Ode on a Vanity Table

why live in the present when you can live elsewhere?

Bette Davis in All About Eve, 1950

I love a vanity table. I’m not vain. At least, I like to think I’m not vain. 

Perhaps I am, a little.

My vanity is oak, has a marble top. It’s heavy, meant to be a bar, but I’ve modified, as one does. 

I bought it off a friend who was moving. When we talked on the phone about the sale, she told me a story of her annual tradition of trapezing. She stands on the platform, bar in hand, and pauses to close her eyes and say goodbye to something from that year. Then she jumps. I like thinking about her in that moment of anticipation, thinking backwards, and knowing a second in her future, her stomach will be in her throat.

I’ve never been good at applying makeup, but I do like to sit and stare into middle distances. When I sit down to my vanity table, it’s a moment of stillness, anticipation, a reach without exertion.

Most of the stuff on my vanity table I don’t use: trinkets, creams, makeup that’s been hardening for years. Children enter occasionally, stage left, Anne Baxters to my Bette Davis. I take a long pull on my metaphorical cigarette, and slide them some blush or some lipstick. I will not be interrupted. 

I’ve mastered ignoring in these ten sitting minutes, much to my husband’s frustration. His idles are in the bathroom, door closed. Mine are in the wide open, but I make myself immutable. The maple outside the window, the jackdaw on a branch, I on my stool. In his “Ode on Indolence”, Keats is interrupted by Love, Ambition, Poesy. Not I. 

In the second to last year of his short life, Keats wrote six odes, seeking to create a lyrical form more pleasing, less elegiac than the sonnet. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats grapples with the art that outlives us. Art like an urn that will know future people, people we have no idea will exist, people who have no idea we existed. Speaking directly to the urn, he says: “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours”. The urn is like a time-traveling therapist.

When Keats looks at the figures on the urn, he sees them frozen in time, forever reaching. Indeed 200 years later, one of the few things doomsday prophet Nick Bostrom and nano-manager Elon Musk can agree on regarding AI: we, as a species, are always reaching, always seeking.  

But alas, we are meat. With as much an expiration date as the milk in our fridge, our reach extends only so far. We are survived, Keats reminds us, by our urns and our machines. 

Joseph Severn’s John Keats (also staring into the middle distance) at the National Portrait Gallery, London

The drawer of my vanity table is becoming my personal junk drawer. Quickly itemized:

1. a brochure from a trip to the Russian baths; 

2. notes on an exhibit of sculptor Mária Bartuszová; 

3. roller sticks of essential oils my friend made at the end of a dead fish marriage, gifting me clean scents, even as the stink of discontent suffused her house; 

4. polaroids and poems by my sons; 

5. handwritten notes from students; 

6. melatonin and plyers; 

7. and oh! the pair of AirPods my husband’s been looking for these last three months! 

When I die, I hope my children spend time in the drawer of my vanity table. Which I suppose is a form of vanity. 

In a house where everything must be dual-purpose, my vanity table is an indulgence. These are all things I could do in a bathroom or on a dresser. But I have wedged this vanity into the ideal real estate of a small bay window.

I have gotten increasingly absurd: covering a stool with Bavarian sheep’s wool, adding a gold and blue life-sized wooden heron, a small marble plant stand. You must understand— there is no space. But I make space. For the vanity. 

I can feel the eccentricity leaking in, veering ever closer to Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight in all her sequins and silk. Even in the scene that we now must agree is domestic abuse, there’s the comedy of unintended feathers floating across Wallace Beery’s livid face, drifting from Harlow’s ostrich feather sleeves, like so many fantasies.

Jean Harlowe in Dinner at Eight, 1933

I have a recurring dream about a hidden room discovered. It’s often lavish, often a master bedroom. Often it opens out to a garden. Often there is a water feature. Dream Me turns to Dream Husband and says, “we should be using this space!” Instead of our cramped IRL bedroom. It is always a disappointment, waking from these dreams. Realizing I am still in this cramped house. 

When Keats looks still closer at the images on his urn, a “Bold Lover” chasing a fair maiden (I might call his boldness something else), what the poet appreciates is the anticipation of the consummation:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

[…] More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

             For ever panting, and for ever young;

Always to be young! Always to desire! 

I was young and filled with desire once, working in a Borders bookshop at Tysons Corner, trading increasingly steamy notes with my manager, when I first really understood anticipation. 

Imagine ee cummings’ “i like my body when it is with your body” on a scrap of torn paper held hotly in my palm as I made a caramel macchiato or reshelved the Self-Help section. 

We were reading War and Peace together, discussing Hegel, and I was looking for letters to show me how to sound smarter — I think he was doing the same. Like parrots with a penchant for song. I came across Flaubert’s letters with George Sand, and then from there, his Sentimental Education. After a failed, much-anticipated trip to lose his virginity in a brothel, our protagonist Frédéric Moreau realizes:

 “Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

The entire relationship with my manager was anticipatory, sex by handwriting. 

Imagination is richer than the act itself. Without intending to, I’ve pinned my life to this belief. It’s one that made sense to how my excitement operates. One that made sense during Covid, when it was less the act of vacationing and more the planning for vacation that people craved. Looking back, it was the best part of my college nights: getting ready with housemates. Imagining what might come, who we might meet. The parties were always a letdown. 

Anticipation is the thought of action and so it is also the absence of action. Vanity comes from the Latin vanus which means empty, idle (the implication of narcissism didn’t emerge until the 1300s). 

To steal a little from Keats: Anticipation is vanity, vanity anticipation. I look to the windows, to my vanity that extends itself against all practicality, and when I sit down to it, the room behind me might as well be the room of my dreams. I am Bette Davis, lavishly decrying my languishing youth. I am Madame de Pompadour. I am ancient. I am timeless. The anticipation of a new day before me.