The Blazing World (19 page)

But you want to know how it happened, the story between Harry and me. Well, it didn’t happen fast. It crawled up on us. We rented movies on Sunday afternoons, mostly oldies Harry had never seen: Busby Berkeley extravaganzas for their kaleidoscope visuals—
Footlight Parade
,
Gold Diggers
,
Forty-second Street
; some Rogers and Astaire; and the old films for Negro audiences only:
Cabin in the Sky
and
Look-Out Sister
, and
Harlem Is Heaven
with the Jangler—Bojangles, “Everything’s Copacetic,” the “Dark Cloud of Joy,” born Luther-in-Richmond-Virginia-Robinson, who danced up on his toes, precise rhythms, perfect tones—and
Stormy Weather
with Robinson again, some faux version of his life with Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and the oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-how-well-they-can-dance Nicholas Brothers. I started tap lessons at four and could impress Harry with some shuffle-ball changes and skating moves, but I never had the real stuff. Lester does a little soft shoe in my show, and it always goes over pretty well. Harry called the Sunday movie our “cozy time,” and she liked to put on what she called “soft clothes” or “nearly pajamas” for the occasion and make popcorn. Then we’d sprawl and laze in front of the TV. We were not always alone. Other members of the lodge joined us from time to time. Bruno, Eve, or the Barometer, who wandered in and out or brought his sketchpad to the sofa and drew.

Exactly when our project was hatched I can’t remember, but one Saturday I visited Harry’s studio and noticed she had painted SUFFOCATION in huge letters on the wall. “I’m thinking about it,” she said, “as a theme.” Then she changed the subject, or so I thought at the time. I now believe it was the same subject, not a transition, because it was a story about her father. She told me about her first show in New York, when she was in her early thirties. Her parents came to the opening. Her mother was sweet and proud and full of congratulations. Her father was silent, but then right before he left, he said to her, “It doesn’t resemble much else that’s out there, does it?”

I asked her what he had meant. She said she didn’t really know. I asked her how she answered back, and she said, “I didn’t say anything.”

He shut her up.

The man wasn’t some unsophisticated boob; he knew art. He had a hankering for Frank Stella, she told me. I said to Harry: “That’s pretty cold, don’t you think? I mean, it’s a cold thing to say to your own daughter.”

“That’s what Doctor F. says.”

I told her a medical degree wasn’t needed to see cold as cold.

Harry looked as if she might cry.

I pretended to be sorry, but I wasn’t.

Harry told me lots of stories about the man, and my opinion on the matter is that her dad, when he was among the living, had a problem with both who Harry was and with what she did. Being and Doing—the big ones. Harry’s work was warm: I don’t mean electrically heated—I mean it was passionate and sexed-up and scary. Her father was a tight-ass who liked neat, closed systems: the world in a jar. What was he going to make of her stuff ? He wouldn’t have liked it whoever had done it. Still, I didn’t blame Harry for trying. Hadn’t I spent my whole goddamned life making up stories about my own heroic father, loving and hating him? And when Daryl came along courting Mama with his big smiles and his shiny shoes, hadn’t I wished he would just vanish or drop dead on the spot?

We started our collaboration because Harry wanted a phallic front. I told her she should think twice about taking on a swishy black man, but Harry was undeterred by my status as a member of not one but two minorities. She wanted scenes of suffocation, she said, metaphorical ones, not pillows over a face, but a theater of rooms the spectator had to enter, and she wanted me to help her build it. Hadn’t I lived my life mostly as a nancy boy? Hadn’t I changed my name in 1995 to celebrate my second self ? Hadn’t I known what it felt like to be smothered before that, Pentecostal tongues or no tongues? Didn’t we live in a country that is perverted by racism? Wasn’t I a black man, even though I wasn’t much darker than Harry? People still called me “black,” didn’t they? What did skin tone have to do with it? Her mother was Jewish, so she was Jewish. She knew something about anti-Semitism. The Protestant set of her grandparents had been sick with that particular strain of flu. And what about sexism? How many years had women had the vote? Not even a hundred years! Didn’t I play a man and a woman, a white man and a black woman in one body? (Harry swooned for Hester and Lester, especially Hester, the whinnying, haranguing spouse of the not-nearly-so-gabby Lester.) Didn’t we understand each other? Weren’t we alike in many ways? (Harry’s identification with me might sound outrageous to some people, but it was sincere.) She didn’t truck much with conventional ways of dividing up the world—black/white, male/female, gay/straight, abnormal/normal—none of these boundaries convinced her. These were impositions, defining categories that failed to recognize the muddle that is us, us human beings. “Reductionism!” She used to shout this every now and then. Her son took after her. Neither of them liked what they saw out there in the big world—received ideas were for peons and huckleberries—and yet, there was tension between them—
bristling
is the word. Maisie was the peacemaker, the sweetie pie waving a white flag.

Back to
The Suffocation Rooms
: I’m proud of what I gave them, my own twists and turns, but it was Harry’s work. It was her idea that the viewer should shrink each time he or she opened a door and entered a new room. The rooms were nearly identical, the same grim-looking table and two chairs with vinyl seats, the same breakfast dishes laid out on the table, the same wallpaper made of Harry’s and my own handwriting and some doodles (I had free rein here to put in all my secret messages), and the same two metamorphs in each room. At the beginning of the journey, the furniture fit your median-size adult—we decided on five-seven—but with each consecutive room, the table and chairs, the cups and plates and bowls and spoons, the writing on the wallpaper grew that much larger, so that by the time you hit the seventh room, the scale of the furniture had turned you into a toddler. The soft, stuffed metamorphs grew, too, and they got progressively hotter. The seventh room felt like a Finnish sauna. After a discussion we decided that the single divided window in every room should be a mirror—more claustrophobic that way.

And then there was “the box.” Unlike all the other objects in the rooms, the box did not grow; it stayed the same size. Harry found a beaten-up wooden trunk with a lid and a lock and had six more made for her by some fabricator in Brooklyn. She was finicky as hell about it and sent one of them back five times before she was satisfied with the “distressing.”

I was the bright boy behind the color changes. I thought each room’s palette and its two characters should get a bit darker—moving from creamy white to a dusky caramel. And we decided to age the rooms. Each one should look a little older and worn than the one before, with furniture a bit more dilapidated, so we orchestrated stains, and scratched and ripped the wallpaper until by the last room you find yourself in a soiled, dingy, fraying kitchen parlor. Time had to get to the creatures, too, so Harry wrinkled up their foreheads, sagged their jaws, and pinched their necks.

We had a high time as wrecking crew. I recall the routine with affection. “Hand me the knife, P., old pal,” she would say. I would bow to her politely and produce the weapon. She would bow back to me and then impale the vinyl seat of one of the big chairs. I would congratulate her, “Well done, H., my buddy bud.” And she would say, “Your turn. A touch of dirt, P., chum of mine, should do the trick.” And I’d smear a wall or table with some mud we had prepared. Harry and I were co-stars in our own early talkie, a comedy team, P. and H. We had fun with pH, the sign of our togetherness and camaraderie.

pH: measure of acidity or alkalinity of a solution. We liked to say we leaned toward the acid. pH = –log [H+]: the logarithmic measure of hydrogen ion concentration as defined by the Danish biochemist Søren Sørensen. Many log jokes flew, including that it was short for what we produced: logorreah. We were the two halves of the Ph in PhD:
philosophiae
and
D
as in
Daddy
, and as in
dead
. We made up other initialisms on the spot:
prurient hiccoughs
—let your imagination run wild—
peeping harlot
,
potted harridan
,
puckish hard-on
,
peevish huckster
, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes we worked in costume, as two men, as two women, as a man and a woman, or reversed. The fat poet took a picture of the two of us in drag, but I don’t think he liked it. He liked his lady friend as his lady friend. Bruno has a macho streak. Nevertheless, Harry and I made the perfect drag couple. Big Harry and little ol’ me.

One day, while we were working on the rooms, she put down the screwdriver she was holding and looked at me with her serious face. “You know, P., my dear,” she said, “I like playing with you. I feel as if I’ve found the real playmate I wanted all those years ago when I was a kid, not imaginary, but real. I didn’t really have anybody until Rachel came along. You’re like the friend I dreamed of back then come to life.”

It’s not my way to be sticky, so I batted her off with a josh and a jest, and she laughed. But alone in bed, I remembered her words, and I remembered Devereaux Lewis, his hand on my head and his knee in my back, pushing my face in the dirt, moaning
faggot
,
pansy
,
fluff
. And Letty, with her big, tearful eyes, staring at me afterward. I should have smashed his head in, but I was too noble and too fearful. And then I saw myself lying in my bed jerking off to those dream boys in my head, and the God guilt, and the loneliness. Harry had been another one, not a homo, just a lonely kid. She had liked her mother and I still liked mine—conflicts notwithstanding. At least she had known her father. Mine was a fantasy man, a row of facts I shuffled around like cards. White boy orphaned at ten; ward of the state; made good, studied accounting in college; fell for Mama, ambitious nursing student, married, divorced, died.

The box had to open, open very slowly, a little more in each room. We discovered later that the bulk of our visitors didn’t even notice the change until about the fourth room. Harry knew there had to be a body in there, a being trying to get out. The “emergence” had humor, but it was dark humor. We called the being “it” and “the demon” and “the hungry child.” Harry drew and drew, trying to find its face, its body, its look. The metamorphs were big, goofy-looking, lumpy things, who sat at their tables in all seven rooms with only minor changes in their positions, but the little one, according to Harry, had to come from “another plane of existence.” Wax. She decided on beeswax. She was inspired, she said, by several sources—the bizarre anatomical wax sculptures of La Specola Museum in Florence from the eighteenth century, with its skinned and opened bodies that displayed systems and organs, the
sacro monte
above Varallo with its lifelike figures, and Japanese ghost-scroll images. Because she did not want the person to look like an alien in some 1950s sci-fi film, the model became more and more realistic: skinny, eerily transparent (liver, heart, stomach, and intestines just barely visible), hermaphroditic (small breast buds and not-yet-grown penis), frizzy red human hair. The creature is strangely beautiful, and when you see him/her in the seventh room out of the box, standing on a stool to look out the window, or rather into the mirror, you can’t help feeling touched somehow. The really large (by now) metamorphs have finally noticed that the personage is out and have turned their heads to look at it.

What does it mean? That’s what they asked me when the rooms were exhibited. It means what you feel, I said, whatever you feel. It means what you think it means. I was cryptic. I put on a mask, not literally, but one of my actor masks, a persona. It was a great role because it mixed me with Harry. I even took on some of her gestures for my gig in the
theatrum mundi
. When Harry waxed philosophical, she fluttered her hands and sometimes curled her right fist and punched the air to give her point zing. With a few borrowed gestures from Harry, a modified accent, less Virginia, and an altogether butchier me, P. Q. Eldridge strode into the art world.

Harry knew whom to schmooze. She knew where to go and where to send me. She introduced me to the right people at “art” parties, gallery owners and collectors and critics I charmed and chatted with, and I made her connections mine. It isn’t a “nice” world, but then, no world is. I did meet some artists I still see, people who turned into friends; but, all in all, the scene made me think that the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac had it right: the grubby human comedy. Illusion upon illusion upon illusion. It was all names and money, money and names, more money and more names.

I met Oswald Case, now author of the sensational real-life thriller
Martyred
for Art
, at several openings, a midget, poor guy, not a true little person, but he topped off at about five-two, I’d say. Full of himself. Bow tie. Every time I met him he told me about Yale, Yale this, and Yale that. And movie stars. Steve Martin. He knew Steve Martin; what an eye he has, so sure. “He owns a Hopper, did you know that?”
No, I didn’t know.
“The price? Millions.” (I have forgotten how many millions.)

“Yes, my husband and I have been collecting for years now,” a woman in a Chanel suit told me. “We just bought a Kara Walker.” (The idea here: Tell black artist about another black artist.) “Her work is soooo powerful, don’t you think?” “Yes,” I said, “I think so.” “We’re eclectic, you see,” she said, before her head swiveled toward a known person across the room, called to him, “David, dear! Excuse me, I see a friend, sooo nice talking to you.”

And so it went. I had fun and I had boredom. For Harry, it was more complicated.