The Blazing World

  What excited and sometimes frightened her, she said, was what Rune brought out in her, and whatever it was, she believed it had been in her for a long time but had never been let out. I recorded her words in my journal the same evening, or at least her words as I remembered them. The whole project is almost over now, Rachel. Soon the trilogy of my personas will be finished. She stressed that Rune had been embedded in Beneath as a “personified possibility.” She had borrowed the words from Kierkegaard. It was the idea of Rune she wanted to exploit, far more than Rune himself, but the idea of him had given her mobility, had opened doors inside herself. Harry’s voice grew louder, and I noticed that a man and a woman at the table next to us had stopped talking and turned to glare at us. I put my finger to my lips to indicate that she should lower her voice, and Harry’s mood turned dark. That’s what I mean, she hissed at me. Don’t be loud, Harry. Don’t make waves, Harry. Keep your knees together, Harry. It’s not polite, Harry.

  Irritated, I said to her, Good grief, what have I done? I noticed you were talking too loudly to keep our conversation private, and I sent you a discreet signal. Harry leaned toward me and growled in my direction. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The thing, the person—whatever it is—is ruthless, cocky, loud, cold, superior, cruel, dismissive, and untouchable. The thing is not polite. It has never been polite.

  Sounds like a real charmer, I said to Harry. I was smiling, but Harry did not find my characterization funny. She looked at me gravely. I suggested that different personalities bring out various aspects of our own, and I explained that I often feel loud with soft-spoken people or retiring and shy with someone who bellows at me. It all depends on the interaction. Harry insisted that she was talking about something far more dramatic. She had never been able to resist what she called “the pull of the other.” As a child she had always obeyed the rules. She had rarely been punished, because she couldn’t bear the idea of disappointing her parents. Neither one of them had been strict or severe, but for some reason, she had always felt wrong, not right. I worked so hard to turn myself into the right kind of child, but I never succeeded. It pained me to listen to her, but I knew I was hearing her revised story.

  Harry leaned forward, both hands in front of her over the soggy napkin. I covered her right hand with my own and felt grateful that we had been seated in a corner and that she was now speaking in a voice so soft I had to lean close to her to hear what she was saying. She wanted to know if I remembered the grand plans we had had for our futures. We were both going to be famous women, remember? I remembered. Harry smiled at me. We raised our consciousnesses. Do you remember? I remembered. It didn’t do any good, Harry said. What I raised turned out to be false consciousness. She had become an artist, all right, but no one can be an artist when her work always comes second to everyone and everything else. She had never been first in anything. Ever. Harry pulled her hand away from under mine and looked at me with tears in her eyes.

  I pointed out to Harry that she had actually been first in our Hunter class, to which she said, A lot of good it did me. Harry’s grievances rolled out of her. She had adored Felix, she said, something Bruno could not accept because he was jealous of her dead husband, but it was her mad love for Felix that had made it so hard for her to oppose him. He had made her feel interesting and beautiful, and she had tried hard to be what she thought he had wanted her to be. This is what I mean, Rachel. What are we? What was Felix and what was me? He was in me. She had always read Felix for his wishes, had always bent herself to him, and it hadn’t been so hard, because deep inside her she hadn’t believed that it should be the other way around. Why should he bend to her wishes? Who was she to ask that? Bend, bend, bend, Harry said, always bending and swaying, bending and swaying. Then Harry remembered her mother bending over to pick up her father’s socks and shorts, remembered her mother serving her father at the table, remembered her mother kneeling on the floor with a toothbrush to clean the grout between the tiles, remembered her small mother smiling anxiously up at her father to read his eyes. Did he approve? Was he happy? Harry said she had found herself tiptoeing past Felix’s study so as not to disturb him on the days when he had worked at home, had squelched her opinions at dinners because Felix hated conflict, but he would march into her studio without knocking to ask her some trivial question. He would criticize an artist at a dinner party, and everyone would listen rapt to the great man’s opinion. Sometimes he’d regurgitate Harry’s own words, words she had spoken earlier at the very same dinner, but to which no one had listened. This was true. I remembered several occasions when I had been an uncomfortable witness to those unfortunate repetitions. I did not say to Harry that Felix inspired confidence because he combined authority with a cool, unflappable demeanor. He didn’t need people to listen to him. Harry did.

  For years, Harry said, Felix had interrupted her mid-sentence, and she would go silent. That’s just how it was. Felix had always said that he admired and supported her work, but he had flown here and there for his own work, and he had called to say he’d be late or had changed his flight, and Harry had stayed home with Maisie and Ethan. Yes, yes, yes, she said, she had had help, all she wanted, but you can’t farm out your children’s souls to others. And although Maisie had been a relatively easy child, Ethan had been difficult, hypersensitive and prone to explosions. His voracious needs had sometimes swallowed her whole. He had grown up all right, she said. He had become a strong, functioning person, but what if she hadn’t sat up with him at night, holding his hand, singing the odd, repetitive Philip Glass–like songs she had discovered were the only ones that soothed him. Harry sang a few bars under her breath: Bleep, bang, rum, rum, rum. Drum, drum, drum. Thrum, thrum, thrum. And the guilt, guilt, guilt, she said wryly to me, the guilt, guilt, guilt that she was to blame for his problems. I knew most of this, but I recognized that Harry needed to tell me, needed to explain. And, she said, she had never felt the money belonged to her. She hadn’t made it. Felix had started out with money and made much more. Over the years, she’d sold a few pieces of her art, nothing more. And the exhibitions she had had. Harry’s lips trembled. They were ignored or trashed.

  I told her this wasn’t actually true. There had been some good reviews. There had. I remembered.

  Harry’s face was a reproof. Money is power, she said. Men with money. Men with money make the art world go round. Men with money decide who wins and who loses, what’s good and what’s bad.

  I offered the comment that this was changing, slowly perhaps, but changing nevertheless; that more and more women were getting their due. I had just read something about it . . .

  Harry’s expression turned bitter. Even the most famous woman artist is a bargain compared to the most famous man—dirt cheap in comparison. Look at the divine Louise Bourgeois. What does that tell you? Harry’s voice cracked. Money talks. It tells you about what is valued, what matters. It sure as hell isn’t women.

  She had all the answers. I didn’t reply. I looked down at the tablecloth and wondered what time it was, but I was too alert to Harry’s feelings to look at my watch. Maybe Harry had an inkling of what I was thinking, because she apologized to me. She said that she was selfish and obsessed and carried away and that she loved me. She asked me about Ray’s health, and I told her he was doing well, still bicycling in the park three times a week with his doctor’s approval, and he seemed sanguine about his retirement from NYU in the spring. He had hated the idea of forced retirement, but now his whole attitude had changed. She even asked me about Otto, and I said our nutty pooch had turned twelve and had to take both an antidepressant and an anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis. Harry smiled. We’re all getting old, she said, old and older.

  I nodded. We talked about Maisie’s film Body Weather, about the psychotherapist who was seeing the Barometer and about the antipsychotics the man refused to take. I thought they might help him. Harry did not. Before we parted, Harry brought up Felix again, this time his love life,
or rather the part of it that did not include her. Felix’s bisexuality has now become a public fact. The book The Days of the Felix Lord Gallery, which was published only a few months ago (in which the author, James Moore, treats Harry’s work with great respect and seriousness, I am happy to say), discussed the subject openly. A number of his lovers stepped into the open to talk about him, so however secret his adventures may have been while he was alive, they are not secret anymore. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Felix’s sex life remains a mystery in the sense that the inside story cannot really be known. If one gains anything over the years working as I do, it is an overwhelming sympathy for the variations of human desire. Sexual arousal is surely not under our control, although acting upon it may be. And the notion that we live in an age of sexual freedom is a half-truth. I have had many patients whose shame and misery about their sexual thoughts has made them ill. And it can take a long time to discover the forces that lie beneath a particular fantasy, whether the desire is for boys or girls or older men or women, the thin or the obese, whether it involves tenderness or cruelty, or whether it is aided by all manner of paraphernalia, standard or idiosyncratic. Is it not anathema in our culture to express even a hint of compassion for the man with pedophilic yearnings, or to acknowledge the simple truth that there are sexual encounters between adults and children that do not leave lasting scars on the latter?

  I mention this because intolerance about sexual life is everywhere. Not long ago, a woman whom I know only a little made a coarse comment about Harry after she had read the book about Felix. “Any woman who would put up with that shit,” she said to me, “had to have been a rank fool.” I told her that Harry had been “a dear friend of mine” and that she had been “no fool.” It was an awkward moment, but the woman said nothing more about it.

  At first, I didn’t know where Harry was going. She began the next turn in our conversation by saying that sometimes when Felix had been out very late at night, at an opening or a dinner with collectors she had not attended, she would hear him when he came home. He was always very careful not to make much noise, but she would hear his light footsteps in the hall anyway. She explained that when their children were young, she would wake to a sigh or a squeak or a cough and lie in bed listening to hear if that small sound would be followed by a wail or a call for her. There had been two parallel worlds at the time, she said, of sleep and of wakefulness, each held in perfect balance with the other. It was as if she had lived in both states at once, and so the creak of the door opening, followed by her husband’s steps, never failed to rouse her. She said that on some nights he would come directly in to her, pull open the bed and crawl inside with her, always facing away from her. Then she would pull him close to her and stroke his back, which he liked. But on other nights, particularly the ones when he returned in the wee morning hours, she would hear him undress in the bathroom and step into the shower. And Harry would lie awake listening to the noise of the rushing water and say to herself, He is washing off the others.

  Harry did not confront him. She said she had simply known what those nocturnal ablutions meant. He had wanted to keep his worlds separate. He had cleaned off one to enter the other. And, she confided, she had pitied him. I would lie there, Rachel, and think to myself, Poor Felix. What if it were me? What if I had desires that overwhelmed me? How would I want to be treated? Would I want meanness and rejection?

  I said I thought sainthood usually had a price.

  Harry agreed with me. She said she had paid dearly. He had hurt her, and she had pushed down her rage at him, but a part of her couldn’t help feeling sorry for him anyway. That’s why I need the cold mask, you see. Harry looked at me so earnestly and in such a big-eyed, childlike way, I found her face comic.

  Cold mask? I asked her.

  Yes, she answered me, a cold, hard, indifferent mask, an imperious persona that will rise up and smash the stupids. He comes out when I’m with Rune. That’s why she was interested in multiple personalities, because she thought plurality was human, she explained. She didn’t get dizzy, black out, or lose people inside her. She knew perfectly well that she was Harry, but she had discovered new forms of her self, forms she said that most men take for granted, forms of resistance to others. Why do you suppose, she said, that over ninety percent of all the reported cases of multiple personality have been women? Bend and sway, Harry said triumphantly. Bend and sway. The pull of the other. Girls learn, she said. Girls learn to read power, to make their way, to play the game, to be nice.

  I said that she was making it a bit too simple, that there were cold, imperious women, too, tough and entitled, who cared little about those in their way.

  Oh, Rachel, Harry said to me. You’re so reasonable. Don’t you ever want to scream and yell and punch someone in the face? Don’t you ever want to breathe fire?

  Of course I do, I said to Harry. Of course I do, but we have different stories, you know. She knew. When we left the restaurant, Harry took my hand. It was cold that day as we walked down Madison Avenue, and we were both dressed warmly. Harry was wearing a beautiful scarf of woven blue and green yarns wrapped around her neck several times. I remember that I admired it. We used to hold hands, she said to me, when we were girls, do you remember? I remembered well. We used to swing our arms back and forth as we walked, she said. Do you remember? I remembered. Now we’re two old ladies together, Harry said, and I told her to speak for herself, and Harry grabbed my hand and began to swing my arm back and forth, and we walked at least a block holding hands and swinging our arms, and because it was New York City, no one gave us a second glance.

  Phineas Q. Eldridge

  (written statement)

  I said goodbye to the lodge and its residents in the summer of 2002 and flew off to winter and financial crack-up in Buenos Aires with Marcelo. My beloved’s money was mostly elsewhere, fortunately. Harry had her fairy tale. I had and still have mine, most of the time, anyway, in the land of Borges and psychoanalysis and taxi-driving poets. Marcelo and I were back in NYC when Beneath opened, and I was deeply curious about Harry’s grand phallic finale. Convincing Rune must have been quite a task, I said to Harry, and when she told me it hadn’t been all that hard, I felt a few flutters because it didn’t really make much sense to me. Then again, the human heart (as metaphor for desire, not as pumping organ) is an unknowable thing. I thought maybe after those crosses, Rune felt it was time for a grand hoax to up the ante.

  When Marcelo and I arrived at the opening, there were throngs of arty types on the street waiting to enter the maze. High circus excitement in the air. We lined up with the predictably overdressed girls, teetering in their high shoes, and the young, mostly white slacker boys, disheveled and slouching, eager to convey their indifference to fashion, but they gave themselves away with their cool hats and their T-shirts, adorned with skulls and parrots or clever little sayings: We strive for games of great seriousness. We were parked in line right behind an aging diva with red-framed owl glasses, dressed head to toe in chic black Yamamoto. Two sweet-and-expensive gallerinas, one in black and white and the other in red, stood watch at the entrance, ushering in ten people at a time, so as not to overcrowd the twisting, turning corridors of the maze. “Don’t worry, if you can’t get out, we have maps. All you have to do is holler,” said Miss Red, straight out of Georgia. I never miss an accent. Harry was nowhere to be seen. She had not wanted us to go with her, and she had given me strict orders not to look for her—much, much too nervous.

  The moment we stepped through the door, Marcelo and I found ourselves enclosed on both sides by thick white walls I guessed were Plexiglas or Lucite. Harry loved to use milky-colored walls in her work, and these were about eight feet tall, not high enough to see over, but not towering either. What I noticed first was their translucence. I could just make out the shadows of three people walking down the adjacent passageway as flickering rectangles of light appeared and disappeared behind their moving figures. The maze was
claustrophobic and disorienting, as mazes should be, and after a few wrong turns I felt that dreamy, hallucinatory, life-really-is-awfully-strange atmosphere asserting itself before I knew why I was feeling it. Slowly, I understood that the corridors of the maze were not of uniform size. Their widths grew narrower and then wider. The walls lengthened and shrank, too, but always gradually, gradually, never abruptly. At one juncture, I was able to stand on tiptoe and peer over the wall. Getting out of there wasn’t easy. Marcelo and I kept bumping into what we took to be the same corner or the same turn with the same window. The corner, turn, or window looked like the last one, but when we continued walking, we ran smack into a dead end that could not have been the one we had run into minutes earlier. A new dead end signified progress, I suppose, but the “windows” we used as landmarks, which had been cut into the walls or into the floor under our feet, were forever misleading us. Unless we perused each window box, with its collection of objects inside it or its film sequence, carefully, we inevitably believed we were looking into the same old box or at the same old movie. Of course, sometimes we were and sometimes we weren’t. Marcelo kept muttering diabólico, diabólico until I told him to can it. Can it? he said. How interesting. Can it? I was giving him hard lessons in American slang. Unless you slowed down, looked hard at the space around you, and noted the changes in windows, walls, and proportions, you could not know whether you had come farther in that “diabolical” space or not. Harry had cleverly designed an art object that forced people to pay attention to it because if they didn’t, they’d never get out of the blasted thing.