The Blazing World

  I think there were diamonds in her ears, and I know there was perfume in the general atmosphere of the table wafting over and up into my nostrils, a scent she said Napoleon, pipsqueak conqueror of Europe, had concocted for one of his wives, Josephine. He had just two, one fewer than me. The arrogant son of a bitch once said, “I am the revolution.” Well, that evening the revolution of Bruno Kleinfeld had begun, and I knew it had to be carried through or I would live forever as a state divided.

  I listened to her. I am not cynical when I say this is the first rule of seduction. There is no seduction without big listening ears. Call me Harry, she said. I called her Harry. I listened to her tell me about her two grown-up kids, one documentary filmmaker, one prose writer, and the grandchild who could do somersaults and had developed unusual passions for Buster Keaton and Peggy Lee, and about her dead husband, who had been half Thai, half English, the son of a diplomat, a man who had been at home everywhere and nowhere. He sounded like a smoothie to me—a lot of money and a lot of angles—the kind of guy who steals into a smoke-filled bar in one of those Hollywood movies from the forties, wearing a white dinner jacket as he scans the room with his foreigner’s eyes.

  I couldn’t really get a handle on Harry, on who she was, that is. She was frank and forthright, but there was hesitation in her, too. She formed her sentences slowly, as if she were thinking about each word. She spoke at some length about Bosch, about how much she loved his demons and “mutations.” She loved Goya. She called him “a world apart.” “He was not afraid to look,” she said, “even though there are things that should not be seen.” Sometime around the second glass of wine, she lowered her voice as if she were afraid the couple at the next table would overhear her. There had been a little boy, she said, who lived under her bed in her family’s apartment on Riverside Drive. “He breathed fire.” Her exact words. He breathed fire. Harry did not say “imaginary boy” or “imaginary friend.” She placed her long hands on the tablecloth, leaned toward me, inhaled and exhaled. “I wanted to fly, you see, and breathe fire. Those were my dearest wishes, but it was forbidden, or I felt it was forbidden. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.”

  I did not say I hoped she would breathe fire on me, although the hankering to say it was strong. I made some other crack, and she laughed. She had good teeth, Harry did, nice even white teeth, and a sonorous laugh, a big fat laugh that gave me amnesia, that wiped out years of my life in the rat hole, that made me feel light and free and, as I said to her, unburdened, unburdened because Harriet Burden’s laugh lifted LIU and the poem and the chipped linoleum right up and off of me. I don’t know why, but my pun on her name made her serious, and her lips quivered. I thought she might break down on the spot with the weepies and water her half-eaten chicken, so I swooped in. I swooped in with Thomas Traherne. Nothing could have been better than my old friend Tom, dead in 1674, an ecstatic versifier if there ever was one, a poet all but lost until 1896 when some anonymous but curious soul discovered a manuscript in a London bookstall. I had memorized Traherne’s poem “Wonder” years earlier. All at once, the third stanza popped into my head, and I read it straight off some sheet of paper inside my skull as the lady of my heart looked at me all atremble:

  Harsh ragged objects were concealed;

  Oppressions, tears, and cries,

  Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes

  Were hid, and only things revealed

  Which heavenly spirits and the angels prize.

  The state of innocence

  And bliss, not trades and poverties,

  Did fill my sense.

  It was a wonder that we found each other, Harry and I. It’s still a wonder. My Harry was a wonder.

  She took me home, and when we walked into her gigantic place with the wall of windows that looked over the water, and the long blue sofas, a space that was still raw but not raw, if you see what I mean, fashionably raw, with art on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a couple of thousand volumes along another, and big old rugs on the floor and a shiny kitchen with pots hanging from a ceiling rack, I said to myself, it’s paradise, man, pure paradise, no cracks and crumbs and dust mites and roaches, and it’s right across the street! Then Harry showed me the studio floor right below. We walked down a flight of stairs. She flicked on some lights, and I noted the long hallway, lined with doors, one after the other, and I heard somebody snoring behind one of them. I didn’t ask. It was all going so well I didn’t want to screw it up.

  Harry opened up double doors on the other side of the hall, turned on more lights to illuminate her workspace. I will not pretend that Harry’s art didn’t scare me a little. To be honest, that first night it gave me a voodoo feeling. I walked right under a flying cock, as in penis, not rooster, authentic-looking as hell, and there were several bodies in progress, at least five of the former spouse in miniature, and other figures that were life-size with clothes on, lying around like so many corpses. She had massive machines and racks of tools that reminded me of medieval torture instruments, and in the middle of the floor there was a big glass box with mirrors inside it and a couple of human shapes that gave me the willies. Louise had said there were people in the hood who called her “the Witch,” and I had said, “Come on. That’s just stupid.” But the place had an infernal quality, no doubt about it. I half expected that fire-breathing brat she had told me about at dinner to come flying out of the beams. The elegant Lady of the Coats was making some weird shit, and I confess that when I looked around that massive factory, I felt the minor character creeping up in me again. He was a shrinker, and I shrank.

  Harry was so excited, she didn’t notice. She smiled and pointed at her creations and talked more fluently than she had all evening, telling me she was working through certain ideas; she wanted to represent ideas in bodies, embodied minds, and play with perceptual expectations. She liked Husserl, another incomprehensible German she probably read on the F train. I read a lot, but philosophy tires me out fast. Give me Wallace Stevens’s version of philosophy any day. She wanted me to understand. She wanted me to get it: operational intentionality. So the shrinker just nodded. Yup, Husserl, yup, good. Aha.

  Okay, okay, I was intimidated. It’s one thing to be in a restaurant, in neutral territory; it’s another to wind up in the woman’s warehouse palace and discover an army of ghoulish dolls and body parts, some of which you could plug in and heat, while she chattered on about abstruse books you’d never read. When I left Harry’s studio, I had dwindled to the size of Tom Thumb and wasn’t quoting anybody. I was ready to run out of there, but Harry put her hand on my arm and said, “Bruno, you mustn’t mind me. I’m wound up because it’s so rare that I meet somebody I can really talk to. And now here you are, and I feel kind of dizzy.” That girlish look was in her face again, not sad this time, but happy.

  We walked upstairs, and she put on Sam Cooke singing “You Send Me,” a song with the sweetest, dumbest lyrics and the nicest melody in the world: “Darling, you send me / I know you send me / Darling, you send me / Honest you do, honest you do.” And Harry grinned at me with her big white teeth, and she sang along and wiggled her hips and her shoulders and did a little soft-shoe. I grew back to my full stature, and once I was all grown again, I lunged. I threw my arms around her waist and buried my head between her beauteous boobs, and we didn’t stop there.

  I’ll censor the juicy business that transpired between us on that first night of the bodies electric when the sparks flew and we breathed lots of red-hot fire. It had been a long time for both of us, such a long time for Harry that when it was all over, and we lay on our backs, spent and listless in her big bed, she started to cry. She didn’t make any noise except for a few sniffs. I looked over at her, and I watched the tears stream down the visible side of her face into her ear. She sat up, hugged her knees, and the tears just kept coming, leaking steadily from her ducts until I
guess they finally went dry. I know when to shut up. I didn’t comment on those tears. I didn’t say a word, because I understood all about it. If she hadn’t beaten me to it, it might have been me sitting on the bed, raining tears of relief onto those clean, soft white sheets.

  Maisie Lord

  (edited transcript)

  No one could have been less like my father than Bruno Kleinfeld. When Mother told me she was seeing someone, I was happy for her, but when I first met Bruno, I was surprised. Bruno knows all this, so I’m not going to upset him. My father was immaculate; Bruno is rumpled. My father never swore; Bruno swears all the time. My father liked tennis; Bruno likes baseball. My father floated; Bruno tromps. It’s funny because Bruno is a poet, and my father was an art dealer, and the stereotypes are that poets are cloud people and business types are grounded in the nitty-gritty of trade and money. I could go on and on about their differences, but I won’t. All I know is that my mother was different with Bruno. She was freer. She told jokes, teased him, pinched his cheeks, and he gave it back to her. They reminded me of Ernie and Bert or Laurel and Hardy, a wisecracking pair of screwballs. They were embarrassing, to be honest, but you’d have to blind and deaf not to see and hear that they were in love with each other.

  I think it was seeing my mother with Bruno that started me thinking about my parents again, about who they actually were, not who I thought they were. My father made mysteries around him. That was his gift, his charisma. He always made you feel that he had a secret in his pocket or a trick up his sleeve. I was his daughter, and I felt it all the time. I saw the way people were drawn to him. Like me, I think they wanted him to smile, which he did, but only now and then. Sometimes I think he held it back on purpose.

  For him, art was the enchanted part of life, the part of life in which anything can happen. He especially loved painting, and he was extremely sensitive to forms and color and feeling, but he always said beauty alone wasn’t enough. Beauty could be thin and dry and dull. He looked for “thought and viscera” in the same work, but he knew that wasn’t enough to sell it either. In order to sell art, you had to “create desire,” and “desire,” he said, “cannot be satisfied because then it’s no longer desire.” The thing that is truly wanted must always be missing. “Art dealers have to be magicians of hunger.”

  My father called himself a “rootless cosmopolitan” and said that he had learned how to play the part from the very best teachers—his parents. As a child, they had lived in Jakarta and Paris and Rome and Hong Kong and Bangkok. I never met my English grandfather, but my grandmother was an aristocratic Thai lady, somehow related to the royal family (which isn’t too hard, since the king always had many wives). After my grandfather died, she settled in Paris in a big apartment in the Sixteenth, with tall windows and high ceilings, and one of those cage elevators that lurches upward after you push the button. I was four or maybe five before I knew that Khun Ya was Father’s mother. I knew about my other grandparents because my mother called them Mother and Father, but Khun Ya was not like them at all. For one thing, she always glittered with jewels. For another, she moved slowly and deliberately and spoke with a British accent and had nothing to do with the grandmother I had in New York.

  The winter after I turned ten, we were in Paris for the holidays. It was a day before Christmas, and it was raining, I remember that gray Paris rain. Khun Ya said she had something for me and led me to her bedroom. I had never been inside that room; it was a little scary, actually, to find myself in there, with her big carved wooden bed and all her shining private things and the strong smells. She had lots of powders and unguents in glass bowls and bottles. She opened up a box lined with yellow silk and removed a small ring—two golden hands grasping a small ruby—which she gave to me. I didn’t hug her as I would have hugged my other grandmother, but I smiled and thanked her. Then she put her hands on my shoulders, turned me to the long mirror, and told me to look. I did. I felt one of her fingers press me near the top of my spine. She took my shoulders, pulled them back, let go, and stepped away from me. I knew she wanted me to hold the pose. “Now your chin,” she said. “Bring it up to lengthen your neck. You must learn, Maisie, how to command attention in a room. Your mother cannot teach you.”

  I wore the ring, but I never told anyone what Khun Ya had said, and every time I looked down at those tiny gold hands, I felt disloyal to my mother, and I worried about it. Even though I couldn’t see exactly why Khun Ya thought standing up straight would command a room’s attention, her words of damnation, “Your mother cannot teach you,” were clear enough. Khun Ya was stepping in because she felt my mother was inadequate. I should have defended Mother, but I didn’t, and I felt like a traitor. I was thirteen when Khun Ya died suddenly on the operating table during surgery for her hip, and I didn’t feel much except vague amazement, and then I felt bad because I thought I should have been much, much sadder. She was my grandmother, after all. Ethan was sad. I think he cried in his closet. But then, Khun Ya loved Ethan. He commanded her attention all right, whether he was crumpled over or standing ramrod straight. The funeral was in Paris, and there were lots of strangers and flowers and heavy scents from women in stiff black suits with hard rows of glittering buttons.

  After she died, my father showed me an album with photographs of his parents and some clippings he had brought from Paris. I saw how beautiful my grandmother had been. “She held court,” he said. She was quick with languages and spoke French, Italian, English, some Cantonese, and, of course, Thai. But wherever they went, my father said, she would learn just enough to say something charming and win over a guest. “She was clever but not thorough. What counted was the effect, not the knowledge, très mondaine.” And then he said something I never forgot. “In that way, I am like my mother. But I fell in love with your mother because she is exactly the opposite. She is deep and thorough and cares only about the questions she keeps trying to answer for herself. The world has little use for people like your mother, but her time will come.”

  Children desperately want their parents to love each other. At least I did as a child. His words stayed with me as only a few sentences do over the course of a lifetime. A writer, whose name I can’t remember now, called these verbal memories “brain tattoos.” Mostly, we forget what people say, or we remember the gist of it, but I believe I have retained Father’s words exactly. I puzzled over them a lot. He had told me that he loved in my mother what he thought he himself lacked, a kind of depth, I guess. Worse, perhaps, he had said that the world didn’t have use for people like my mother. It—the world—preferred people like my father and grandmother. And yet, I felt that he thought my mother’s way was superior. Most important, I felt that he loved her for it. But then again, if he was so aware of not having it, I couldn’t help wondering if he didn’t have more of it than he thought he had. “Khun Ya didn’t like Mother, did she?” I asked him. I remember he looked surprised, but then he answered me. He said they came from different worlds. He said that Harriet had unsettled his mother’s expectations, and he smiled his smile and said, “Maisie, Maisie, Maisie.”

  I didn’t know my father had lovers then. I didn’t know until much later. My mother talked openly about it only near the end of her life. There had been both men and women. She wanted to tell me and Ethan that she had known about the affairs, not all the details, but she had known. It had hurt her, but she never once feared she would lose him, “not once.” In their last years together, there had been no one but her. “We found each other again, and then he died.”

  I remember a set of keys lying on a table in the hallway of our apartment. I remember looking at the foreign keys, and my father scooping them up swiftly, casually, and stuffing them in his pocket.

  I remember standing outside my father’s study while he was on the telephone. I remember his low voice. I remember the words our place.

  I know now that it’s easier to be disappointed by a spouse than by your parents. It must be because, at
least in early childhood, parents are gods. They slowly become human over time, and it’s kind of sad, really, when they diminish into plain old mortals. Ethan says that I have a stupid bone that acts up regularly. He thinks I’m stupid about our parents. When he was fourteen, he says, he realized that our mère and our père—he says that to be clever and remote—were frozen against each other, two icicles. He didn’t like to be at home and stayed away a lot. I don’t remember it that way. I think it was much more complicated, and I’ve come to think that my father needed my mother more than she needed him. And I think she knew it.

  Three days before my father died, Oscar and I had dinner with my parents. I was pregnant, and we talked about “the baby” a lot. Mother had been reading studies about infant development, about newborns and their capacities to imitate the facial expressions of adults, for example. I didn’t follow all the details she cited, which had to do with systems in our brains, but I remember I was very excited by something she called amodal perception—the different senses are crossed in babies, touch and hearing and sight and maybe smell, too. (I can’t tell you how many times I wrote down the names of books my mother gave me and then never read them. Oh well.) She talked more about visual development and cultural-language influences on perception, too, that we learn to see, and that much of that learning becomes unconscious. I sensed there was an urgent reason for her studies. She was trying to figure out why people see what they see.

  Making documentary films means, at least in part, choosing how to see something, so I found the conversation compelling. Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t—a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Experanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’ Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers. The woman had also gathered bits and pieces of twine, ribbon, string, and wire on her journeys around the city and knotted the pieces together into a gigantic hairy, multicolored ball. She told me she just liked to do it. “It’s my way, that’s all.”