (located on his cell phone by Carol) arrived on the sidewalk and put his face to the mullion. The little square window filled with his big head. He spotted me in the cheerful dark dipping my brittle cake into the milky tea. In he bounded. It was my fault, somehow, that I had not located him—not that it mattered, he said. Come along then. A nod to Carol, and we were off. She wouldn’t accept payment for the tea. Glad to take in a stray, come anytime. It was raining now, the owner blustering across the street. Come along.

  My room was on the third floor of an old building, many coats of stucco whited over. Narrow staircase, the roller bag bumping behind me, the room larger than I expected, with a sloping floor, double bed, the mattress cratering toward the center, everything clean and orderly, dried flowers, only slightly dusty, on the mantel of the fireplace (no, no, entirely bricked up, no fires here, I’ll tell you). It was the tatty look I remembered from my first trips to England in the 1970s (Keats, Blake, Wordsworth). Décor meant to convey hominess, but experienced as dispiriting.

  Too bad I was missing the wine bar, the owner was saying. Best wine bar in town, he didn’t mind claiming. But closed Sundays. Try the Corn Mill, he suggested, and pointed the way. Bit of a trek in the rain, but who’s afraid of a little damp, there you go.

  The Corn Mill was a stylish place fitted into (what else?) an abandoned stone corn mill, “repurposed” as a restaurant overlooking the Dee. Bar downstairs, mostly young people, loud and happy. Upstairs in the quiet restaurant I found a corner table with a small window to myself, almost as cozy as the Cornerstone by the peat fire with my tea and cake. I looked down at the river billowing with mist, the rain steady now, the night lowering. Imagine Eleanor and Sarah arriving about the same time of year. Spring can be cold, the rain penetrating. No wonder they loved their fire. Strangers here, but not, at least, alone.

  Why is it still so hard to enter a restaurant on my own, take a table, settle in to the business of dinner, as if eating alone were faintly reprehensible? My mother’s voice homing in as I lie under Mr. Kinney’s beechnut tree. Well, it’s sad, darling—he drinks alone. And me, waiting for a glass of wine.

  It’s a feminist thing—I know, I know. I’ve read the articles in the women’s magazines, how you must walk right in, take possession—and don’t let them park you next to the kitchen door.

  The woman who dines alone. The postmodern valor I struggle to claim. I’ve never had this anxiety about traveling alone, which I’ve done for years. But the barricade of a good restaurant for dinner (lunch, strangely, poses no problem)—for that I must suit up. The armor covering my unease is always a book tucked in my purse, as if I packed a pearl-handled pistol. More recently, the iPhone. But somehow a book seems more companionable. I put it on the table to my right, security detail, riding shotgun.

  The waiter arrives, sweet kid with a concerned look. He brings me my glass of wine, still frowning. Something bothering him. Maybe I shouldn’t have seated myself? No, no, not that at all, madam.

  He would like to see me at a better table, the larger table by the big window with wh
at he thinks—what he knows (Been here all my life, haven’t I?)—has the better view. Big storm coming, lightning and that, something to see. I argue for my small table with the partial river view, and try to foist off concern for him as a reason to stay put: won’t he need the big table when the place starts to fill up?

  He insists on being the feminist—You’re a nice lady and you got here first, didn’t you? He wins. Picks up my wineglass, settles me and my book at the big table with the big window, and goes off, much relieved that things are now as they should be.

  The place did fill up. I held uneasily to my fiefdom with the best river view as couples and larger groups mounted the stairs, gazing around for a good table, lowering an eye at me with my lamb (The best thing on our menu, if I may suggest . . .), the second glass of wine, my low-grade misery, my difficulty claiming my place on planet earth.

  I open my book, which is meant to prove I’m sustaining a relationship of some kind like everybody else out for the night. I’m dining with Colette.

  I discovered the Ladies from her. I’m rereading the chapter she devotes to them in The Pure and the Impure, the book she considered her best, “the nearest I shall come to writing an autobiography.” Two of Colette’s biographers, I’ve read elsewhere, seem uneasy about the book being her “best,” saying it displays a certain “incoherence” (Joanna Richardson), and the prose is rather “cryptic” (Judith Thurman).

  In this book about the first stirrings of modernity and Colette’s revisitation of her gallant cross-dressing, lipstick lesbian youth, the Ladies seem oddly placed. They get a whole long chapter. Strange to find them here. Once again, as they were in the eighteenth century, Lady Eleanor and Sarah are outliers, conscripted this time into a tour of early-twentieth-century escapades from Colette’s years as a “vagabond,” her jaunty term for her youthful transgressive self.

  The book’s other chapters are portraits from Colette’s fin de siècle experiences, observations of the lives of those living on the wild side of desire at the cusp between the belle epoque and modernism when the demimonde was not, as it has since become, pretty much the monde entire. The book does not strike me as particularly autobiographical, at least not in the self-revealing way we expect now of memoir. Much of the fan-dancing is performed well behind the fan.

  The Wikipedia entry for the book describes it as a “novel,” as do some of the readers posting responses online. Yes, I’m online. My waiter has given me the restaurant’s Wi-Fi password, so I’m dining not only with Colette but with any number of people who have opinions about her and much else. Is it really possible that Kobe Bryant has posted a Goodreads rating of The Pure and the Impure? Three stars. A man of few words: “What I’ve learned is that when the Goodreads description says ‘erotic,’ it never is.” Kobe Bryant? There he is—or someone claiming to be Kobe Bryant—and mightily disappointed in Colette.

  I’m heartened that Kobe Bryant confirms my thoughts. The Pure and the Impure isn’t a novel, nor is Colette a “reporter” as she suggests in the opening pages. The book is rich in her signature descriptive riffs, revisiting scenes and people from a life now at a distance, looking them up in memory to see if they have anything further to report on the ever-beguiling subject of desire, festooning scenes with volleys of dialogue as if she had a tape recorder in her pocket all those years ago.

  But what are the Ladies doing here? On this, Kobe has nothing to say. All the figures Colette describes come from her world and observation—except Eleanor and Sarah. They belong to that other history—History—the past beyond memory.

  The book isn’t an autobiography, and the Ladies’ chapter isn’t quite a work of history. There is nothing to call research, and of course no “reporting.” Instead, speculation. And assumption. Or presumption.

  The Pure and the Impure opens with a memory of a visit to an opium den where Colette claims the identity of journalist. She tells her host she is “here on professional assignment,” giving herself the ideal narrative cover—observer, not participant: she doesn’t take the offered pipe, the pinch of cocaine. This refusal is emblematic of Colette’s teasing tour of the banlieues of desire that follows. The source of the book’s “cryptic prose” seems to be the feinting and lunging Colette performs throughout about her own sexuality.

  It is strange that she should invite readers to call this now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t book her nearest try at autobiography. But then, maybe foregrounding life’s sinkholes and silences is the deepest resolve of autobiography, and not, as we tend to think, confession, display, self-revelation.

  The book is a scattering of prose patches held loosely together by the notion of the power of the senses. Montaigne again—the book along the lines of “these things” that Montaigne, loath to be corralled into form, called his basket of thoughts and observations. Maybe such random takes on a subject, barely held together by the idea of a chapter and certainly not comprising anything as taut as narrative, are the real destination of autobiography—not our experience as it is reeled out in stories, but the play of consciousness over the inchoate field of existence. What holds Colette’s “things” together, if anything does, is the conundrum at their core: what is desire and why does it rule us?

  Maybe, I decide, Colette abandons any pretense of autobiography or reportage and turns to the more distant region of History to grasp a life she can fashion into something more complete than a vignette, more than a shard of observation fitted into her collage of desire.

  She not only conscripts the Ladies out of the eighteenth century and out of their Welsh cottage. She plunges forward, imagining them out of their century and into hers in 1930:

  They would own a car, wear dungarees, smoke cigarettes, have short hair, and there would be a liquor bar in their apartment. . . . Eleanor Butler would curse as she jacked up the car, and would have her breasts amputated.

  Anything amiss? The attentive lad who thinks I’m a nice lady deserving of the better view has returned. Unhappy with the lamb? I realize I’ve been scowling. At Colette. I’ve put down my fork and picked up my pen. In the margin, bearing down hard, next to the amputated breasts: Puh-leeze.

  He clears my plate, inquiring if I might like the pudding. I remind myself this doesn’t mean chocolate custard. It’s how they say dessert over here—the upper classes insisting on the nursery word. Only the working classes say dessert in an effort to sound cultivated—this I’ve been told by an English friend. But he has turned it around again, the working lad who has picked up the way the nice ladies talk. I say, in my flat midwestern voice, Thanks, yes, I’d like dessert. It’s tiramisu, he murmurs as if tending an irksome patient.

  And the strongest coffee you have. I want something bitter. Off he goes.

  I’m back with Colette and my annoyance. She feels free to make the Ladies into her cartoon—they’re beyond living memory, beyond witnessing. How amusing—to be born in the eighteenth century with all its rules and regs, when in the twentieth century they could be free to tinker with a car and lop off their breasts. If they’d only lived in the twentieth century, the Ladies could have set up frankly as lesbians. For weren’t they two women who so desired to be together, merge and love and entwine themselves, that they fled family and friends on the heroic wings of Eros?

  Well, no. They said they didn’t elope for this reason—even the word “elopement” did not have the erotic undertow in the eighteenth century that it has in ours. But of course we think we know better. We know what they were really up to because, in plucking them out of their moment in space-time and “understanding” them into our own, we see they were lesbians, never mind what they said.

  I seem to be annoyed not only with Colette, but with the frame of mind I have inherited along with her—the postmodern pride of calling things by their names, the arrogance of assuming integrity is a matter of being more and more open. Or simply that a label, firmly affixed, is honesty in the face of euphemism and discretion. Why
can they not be believed? Why must our age out them? They wanted to live the life of the mind, the life of perfection. Don’t they get to say what they were up to?

  Your voice again as I mutter inwardly to Colette. You’re saying again with that amused affection, You and your nuns . . . cool your jets, sweetheart.

  Stop it, darling. I’m investigating the desire for the cloister, not the bedroom—I think the Ladies were too. I’ll never convince anyone of this, not Colette, not even you. Not in our age. But thanks anyway—thanks again and always—for making me laugh one more time.

  After the half-eaten tiramisu (pudding after all, I realize) and the depth charge of black coffee, I leave a ridiculously outsize tip to confirm my bona fides as a nice lady. Then it’s back up from the river under the owner’s sagging umbrella, in the rain and gloom to the Falls, in the back door as the owner instructed. I seem to be the only one on “the premises,” noticing lights on in the upper floors of the Cornerstone, though the ground floor where I sat by the peat fire is dark. Carol, surely, is up there, cup of tea or “something stronger” (she had offered that in the afternoon).

  Up to my room, propped against all the pillows on the sagging bed across from the yawning decorative fireplace and dusty former flowers, I swap out The Pure and the Impure for the biography of the Ladies (they finally got one a generation after Colette). Honest research, years of steadfast sleuthing, careful footnotes, many visits to the sites, full index at the back. A writer to trust—Elizabeth Mavor. In the acknowledgments, she thanks for their gracious help the staff of Plas Newydd—where I go tomorrow.