The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  After Harriet left, Rune and I strayed onto the meanings of money, that eternal American subject. He had never seen real money before he came to New York. His hometown, Clinton, Iowa, had rolled in the glories of lumber riches in the second half of the nineteenth century, but when the forests were depleted around 1900, the wealth died with the trees. He had grown up with the moldering mansions and ragged parks left by long-dead millionaires, but in New York City those riches had been reborn in the body of Rena Dewitt. “Her soul was made of money,” he said. My own initiation had come at Yale, where I witnessed firsthand the casual assumptions of class, its ease and smugness, the lawns and paintings and town houses that lurked behind the friendly but distant smile. Of course we need the rich. We always have: to ogle and envy and imitate. They are our spectacle and our joy because in the head of every American lies the thought That could be me. (That could be I, grammatically correct though it is, does not lurk within our collective heart, not anymore.) The rich constitute our mythos, after all, our fairy tale, our hymn to success: the self-made man, the robber baron, dog-eat-dog, rugged individualism, nice guys finish last, carry your own gun and ride in your own limousine, long-legged babes with enhanced boobs on either side of you as you drive to the premiere and exit the car, flashbulbs exploding around you. There is still old money around, quiet and hidden and stealthy, but it has no grip on the public imagination as it once did. The social register, the 400, the debuts—still around, but there are fewer and fewer Philadelphia stories told in our world of Twitter and Facebook.

  Rune and Rena—a gleaming pair. “Rune, the Rube,” he joked, “learned fast.” He learned because in the United States there is still a teeny-weeny bit of truth in the myth. Millionaire hairdressers hobnob with heiresses. Cowboy traders, suddenly flush, saunter through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum for a gala. The actress, once the kept paramour of Mr. Old Money slumming backstage, is now royalty in her own right. The newly minted artist buys up lofts and houses right and left. I have seen it all. Believe me. They’re up. They’re down. They soar and they crash. I am nobody’s conscience, but I am the man who looks on at the fiascos and the greed and the pills and the booze and the bouts in rehab. And I still have a job. I am still in my comfortable apartment, and I am invited to dinner a couple of times a week with people who count. I own two tuxedos. No one remembers the Crawler, but the techniques I used then are still good, and I have what cannot be faked: wit. It is a commodity in short supply.

  The art of conversation has been dwindling steadily until there is nearly no art left, but I do my best to resurrect it when I can. And I understand the power of the compliment, which must always seize upon a truth. I told Rune that day that he was fascinatingly elusive, that he held my interest not only because I admired his work but because he embodied contradictions I felt in myself. I am continually torn between admiration and contempt for the circus of vanity and stupidity I witness every day and on which I dutifully report. I admire the ruthless vigor of the climbers, but I often bemoan their lack of style. I feel the pull to the future, the revolution of the digital age, but I long for the literate niceties of the past, for a touch of romance and courtesy.

  He snorted at my comment, but then he made a long, rambling, excited confession of sorts, which I taped. I wasn’t going to use it. I just pushed the button through my jacket pocket and, even though the sound wasn’t perfect, I got a lot of it. He had always wanted to get out of Clinton, and he attributed this desire to escape to his mother. Not surprisingly, when one examined the son, the mother had been a beauty, a homecoming queen and then Miss Iowa Dairy Farm. Yes, even in Rune’s not very distant youth, such traditions continued in the Midwest. The woman had nurtured her own Bovary pipe dreams focused chiefly on Chicago, which came to naught. She had loved Motown music and used to dance wildly to the Supremes, bumping, grinding, and panting with her two children as all three laughed until their sides hurt in the living room, where she kept the framed photographs of the homecoming court—she at center smiling beside the king—as well as several eleven-by-thirteen glossies of herself in full Miss Dairy Farm regalia with a ribbon that crossed her chest and a golden crown on her head. “That was her glamour, her moment,” he said, “everyone staring at her.” She never let go of the moment, apparently, to her husband’s annoyance. She told the stories of her triumph again and again. “My poor mother,” Rune said. “She used to dress up for nobody and sashay around the house. Now I think she was crazy, nuts, certifiable.” And then there were the days when she didn’t get out of bed. She’d lie inert in her nightgown, staring at the ceiling, a glass of vodka beside her, disguised as a Coke. “Or she’d cry.” Brother and sister would try to rouse the listless parent, but nothing worked.

  No, it was not a charming family portrait. The woman killed herself with a lethal combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. It was probably intentional, but Rune didn’t talk about her actual death, how exactly it had happened, and I didn’t ask. He beat his thighs as if they were two bongo drums through most of his tale, his eyes not on me but on the lamp beside his chair. At some point, he wandered onto the story of the cat, and he stopped drumming. He had been eight at the time.

  Mrs. Sharon Larsen, an orphan of Nordic stock—hence the names of her two progeny—had been feeding a feral or near-feral cat against her husband’s wishes, a scraggy tabby, who came around for food late in the afternoon. After a while, the cat settled into the household, but the three familial conspirators would always put the feline out before the Patriarch returned, although the man took to sniffing for the animal and complained bitterly about “cat stink.” “No cats! I said no cats!” And then one fateful afternoon, the interloper gave birth in the family’s hamper on one of the paternal shirts, a gray work shirt with the name of the business, Hiram’s, embroidered on the pocket. A domestic battle ensued, which led to the act Rune then described. His father scooped up the litter of tiny, blind pink bodies in paper napkins and drowned them in a bucket in the garage as his mother screamed “No!” and the children cowered in the doorway. When Mr. Larsen retreated back to the laundry room to grab the tabby and expel her permanently from the household, Mrs. Larsen kneeled beside the crime-scene bucket and fished out the corpses as she howled, “I hate you! You monster!” The neighbors called the police. By then, Mr. Larsen had come to regret the massacre, and had apologized to his spouse, but Mrs. Larsen would have none of it. The officers managed to frighten her into silence, but there was no reconciliation between the couple, despite the fact that Mr. Larsen, according to his son, begged and blubbered and, at one point, kneeled in contrition. In the morning, the children found the cat remains on the garage floor. Rune’s descriptive adjective for the poor stiffs was “gross.” Kirsten orchestrated a proper burial in the garden, complete with prayers, but her brother did not participate. “I decided,” Rune said, “right then and there, looking at those disgusting dried-up little pieces of shit, that I wasn’t going to be me anymore.”

  When I asked him what he meant, he said he knew that he didn’t belong to those people, and he never would. They weren’t going to see him again. I asked him if he had run away. No, he didn’t mean that, he meant that they could see someone, but not him. “I’d give them Rune Two, Rune Three, or Rune Four, but never Rune One. They couldn’t tell the difference. As long as I didn’t bother them, what did they care?” He said the cat kept coming around looking for her kittens, meowing outside the door. He used to go out and talk to her, pet her, and give her something to eat. His mother, it seemed, had lost all interest in her former cause. “She became my cat,” Rune said. “I had her spayed with money I stole from Sharon’s purse. She never noticed the cash was gone, or if she did notice, she probably thought she had spent it on the booze she imagined she was hiding so carefully. I never let my cat into the house. I’d go out to her.”

  Rune smiled at me. The ready adjective for that facial expression among many of my colleagues would have been sphinxlike, but I work hard to keep my
prose unsullied by slack clichés, not that anyone truly notices in our illiterate age. The man’s smile was illegible. I put the family cat histrionics into Martyred for Art because I admired the idea of numbered Runes, whether he had invented it on the spot for my benefit or not. It captured his aesthetic and a longing for virtual selves: one, two, three, four, and (the coming rhyme is intentional) perhaps more.

  The Barometer

  (excerpt from Phineas Q. Eldridge’s taped conversation, October 15, 2001)

  PQE: How did you get interested in the weather?

  B: From God. Beginning and end. He is, I proclamate, all weather, the weatherman of all and allness, of all’s well that ends well. Windy pressures ride high in his blasted being of beginnings and endings. You understand he is a totalitarian, but also a hotelitarian, who takes in mankind, takes him in to the inn, but then blows him down. The song goes, “Blow the man down, O give me some time, and give me some rhyme and blow, blow, blow the man down.” Blow that puny little butthead, Man, man and his kind, into ribbons and smithereens. How does he do it? It’s a big secret deal of the Potentate, the Reprobate, the Pulverizer and Mercifier, the Big Blue Sky Daddy who dreams on our screens. That’s what happened with the World and Trade, the Power towers. God had a nightmare, you see, and it went viral onto every TV and computer and also into the heads of every geek tuned into the net. Divine Head, the godhead storms onto the earth, his curse on our things, but no things we can understand or demand or remand or take in hand. I am blessed with inside scoops of ice cream and then I scream on these matters, these barometric matters that aren’t matter, but air issues for fair, fair weather, which should be fair, but often are not fair, in that life is not fair. It all registers, tremors and tickles and rumbles, ups and downs in my organs and my head, in the gray pulp up there with graphs and that little needle wobbling, you know, in there, too. My head has a direct connection to the godhead, two heads, and it can be too much, way too much for me, and some days I can’t manage the management of the bandages needed, too many, when the earth and the air are crying outside and inside my head . . .

  PQE: You’ve lived with Harry for quite some time now. I’ve heard you say you want to leave, but you end up staying.

  B: The reasons are demonish.

  PQE: Demonish?

  B: The bad angel who comes sometimes at the dark hour, stealing around in Harry’s things, into her world of the metamorphoses and the changelings. The Barometer can feel him, his omens. I stay as the barrier, the needle speeds when he’s here. I can wrestle. I was on the team. I will wrestle. Jacob wrestled him. The sinew of Jacob’s thigh shrank.

  PQE: Yes, they wrestled all night. I always found it rather homoerotic. But you don’t mean Bruno, do you?

  B: Bruno is not an angel. Have you no eyes? Are you blind, blind and unkind? He comes when you’re gone, Phineas. He hides behind the buildings and the trash cans. He keeps his wings folded in, big, awful, veiny wings. He’s fallen, you know, fell from Heaven to here below, to keep us low, to build our ruin, but nothing broke when he fell, and now he roams through wood and waste, over hill and dale to the place where Longitude meets Latitude, you see, don’t you, he’s fallen down, the Arch-Enemy. If he touches you, you burn and shrivel. Look here on my arm.

  PQE: You say the angel left that red mark on you?

  B: A fiery finger of wrathful fate. He said, “Don’t say a word, you crazy fuck. Not one word.”

  PQE: He said that? Not very angelic.

  B: He said that, and then he turned around and walked down the hall, dragging his wings like peacock plumes behind him.

  Maisie Lord

  (edited transcript)

  My mother had to tell me and Ethan that Phinny was her front, because she knew the moment we saw The Suffocation Rooms we’d know she was responsible for them. Those lumpy figures, the heat in the rooms: No one but Mother made art like that. She just blurted it out: “Maisie, Phinny’s showing my work for me.” When I gaped at her and asked her if she had gone completely batty, she got that wrinkled, knowing look on her face, which always let me know a big explanation was coming, and she launched into a story about James Tiptree, the science fiction writer. According to Mother, for at least ten years no one actually saw Tiptree in the flesh, not even his editor. His secret identity caused a lot of speculation, and there were some people who thought that hiding behind the pseudonym there might be a woman, not a man. Robert Silverberg, another science fiction writer, wrote an introduction for a book of stories by Tiptree. He weighed in on the sex question and argued that just as no man could have written the novels of Jane Austen, no woman could have produced the stories of Ernest Hemingway or James Tiptree. Mother loved this part of the Tiptree drama because Silverberg’s faith in the writer’s unimpeachable masculinity turned out to be misplaced. When the actual person stepped out from behind the pen name, the macho Tiptree turned out to be Alice Bradley Sheldon.

  But Mother stressed that nothing was simple. After she had invented Tiptree and before she unveiled herself as Alice Sheldon, the writer took on another persona, a female one she named Raccoona Sheldon, whose work was rejected by a number of publishers and deemed inferior to Tiptree’s. The writer, who had been praised as a man who could write feminist science fiction, now had a female mask, too. My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have—the ones given them by nature. That’s the title of my third film, the one I’m working on now about my mother: The Natural Mask. The revelation that James Tiptree and Raccoona Sheldon were two sides of the same person didn’t make life simpler for Alice Sheldon. Although the women who had been friends with Tiptree by letter, including Ursula Le Guin, greeted the newly revealed Alice Sheldon warmly, a number of the men who had been writing to her vanished abruptly from her life.

  Mother told me the whole story with shining eyes. We were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table, and she leaned toward me, lifting her index finger every now and then to make her points. What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: “Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.”

  Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. “When you take on a male persona, something happens.”

  When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. “You get to be the father.”

  As her daughter, I didn’t like hearing my mother talk about being the father. I felt a visceral jolt under my ribs, but I started giggling and said something like “Oh, Mother, come on, you don’t really mean that.” But Mother did mean it. She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man—not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her—and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

  I retell the Tiptree story in my film. Alice, who was known as Alli to her friends, once said: “My biography is ambisexual.” Harriet Burden, known as Harry to her friends, could have said the same thing. It did not end there. My mother knew that telling me about her pseudonyms upset me because her father and my father were somehow mixed up in it. I suppose we all like to have people and things in their place, neatly outlined in black, but the world just isn’t like that.

  We talked about Aven for a while and the death of Radish, who drowned in a glass of orange juice. My daughter had been so cavalier about the death of her noisy, difficult, but also jovial companion who lived in her throat that it had worried me. Mother laughed and said imaginary friends didn’t need funerals. They returned to “from whence they came,” and we both laughed.

  And then we covered the Ethan territory. Mother and I always did. He was our shared obsession, the son and brother we couldn’
t quite figure out so we always had to talk about him. He had just published his first short story in a literary magazine, and Mother was proud. “The Umbrella” is a curious tale about a man who forms an erotic attachment to his striped umbrella. Whenever it rains, he shudders with excitement at the prospect of opening the umbrella, and he has to work hard to resist pressing the little spring on sunny days, although he spends a lot of time admiring its beauty as it leans casually to one side in its stand. Like my brother, the story’s hero has rules for how to behave. Out in the street on rainy days under his umbrella, he doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s actually quivering with joy. To everyone he passes or meets, the umbrella should be only a thing—a tool for keeping off the rain. And then one day, after he has checked it with his coat at a restaurant and had his meal, the woman who hangs the outerwear retrieves the right coat but the wrong umbrella. A search ensues, but the striped umbrella is not found, and Ethan’s nameless hero is devastated, although he keeps up a false front for the obsequious manager, who apologizes profusely for the error. He walks into the street with the wrong umbrella, which he discards in a bin, and proceeds home in a deluge, getting wetter and wetter and colder and colder. The last sentence, which uses the feminine pronoun for the first time, is: “And no one would understand that she was irreplaceable.”

  Mother thought the story was better than anything Ethan had written before, less pretentious, and I agreed, even though being titillated by a gendered umbrella struck me as another oddity in the catalogue of oddities that all together made up my brother. I had always been jealous of Ethan’s specialness. He always had to be handled so carefully, our eccentric boy with his stiff movements. He used to remind me of Pinocchio (before he became a real boy, of course). And he’d get so frustrated with stupid little things and throw tantrums. All the pounding on the floor, the howling and the kicking. Mother would hold him tightly in her arms and just let him wail. I was always told to “make allowances” for his “peculiarities.” Looking straight at her, I told Mother I had wanted peculiarities, too. I had wanted to get the special, Ethan boy-genius treatment, but I had been good old normal Maisie without a special bone in my body. I remember Mother looked shocked because I was so vociferous. She leaned across the table, took my hand, and said, “Maisie!”