Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles
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This week, the Magpie’s eye was caught by the shining white of the pantsuit Hillary Clinton wore to the third debate. The Magpie was listening, citizenly. But those buttons. Those big, white, shiny buttons on the vaguely Maoist jacket flap thingy—the Magpie wanted to peck off one of those buttons and fly away with it. The round white buttons, Clinton’s round white face, the blondish waves of her hair: She put the Magpie in mind of Glinda the Good Witch, whose big shiny dress was actually a faint pink, though in the Magpie’s memory it is shimmering white. It seemed to the Magpie that Clinton might have arrived on the stage in a bubble, floating down to alight by her podium with a tilted head and a beatific smile.
The Magpie thought it was a good strategy to wear all white, because, of course, next to white, which is the color of white hats, Trump would look like the black hat, no matter what he wore. Clinton’s pantsuit was made by Ralph Lauren, who favors iconic Americana imagery and is also just a little downscale, a little mass market, and a little android, although maybe that’s now a good thing. Several news organizations have suggested that Clinton was ringing the note of the women’s suffrage movement, which took white as one of its colors; they have also noted that the three pantsuits she wore to the debates were, respectively, red, white, and dark blue, so that she may have been performing an American flag in successive stages, playing the long game. The political artist is present, as it were.
The Magpie kept gazing at the shiny button, thinking of the Cat Stevens song “ Into White ,” which has a William Carlos Williams-like imagistic intensity, and the sense of everything solid melting into air, the erotics of disappearance, in a lick-my-soulful-lute sort of way.
Cat as such did disappear, converting to Islam, leaving the music scene, and changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1977, walking away into another life and breaking the hearts of millions of dreamy girls. Glinda evanesced, too, getting back in her bubble once her work in Oz was done. The Magpie, possibly not listening entirely to the ten thousandth invocation of the 33,000 emails, seemed to see Trump getting smaller and smaller, Munchkin-sized, behind his podium, with just a little orange troll hair visible by the microphone. He was melting. But Clinton, too, in her opalescent glow, seemed to be prepared for a sacrifice or a wedding or a ritual in which one identity is shed and another, perhaps perilously, assumed. She looked so swaddled, and so happy. She looked simultaneously like a bride, a nun, a pierrot, a doctor, a woman in a shroud, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who held that position for almost thirty years. She was also wearing white way after Labor Day, the anti-fashion fashion-forward thing to do.
White is also, of course, the color of the White House. The white pantsuit, in this context, seemed like a smart and funny matchy-matchy choice for what she hopes to be her new house—well, it’s actually her old house, but she would be moving back in under a different name. One can imagine Diana Vreeland writing in her legendary Harper’s Bazaar column “Why Don’t You . . .”: “Why don’t you wear white in the White House at all times, as a fashion uniform? I had red. You can have white.”
In her very short story, “What Were the White Things?,” Amy Hempel’s narrator is a woman who looks at a succession of white things—ominous spots on an X-ray of her own body, images of white crockery in a painting—and finds that the more she looks, the less she understands what the white things are, what they mean, what relevance they do or don’t have to her life. The Magpie, looking at Hillary Clinton in the white pantsuit, had something of the same experience. The white pantsuit could not be definitively pinned to a single meaning. It did not stay on message; instead, it radiated multiple messages simultaneously; it winked; it blurred. A man’s suit, as worn by a man like Trump, cannot do this. It says power like a beer mug being slammed on a table. But the white pantsuit: Who the hell knows what it means? That is its genius. It catches many kinds of light. It is a blank page.
The Magpie has never understood the rank hatred Clinton inspires in some, but the Magpie has been concerned about the candidate’s overwhelmingly sensible quality. Sensible is a great thing, particularly when has one’s hand on that other big button, but charismatic it is not. Moreover, charisma cannot be manufactured or faked. You can’t arrange the lighting to make it look someone has charisma. Additionally, Clinton’s inherent sense of privacy, the feeling that she has rooms to which she is clearly not going to give us access, has provoked suspicion and in some cases the sort of rage that caused the French to attempt to ban the burka or Claudio Gatti to pry into the identity of Elena Ferrante. She is not an open book, nor will she ever be.
And yet, finally, with the white pantsuit she seems to have hit upon the way in which privacy—the buttons up to the neck, multiplicity and mutability—can get you where you want to go, back to the house for which you still yearn.
Or, as Glinda the Good Witch said to Dorothy just before she clicked her heels together three times, “You had the power all along, my dear.”
