Sherry Chandler

In Diane Demorney’s arctic living room, Melrose sat sunk in a shapeless white leather chair that reminded him of an ice floe. He did not like this chair and never had, but it was either this or the settee (Diane herself commanding suzerainty over the long sofa), and if he sat on the settee, he’d have to share it with the cat. Melrose despised Diane’s cat; the feeling (he knew) was mutual. It had squinty golden eyes buried in a mess of soft white fur and an enormous showy tail that it liked to flick in a warning gesture whenever Melrose looked its way.

…He looked around at the room, done so relentlessly in white—carpets, furnishing, slipcovers—that Admiral Byrd would have felt at home. Even the paintings were mysteriously white on white, form sinking into background, redundant against the white walls. Sunlight, in this room, did not bisect carpets in golden rhomboids, or stripe sideboards and walls with delicate lemony fingers. Rather, it flashed and knifed, sparred with mirrors, cut across paintings, looking for a duel. …Diane…stirred the martini jug with a long glass icicle-wand which was full of oil in which hundreds of tiny silver stars were suspended. A sudden flash of sun lit the glass stirrer and moved off in its laser search. Melrose only hoped it would rest its pinpoint beam on the cat. Zap.

…

The house on Ryland Street, only a short distance from the pub, had been their destination. …At the door they were met by a chewed-up black tomcat that looked as if it had just escaped from Borstal. Melrose at first mistook it for a piece of misplaced garden statuary, as it sat there looking scraped, chpped, and dusty.

The cat decided to bristle at the sight of the intruders, the hair along its back standing up like a Mohawk on a Piccadilly Circus punk. Actually (thought Melrose, tilting his head) the resemblance was remarkable.

“You wanna see the warrant? There.” Lasko unrolled the search warrant and held it out to the cat.

“Thank God you were first one in,” said Melrose.

The cat became very starchy, got up and turned its back and swayed out of the hallway.

—Martha Grimes, Rainbow’s End (Knopf, 1995)

Watch on YouTube.

H/T Gin.

I fell to musing while cooking my oatmeal on this dark post-Thanksgiving morning with a dusting of snow on the old Camry —no doubt a dangerous time to muse — about Cheney and Rumsfeld and how they’ve been making mischief in the United States, off and on, for all of my adult lifetime. They have been like avatars of a mischief-making god, personification of the dark forces in our national psyche that can be temporarily vanquished but never destroyed.

My first thought was Coyote, but while Coyote is a trickster and sometimes evil, he is also a creator and a culture hero. One might say he’s emblematic of the Native American’s more forgiving attitude toward ambiguity. I’ve always liked Coyote and feel it’s an insult to compare these men with him. And anyway, Coyote’s tricks often backfire on him. (Hmmmm….)

Loki may be more appropriate: shape-shifter, coward, con-man, and father of monsters.

Or, to come closer to home, Satan, the dark side of the West’s neurotic singularity of a god. Reduced to a fallen angel, or worse, to a pointy-tailed caricature suitable only for potted meat cans, loser in Milton’s culture wars (or was he?), he still cannot be destroyed. Although Jehovah and Satan have become a skewed yin and yang, you can’t have one without the other.

So perhaps in some ways the dark and brooding face of Nixon is a more accurate picture of our national soul than is the bright and shining Kennedy. Perhaps in our huge democracy that is always on the verge of falling into chaos, we in some way need these mischief makers. Maybe they are, in some way, corrective as well as destructive. Or maybe they’re just part of the human condition, that for every Mother Teresa produces also a Jeffrey Dahmer.

Or perhaps we all just think we’re John Wayne when we are in fact Dan Duryea. Or to make that metaphor more feminine, Catherine Hepburn when we’re only Ava Gardner.

Possibly the problem is in our Manichean view of life. Perhaps the more we try to suppress the dark side (sorry), the more destructive it becomes.

Read Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist.