Dissonance is created by facts that make each other impossible. They simply can’t both be true. Most people are made so uncomfortable by dissonance they pretend it doesn’t exist. But dissonance is the line that artists – and warriors – learn to walk. When I was little my first dissonant discovery was that highly desired things seemed to melt in my arms – I wanted getting them, but I didn’t want having them. The next dissonance was people saying they loved you but fleeing. I decided this dissonance was connected to the first; people like the idea of something much more than they like its reality. This was my first introduction to the importance of ideas. My warrior self began to emerge when I observed that people made elaborate rationales to retroactively justify their behavior and they wanted me to sign on to these. I thought it was easier to just admit that emotional states are fleeting – the pursuit of knowledge shows us that knowledge itself is amorphous, but discovered that my ideas were unpopular to say the least. In the meantime I wanted to strengthen my shell and explore ecstatic states. Looking at the past and trying to figure out what actually happened – turns out to be the most ecstatic state of all.
Is there justice…or not? The Shadow says there isn’t. The Shadow passes over us, enervatingly, sapping our vitals, suggesting, “What’s the use?” If Jesus is right and “By their fruits you shall judge them” then the Shadow’s apparent desire is that we lose hope and focus and accomplish nothing.
This is such a devastatingly undesirable outcome it is obvious that the Shadow is to be resisted with all our strength. Warriors reject The Shadow.
But Jesus also says, “Resist not evil” because evil wants you to play with it. How resist non-forcefully?
I would say through the exercise of our creative – i.e. positive – gifts. This is why I study evil, tease it, laugh at it, explicate it.
Artists spend a lot of time trying to find and develop their unique voice. Purveyors of art want you to copy first – so they can compare it to something they already sell – and put a unique – but not TOO unique – touch on it later.
These contrasting mandates send the artist down a lot of rabbit holes with no rabbits at the end.
Before I discovered True Crime my own work annoyed me with its amorphousness. I could not figure out where my sense of doom was coming from. Everyone around me just assumed I was being fashionably angsty. You know! Modern megrims!
But then I attended the Beth Carpenter trial for capital murder in New London, CT in 2002. The guilty were paraded before us – the hitman, the girlfriend, the coked-up lawyer, the hitman’s son. Frozen in the press gallery (my husband was covering it) our eyes boggled. American law gave the story shape – defense attorneys battled right in front of us with the prosecution bar. The jury, invisible on TV, sat before us dressed as if attending sporting event. Which this was – the outcome in question right up to the end.
This was thrilling modern theatre – the view (the harbor was visible from the courthouse), the company (Press World), even the food was good – we tried a different restaurant every day (once the jury treated us to an Italian meal.)
I became an addict of Court TV, segueing to the ID channel (where I appeared on Blood Relatives in 2014.) I began reading the true crime greats of which, it turns out, there are many. A novel I had been struggling with – Model Prisoner (which could have described me) was freed into becoming Woman Into Wolf. I based Find Courtney on 2 famous cases.
When looking for approval, you first notice that the “approvers” aren’t in agreement, keep contradicting themselves and shifting their own goalposts.
This is enough to make a warrior out of anybody.
How to choose your standards? How to design our path and feel confident about it?
As a child, I was a sunflower, looking for nourishment I could turn my face towards. People who dampened and depressed, who structured and suffocated, were to be avoided.
My parents claimed to be interested in physical health (and I wasn’t even completely convinced of that) but mum on the subject of mental health, which seemed to be the purview of adults who’d mastered the wherewithal to “step out of the rat race.”
As an elementary school student, I was certainly in a rat race. And it looked like a long haul. When we moved to Morocco and I was sent to a school where I didn’t speak the language, life got downright dangerous.
Luckily there were books. Agatha Christie in specific, who turned out to be the favored reading of travelers passing through Dar El Baraka, where we had been installed.
Agatha Christie is excellent training in the Art of Being a Warrior. Life in her books is dangerous, but since everyone is lying and pretending to be someone they’re not (“Society”) it’s difficult to tell where the threat is coming from. The Detective uses Clues and a knowledge of Human Nature to figure out The Truth.
This is riveting stuff for an eleven year old. These skills of judgment, analysis, research and truth-telling are essential for the Warrior.
I’m convinced the main attraction of the evangelical religious movement is that it offers the opportunity to be “born again.” But I believe that option is always available to you without the necessity of signing up to be a cog in a “movement.”
When I was twelve years old I read a James Bond novel in which he is washed up on a beach and needs to be nursed back into life without any of the previous appurtenances of his personality. I was very taken with this idea. Of course, it has literary antecedents in all the “castaway” and adventure stories of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. The question revolves around your essential self: do you have one? Or can even that be remodeled and rebuilt? This is the question warriors try to answer.
Warriors pare their needs down. We keep ourselves ready for action. We are shapeshifters and time travelers – if that sounds attractive to you, keep listening.
The first rebirth was rather brutal. At age 12, I was sent to live with my father’s sister and uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts. Since these people didn’t believe anything my father believed I found this cross-training startling, and the more I behaved in my father’s image, the more I was punished. My uncle was enormously excited to have a pubescent girl in the household, snuck into my bathroom, groped and French-kissed me. I did my best to fend him off, while crushing on one of my cousins. In intervals, we exhibited social politeness. (I attended dancing class where white gloves were mandated for touching specimens of the opposite sex.) I also was taught to ski. Sort of. This hot-house atmosphere lasted only nine months.
My parents simply refused to listen to, believe in, or pay attention to any of this. I realized I needed to become a different person –the person I truly was, underneath, the person without all this reflexive training and behavior. And the question was, who was that?
The desire to participate in the world of art hit me early. As a young teen, I was fascinated by the internecine struggles of the Trojan War and the Wars of the Roses. History was a family story, history was a crime story. Books for children – the Narnia stories, for example, couldn’t match the explosive, desperate sweep of historical intrigue. I had a facility with English that allowed me to “opt out” of language drills – I read the encyclopedia instead, which was full of improbable information. I loved reading to the class, and the class loved to have me read to them.
When I entered boarding school at age 14 I really began to write in earnest. But the faculty did not like what I wrote. Moby Dick and the writings of John Steinbeck were seriously offered to me as models. This was the first moment I chose the Warrior Path. I complained that we were not reading any female authors and in fact, made a resolve never to read male authors again (I broke it for the Russians, who were feminine enough for me – especially Turgenev.) I liked Colette, so I read Francoise Sagan. I modeled myself on them – they were literally anathema at my school to such an extent that I decided not to go to college and pursued acting school instead.
That was a dumb decision literally no one helped me with but by that time I had discarded The Appropriate Path to such an extent I don’t know if anyone could have reasoned me out of it since Adult World seemed so desperately stupid to me. What I chose – I thought – was the world of inspiration where magic could be created, second by second.
When I was 11 I saw a 3,000 year old Greek play in a Greek stone theatre and was very taken by all its mechanisms of chorus and emotion. When we went back to the boat I sat down and wrote my own play, Chrysothemis, about Electra’s other sister. I couldn’t help it, I had to reflect that emotion back. It was a hot day and everyone else went swimming, but a Warrior would have finished that play. I finished the play.
Stoker’s screenplay started out as fan-fiction to Alfred Hitchcock’s much more enjoyable Shadow of a Doubt, which has a moral center, plus victims we care about and characters we can root for.
Stoker has a good, even beautiful movie buried in it but park Chan-Wook kept messing it up, very deliberately, probably under the pressure (and pleasure) of his personal fetishes. It starts WONDERFULLY – psychologically interesting, visually compelling, achieving an apotheosis of eidetic perfection hen a shot of hair dissolves into quivering grasses but jumps the shark on story sanity. Anyone who want to write about crime (and criminal psychology) need to STUDY it carefully or they risk sounding like nine year old girls guessing about sex – majorly clueless and missing all the real points – ultimately creating an uninteresting world too obviously made up.
Subjects like mental illness, spies, the foreign service, rituals of different countries, etc., can’t be persuasively invented, and threadbare simulacrums relentlessly reveal unpleasant truths about immature people who just don’t want their fantasies interrupted.
I used to write fantasies, too, until I began an in-depth study of crime. It changed what I wrote, how I think about the world, even how I live my life. Devlyn is a fantasy – but Find Courtney can actually happen. (Versions of it already have.) This is the reason I usually don’t like sci fi. It is possible to completely make up a world – for example Alice in Wonderland – but if it doesn’t satirize the rules of the real one it collapses like a bad soufflé. Michelangelo felt he couldn’t create a credible physicality of angels without studying dead bodies in morgues.
I understand that in Stoker our “Oldboy” doesn’t want to be “bothered” by all that stuff – he’s an “artist” who wants to create visual poetry so hypnotic it gets away with breaking the rules and it almost works! But by the end of the film real life insistently intrudes with its message that the “impossible” is ultimately boring.
The acting in Stoker is very good – especially Matthew Goode who seemed creepily young and was almost perfect – he would have BEEN perfect if the director had allowed him to be a little less vampiric and a little less “ka-razy” and a little more human. That would have made him more appealingly believable. But of course everyone has to submit to becoming an “archetype” to satisfy this director. India Stoker’s amoral, murderous sexuality has been a fetish for middle-aged men seeking to relieve their guilt (and excuse their behavior) for literally HUNDREDS of years. “Some girls” don’t have “proper feelings” so can be ruthlessly used and heartlessly exterminated.
Poor Mia Wasikowska! I have admired her ever since In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne – she deserves better. That said, I have to admit a personal failing – Nicole Kidman’s frozen weirdness always gets my back up. I have been rolling my eyes over her rigidity since Cold Mountain.
Mostly I feel sorry for actors who are talked into limiting the range of their gifts by these visual directors who set out to make a cohesive, visually stunning objet d’art, not a complex story about humans. As proud professionals they know how to give the director what he wants, thereby betraying their actual abilities which could create something much more intriguing, provocative and mentally long-lasting.
I watch a fair amount of crime and it’s always entertaining for me to speculate about how people could have gotten away with it. In this case, easily with a modicum of adulthood & sanity which seemingly bores our first-time scriptwriter (Wentworth Miller) who needs to be more “in your face”. Too bad. But I did enjoy seeing it because I relish being given a puzzle mistakenly assembled – in my view. Then I have the mental fun of putting it together more effectively myself – an amusing occupation for a winter afternoon Ah.
Candi admitted everything. According to the newspapers, who disclosed much more than the police, “Scorned Girlfriend Plots to Confront Wife.” Candi admitted only that her plan was to “get the truth out of Scarlet,” but Miss Bottomley started screaming when Candi entered the house – “I couldn’t shut her up and I just panicked.”
Mrs. Pourfoyle was indicted for “Malice Murder” – a capital offense. The murder weapon – brought by Candi all the way up from Wyvern House – was a table leg she wielded as a club.
Candi’s husband David announced he was standing by her. “Husband Claims Home-wrecking Cad Manipulated Lovelorn Girl.”
Was Ian the one who really wanted Scarlet dead? That was David’s argument! Would Ian be indicted? And how long would the generous, the fantastical, the life-altering disposition of Miss Bottomley’s estate remain private knowledge?
For these reasons and many more it was no surprise to receive a call from Scarlet’s solicitor, Pelham D’Arcy.
“Ian agrees to sign the divorce agreement we propose, without changes.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Scarlet sighed.
“He’s worried about being indicted for “transferred malice murder.”
“You mean they think he suggested killing me to Candi? I’ll never believe that.”
“The press is painting him as a lady-killer. He’s concerned about losing his job. A quick divorce removes his motive and makes him an eligible bachelor.”
Eligible Ian. Didn’t women flock to “lady-killers”, no matter what devastating facts they knew? Perhaps, thought Scarlet with her newly-acquired cynicism, they flocked BECAUSE of the “devastating facts.” Doesn’t every woman long to reform a roué? Horribly, I did, thought Scarlet. I fell for that. But she was a different person now. Still, the world thronged with eager victims. Ian wouldn’t be alone for long.
“When’s he going to sign?”
“It’s contingent on meeting you alone. I told them it would have to be at our offices.”
“All right. Let’s get it over with.”
“I suggest you wear your police whistle.”
Could Pelham be serious? Surely Ian wouldn’t try anything violent – but she knew he would expect to physically touch her and she shrank from the thought. She knew him that well.
“Is that a serious suggestion?”
“I’m very serious. If you don’t bring it, we’ll have to bell you like a cat.”
“I’m sure Enid will let me borrow it. If he signs, then where are we?”
“Then we get a decree nisi, which is provisional for one year. They usually rush these things through to get it out of the papers but it depends on the judge. Every now and then you get a Huey.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Bob’s and my shorthand for an impossible judge. I must say the publicity makes this very unlikely.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s an open secret that everyone hates our divorce laws. Literally everyone. They’re just on the verge of either breakdown or reform.”
Scarlet shuddered. So many things you didn’t think of when you stood before the altar, wide-eyed and innocent!
“I’ll bring the whistle,” she promised.
She took care to wear it well-concealed. No point red-ragging Ian. She had never figured out his level of self-control. Was everything he did well-planned, or was he ruled by a raging id? Well, thought Scarlet, I don’t care. I don’t have to care. She imagined a future of trying to explain to Nick why Daddy did the things he did. Why he wasn’t like Pom. Adorable, sensitive, reliable Pom, who talked things out, who listened, who cared. Who changed, day by day, evolving to love better. To live better.
Ian looked different. Older, battered, his eyes bloodshot. Scarlet thought she smelled whisky underneath the cigarettes. Was he drinking every morning now, or was it just because he was seeing her? His suit hung on him in a peculiar manner, as if he had given up on any real nourishment. He and his solicitor, Mr. Jellicoe, whose suit also was ill-fitting, could have been a vaudeville act – one so fat and the other starving-lean. Then again, perhaps Ian just wanted Scarlet to feel sorry for him.
Mr. Jellicoe seemed very obliging and impressed by his surroundings. He shook damp hands all around.
Ian looked at Scarlet with deep hunger. I’m the one who “got away”, she thought. The only one. She was glad of the whistle.
They were guided to the Partners’ Room. At ten in the morning, no sherry was on offer. Ian refused everything, even water. Scarlet accepted a cup of tea to have something to do with her hands, until she noticed they were trembling. Then she set her teacup down hastily.
Pelham made a point of seating them at opposite ends of the table. He closed the door softly. Ian began. “Scarlet, I want to let you know how sorry I am.”
He waited for a moment as if to allow her to speak. But what could she say? She had already decided there was no point in being accusatory. When he was her ex-husband and the “occasional” father of her child perhaps they could concoct a relationship. At the moment, the situation was hopelessly fraught.
He spoke again as if covering her silence. “I never guessed…what she’d do. I didn’t listen to her natterings.”
There went her resolve about accusations. She was just too angry. The words boiled out of her. “You treated her like a joke, but the joke is on every one of us. Poor Candi wanted to be treated like a wife without realizing how cruel you are when you’re sure of someone. You ignore them, you devalue them. You fobbed her off with lies while you went your smug and merry way. I think you secretly enjoyed making her crazy. I think you wanted to see just how crazy she would get. Makes it easier to get rid of them, doesn’t it?”
She half-expected him to fire up or at least smile that he’d gotten her goat but he hung his head like a shamed schoolboy. Scarlet struggled to contain herself. After a moment, he spoke.
“Don’t compare yourself with her. You’re nothing like.”
She could see the oil bubbling beneath his surface. Planning, planning, all along. He schemed to flatter her, fawn on her, throw himself on her mercy. He was testing, testing, for any way in. She should never have bothered giving him her honesty. It was all a game with Ian, and any game with Ian was just too dangerous. She summed up as best she could, “No one likes being lied to. A word of advice: it torpedoes relationships.”
He rose.
“You’re right, I’m wrong. I managed everything badly. I want to turn over a new leaf.”
She rose as well, feeling a bit panicky. Was he planning to chase her around the table?
“There’s Nick,” she said finally.
“Of course, there’s Nick. But we won’t be together – with him – all the time.”
Creepy! We’ll never be together with him at all. If I can help it. She summoned up her strength. “I don’t see that. I’m afraid we have little in common.”
“How can that be? Don’t you remember the two young Oxford students working on St. Euphrosyne, with all our hopes and dreams and ambitions?”
“I do,” she said. “I thought you didn’t.”
He seemed calculating as to whether he could to rush her. He leaned forward, light on his feet.
She pulled out the police whistle.
At the sight of it he sat down heavily and put his head on the table.
“Oh, Scarlet, Scarlet.” He began to weep.
She felt stunned. She had never seen him cry. She was surprised it was even possible. Could he be faking this? Then she suddenly realized with a flash of insight that, from her point of view, the problem wasn’t that his emotions were false, but that they were ephemeral.
“I’m sorry, too.” She advanced toward the door. “Haven’t we said everything?”
He looked up, tear-streaked. “Do you hate me?”
She was startled. She had hated him. That feeling was ephemeral. “No.”
“Will you tell Nick to hate me?”
Now she felt irked. “Of course not.”
He gazed at her slyly.
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll look on me as the fun dad, the devil-may-care seducer who knows how to get whatever he wants?”
He’d been arguing inside his own head, cruelly mimicking her voice.
“I’ll take my chances.” Nick would know Pom. He could choose; trustworthy love or untrustworthy disappointment. Choice – once well-informed – is up to each of us.
“I’m forgiven?”
This was strange. Odd word from a self-confessed unbeliever. The trial hadn’t even been held. Was he planning to call her as a character witness?
“Not yet,” she said briskly. “You haven’t signed this document.”
She put a hand on the doorknob. “Aren’t we done here?”
He seemed almost confused, as if she’d spoke an unknown language. He rose awkwardly, holding out his hand. He had the sense to say nothing.
She took his hand slowly and he immediately grasped it with his other one, as if he wanted her to feel his strength.
She realized she just didn’t like the man.
She turned away. She wrenched her hand back and, very unwillingly, he let it go and picked up the pen.
Dawn was just breaking as Scarlet came home. She took a long, hot bath and dressed, but the warmest sweaters and tights could not block the chill that had settled in her bones. The kitchen had become a crime scene. Enid switched her sphere of operations to the tiny kitchen off the ballroom. She could toast bread. Milk could be placed against the cold windowsill to keep it fresh.
Scarlet crawled into bed with Nick. He still was healthy, wide-eyed, fresh, new and needy. He had no idea how horrible the world really was.
“She’s gone,” Scarlet told Enid. “The brain injury was just too awful.”
“What made you wake?”
“I’m not sure. I had a dreadful dream. Something about Miss Bottomley lost on a raft. I must have heard a sound from downstairs.”
“Miss Bottomley screamed. I heard it too. That dreadful woman must have attacked her to stop her noise.”
Candi had lots of reasons for attacking people. All given to her – thought Scarlet grimly, by my dear husband.
The policeman climbed up the stairs to see the women. He didn’t look like a detective but more like a department store floorwalker with his shiny bald head and a sharp-cut suit.
“Scotland Yard,” he introduced himself. “Inspector MacBlythe. May I get the details of your story?”
“We’ll meet you in the sitting room,” sighed Scarlet. She climbed reluctantly out of bed and walked to the chintz settee she had so admired just a few brief weeks ago. She had thought she knew trouble and sorrow then, but in reality she had been only too naïve in the ways of misery. Fatally so. How could she could have ever guessed what depths of viciousness simple selfishness and greed could release!
The Inspector was not as surprised by the existence of a night guard as the bobby had been. “This place is a treasure house,” he said. “It’s at least a two-man job.”
“I wish we’d thought of it,” Scarlet wept. “The security man seemed so confident.”
Enid freshened the tea.
“What connection are you to Mrs. Pourfoyle?” MacBlythe was coming to the meat of the matter. “When I found out she and my husband were having an affair I told him I wanted a divorce. She quit her job and moved into our country house – at least that’s what my solicitor tells me. But last week she came up to London and threatened me as if I was the one blocking the divorce. But Ian’s been the blocker. It seems he’s got other girlfriends, one actually living with him in his flat. Again, according to my solicitor.”
MacBlythe took down all Pelham D’Arcy’s and Ian’s information, and moved over to Enid. Nick began to cry and Scarlet gladly sprang to her feet to remove him from the room.
Pelham called when the police had finished with him and requested an interview – “you and Enid both.”
“Oh, good,” said Enid. “I don’t want to be alone. Let’s have dinner out, afterwards.”
“I’m too tired for anything but fish and chips,” said Scarlet, who really didn’t want to see people.
“That’s fine with me.” Dear Enid, obliging as always.
Bob Thomas and Pelham met them in the Partners’ Room, which had a long table, imposing portraits and deep comfortable wingback chairs. Nick slept angelically in his carrycot. Scarlet imagined someday trying to explain all this to him.
“Well, this is a terrible thing,” said Bob Thomas, pouring tea all around. From an antique silver set, Scarlet noticed. She and Enid refused sherry. “Is the woman mad?”
“Temporarily maddened,” contributed Pelham, who was more accustomed to the vagaries of divorce.
“Well, she’s committed murder, is what she’s done,” said Bob Thomas.
They all agreed it was an unconscionable thing as they sipped their tea. There was a knock on the door and Pom thrust his head inside.
“Pom, I’m in a meeting!” gasped Scarlet.
“I asked Mr. Bronfen to join us,” said Bob Thomas. “Tea? Sherry?”
Pom accepted a small sherry. He sat next to Scarlet and held her hand tightly, under the table. “All three of you – Mr. Bronfen, Mrs. Rumson and Mrs. Wye – are beneficiaries under Miss Bottomley’s will.”
Light burst onto Scarlet when she realized, he is talking about me! She had forgotten she was Mrs. Wye. Suddenly she was on a par with Lady Lechmere in her attorney’s eyes. She had been upgraded.
“Oh, my goodness,” she gasped. “But won’t they contest it?”
“Who?” inquired Bob Thomas calmly. “There are no interested parties. She was literally the last of her line. The property would have reverted to the Crown.”
“Mr. Inkum-“
“Mr. Inkum would not dare. The papers he attempted to get Miss Bottomley to sign were so outrageously self-interested he would be drummed out of the profession if anyone complained.”
Reality began to sink in. She sadly recalled Miss Bottomley’s delighted exclamation, “Do you know, I am a very rich woman?”
Pom and Enid and Scarlet gazed at each other, dazzled.
Bob Thomas cleared his throat. “There are six trusts concerning real estate, art, publishing and commercial properties. Mrs. Wye is the discretionary trustee and I am the advisor.”
And he proceeded to explain.
Scarlet was openly clutching Pom’s hand as they staggered out of the lawyers’ office. “I’m gobsmacked,” said Enid. “What a lovely human being she was.”
“And how we’re going to miss her,” gasped Scarlet.
Pom guided them into a nearby bistro – “do you like pizza? You must try it,” and ordered a bottle of chianti.
“To Miss Bottomley’s foresight and generosity,” toasted Pom.
Nick’s eyes were big as he looked from each to each in the candle flame.
“But we couldn’t protect her!’ sighed Scarlet. “It’s because of me she’s dead, don’t you see?”
“How could you ever have guessed that Candi would do such a thing?”
“I couldn’t!”
“Any thug could have broken in and attacked poor Miss Bottomley at any time. She could have been assaulted on the street! She was all alone before we came.”
“But the time was so short. Too short.”
“Time is always too short,” said Pom and he squeezed Scarlet’s hand meaningfully.
Alysse Aallyn 