The Blazing World

  But then Rune relates that once upon a time there were two Dicks, Philip K. and his twin, Jane Charlotte, who died when she was six weeks old, and the little girl ghost haunted the brother’s writing. Philip K., it seems, blamed his mother for Jane’s death. The foul womb killed his sister? He had been in there with her, after all. The mother had neglected her for him? Alas, I didn’t get the details. Rune was on a roll.

  The dead girl child led us to mirrors and doubles and ghosts that never leave us, and the old story about the two sexes as the cleaved halves of a single whole being. He told me about his sister Kirsten, to whom he had always told his secrets. They had invented a code when they were children to send messages to each other their parents couldn’t read, and they called the code Runsten. They had built a fort from boxes and scrap lumber, and inside their fort they had dissected the body of a dead baby bird. And I told him about my mother’s miscarriages and that I had always wondered if my father hadn’t wanted a boy. Maybe one of those who had died had been a boy.

  Later, he rattled on about artists I’d never heard of, and I understood he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the now—what’s in the Chelsea galleries this minute. It was impressive, but after a while my mind left his words for my own silent ones, the ones who think they have a right to be young and wander off to look for new meanings, and I interrupted him at one point to bring up our work. I said the project would have to disguise the line of suture, the incision between his art and mine. I had to know more about him. It was a question of becoming.

  Becoming me?

  No, I said to him, double consciousness. You and I together. I am hoping you will goad me into something else. My voice rose. Goad me into the dizziness of exile.

  His face went dead, blank, as I had seen him on the film. No answer.

  With your name on my work, I said, it will be different. Art lives in its perception only. You are the last of three, and you are the pinnacle. I could hear the cracking passion in my voice. I altered my tone to one of calm deliberation.

  He liked the idea of pulling a fast one, but my ideas felt outdated, a little lame to him. We live in a postfeminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?

  No, I said to him, it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making. Two down, one to go. After that, I retire from the game. We will find a project, I said. Hadn’t his work The Banality of Glamour focused mostly on women’s faces and bodies? Surely he knew that women face pressures men don’t. I had suffered from the cruelty of the beauty culture. I knew what I was talking about.

  He smiled a gentle smile, and he said, Harry, you have your own style, your own elegance, your own femininity. He wanted to be kind, but I boiled—fists clenched, fury rising. He had offered me condescension, compensation. Don’t worry, Harry, you count, too, he was saying, even if you are funny-looking. I bristled at him and growled, But that’s not the point. The point is the trap, the suffocation. I turned away.

  No pique from him: You want to wear me for one exhibition. It was a good phrase, “wear me.”

  I told him yes, that was it exactly, except that by “wearing” him I might find something else in myself. This is what I was trying to explain.

  He licked his teeth and asked me what that something might be.

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

  Little talk after that. I’m tired now, very tired.

  Tomorrow the masks come out.

  Friday, June 8, 2001

  Hid all day without speaking to him. I had notified him of the house rules: He had to find his own breakfast and lunch. I watched him through the studio window, loping toward the beach, book in hand, saw him lean over and brush sand from his heel, then light a cigarette. I have already dug out a couple of Felix’s ashtrays for Rune. I kept thinking of his surgical videos while I worked on a head for a sculpture. The controlled mutilations made me think of his beloved crashes—a bloody aesthetic.

  Faces. The face. Locus of identity. What the world sees. My old face.

  What happened today in the studio, Harry? Think it through.

  Harry, you were worried. You were anxious. Be honest. When you unwrapped the masks, you were a little frightened, weren’t you? But why?

  Because you weren’t sure he would play. Is that it?

  But when he saw them, your man face and your woman face, when he saw your face masks, he smiled, and then he ran his finger over the woman and took her up and put the face over his own.

  He took it off and examined it. They’re both so blank, he said.

  I made them blank.

  Like Noh masks, he said, and I said, a little like Noh masks, but light and flexible. The difference between the two is very slight, in the chin.

  I want to use them, I said, as part of the experiment for our work together. We’ll change sex and play a game, a theater game. It’ll be fun, I said. Are you up for it?

  Are there rules? he said.

  No rules, I said. He would find a woman, and I would find a man.

  He wanted to film it with a stationary camera. He could set it up quickly. He would add it to the Diary.

  Loss of air in your chest, Harry. Increased heartbeat, a feeling of danger. Why? Were you frightened by that machine’s eye? Will I look bad? Will I look ridiculous? I insisted he give me a copy. He agreed. But there’s more, Harry. Examine yourself. Weren’t you afraid you were opening a door you might not be able to close?

  It is almost midnight, but I must write it down now, or I will lose the immediacy, lose the force of it, because whatever is on that damned film, it’s not my insides, not my perceptions, not the magic of transformation.

  It moved slowly at first. We were awkward, silly. I told him I was John. He hated John. Why John? Such a bland name. I had to explain that I had played John as a girl. John’s adventures. Captain John on the ship in a hurricane, Soldier John killing Nazis, John in the caves. I did not say that I alternated between being John and being Mary, Mary who was rescued by John, swooning, delicate Mary who loved being saved. I agreed to give up John. Dumb name, okay. As soon as Rune had put the mask on, he began to wriggle and mince and roll his shoulders up and down. I told him sharply he was a woman, not a drag queen. No woman moves like that, for Christ’s sake, and he shot back, Wanna bet? But he stopped the ridiculous parody after a few minutes. He told me he was Ruina.

  A nutty name, I said, but Ruina is kind of funny. A ruined woman. Poor ruined Ruina/Rune.

  The mask changes everything.

  It changes far more than I had imagined when we began the game.

  Rune began to vanish.

  I looked at that empty face with its soft, pink, expressionless mouth, arched brows, and narrow chin with the thick elastic band that held it in place over his ears. Rune lifted his voice to a higher pitch and spoke more softly. He said he liked to draw. Then he looked down at his lap, then upward again. His eyes through the holes held mine for a moment before he looked away. I must try to explain this to myself. Why did this series of movements feel like a blow to my skull? He was making a character, wasn’t he? I took a breath. Under the mask, I felt my skin grow hot. Masks do not move, but when I looked at him/her, it was as if I saw the fixed lips tremble, as if in this act of looking down, up, and away he had captured something feminine, and I found it terrible.

  Richard, I said, Richard Brickman. The name appeared in my mouth, and I spoke it. Looking at it now, written on the page, I am smiling. Richard, as in Lionhearted, as in the Third, as in Tricky Dick, as in dicks and pricks, more pricks than kicks. What’s in a name? The choice is hilarious. And bricks? Need we go into it? Hard, of course. Stable, of course. The three little pigs, of course. Remember, Harry, whose house stands? And he blew and he blew and he blew, but he couldn’t blow the house down. And the man in Brickman? Harry, you’r
e Mr. Overdetermined himself.IV But he came, Richard Brickman came, coming like a wind blown from old Harry’s blue lungs into the purple space between him and Ruina, that shrinking pinky of a girl. She had a story. She had dreams, big, little, pathetic dreams of grandeur. Rune was making her up for me, for Richard. She was not an artist, no, just an illustrator. Her grand ambitions were to draw and paint for children’s books. Where had he found this shy, hopeful creature? I wonder now, but I didn’t wonder then. In his mother, his sister? I was too caught up in Richard and Ruina, in the miracle of their talk.

  I sat across from the mask, Ruina, with the brilliant light of the afternoon sun behind her. The faded red of the sofa’s cotton at her back, I watched her play with a cushion in her lap. My posture changed. I sat with my legs open, and I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. But can you draw? I demanded. Can you draw?

  She didn’t want to brag, you see, but she could draw some, and she was getting better, and she was hoping for a break, an introduction, perhaps. I might be able to help her. The masked head went up and down and back and forth. She was in motion, our Ruina, a bobbling head of hesitation and nervous laughter. It was so hard for her to ask. She didn’t like to do it, and a new high note of pleading entered her voice.

  As she wheedled and sighed, I began to find her contemptible. Pull yourself together. If you want something, ask for it straight out.

  And then, horribly, Ruina began to whisper. I could hardly hear her. Was she asking for a favor? Her head fell forward, and she spoke so softly under her breath that the words ran together in a murmur of sounds.

  Speak up! I, Richard, was telling her to speak up. I didn’t shout. I ordered her to speak clearly so that I could hear her. What was the point of a conversation with a person who could not be understood, who could not get a sentence out of her mouth without mumbling? We would get nowhere.

  She whined. The sound of her whining made me close my eyes, made me wince. You disgust me. You sound like a kicked dog. Who said that? Richard said it, cruel bastard that he is.

  High protestations from Ruina followed. She is suddenly enlivened. In her feeble way, she fights back. Her voice rises into new registers, high, splitting sounds of pain. That’s mean. You’re a mean, horrible man. Blubbering follows.

  I am not mean. I am reasonable. You hear me. I am just speaking rationally. You, on the other hand, are acting like a hysterical child. I ask you to stop right now, immediately.

  Ruina is crying. She is holding the pillow to the masked face. I imagine that the mask moves. I see the corners of the mouth move downward, and I feel the wrinkling of the forehead. I feel invigorated by my anger. Richard stands up and walks to the sofa in three swift strides. He grabs her by the shoulders and begins to shake her. She is loose as a rag doll. I lift my hand to smack her hard. The masked head is thrown back, and Rune is laughing. The laugh enrages me. The laugh storms inside me. I lift my hands from Rune’s shoulders. I make a noise, a hollow grunt. The game is over.

  We take off the masks.

  I feel shaken, a bit shocked. Rune is jovial. He repeats this sentence: We have it on film.

  But Richard and Ruina have unsettled me. I told him so as he snipped the rubber bands off the steamed lobsters. Why had it gone in that direction? Who had led the way? Why had he made Ruina so wimpy? Is that his idea of what women are? I wanted to talk about it, but he said that I always wanted to interpret everything, and enough was enough. It had been fun, hadn’t it? And I felt both oddly relieved by his humor and still troubled. Our conspiracy, he said, was interesting, damned interesting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let it go yet.

  He talked about an artist friend who had hanged himself last year. A woman he loved had left him.

  It must be terrible for her, I said.

  And he said that some deaths are more beautiful than others.

  I said I didn’t find death beautiful, except maybe the perfect death, dying in one’s sleep at a hundred.

  God, that’s boring, he said.

  I must think it through now. I must find some distance. Harry is trying to understand what has happened.

  Saturday, June 9, 2001

  I called Rachel this morning. We talked for almost an hour. I wanted to tell her about Richard Brickman, but something stopped me: shame. I am ashamed of both Richard and Ruina.

  Ray has had a stent put in his artery.

  Who are you, anyway, Harry, a wimp? Who cares about this little theatrical event? Isn’t the world in thrall to actors, especially to those who press themselves to extremes, who starve themselves for authenticity, who rage and gnash their teeth and turn themselves into demented patients or idiots savants or leering, cannibal psychopaths? Are we not all malleable beings made of putty, who can be pulled and pressed and reconfigured? Doesn’t all art partake of this extension into others? What’s the big deal? This was next to nothing, no violence at all—just a shaking of shoulders—a little anger, a laugh. Why worry?

  Because Brickman was there, fully formed. Who is that man?

  And yet, consider this, too: He may be the avenue to the project. Didn’t I say it: the dizziness of exile? Exile into the other.

  I called Bruno, too. (I will never tell him about the masks.)

  Cleo is his salvation, but I knew that. Jenny needles him. Liza is taciturn but much sweeter to her old dad. He tells me, in a typical soaring moment of hyperbole, that he has botched fatherhood, and I tut-tut the comment because it isn’t true. They want to see him, after all. They leave their spouses to come to Papa. And Liza has let him feel the movements of the fetal boy under her skin, the first grandchild, and he wonders why this unborn child is so much more exciting for him than the first time around. And I tell him he was afraid then, and he isn’t afraid now. He doesn’t have to take care of it, and we laugh, and soon he makes some comments about my clit, “ever on alert,” he says, and how his tongue longs for it, the clit, and I make a few false moans on the telephone, and he yuks it up. Laughter is a boon. He asks me about my gigolo, the slithering pretty boy, but his tone is not cruel, and so I take it. I tell him the project is coming along and that it’s “interesting,” borrowing Rune’s word. Yes, it’s interesting. And then we can’t wait to see each other, and he hopes Francis, Liza’s lawyer husband, whom I’ve never met, will not insist they call the baby Brandon—so sissy, so meatless. How could Bruno tolerate a grandson named Brandon? He plans to write here on the island. We do not mention the bloody poem. He knows what I think—write the memoir!

  It wasn’t easy to work today with the resonant anxiety beneath my ribs.

  At four, I found him lying on the sofa reading a book on Houdini. He waved it in the air and delivered facts—the man’s father had been a rabbi in Appleton, Wisconsin; Houdini loved his wife, Bess. Twenty years before Kafka published his Metamorphosis, the two Houdinis, husband and wife, traded places in a locked trunk and called the act Metamorphosis. (The German word is Verwandlung, but Rune lives entirely in English.) The master magician could regurgitate small keys at will, dislocate and relocate his shoulders at will, and had learned by practicing in an oversized bathtub to hold his breath for three minutes. Rune said he, too, was practicing not to breathe, and when I asked him why, he said he had his own projects.

  He wanted to play again, change masks. I’ll be Richard, he said. I thought to myself, that’s impossible, you can’t be Richard, you don’t know him, but I didn’t say it. I said, no, another time. I wasn’t up to it. We talked some more, but just blather, and then he said, I think Ruina should get her revenge on the bastard, don’t you? I must have looked confused. If we keep the game going, he said, she’ll have to fight back, won’t she? I had to think about it. I understood I had cut myself off from the ongoing story out of dread.

  Rune thought the film sequence could be used outside the Diary. We’ll put it into a piece, he said, maybe your piece for me. I felt him watching me. I tried to
be blasé. But what if it’s bad? I said. He had already watched it several times, and he wanted to see it on a larger screen. He could hook it up to the television.

  We watched the masked aliens in silence. I noticed that I had forgotten large chunks of our dialogue and that the game had lasted longer than I had thought. As a spectator, I saw immediately that without the masks the exchange would have lost its power. As it was, I felt startled by the vapid dialogue. The authoritarian Richard and the cringing Ruina were types lifted straight from melodrama or soap opera, but their immobile, artificial faces—my empty creations—enhanced the archetypal character of their struggle, and their gestures took on a quality of pathos.

  Pathosformel?V

  Master and slave locked in their contest for recognition?VI

  Role-playing gone mad?

  Cultural parody written in capital letters?

  Was this TV show the objective view? I noted that my green sweater had lost its shape and hung loosely over my substantial breasts, that beneath the man mask, my own flaccid chin fell into a neck with no Adam’s apple, and that my hair floated out around the false face in a frizzed halo, but somehow these physical details did not feminize Richard. They were overpowered by the mask and its, or his, decisive movements. And despite Rune’s rounded biceps, broad shoulders, and flat chest, his quivering Ruina, crunched up in a ball and crying by the end, read as womanly. Performativity.VII The particulars of the room, with its fireplace, big conch on the mantel, and Calder print on the wall, were submerged by the raw emotion that passed between the two players. Was it pretend? We watched it again.

  Rune leaned forward. His elbows rested on his knees, his chin cupped in his hands—his body tense with concentration. What had he seen? I asked him. I think we were good, he said. We plunged right in. You believe it. It’s so fake, but you believe it.

  I told him to run it again without sound.

  He did it automatically, which surprised me a little. He seemed to understand. We watched. Without the voices, the film became all masks and movement. I didn’t look at Rune beside me on the sofa, but I felt him. I may have heard him breathing. I don’t know, but he did not stir, and neither did I. The two people on the screen had been changed again. The two had spoken from behind the motionless lips of the masks, but this time we listened to nothing. The static faces appeared to speak because they nodded and lifted their hands, but without words, and I watched the two of them perform a dance that in silence had become alarmingly erotic. Ruina’s gestures had a seductive quality that inflamed Richard’s brutality and the pleasure he took in it.