Meet the Wife

In a fever-dream of Edwardiana, Percy—chinless, purseless, but throbbing with social ambition—commissions a matrimonial bureau to net him a silk-stocking bride; the agency, equal parts bordello and stock exchange, pairs him with a gorgon of dowdy grandeur whose purported fifty-thousand-dollar dowry glitters like a klieg-light. The wedding night unspools into grotesque carnival: the check disintegrates, the bride’s cackle ricochets off asylum walls, and Percy, duped by his own cupidity, finds himself yoked to a fugitive lunatic whose only fidelity is to chaos.