the writing life

life lessons from book 3

Epigrams and aphorisms are making a comeback, going by the success of Fried and Hansson’s Rework, Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes and other smartass non-fiction best sellers.

So I’m pleased to see that my people can keep up.

Here’s a fresh look at the state of things from Sylvie, Book Three in the Tabou quintet, now available for all eReaders.

Annihilate the enemy with acts of kindness only you can afford.

Patience Herrick

Owner, The Philadelphia Flyers

 

 

The only risk they acknowledged was scandal.

John Dobbs

General Counsel, Russet Brewing Company

 

 

Who chooses to spend the rest of her life building a dream with a girl who belongs to another woman?

Patience Herrick

 

 

Weak people will hide ignorance. I am not shocked, of course.

Marie Christine Aurore Faucigny-Lueur

de Scey-Brouillard, Princesse de Fillery

at age 15 in 1959, writing to her long lost sister

 

 

“I will tell you everything.”     “Oh please. Not everything–not yet. I’m still high on the mystery.”

Patience and Aurore

getting to know one another on Antigua

 

Patience steals more than her share of Oscar-worthy scenes in this volume:

 

On setting boundaries:

“Since we are to be cordial neighbors after you get off my property at once.”

 

On whether to book one hotel room or two:

Forget about less is more. More is more.

 

Unmatched in seduction technique!

“I remember you as a drug addict.”   “I remember you as an uptight bitch.”

Patience and Sylvie du Montclair Russet

chatting over a candlelight dinner on Antigua

And history comes alive!

On courting:

She was always off to the wars, “Like you, little one,” leading troops into battle and so forth while Louis dieted. “Now there was a woman with a big dick.”

Sylvie on the Duchess of Montpensier

On cooking:

“People don’t know how to make a real banker’s sauce anymore except in France. It’s impossible in America. I don’t ask my people to do it.”    “Nutmeg?” Patience put out her hand: Sylvie handed it over.     “Thank you,” said Patience.     “The banker’s sauce?”    “Béchamel. Court banker.” There was a long pause, with Patience not following. “I mean to the court of Louis fourteen.”

 

On cognac:

“So Cognac is like the ATM at the Royal Bank of Bastardy.”   Sylvie nodded. “A very stable financial institution. But a very volatile social organization.”

 

On dynastic challenges:

In your case I am not sure how it is regarded in England. The legitimation aspect. Certainly let us hope with respect! He was not the one who got his head cut off.

Aurore at 15, in France

writing to Sylvie, age 11, in the South Pacific

 

On going native:

I have attached a treatise on the South Pacific, with pictures I drew, it details outrigger canoes and the flora and fauna and some things you may not know about in France. I doubt your teachers know anything about our people, my father is making a study because he says the French are ignorant of this great culture. I am worried that perhaps you have never seen people naked? If it is shocking you can just fold over the page. Memorize it though in case they take it away from you in the convent. Everybody goes around like this here, it is breezier in effect, but my mother tells me that this is not the case in France. But I don’t believe it. It is not natural. And France is real civilization, no?… With my most distinguished sentiments, princess,

Sylvie Russet, age 11, on Hiva Oa 

Eavesdrop on Greta Garbo’s lookalike hob-nobbing with Greek tycoons moored off the shore of Martinique.

 

“Ah, the scent of a woman. What can never be duplicated. The perfect fragrance.”

Sylvie Russet, lost twin of Greta Garbo

 

Have an affair with the world’s most talked-about woman? Was she crazy? No. It’s out of the question. Our children are falling in love, and besides, my husband will kill me. That made it even more exciting a thought, somehow, but she had to get Sylvie off the boat in case something else happened.

Appolonia Mavros, aboard her yacht Serena

 

“You were so cold, so offhand!”    “I’m not offhand now.” Apple put her hands on. Oh dear Jesus. She could see her marriage going up in smoke. Her whole life going up in smoke. Ostracized. All for Garbo. “But this room…”

Appolonia and Sylvie admiring a Titian

Visit Curacao and Caracas and learn from tales of treachery, tax avoidance, social gaffes and wardrobe malfunctions:

Think two generations ahead, the way Kate did naturally and had done since Macbeth.

Eric Leyden, insurance executive

summarizing business lessons learned from

Kate McKenna Russet

Scottish-born Virginia matriarch

 

“The boys had their first date, I’m told, in a desert hot spring….Anyway, Talloway’s a Scot and there have been terrible rows over how many skirts to pack. Lesbian couples always dress alike.”

Jocelyn Russet

 

‘Bail money,’ he said without irony. ‘Every good general counsel always has enough on hand.’

Esteben Ovéquiz de Castañeda y Bohorques Inigues

General Counsel, Empresas Glacial

 

Cooper looked Esteban over. He was wearing a fancy Italian suit and handmade Spanish shoes and about $50,000 worth of jewelry. Cooper had seen the wives of dictators flee their homelands with fewer accessories.

Gary Cooper off duty in Caracas, Venezuela 

 

Leyden knew Kate well enough not to be shocked by her violent sex analogies. Plain-spoken, horse breeding woman.

Eric Leyden as a houseguest

of Kate Russet in the 1980s

 

The bitch never sleeps, thought Leyden, and if nobody but me worries about that at night…well, they should.

Eric Leyden, Independent Director

Russet Brewing Company

appointed by Kate Russet

 

Sylvie Russet. Leyden imagined money like water falling in the bright sunshine over the sculpted ice of her face, her body.

Eric Leyden on Curacao, May 1993

 

His pink neck was rolling over his shirt collar. His fake smile barely covered his social aggression.

Rowan Rask, Governor of Florida (R-Fl)

 

A violent society is proof of its own ignorance.

James Russet IV, Chairman

Russet Brewing Company

 

Herrick’s cold rage was an enforceable warrant.

Ambassador Herrick on jealousy

  

Due to the incompetence of those around him, he was only ever thirty seconds away from rolling away to a violent death.

James Russet IV

Ah, Valerie

In New York, the Anglo-Irish Countess of Tiffin and Ross, Valerie Drummond, is back and better than ever, taking center stage with an Oscar-winning back story of her own. 

‘I see by your sheepish grin and your Freudian slip that all’s well that end’s well.’

Valerie keeping the mental gears well oiled

 

‘Learn to accept the power of your attraction for others.’

J.O.P. “Oliver” Russet

lunching with Valerie at the Café Royal, 1934

 

If one could have any girl one wanted at the drop of a hat, would one want one?

Valerie in Socratic dialog with herself

 

MORE FROM THE VALERIE CHRONICLES

On Natalie Barney:

“I do recall asking for half, but all I got was teatime.”

The pioneer strain:

‘All this fuss about the G-spot,’ she’d said to Helen Gurley Brown the other day when they met to walk their dogs, ‘and I’ve known about that for centuries. I mean why doesn’t anybody ask me anything?’

Like mother like daughter:

She liked David, although she preferred Albert of Monaco. A principality whose name she pronounced roughly synonymous with the breath freshener Binaca.

Mercedes Russet, Valerie’s younger daughter

On the charm of Edwardian pleasures:

She hated the drama. She wanted them both to stop it, the girl and the young man. There was no need for all this drama. She would sit them down together and calmly explain what she was made for. She was fashioned for, built for, loving them both. She’d tell them she cared for them equally, tell them she’d treat them equally, draw up a schedule and make copies. It’s really only a question of management, like nearly everything else in life.

On guilt over the suicide of a lover:

For the first time in Valerie’s life, she found that everything was more than she could give.

On adventure travel:

If one wants to explore anything nowadays, Valerie felt she had no choice but to conclude, one should get down into a diving bell or up onto a rocket ship or deep into a viral molecule.

On the droit du seigneur:

Virgins deflowered by their true love are like that. Valerie knew from experience.

On lesbian appeal:

Valerie considered all the women who’d ever run from loving other women, going back 3,000 years. Well, none of them had ever laid eyes on her granddaughter.

 On slipping standards:

“Spent marriages lying about all over the place. How are you going to tidy that up?”

 On gratitude:

“Thank God for that girl at Bletchley Park, even though she sent me straight down the wayward path with her…her…” (Valerie blushed) “…comprehensive tuition.”

 On dowager duties:

She had raised them to lead and be role models, befitting their position in society. Lead what? Model what? Society where? The gay world seemed so fragmented now. There was no more real underground. No elite, no social pecking order. Fewer and fewer exciting secrets. And deep confusion actually, when it came to society. You never knew if you were in it or not, to steal the words of Henry Adams…. So she had gotten what she wanted for her granddaughters, a safer world to live and love in, but Christ, how utterly mind-numbingly boring!

Suggestions for improving psychotherapy:

“Let’s have your muddle first. Then we can have mine.”

On the principal of No Surprises:

“Jocelyn, dear, brace yourself.” Yet Valerie made no pause. “I need to tell you that you’re to be cruelly disinherited by me.” 

On prospects for the entrepreneurial generation:

Mastery of the physical world “merely” seemed central to their spiritual quest. They always wanted to be worthy of enjoying their luxuries. They were Epicures. 

On looking at art:

It wasn’t androgynous in the sense of stripping away one’s identification with sex, but rather ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine at once, in the sense of adding to it.

Valerie watching her granddaughter

Jocelyn enter a room at 960 Fifth Avenue

Not to put down those every-day, tossed-off aperçus of family life:

On family planning:

These days it’s the mere announcement that two people are preparing to breed that’s the real excitement. The actual pregnancy’s such a letdown.

Tristan Canoncourt, Fourth Lord Crome

On daily chores:

“I never get bored of it. Watching their ass lifting a load.”

Jocelyn Russet, amateur alpinist

What becomes a legend most

Her exploits had invented the term starfucker.

Jocelyn giving credit where credit is due–

to her grandmother

On masculine appeal

He hasn’t a microfiber of investment banking in his body. Couldn’t manipulate a number if it was attached to his scrotum.

Astrid Kay

President, Art Students League of New York

On troublemakers:

One impossibly attractive and too-capable lesbian in my life was trouble enough. Two of them together is a menace.

Constance Canoncourt, Lady Crome

 

Economizing

Nobody has half a million to spare.

Phoebe, Comtesse du Montclair

 

Scrabble

An owner is the person with the most responsibility.

Phoebe du Montclair 

Comme il faut

Never take a man’s car to St. Cloud.

Phoebe du Montclair

 

Every beneficiary is a minor for life.

Jocelyn Russet

 

“Not so fast, Narcissa dear. What about her own legacy? The one you share?”    “The one we what?”    “The one you share. Share, share, as in commingled assets.”

Jocelyn and Valerie

fighting over a pot au crème

 

All mixed in, of course, with pearls like these:

I hope you lead yourself to find yourself, Madame.

Natalie Barney’s male ghost

encountered on the rue Vignon

 

This river go to Mombassa. No! Shit! That was La Brea.

Darius Jones, UCLA film student

 

“He can’t go back to Italy. I’ve already ravaged the entire country as you know.”

Valerie mulling over

her estate planning problems

 

One man’s son, and no man’s progeny.

Ambassador Herrick as a young man

in 1939 with money problems of his own

 

Never cross a Herrick. You could feel the murderous impulse throbbing across the table.

Sylvie Russet having drinks at the Ritz

 

A late entry I’m afraid. A very late entry. Oh I’d love you to read it, but in Denmark, you see, we don’t actually write the paper until it has been presented to society.

Alexander “Zander” Duffield

Hollywood screenwriter, Zen master,

rock climber and secret agent

 

We must deconstruct denial itself! How much of it is implicitly acceptance?

Zander gaining entry to an academic conference

under false credentials

 You’ll meet numbers guys

Laughing like money going downtown.

Julien Russet, terror attack survivor

 

“Basically I do math, sir, not clandestine operations that severely deplete my mental resources.”

Kit Hemion, math genius, arborist, surfer

 

 

Patience is never happy with two-fifty, thought Joss, unless it’s followed by six zeros.

 Jocelyn on Patience

And literary posers

“I’m exploring the human heart. Taking all the borders off the maps.”

Jocelyn Russet

On insufferable dead poets:

Don’t take the fragment thing so seriously!

Jocelyn Russet, Hollywood screenwriter

 

Indulge your inner Peeping Tom!

“Oh please! Don’t believe everything I say in our pillow talk, for heaven’s sake.”

Jocelyn Russet

She can’t find the place on the map where she used to be comfortably wasted.

Jocelyn on Patience

And your hopelessly romantic side

Trying to forget her…that would be like trying to get the ocean out of her inner ear.

Sylvie on Jocelyn

“All people really want, Louise, is a bit of a dream.”

Witherspoon to his secretary

in HIRE WITHERSPOON!

screenplay by Jocelyn Russet and Alexander Duffield

“Please, be at leisure! At leisure! I can’t think in this atmosphere!”

Witherspoon to his staff

on taking over the family business

so his identical twin can elope with a courtesan

 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. So that’s Sylvie in a nutshell. It’s a bit like a multinational DOWNTON ABBEY. Only sexier. How deep the wisdom? I’ll leave that up to you.