Four Vignettes

I don't know what this is. Maybe it was inspired by my Spotify Wrapped? I'm still not sure I'm using the word "pastiche" correctly. I pulled at a few different threads and I wove this, whatever it is.

I.

Robert Sheehan is outside my window again. Lucky for me, I'm on the 2nd floor, in my writer's studio above the corner bodega and he's standing on the sidewalk.

The window is open.

"Eileen!" he shouts up. "Come on, Eileen."

I leave my chair, push aside the pink-and-gray buffalo check curtain and peer down at him. 

Putting his Irish accent on thick, he sings, "Believe me, if all those enduring young charms..."

"I'm dreaming," I say, interrupting his croon. "This is because I said you should play Kevin Rowland in a movie about Dexys Midnight Runners."

"Not a dream," he half-says, half-sings. "Don't you want to come down and go for a walk with me, just around the neighborhood?"

"No." The smell of hot tortilla chips warming in the bodega below makes my nostrils flare. I imagine the salt crystals on their flat surfaces. Craving the warmth and salt, I feel a hunger pang.

"Why not?"

"I've got things to do."

"Like what?"

I gesture at my laptop. "I have to write things. Legitimate things, fresh things, not just this Joyce Carol Oates pastiche."

"Eileen, you ain't telling the truth."

"Not my name," I remind him.

"Eileen, Erin, whatever. This is your day set aside for going for a walk with me and you know it."

I feel threatened. I close the window and go back to my laptop.

II.

I walk into the little Historic Downtown Irvington shop on Washington Street that used to be the ice cream shop that sold bubble tea. I see the new owner has rebranded it as a 1950s-themed nostalgia diner. The bubble tea options and anime keepsakes are gone, but the ice cream counter remains, as do about a dozen shiny, chrome milkshake blenders.

The brightly lit Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner plays “Drugstore Rock'N'Roll” by Janis Martin. The cheerful song paints the perfect picture of midcentury innocence.*

At one high table sits Edgar Allan Poe. His dark brown suit fits him well, although the foot that dangles from the long-legged chair has an untied shoelace. Catching me in his blue-eyed gaze, he says, “This was her favorite place.”

I’m confused. He died in the 1840s, over a century before the trope of the ‘50s malt shop emerged.

“I’m sorry?” I say. “ 'She’ is –?”

“Was,” he corrects me. “She was my Annabel Lee.”

I shake my head as I take the seat across from him. He offers me a sip of his milkshake, turning the straw toward me. I know I shouldn’t, but I indulge myself in a sweet sip of Poe’s chocolate malt.

I then continue, “This couldn’t have been her favorite place; that’s a line from that MC Lars song, 'Annabel Lee R.I.P.’”

He shrugs. Poe looks sad and beautiful but not morose. Despite his Gothic reputation, there’s nothing gloomy or goth about him. He’s every bit the Southern gentleman, gracious and effortlessly charming. I want to touch his dark hair where it starts to curl, just behind his ear.

I excuse myself to use the restroom. In the mirror, my eyes are less green and much more hazel than usual. Am I Christian Bale? No, I’m Augustus Landor. My clothes are careworn and I want to go back to my cottage.

Well, perhaps one more sip of Poe’s chocolate malt first.

*The song is about a drugstore. The former drugstore with the soda fountain, the one robbed by John Dillinger, is up the block a bit and on the other side of the street, across from the present-day library.

III.

John Legend, wearing a fashionable off-white suit, sits at his white piano, playing me a Christmas song in front of a roaring fire. Actually, he’s singing me “The Christmas Song.”

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

“Happy birthday,” I blurt out.

“My birthday isn’t until the 28th. I’m an after-Christmas baby.”

I say, “You’re the Christmas baby; you’re Jesus Christ Superstar.”

He laughs, and I can’t tell whether he’s more surprised or amused.

Presently the fireplace-warmed air grew hotter. This was no winter wonderland. Were we in Jerusalem? Beyond John I spot a man with copious sandy-blond hair wearing black eyeliner and a keffiyeh.

“Judas,” I say upon the appearance of Tim Minchin.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, approaching John, seemingly moving in to kiss him. They lock eyes and I feel I’m witnessing something I’m not meant to see.

“…Superstar,” I mutter to myself as I turn away to give them their privacy. I muse aloud, “I can appreciate casting Alice Cooper as King Herod; I appreciate his showmanship. You know else might have made an interesting casting choice? Murray Head, the original album-Judas Superstar, coming back to play King Herod.”

We stand before his throne now: King Murray Head.

Blame W. Somerset Maugham. He had a birthday (January 25), I remembered that his Oriental Hotel suite is name-checked in “One Night in Bangkok,” and soon I’m detecting something wistful in Murray Head ballads that speaks to me as something other than merely an ‘80s kid.

“Now see what you’ve done?” Jesus Christ Superstar admonishes me. “You chose to lean fully into your 1980s nostalgia and now I’m going to be crucified.”

Is Tim Minchin Judas wearing lip gloss? And is it a bit smudged now?

“I’m not interested in matters of Jewish law tonight,” King Murray Head says in the crispest English accent you’ve heard since Ralph Fiennes. Offering me a doubtful smile, he adds, “My dear, would you care to join me in the Somerset Maugham Suite?”

“I thought you got your kicks above the waistline, sunshine,” the saucy Aussie chimes in.

King Murray Head shrugs. “I’m only human. We can’t all be Jesus Christ Superstar.”

I’m sexualizing that old man. I desire him carnally. But will he love me tomorrow? I'm guessing no, but that's ok. Nothing lasts forever.

IV.

I’m tucked snugly, quite comfortably into my 4-post bed, the curtains drawn around me, blissfully asleep in the warm and the dark. The sound of my name awakens me.

“Who’s there?” I ask. It had better not be Robert Sheehan.

“Charles Dickens,” comes the reply. This is what I get for reading Greg Jenner’s Dead Famous before bed.

But I know that distinctive voice. I part the bed curtains. “Dan Stevens?!” I ask incredulously, laying eyes on the extremely handsome English actor in the early morning light.

“It’s Charles Dickens,” Dan Stevens insists. He’s brought a friend.

“And John Forster,” adds Justin Edwards-in-Victorian-costume.

Accepting that these British thespians are in character as their The Man Who Invented Christmas counterparts, I ask, “Are you the Ghosts of Christmas Past? Am I dreaming?

“Neither,” says John/Justin, pulling a pie sprinkled with sugar seemingly out of nowhere.

That explained nothing. I thought back to Robert Sheehan telling me his creepy Oatesian visit wasn’t a dream. I then grew distracted by the state of my bedroom, suddenly filled with evergreen trees and boughs decorated with silver baubles, iridescent glass bubbles, and magical flickering candles. I smelled cinnamon and cloves; was someone mulling red wine in my bedroom?

It was beginning to look a lot like Victorian Christmas and smell like it too. My chamber suddenly possessed a long dining table on which there lay a roasted turkey, an enormous figgy pudding, and a rapidly-multiplying host of 19th-century holiday delicacies that would have made Ichabod Crane’s head explode.

“And you’re saying you two are not the Ghosts of Christmas Past?” I asked my guests for clarification.

Seating themselves at the table, they denied being ghosts a second time as they helped themselves to a portion of the mouth-watering feast.

“Tuck in,” said Charles/Dan.

I serve myself, but soon notice how the actors favor each other’s company, eat from each other’s plates, and feed one another. They’d constructed an elaborate ritual that allowed them to touch one another without social judgment.

“What is this?” I wonder out loud.

“You could think of it as recursion,” Charles/Dan says. “Each Christmas harks back to every other Christmas. This Christmas reminds you of childhood Christmases, which in turn retains elements of Victorian Christmas past, which in turn bears marks of earlier traditions, and so on.

“One might say,” remarks John/Justin, “that, in a sense, there has only ever been one Christmas and we return to it every year. We practice the myth of eternal return when we practice Christmas.” His thumb traces a line of cream that Charles/ Dan has smeared on his cheek, then eats the errant cream.

“I still don’t understand why I’m here,” I say. “Why was it necessary for me to be the Scrooge in this drama?”

“It isn’t,” Charles/Dan says flatly. “We merely need your bed.”

With that they abandon their feast and retire to my comfy bed, drawing the curtains behind them. I politely ignore their pleasured sighs as I slice into a steaming plum pie, but internally I wish they’d gotten a different room. I knew the Somerset Maugham Suite at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok had recently been vacated.

* * *

Author’s Note: Oliver Sacks wrote that Charles Dickens had a haunted mind, but didn’t explain that statement and then very sadly passed away. I began to understand it when I read about the railway accident he was involved in. I now believe that perhaps Dr. Sacks also meant that Dickens was haunted by his childhood poverty. This is depicted in The Man Who Invented Christmas and discussed in Dead Famous.

But then in this podcast, Helena Kelly spilled the absolute tea on Dickens and found out that he might have been lying about working in a boot blacking factory?! And he probably had syphilis, which he gave to Kate and the children - some of them may have died from it! - and maybe her sister too?! I don’t want to slut shame Charles Dickens, but I do think I understand what Dr. Sacks meant a lot more deeply now.

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But I wouldn’t be sad if the ghost of Dr. Oliver Sacks wanted to visit me and talk about it.