The Blazing World

by Siri Hustvedt

  I told you so is a phrase for assholes, and since I happen to intermittently find myself in that category, I used it on Harry when Rune screwed her over in the pages of Art Assembly in an interview, in which he was questioned outright about the Brickman letter in The Open Eye. Rune had guts. I have to hand it to him.

  Harriet Lord has been really great to me, not only as a collector of my work, but as a true supporter. And I think of her as a muse for the project. Beneath could never have happened without the long talks we had together and her generous backing. What I can’t understand is that she seems to claim she is responsible for my work. She seems to believe that she actually created it. I simply can’t understand why she would say that. You know, she had a really hard time after her husband died, and she’s been in psychiatric treatment for years. For the record, let’s just say she’s a kind lady, but a little confused from time to time, and leave it at that.

  I was on-site in the kitchen when the kind but a little confused lady in long-term psychiatric treatment hurled the offending magazine at the pot rack. I was there when she cursed, roared, went cross-eyed and then blind with rage. Head down, arms flailing, she attacked an open shelf, batting mugs, dishes, and bowls to the floor, where they met their spectacular ends in smithereens. After the crash, I knelt on the floor, wielding brush and dustpan to collect thousands of shards, while Harry sat on the floor and said over and over, “I’ll kill him.” The fact that the man had called her Harriet Lord, not Harriet Burden, had shaken extra salt on Harry’s already open wound.

  And my refrain was: I told you so. I couldn’t help myself. I had told her so. Harry penned a flaming letter to Art Assembly, which was never published. She phoned Rune and screeched at his voice mail: Liar, thief, horrible, horrible man, traitor. Her vituperation didn’t budge him. Harry contacted Anton Tish’s parents. His mother politely but firmly told her, “My son wants nothing to do with you.” Harry hired a shamus named Paille, a hazy-faced, laconic character with a Maine accent who specialized in blackmail and extortion. Paille tracked the kid to an ashram in India, to Thailand, and then to Malaysia, but after that, the boy’s path ended with his airline records. Paille promised to keep up the quest.

  Methodically, deliberately, Harry compiled every shred, morsel, sliver, and dust mote of evidence to prove her case. As she dug into piles, riffled through papers, and hunted for signs of her creative ownership, it dawned on her—a rainy, bleak, gray illumination, to be sure—it dawned on Harry how carefully she had hidden her involvement. She unearthed early drawings in sketchbooks and some plans on her computer, but other drawings and further designs were in Rune’s possession. Her e-mails to him read like cryptograms, as did his to her. No slips. And the assistants, whom she assumed were in the know, were not. Even Edgar Holloway III, old studio hand, Friday to Harry’s Crusoe, had to admit that this time around he hadn’t suspected a thing. All he knew was that Harry had written a check for the work she had purchased from Rune as well as checks for the production of Beneath, but a benefactor is not a creator, and Rune had thanked her in print for her “support.”

  Eldridge came through for her. Art Lights published the story of their work, but his page of eloquence touched very few people at the time. Harry’s experiment had been gutted and crushed, and she ranted in protest. Once the gears of despair began to turn, they banged and clinked with the same compulsive music. She had been robbed. No one understood her. No one paid attention to her. They were all blockheads, dupes of creeping sexism and phallus worship. Rune should be drawn and quartered, his eyes scooped out with razor-sharp grapefruit spoons and smashed into jelly with a hammer. Her life’s work had been ruined, the ambitious project carefully constructed from the blocks of her radiant intellect, one beautiful irony on top of another—which would prove once and for all her theories about sex bias and perception and God-knows-what-else had exploded in her face.

  I begged her to give it up. Show your work now, I said. Take it to the cooperative here in Red Hook. Forget about pseudonyms and figments, your ironies and philosophies. Who cares about the incestuous art world of dupes and phonies. But Harry couldn’t give it up. Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.

  I wanted to cuddle her in my arms. I wanted to send her to those sweet, high places we had visited a couple hundred times already, but she pushed me away. She barked, sneered, and hissed. I am not the bad guy, I said to her, but somehow that’s what I’d become. One night she sat on the big bed, ferocious in her pain, and she taunted me. Who was I to say a word to her? I had ruined myself, hadn’t I? I had had everything—my Whitmanian gifts, my cock, the powers-that-be on my side—and I had thrown it away. She, on the other hand, had fought, worked and worked and worked like hell, and now she was betrayed. I was pathetic, yellow, a leech that lived off her good graces. (Read, her dough, or rather Lord’s dough.) Words had flown fast and cruel between us before, but this time her voice smacked me to the ground. My jolly, kind beloved had turned hard, sad, and mean. From my metaphorical position, laid out on my back in figurative dust, I called her a castrating bitch.

  She stalked out of the room and did not return. After waiting up for her until three in the morning, I walked across the street to my hole and stayed there. We did not see each other or speak to each other for three long months. Most evenings after our breakup, I’d saunter over to Sunny’s with anxious thoughts of spotting Harry, but she was never there. I’d buttonhole some schlemiel at the bar and offer up the rousing but oh-so-sentimental tale of the great Bruno Kleinfeld’s decline and subsequent fall, the story of how it came to pass that the literary hero, K., in a far less glorious incarnation than the one who had preceded him, now drank away his evenings at the local bar, the very same hours of the day he had once spent with Our Lady of the Coats, the last great love of his life. When sufficiently doused and soused, K. moved into lachrymose mode, sniffling over his whiskey and swaying to music that came from the speaker over his head, only a foot above his darling’s drawing of Sunny’s motley regulars, a work of art that caused his heart to cleave in two.

  Harry had fled to Nantucket. It’s nice to have houses to mope inside, large and empty, with the beds made up in advance. It was Maisie who called to tell me where Harry had gone. She said she wished we could patch it up, make it square, redo whatever it was that had gone wrong between us. Mother shouldn’t lose you, she said. You must forgive her, she said, as if I were the bad guy again, instead of the pining Romantic, for Christ’s sake. Both leech and castrator held their ground, however. It was a waste, a waste of time, a wasted time. I know that now, but then the world looked different to both of us. What can I say? My pride had been used as a snot rag, or that’s how it felt, so I knotted it up even more tightly, just to make sure it hurt keenly enough to justify my life as a suffering scrivener.

  And then one early evening in spring, I was taking a leak with two lines from the divine Emily in my head—This slow day moved along— / I heard its axles go—and from the window I saw Harry striding on the street below, looking thin, too thin, ten pounds gone, at least, maybe more. The un-Harry, I said to myself, not my Harry. And for the second time in the course of our romantic entanglement, I galloped down the stairs and into the street after her, but I didn’t hail her. I hastened after her in the cold air and trotted along the water. Like a private dick tailing a suspect, I held my distance at about thirty yards, but then I thought, Run after her. Go get her, man. Hadn’t I done it once before? I was about to yell her name when I saw Rune loping toward her from the opposite direction, and I stopped in my tracks.

  As I watched the two of them, their figures stood out against the expanses of gray sky and gray water—and above them were halos of yellow light on the low clouds. A wind blew Harry’s trench coat up behind her and pushed around her hair. A pair of gulls flapp
ed, flapped and sailed, flapped, flapped, flapped and sailed again high over their heads. The scene is vivid, a hard, clear picture in my mental space, even though in hindsight the memory has an unreal, dreamlike feeling. I watched Harry plead with her hands. She shook them in his face. He leaned toward her. He must have been talking to her, but they were too far away for me to hear anything. Then he opened his arms, palms up, and shrugged his indifference at her. I didn’t really need to hear them. Their bodies spoke for them. Harry stepped forward, gripped him by the shoulders, and pushed. He stumbled backward, danced to regain his balance, and, once upright, he wiggled his hips and shoulders, swishing like a fairy, but why? He was taunting her, but what was it all about? The man continued his effeminate gestures, mincing and prancing and limp-wristing her, and I realized they were more mixed up in each other than I had known. God Almighty, had they been lovers? I thought. She was more than twenty years older than Rune. Sick confusion in the general vicinity of my lungs and then a piercing anxiety. I began to trot toward them, my protective instinct rising by the second.

  And then, as I neared them, I saw Harry ball up her fist and hit him in the face hard. He stumbled backward, his mouth open as he yelled in pain. I started to run toward them, but so did everybody else within shouting distance. When I reached them, I saw Rune with his hand to his mouth, blood pouring over his fingers. But Harry hadn’t finished. She threw herself at him again and punched him in the stomach. He cried out as he held his gut, but he recovered, grabbed her by the shoulders, and heaved her away from him. She lost her footing and sailed backward onto the ground. A woman wearing owl glasses and a red-and-black-checked jacket ran over to Harry and crouched beside her. I noticed that Harry’s coat was bloody, probably Rune’s blood. She saw me, her old lover come to witness the fracas, and looked up with a surprised face, but no anger, not a trace of anger. Two men had grabbed Rune by the arms to restrain him from further violence. He was saying, She attacked me, for Christ’s sake. She attacked me. This was in fact the God’s honest truth, but who is going to defend a man standing over an unarmed woman whom he has just thrown to the ground?

  Rune avoided my eyes, and this pleased me. He knew that I knew. “Oh-the-poet” knew he, Rune, was a goddamned liar and thief. There were questions in that citizen huddle about whether to call the police, about whether to press charges, but it was determined that neither combatant wanted the law involved, and while the discussions went on, Rune fished out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and, cupping his hand around a lighter, carefully dragged in the smoke to avoid his fat, bloody lip, and looked casually around him. I’m going to leave now. This is absurd. She’s nuts. Anyone who saw her hit me knows she’s nuts.

  And after the committee had all agreed to it, Rune left. He turned on his heels and strode down the walk beside the water.

  Harry hadn’t moved. The owl woman gave her a kindly pat and, understanding that the emotional bomb had been defused, she and the other concerned folk who had intervened wandered off to their lives, a few of them turning to look at us to make sure the felled lady was in good hands.

  Oh, Harry, I said.

  She started to nod at me. Her chin moved mechanically up and down. Her mouth stretched into a grimace, and she squinted to shut out the tears, grabbed her head with her hands, and rocked back and forth. Oh, Bruno, she cried. I’m so lost.

  And then I said the right thing for once. I said, That was a nice right hook, Harry.

  I practiced, Bruno, she said. I practiced on the bag. And then she lifted up her swollen right hand to show me, and I saw the bruises forming already. The injured warrior slumped toward me, and I gathered her up, as the saying goes. I gathered up Harry in my arms, and we walked haltingly back to the lodge together, bandaged her hand, and celebrated our reunion.

  Your body / has not become yours only nor left my body mine only. Capacious, he was, Whitman, and greedy, greedy for people. He wanted to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch people. He rolled around in their humanness. He sucked in the city and its crowds as tactile realities. We went to sleep that night in Harry’s big bed folded in each other, and before we slept, I thought of the bard sailing over the world as he surveyed his sleepers in the great democracy that is sleep. All of us creatures have to sleep.

  After her first and what would be her last fistfight, Harry didn’t speak of Rune or the project or her resentments much anymore, not to me, anyway. I have been thrown back on myself, she liked to say. I have taken the Kierkegaardian position. The Kierkegaardian mingled with tragic queen. Harry quoted Margaret Cavendish regularly, that colorful lady philosopher, whose most fervent hope was that she would find readers after she was dead. The Duchess of Newcastle had dreamed of a glorious posthumous life when she would finally be appreciated. I had never heard of Cavendish before I met Harry, patriarchal dupe that I am, but Harry loved her. Dead in 1673, her work had been dismissed, ignored, or denigrated for more than three hundred years until she rose again and people began to take notice. Harry embraced the duchess as a battered and rejected sister striver in a man’s world.

  Harry returned to her Margaret, her Blazing World Mother creature she had begun much earlier and had nearly finished, but which she had abandoned because this monster had never satisfied her. When I first saw the huge, grinning, naked, heated-up, pregnant mama with her hanging boobs squatting in the studio, she gave me a start. This was no sweet, dreaming, oversized odalisque like the one Harry made for that kid, Tish. This woman had worlds inside her. When you looked up and into her bald, see-through cranium, you saw little people, hoards of busy wax Lilliputians going about their business. They ran and jumped. They danced and sang. They sat at miniature desks facing computers, typewriters, or pages. When you looked closely, you could see they were making musical scores, drawings, mathematical formulas, poems, and stories. One dumpy old guy was writing Confessions of a Minor Poet. There were seven lascivious couples going at it upstairs in the female Gulliver’s head—men and women, men and men, women and women—a regular orgy. There was a bloody sword fight and a murderer with a gun, looking down at his victim’s corpse. There was a unicorn and a minotaur and a satyr and a fat angel woman with wings and lots of chubby babies in all colors. Downstairs—that is, from between the labial folds of her enormous vagina—the fertile matriarch popped out another city of little humanoids. Harry worked hard with her suspension wires in order to achieve the effect: Some of the teeny ones were suspended in midair between the giant doll’s birth canal and the ground. Others had already landed and were seen crawling, walking, running, or skipping away from their giant originator in several directions.

  Harry didn’t believe the piece was finished. It’s wrong, she said, too comic. She added letters and numbers in many colors. She added more figures. It wouldn’t matter, she said, whether anyone saw them or not. She needed to make them, and she did, small, perfectly formed wax persons. She sewed clothes for some and left others naked. She could work on them almost anywhere, and more than once I sat down on a hard little body on the sofa, smothering some man or woman or child under my colossal ass. After these accidents, Harry would take the poor rumpled critter from me, rearrange its hair or limbs, and generally fuss over it. Why, it’s you, Cornelius, she would say, or: Keisha, I wondered what had happened to you. In Harrydom, nobody went nameless.

  She wrote and read as well. She punched her punching bag (good exercise and cathartic release of perpetual anger) and visited her shrink cum usual. Maisie’s film Body Weather about our own household lunatic came out in September. Harry was red-faced with pride at the opening in New York at the Quad Cinema on Thirteenth Street. Maisie has a gift for making insanity look, if not normal, at least comprehensible. Halfway through the film, the Barometer’s father, Rufus Dudek, a tired man with bloodshot eyes, who still lives in the godforsaken Nebraska town where he raised his sons, holds up the prodigious drawings his youngest boy, Alan (later the Barometer), made when he was seven years ol
d, and proceeds to tell the off-camera Maisie about the tornado that killed his wife. A wall of the family’s trailer caved in and crushed her while he and his boys were out “visiting.” Alan Dudek’s mother died of weather. Alan made his way to New York and the Studio School, but while he was in a life-drawing class he cracked up and was hauled off to the first of many psychiatric wards. He was twenty-two when he became the Barometer, a man who quiets the winds and stirs them up, a man who feels the motion of the spheres via his high-tech, super-duper, but ever-so-fragile nervous system.

  After Body Weather, Maisie launched her film on Harry. She trailed after her mother in the studio, set up shots by the water, and held the camera tightly on Harry as she told the story of her life or expounded on ideas, in which the words preconceptual and embodied came up frequently. I credit Maisie with propping up Harry’s sacked dignity. I underscore this: I don’t know what we would have done without Maisie. The hours of footage mounted. The daughter was going to tell the mother’s story, come hell or high water or hurricane or typhoon, and this made Harry happy, at least intermittently.

  I wrapped up my own autobiography-hyphen-memoir, had it typed up on a computer by a woman named Edith Klinkhammer (no fooling), mailed it out to agents, and, after several rejections, found myself a willing representative and then, hail holy light, a New York publisher, after which Harry could gloat at me with her own “I told you so.” Those are rosy days now when I look back on them—that stretch of freedom we had together after we found each other again. The artists in residence had left us, all except the Barometer, whose existence had become more orderly because he had a doctor and a little lithium and a new diagnosis—schizoaffective. All in all, I have to call those days rosy, just plain old rosy, cozy days of coffee and bagels and goodbye-I’m-off-to-work-now-my-love kisses in the morning and a whole lot of chitchat after work about not all that much as we chopped vegetables for or cleaned up after dinner. We yelled at the evil president in unison and had a few royal fights about men and women and what’s innate in one sex or the other and what’s not. Yes, to be honest: We fought. We fought, but we also rolled in the hay, and, to be honest again, there were plenty of nights we were too tired to do any rolling because we weren’t young anymore, and we talked instead, long sessions of thinking aloud about art and poems and our youngest ones, Aven and Bran, the children who would brave a future we would never see.