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 shot 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.